Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

And even though I saw this, I still wanted to help the boys; I tried to get Hédi off Krisztián's back, which wasn't easy, since she was now scratching and biting.

In the end, this rather dubious help from me was totally superfluous, because as soon as Krisztián sensed that Hédi was on his back, clinging to him and sinking her nails into his shoulder, he let go of Livia and with one violent jerk of his back threw Hédi off, so powerfully that she slid down and turned over; Prém stopped, too, but when Livia tried to slither out from under him, he once more snatched at her blouse; I don't know whether the buttons had been ripped off earlier or popped off now as she sprang up and fled, but in any case her breasts were visible; Krisztián grinned at Hédi, something made him shake his head, his beautiful dark curls, and smartly feinting, he managed to slip away, because Hédi was again screaming and trying to attack him, while Prém started running after Livia — but actually to get his shorts, which he'd thrown away before — who, clutching her blouse to cover her breasts with one hand and her red skirt in the other, sprinted for the trees; Kálmán, who was just coming out of the woods, returning from his apparently unsuccessful foray, stopped, surprised, to watch Livia in her pink panties disappear; "You're an animal, an animal!" Hédi screamed into Krisztián's face, her voice choking, her scream turning into tears, but he somehow looked past this outburst, as though their love no longer mattered to him, his glance grazing mine, and I felt I was grinning just the same way he was; there were long scratch marks on his forehead and chin; he stepped toward me, we grinned into each other's grin, and, with Hédi standing between us, looked into each other's eyes; then he stepped around Hédi, lifted his arm, and with all his might slapped me in the face with the back of his hand.

Everything went black, and not because of the slap.

I seemed to have seen Hédi, who couldn't possibly have understood the reason for the slap, trying to defend me, but Krisztián pulled away from her, shook her off, turned, and started slowly for the fire swirling in the wind.

And I probably turned my back on the scene then and let my feet carry me away.

Kálmán was standing under a tree, looking at us impassively, Prém was pulling on his pants, and Maja was nowhere to be found.

Prém later claimed he'd been taking a crap when Maja lit the fire, but I didn't believe him; when you take a crap you pull down your pants, you don't take them off; but after what had happened it wouldn't have made any sense to tell him to his face that he was lying.

I also found out later that Kálmán had almost managed to catch Maja, but to get to her would have had to hug a tree trunk; he wanted to kiss her, but Maja spat into his mouth, and that's how she got away.

It took many a long week to get over this incident. We didn't go to each other's house; I barely dared leave our garden for fear of running into one of them.

By the end of that summer, though, things had got back to normal, more or less, if only because Krisztián began to hang around Livia, perhaps to win Hédi back by making her jealous or perhaps because he really got a good look at Livia that afternoon or because he wanted to make amends for assaulting her; anyway, he'd wait for her and walk her home from school; from her window Hédi must have seen them leaning against the schoolyard fence, engaged in conversation, long, absorbed, cozy conversation, for she complained about it to Maja, who, just to torment me, told me about it, on the pretext that she'd once again found something suspicious among her father's papers, something quite new, which I'd better go over to look at; she called urgently on the telephone, but in fact she hadn't found anything interesting or, rather, useful; it was a neatly folded copy of a memorandum in which her father requested the Minister of the Interior to confirm in writing that he'd acted on the minister's express verbal instruction when he had had a tap put on the telephone of a certain Emma Arendt.

Maja wanted to gossip, to see how I'd react to this new development, and the excuse came in handy, since I'd been looking for a way to patch things up between us, so I went over and pretended to be not the least interested in what was going on between Livia and Krisztián; we also decided that in the future we wouldn't talk about important things over the telephone, because if her father was told to listen in on certain phone conversations and if there was indeed such a listening device, then quite possibly our phones were tapped, too.

On my way out I saw Kálmán standing outside the front door; he turned red and said he just happened to be passing by — from the time of that incident we all began to see through one another's lies, yet stubbornly went on lying — and Kálmán and I walked home together, because he couldn't find an acceptable excuse for staying, having to be consistent in his lie; on the way I found out he had made up with Prém and Krisztián, the opportunity for which had been provided by the military maps Krisztián had left at his house; in short, by summer's end, slowly, not quite smoothly, and in a somewhat altered configuration, the old relationships were more or less re-established, but they could never regain the strength of the old closeness, no longer had the old flavor and fervor.

In his clever, cunning reasoning, Krisztián went so far as to call what happened that afternoon in the woods a piece of theater, and by using that phrase he tamed it; what's more, he planned more performances on the original site: we'd clear away the bushes under the flat rock, that's where the stage would be, and the girls would sew the costumes; at first he wanted to leave me out of the production, but the girls wouldn't let him — it seemed that even our differences meant something to them — so he finally relented and suggested I write the text; twice I went over to his house to discuss the details, but we only ended up fighting again, then he decided we didn't need any text; he wanted to do something dealing with war and I had a love story in mind, which doubtless resembled too closely our real-life situation; by stubbornly insisting on my version, I talked myself out of a job, because the girls far preferred playing amazonlike warriors to inamoratas.

The afternoon I visited her, Maja was getting ready to go to a rehearsal for one of these performances — I wasn't invited — but of course there could be no more performances, not after that unique, true performance born of a series of coincidences, the one we'd do well to forget; subsequent ones were prevented by other, strange coincidences, because without our feeling the changes in ourselves, our childhood games had come to an end once and for all.

But sometimes I still walked through the forest just to feel, for myself only, the thing we were so afraid of.

The following spring grass grew over the scorched spot.

And now, after what turned out to be a lengthy digression — so long that it's hard to tell what we had digressed from and to what — it's time to return to the point where we left off our recollections; it's to Maja's rumpled bed that I should return, to her open mouth, to her slightly alarmed yet hate-filled, loving eyes, as she simultaneously wanted and didn't want me to tell her what I knew about Kálmán, and there I am, unable to tell her what I want to tell her; desire, will, and intention falter and stumble on the strict dividing line between the sexes; something made itself felt, something with a will stronger than mine, like a law or an erection; at the same time, the mere mention of the woods was enough to make her lose heart, frustrate her designs, interfere with and even cancel some of her plans, and I could do all that without betraying my own smoldering jealousy.