Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

Look, he said suddenly, quietly, choking with surprise, and though I'd been waiting for just such a sound or signal, it came too suddenly — in the desert of endless waiting the slightest stirring of even a single grain of sand seems sudden and unexpected — and I perked up, but this wasn't the same voice, not his pugnacious voice but his old one, a joyful voice expressing fond surprise at seeing what he'd anticipated all along, as when during our rovings he'd spot a fledgling bird fallen from its nest or a hairy caterpillar or a tiny porcupine among the dry leaves: I had to sit up to see what he was referring to.

There it was: down where the winding trail, rising sharply from the street and hidden by two big elder bushes, ran into the clearing, there among the windblown leaves was a flash of white, then something red, a bare arm, a blaze of blond hair, bobbing, moving closer, then popping out from behind the bushes: the three girls.

They were moving steadily up the trail, sticking close together, slightly blocking one another; they must have come in single file on the trail and now, having reached the open field, were jostling one another a little, full of small movements, leaning to the side, throwing out their arms, chatting and giggling; Hédi, the one in the white dress, was holding flowers — she loved picking them — and, leaning back, kept brandishing them in front of Livia, behind her, even stroking her face with them, gently, teasingly; then she leaned over to Maja and whispered something in her ear, though it seemed she meant Livia to hear it, too; Livia, whose skirt was the red spot we'd seen before, leaped in front of the other two, laughing, and as if wanting to carry them along with her momentum seized Maja's hand; but Hédi grabbed Livia's hand and waved her flowers in Maja's face this time; and then they stayed this way, hand in hand, their bodies almost pressing together, advancing slowly, taking very small steps, first Hédi, Livia in the middle, then Maja, completely absorbed in one another, and at the same time exchanging words, moving in an unknown formation, hovering along on the rhythm of their continually crisscrossing conversations, their faces and necks leaning close to and away from one another, their progress in the windswept, wildly undulating grass at once swift and majestically measured.

The sight itself wasn't so unusual, since they often walked this way, hand in hand, clinging to one another, and it also wasn't unusual that Hédi should be wearing Maja's white dress and Maja Hédi's navy-blue silk one, though because of the differences in their build the dresses didn't quite fit them; Hédi was taller, rounder, "stronger in the bust," they'd say among themselves, the mildly judgmental words referring only to how the dress made her look; I always paid close attention to such remarks, eager to learn whether they had a rivalry similar to the one found among us boys, but they weren't concerned so much with the difference in breast size as with the right place for the bust seam, which they debated with great seriousness and adjusted with little pulls and tucks, even unstitching and basting it anew; and although this managed to lay my suspicion about rivalry to rest, I still felt it wasn't quite unfounded; anyway, Maja's dresses "unflatteringly" flattened Hédi's breasts, but it seemed that the not-quite-perfect fits, the continually mentioned differences in build, was what made swapping dresses so attractive for them; however, they never swapped clothes with Livia and were very sensitive to the pride she took in her clothes, so while they tried on her dresses, they never insisted on wearing them; her wardrobe was rather shabby and limited in any case, though they always found her things "adorable" and eagerly outdid each other in lending her scarves and bracelets, pins, belts, ribbons and necklaces, things that would "show Livia off," as they put it, and that she accepted with engaging bashfulness; even now she was wearing a coral necklace Maja filched from her mother whenever she wanted to wear that white dress; the two girls did not seem to mind that these uneven exchanges tended to favor Maja, because most of Hédi's casually loose-fitting dresses looked quite good on her; at least in our eyes she seemed more grown-up in them, like a woman, her gangly awkwardness vanishing in their ample material; in fact, it seemed that our overlooking the unevenness of these exchanges eliminated the actual, hurtful differences which caused so much jealous rivalry between them and from which Maja suffered so much, Hédi being the pretty one, the prettier of the two, or, more precisely, the one considered pretty by everybody, the one everybody fell in love with; whenever the three of them were out together she was the one everybody looked at, behind whose back grown men whispered lewd comments, who was felt up and pinched in dark movie theaters or on crowded streetcars, even when Krisztián was with her; she cried, felt ashamed, tried to hunch her back so that her arms would cover and protect her breasts, but all in vain; and women were crazy about her, too, praising her hair especially, touching it like a rare jewel or digging into it with their fingers; with her soft blond hair falling in great shiny waves over her shoulders, her smooth, high forehead, her full cheeks and huge, somewhat protruding blue eyes, she was the "prettiest of them all," which hurt Maja so deeply that she always brought it up, kept dwelling on it, extolling Hédi's beauty more loudly than anyone, as if proud of this gesture, hoping that people would correct her exaggerations; what made Hédi's eyes especially interesting and dazzling were her long jet-black eyelashes and equally dark eyebrows, the precise curve and density of which she controlled and maintained with the help of a tweezer, plucking out hairs she considered superfluous — a very delicate operation which I saw her do once: with two fingers she stretched the skin above the eye; while working with the tweezers, snipping and plucking the stray hairs, she kept glancing at me from the mirror, explaining that although thin eyebrows were the current fashion and some women plucked them out altogether and drew new ones in with a pencil, "like that cook in school, that monster," a truly fashionable woman wasn't supposed to conform blindly to everything new but had to find the proper balance between her own assets and the prevailing trends; now Maja, for instance, often made the mistake of wearing something that, though very much in fashion, didn't look at all good on her, and if she said something about it to her, Maja would be gravely offended, which was childish; as a matter of fact, her eyebrows could use some plucking but she said it hurt, well, it didn't hurt that much, and anyway, if one had brows as thick and ugly as Maja's, one should use hair remover, which didn't hurt at all, and she should use it on her legs, too, which were terribly hairy; and the reason she didn't want to make her own eyebrows too thin was because that would make her nose look even bigger, and it was big enough as it was, so in the end she'd lose more than she would gain; her nose, skinny and slightly hooked, might indeed have been a bit large, she had her father's nose, she once told me, the most Jewish feature of her face, otherwise she could pass for a German, even, she added with a laugh; she'd never known her father, was too young to have remembered him — just as Krisztián had no memories of his father — he was "deported"; the word made as profound an impression on me as that other phrase about Krisztián's father, who "fell in battle"; and I liked running my fingers over her nose, because then I felt I was touching something Jewish; in any case, the color of her skin made up for this tiny flaw, if one can call flaw the irregular which is so organic a part of beauty; her complexion complemented her beauty, made it whole, though not fair, as one might expect in a person with blond hair and blue eyes but with the hue of a crisp, well-baked roll, and it was this color, full of tenderness, that created the harmony of perfection out of her sharply contrasting features; and I haven't even mentioned her round shoulders, her strong, slender legs that touched the ground so softly, her narrow waist and mature, womanly hips, on account of which she was once sent home with a note from her teacher for supposedly wiggling them too much; Mrs. Hűvös came flying into school and was heard screaming in the teachers' room that they'd do better to curb their own filthy imaginations than scribbling such revolting notes, and teachers like that ought to be "banned from the classroom"; Hédi's exquisite perfection did not just make her special among us but made her a distinctive and provocative beauty, a true beauty; with the help of these swaps, sometimes she sought relief from this image of perfect beauty, the swaps being all the more attractive, since Maja's dresses were nicer and more interesting.