Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

The bugs, though hindered now and then by a clump of dirt or a big pebble, quickly bored their way under the carcass; they used their jetblack pointed heads as shovels, spinning in the protection of their armorlike shell, and the dug-up dirt was thrown to the rear by their tiny many-jointed feet; first they dug a proper trench around the dead mouse, then scooped out the soil from under it so that the carrion sank below the surface of the ground, and then, using the dug-out dirt, they carefully buried the animal completely, leaving not a trace; and as I then learned from Kálmán, that's why they are called necrophores, burying beetles; their work is hard, and since the corpses they bury are immovable giants compared to their own bodies, it takes many hours to complete the job; of course, the work is not without profit: even before they begin their labor they lay their eggs inside the carrion, where the eggs will hatch; as the larvae mature, they consume the decomposing body, and eventually chew their way out to the light of day — that's their life.

That Sunday, when Kálmán came to call for me, they were burying a field mouse, which was a much easier piece of work, despite the field mouse's larger size, since here, around this wood mouse, the ground was not only hard because of the trail but also full of stones.

Nine carrion beetles were on the job.

The hard shells of their backs were marked by two red stripes running crosswise, and on their necks and abdomens fine yellowish hairs protected their delicately articulated bodies.

Each insect worked within a clearly defined area, yet this was clearly a concerted effort; if one of them came up against a stone or a too solid clump, it stopped, as if to summon its mates, and the others also stopped; then they all began scurrying around the object causing the difficulty, touching it with their long, hornlike feelers, appraising the situation, and then, as if to discuss the problem and reach a decision, they touched each other, and several of them got down to work, chewing from different sides, burrowing under the obstacle, making a common effort to remove it.

While I was watching the beetles and trying to figure out what had got him so upset, Kálmán told me, out of the blue, that Krisztián had knocked the milk out of his hand on purpose.

I didn't know what milk he was talking about.

But he kept insisting that Krisztián had done it on purpose, it was no accident, he meant to do it.

Only I did not understand what had been done on purpose.

Last night, Kálmán said breathlessly — after he managed to tear himself away from his obsessive insistence on Krisztián's hostile intent and was ready to answer my repeated questions — last night, and he'd forgotten to tell me this before, they decided to camp out — yes, I knew, Prém had this large army tent — and a little while ago he brought them fresh milk, and then Krisztián did this stupid thing: Look, he said, there's a fly in the milk, and as Kálmán looked down, Krisztián hit the bottom of the jug, knocking it out of his hand, and of course the jug broke, and this was something Kálmán would not forgive him.

He was serious; in the terrible noise of the strong wind I almost had to read his lips, and he wasn't even looking at me, he was looking off somewhere as if ashamed to speak, or ashamed at not being able to keep this to himself, at complaining; but as I pictured the scene, the crude little trick that works every time, I couldn't help seeing him as the milk hit him in the face, and I burst out laughing.

It was as if Krisztián had tried to please me with this trick, although I'd never have thought of taking my anger out on Kálmán.

Yet my laughter, I realized as I heard it, would seem like revenge, pleasantly gratifying revenge, an abuse of Kálmán's trust; still, I could not help myself, I had to laugh: still crouching over the hardworking beetles, I looked up at him; the mark Krisztián had left on his innocent, strong face, in his offended yet still candid gaze was plain to see, and it made me feel so good to be able to read Krisztián's handiwork on his face that I couldn't, and didn't want to, stop laughing — it's a good thing we don't always know what we're doing! grabbing my legs below the knees, I tipped over and dropped on the trail, rolling with laughter as I thought of how Krisztián had knocked the milk into his face, crash! the jug shattering into smithereens, the milk splashing all over; at the same time I saw the shocked and indignant look in Kálmán's eyes as he watched me convulsing with laughter, he couldn't possibly comprehend this, how could he? the only reason Krisztián could manipulate him so cruelly and tyrannically was that this was a language of bullying and cruelty Kálmán could neither speak nor understand, while not only did I speak and understand it but it was my sole common language with Krisztián, the language of achievable superiority, of acquirable power; this was our innately common language, all right, even if we tended to watch from a distance our different means and strategies in using it; and right now it was a delight to be able to communicate with Krisztián in this secret language at Kálmán's expense.

