Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

In short, I had a premonition of my woeful future, and I cannot decide even now whether this happened because, faithfully following Dr. Köhler's instructions, I had actually reached the state his cure had promised, or, conversely, because I was able to comprehend the old man's exercises since my fate had predisposed me to this more reflective state of being; the latter possibility seems more likely, though my predisposition may have been colored and strengthened by my sense of duty, which along with my pedantry stemmed not from diligence or interest in an active life — this I realized even before the Heiligendamm vacations — but much more from a desire somehow to conceal from the world my deliciously obscure conditions, brought on by my lascivious indolence, letting neither my face nor my movements betray my whereabouts (Please, do not disturb!), so that retreating behind the partition of compulsively performed duties I might be free to daydream about what really interested me.

I was born to lead two separate lives, or, I should say, the two halves of my divided life lacked harmonious congruity, or, to be still more precise, even if my public life had been the matching half of my secret existence, I would have felt an odd and jarring strain between them: it was the quagmire of a guilty conscience, something difficult to negotiate, because my self-imposed discipline in public resulted in a kind of dull and halting obtuseness for which I had to compensate myself by indulging in ever more fevered fantasies, and that, in turn, not only widened the gap between my two halves but made each of the two more isolated in its own sphere, rendering me less and less successful in rescuing anything from one and shifting it to the other, a process that in time became painful; the psyche would not tolerate my acts of self-denial, and the pain I experienced evoked a fervent desire to be like other people, who displayed no symptoms of a suppressed, tension-filled guardedness; I learned well how to read thoughts from facial expressions, how immediately to identify with these thoughts, but this mimetic ability to empathize, this desire for otherness, also led to bouts of mental anguish and brought no relief, for I realized I could not be another person, could only appear to be someone else, and total identification was as impossible as fusing my own two halves and making my secret life public, or, conversely, as impossible as freeing myself from my own illusions and compulsions and becoming like other people who are usually called hale and hearty.

I could not but consider my nearly uncontrollable inclinations to be a disease, a peculiar curse, a sinful aberration, although in hopeful moments I saw them as nothing more serious than an autumn cold which — even if I felt utterly lost when suffering from it — some hot tea, a cold compress, a few bitter, fever-reducing pills, and honey-sweet compotes could easily cure, and which I always knew, and could tell in advance, in the brief lulls between spells of fever, would ultimately, when I first got up and went to the window, make me feel light, cool, and clean, and also mildly disappointed, for though the swaying tree branches might seem to be lunging at me, their soft, leafy palms ready to snatch me away, I could see that nothing had changed on the street, nothing and no one had been disturbed by my illness, my room had not been transformed into a vast hall reverberating with the footfalls of giants; everything looked as it should — even friendlier and more familiar, actually, because the objects no longer evoked unpleasant memories associated with events thought to be long past — everything was safe and sound and exactly, almost indifferently, in place; it was some such release or cleansing I kept yearning for, though for those embarrassing and shameful reveries of mine I knew I'd have to find the remedy myself.

That day, having completed our fresh-air treatment, we first began to walk toward the station, and in this not even I, conditioned though I was by the very uneventfulness of our lives to notice the subtlest of changes, saw anything out of the ordinary, though Father, slightly out of breath, did stop the exercise a little before the prescribed time and, as if he had just gone through a terrible ordeal, leaned his pleasantly ample body against the stone parapet and with ironic self-satisfaction looked back at Mother; he meant to turn toward the sea, but could not resist looking back, which wasn't something unusual, either; he always did that, for the sea, which Mother invariably referred to as "enchanting," like the sights of nature in general, bored Father no less than these ludicrous breathing exercises; what was there to look at, anyway; "As far as I'm concerned, my dear, this is nothing but a large body of empty water," he would opine, unless a ship happened to move across the horizon, for then he could play at guessing its stupefyingly slow progress by picking a "reasonably fixed" point onshore, establishing its angle to the ship's original position, and then gauging the changes in the angle: "It has moved twelve degrees to the west," he might cry out unexpectedly, and on occasion he would also offer rhetorical remarks about the relativities observable in the trajectory of human existence; but just as he never expected us to follow the trends of his thoughts—"Human thoughts are for the most part the by-products of basic life functions," he claimed, "because the brain, like the stomach, needs always to be fed with stuff it likes to digest, and the mouth, let's not condemn it for this, merely brings up bits of this ill-chewed stuff'—Father was gracious enough, when his own temper didn't get the best of him, not to spoil other people's pleasures, and, indeed, made it clear that it was the plain sight of human pleasures and exertions that he found most interesting and entertaining, that were the very objects of his delight; and perhaps it was his lack of interest in natural phenomena that might explain why he was attracted to everything that was coarse, common, and lowly, experiencing the broadly and universally elemental through the raw, cruder forces of human nature and thus for him everything refined and sophisticated served only the purpose of concealing its own true essence and was therefore worthy only of anger and biting scorn—"Theodor, you are simply insufferable," Mother would say to him at times, clearly annoyed, though she must have been pleased if pained to know that her ingrained habits, to which she clung tenaciously, were being continuously exposed; but there was something alarmingly two-faced in Father's behavior, because he was reluctant to formulate a clear-cut, straightforward opinion about anything, though he did have opinions, very definite ones, about everything, but pretending to be indecisive and impressionable, he agreed with everyone about everything — oh no, he wasn't going to argue, he deeply respected everyone's right to an opinion, he merely weighed the pros and cons and, almost as if searching for evidence to support other people's assertions, put things in the conditional mood and posed his unwieldy questions so awkwardly that acquaintances, aware always of his ungainly, larger-than-average build, thought him charming; "Pardon me, my dear Thoenissen," Privy Councillor Frick was wont to say, "but with such thighs and such a barrel chest, you cannot help being a democrat," or as Fräulein Wohlgast put it, "Our Thoenissen is playing the clumsy bear cub again" — counting on and enjoying this kind of reaction, Father kept on fussing until the whole edifice of the argument gently collapsed, without offending anyone, almost as if by itself; but at other times he wasn't so circumspect and would greet an assertion with such boisterous enthusiasm, such resounding astonishment (my ghost story was a case in point), and inundate it with such a fierce and exalted torrent of words which like all effusiveness had a certain childlike appeal, and go on to exaggerate, color, and embellish every little detail to such an extent that the statement completely lost its original dimensions, a riotous imagination inflated it into a monster of such absurd proportions that it lifted off, away from any notion of reality, no longer fitting into or connected to anything; Father showed no mercy in this game of his but kept embroidering and intensifying it until the original idea, the modest casing of reality, became so fatally distended that it burst from the pressure of its own emptiness; of course it wasn't these dubious if entertaining flights of fancy that so upset my mother — I think that words, insofar as they went beyond polite clichés and the vernacular of daily concerns, remained out of her grasp, so the subtleties of Father's verbal games were bound to elude her, by which I don't mean to imply that she was dull or limited, though alas the opposite wasn't true either, if only because her strict puritanical upbringing, or perhaps her inherently rigid and repressed nature, had made it impossible for her to realize her intellectual potential or to develop her other, emotional-physical sensibilities, so that everything about her was disturbingly unfinished, much like her life itself, and for that reason it probably would have been more appropriate if on her eternal resting place, instead of a winged angel tearing at her breast, Father had erected a statue of something more fitting, more dignified, for there was certainly nothing angelically feminine about Mother, and if we must dwell on this banal symbolism, picture a delicate pedestal supporting a densely fluted marble pillar that is brutally broken asunder, its ragged fissure exposing the stone's coarse inner texture, contrasting sharply with the finely polished exterior: this would have been a more apt representation, one that would have impressed me each time I visited her grave.