What was I laughing at, he asked, looking at me with his transparent blue eyes; what's so funny? he repeated somewhat louder, now he'd get it from his mother, it was a fine glazed jug.

A glazed jug, yet! reveling in the liberating effect of spoiling and destruction, I had to laugh even harder, and precisely because you don't know what you're doing but are free in that you're doing it unknowingly and unintentionally, I had to do something more: my joy was so intense that laughter alone didn't suffice, and his mere existence, the sparkle of his blond, brushlike lashes, could only increase the pleasure of my laughter, now bordering on hysteria, and still this wasn't enough; letting indecency run amok, I needed to draw Kálmán into the merriment, to share my pleasure with him, not to mention that at that moment laughing for me was but kissing Krisztián on the mouth; so as I was rolling around the ground next to the dead mouse, laughing even at my own laughter, I suddenly grabbed his feet, which surprised him so much he toppled onto me.

That was it: the joking, the laughter, the kissing, the joy of unforeseen revenge all ended when, still falling, he seized my neck with both hands and Krisztián's mark vanished from his face without a trace, and although I quickly locked my arms around his back and arched my body to throw him off with one heave, my laughter had obviously released a current of obstinate and implacable hatred in him so powerful that I had neither the strength nor the skill to subdue it, and I realized, with the last spark of rational thought in me, that I'd have to resort to more treacherous, baser tactics, though to do so right away would have been shameful — first I'd have to struggle, display courage and resourcefulness, flaunt my manhood, abide by the allegedly civilized rules of properly declared hostilities; but I couldn't shake him; he was squeezing my neck so hard that the sound of the wind began to fade, darkness was descending on me, like a red rainfall, his body was becoming unbearably heavy; I gasped and choked, and I got angry, but what was that compared to the raging hatred directed not only at me or my laughter but also at Krisztián — I could clearly sense this even at the moment when he fell on me — for humiliating him so; his innocent, good-natured, patient, considerate self went haywire, he wanted to choke me! get back at me for the injury received from Krisztián and take revenge on me for Maja, too; no, there was nothing funny about this, he meant to stifle me, to knock the laughter out of me for good, along with Krisztián and Maja; he pressed down on me with every ounce of his body, which was both an advantage and a disadvantage: I couldn't kick him in the balls, couldn't move my legs or move him, but for a moment I could catch my breath, and that loosened his grip on my neck, and I tried to use that favorable moment to break the stranglehold by yanking my head out of his hands, so I began knocking my forehead against his head; the two skulls collided with terrific force — a whole shower of stars — and I couldn't capitalize on the advantage of my desperate counterattack because I was dazed and in pain, and I missed my chance: he still had me pinned down, and to incapacitate my head, he struck my face with his elbow; all I could do was jerk my head sideways; I felt my nose begin to bleed, and my open mouth was touching the dead mouse! do criminal statistics include records of children murdering other children? but I'm sure he wanted to kill me — no, I'd better qualify that, he didn't want to, I don't think he wanted to do anything just then, for raw fighting instincts had displaced will, intention, and premeditation— and if I hadn't felt the dead mouse on my lips, the limp little body all but dangling into my mouth! if this humiliation, which took the fight out of the realm of the usual daily horseplay, hadn't mobilized the deepest, most artful cunning — when, sensing complete physical defeat, one is ready to try anything, seek the most desperate solutions — I'm sure he would have killed me, I don't know how, maybe choking me or bashing in my head with a stone, though that wasn't the uppermost question in my mind at the moment, I had no question at all, there was nothing, everything we might call the controlled function of the conscious mind had vanished, dissolved in the haze of the battle; in a split second, in a flash, the prank, the childish swagger, the game of rivalry and provocation had turned into a life-and-death struggle, an extreme situation in which the mind can summon the body's untapped resources precisely by rejecting all means of moral control as unnecessary, throwing off all restraint, no longer wondering whether what is possible is also acceptable, considering the body's capabilities no longer from the standpoint of conventional moral order, as a supervisor might, but only and exclusively from that of its own survival: in a sense, that's a matchless vantage point, God looks the other way at such moments, a wonderful lookout point for the memoirist, even if the inevitable lapses in conscious functioning keep us from remembering specific decisions, specific questions, and answers from our inner dialogue, and we can recall only random images and chaotic feelings, for in that state the mind has no purpose other than to preserve the body and therefore has no will either, so what is left is a bare shape which, being unaware of itself, is not even our own; more precisely, we are no longer in control of it, and it is making decisions about and for us; it's no accident that poets so delight in singing of the connection between love and death, for never do we experience our body's autonomy so purely as when we fight for our lives or in the moment of love's consummation, when we experience our body in its most primeval form, with no history, no creator, obeying no law of gravity, without contour, able to see itself in no mirror, having no need for any of this, becoming a single, explosive dot of pure light in the infinity of our inner darkness; so I wouldn't want to give the impression that at that moment I was thinking about what I was doing; no, it is only now, out of the shards of pure sensation preserved by memory, that I am trying to assemble this pretty little series of actions — which also happens to reveal some of the dark spots of my character, and of course I realize that as soon as I say dark spots I am exercising the memoirist's inevitable moral judgment, nothing but the moral distortion of the story, after the fact, similar in nature to the way we view great wars in retrospect, ennobling what is ignoble, adding the moral requisites of courage and cowardice, honesty and treachery, steadfastness and dereliction, but then, it is our only chance to retrieve the amoral period of a state of emergency, tame it, refit it into the humdrum morality of our placid daily life; if in my pain I had closed my mouth, I'd have bitten into the mouse, with the blood from my nose dripping on the tiny body, and the possibility of this must have struck him as so bizarre, so repulsive, yet also so sobering that for a fraction of a second he relaxed his grip: there was something odd about this momentary relief, maybe a touch of uncertainty, but it held out no promise of escape, merely opened a crack through which the soul could witness the total defeat of the body; no, in this very short interval I did not think of Maja, although being defeated by Kálmán might also mean I'd be at a hopeless disadvantage with her; when you taste defeat, when the soul is in flight, you grasp at the very thing you had abandoned, which in this case was laughter, and I simply had to laugh, more freely and brazenly than before, but silently, and out of this bubbling, frantic laughter, which mocked his murderous intent, his victory, his strength, and made me feel his skin and the warmth of his bare body, directly out of this perfidious and hideous laughter flowed the movement of my hands: I tickled him, and the joy of seeing his reaction caused me really to bite down on the dead mouse, at the same time as Kálmán grabbed my head with both hands and began banging it against the ground, which didn't bother me, because the treachery of the soul had handed me the key to the situation: I kept laughing and tickling him, I was retching and spitting, he could have held my hand down only by rolling off me, which would have robbed him of his victory, but he couldn't take the tickling; he banged my head hard four times, very quickly, I felt as if a sharp stone had torn into my skull, and then he began to howl; I tickled him and he howled, how he howled! starting out as a cry of victory, exploding out of the deadly force pent up in him, and now feeding on itself, then at its loudest, at the peak of his triumph passing over into a whimpery laugh; his skin, his twitching body, his very flesh tried to repel this laugh, but the howling had become a kind of defense mechanism: on the one hand he tried to scare me with it, and on the other he hoped it would help him get over the unwanted laughter, but as he tried to evade my tickling fingers and abruptly arched his body over me, I was able to complete the move begun but thwarted earlier: I managed to get up, thrusting out my hip and kicking against the ground at the same time, while he, enervated by the tickling, giggled and whimpered and let himself be turned over, and we kept on turning over and over, screaming, laughing, clinging to each other; tugging and pushing each other we rolled off the trail and into the bushes, and by then his dog had turned up, greatly excited, barking and snapping at us, and that definitely determined the kind of outcome our fight would have.