Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

That afternoon we were going to go through her father's papers, and there was nothing to stop us from getting down to business as soon as I arrived; her mother had gone shopping downtown, Szidónia was out on an early date, yet we had good reason to tarry: we were scared; now I should find my way back to our dark secret, mentioned only in hushed voices, I should tell about it, about how we conducted our searches, sometimes in my house, sometimes in hers, and I should remark, objectively, that it was more dangerous in my place, because Father knew all about my penchant for spying and snooping and kept his desk drawers locked.

It was one of those tricky locks, locking the middle drawer locked the rest as well, but the tabletop could be lifted with a screwdriver, and then the lock simply snapped open; Maja and I were convinced that our fathers were spies and were working together.

This, the most dreadful secret of my life, I have never told anybody before.

There were enough mysterious elements in the behavior of both men to make our daring supposition not altogether implausible, and we were constantly on the alert, searching and collecting evidence.

The two men had only a nodding acquaintance, or more precisely, we assumed they only pretended not to know each other well; we would have thought it more appropriate, and also more suspicious, if they didn't know each other at all; sometimes their travels — of unknown purpose — coincided, but we were suspicious even when they didn't and one of the men would leave just as the other returned.

Once I had to deliver a heavy sealed yellow envelope to Maja's father; on another occasion we both witnessed a particularly suspicious scene: Father was coming home, in his official car, and Maja's father, in his car, was on his way into the city; on busy Istenhegyi Road the two cars stopped, the men got out, exchanged what seemed like routine pleasantries, then her father handed something very quickly to mine; when later that evening I asked Father what Maja's father had given him — the question was a kind of cross-examination, of course — he told me to mind my own business, and laughed suspiciously, which I promptly reported by telephone to Maja.

If we had found a piece of incriminating evidence, like a cryptic note, some foreign money, a strip of microfilm — we knew from Soviet films and novels that there was always some incriminating evidence, and we went from cellar to attic looking for it — if we had found some tangible, incontrovertibly incriminating evidence against them, we swore to each other that we would report them, because if they were spies, traitors, we'd show no mercy, let them perish! and our mutual oath could not be broken because this mutual intrusion into our parents' lives made us fearful, terrified of each other, and so we kept searching feverishly, hoping to pick up a trail, stumble on a clue, get the thing over with; there was crime in the air, that much we knew, we felt it in our bones; and if there was crime there had to be evidence; at the same time, and equally, we feared being proven right, a fear we had to hide from each other because showing concern for our respective fathers might have been construed as a violation of our oath, a betrayal of our principles; so we stalled and dallied, deferring for as long as we could the moment of possible success, of possibly coming upon some proof positive.

The moment would have been wonderful, and awful; in my fantasies it implicated only Maja's father, and Maja behaved so heroically that only a single tear of anger and frustration glistened in her eye.

And that afternoon, in our fear, we got so entangled in each other's soul and body that we mercifully forgot all about our original goal, our secret, the solemn vow, and the search itself, although we knew we couldn't completely get away from them: our political alliance had revealed a mysteriously deep, to us incomprehensible, erotic pain and thrill which proved more powerful and more exciting than our unfulfillable spiritual and physical desires.

But to return, to pick up the thread of the narrative, even if my narrator-self hesitates at this point, and of course also urges itself to carry on, yes, please continue! go on! yet it fears, even today it fears, that the siren voices of charged emotions may lure it toward further digression, explanation, self-justification, self-exposure, an even more scrupulous unearthing of details, just to avoid this one subject! the analytical part of the self would find this justifiable, because without further detours it is even harder to explain why two children would want to denounce their own fathers, why they would suppose their fathers to be agents of an enemy power — what kind of enemy power, anyway, and who was the enemy of whom?

It would be overhasty and no less vulgar if I explained that our secret political alliance gave us the hope that by exposing these two men, whom we loved with the most ardent physical love above everyone else, by sending these fathers to the gallows, we could unburden ourselves of this impossible love; and in those years denunciations like these were not considered only the result of childish fantasies: the imagined scenario, like a broken record, kept going around and around in our minds.

But this was it: what had to happen did happen, and there was to be no more delay; Maja pulled her foot out from under my thigh, helping herself with her hand, slipped out of our closeness, quickly and mercilessly, as when one is compelled to cut something off, got up, and started for the door.

From the middle of the room she looked back — her face was red, splotchy, and most likely as hot as I felt mine to be; she gave me a strange, soft smile — I knew she was heading for her father's study, but I waited for my emotions to subside; again she was the stronger, which made me feel as if she had torn herself from my body, a feeling that would not subside, because as she was standing there smiling, in the middle of the room filled with flickering green shadows, I heard myself think, in Kálmán's voice, I should have screwed her; it was as if in his stead I had bungled something he had been waiting for in vain.

And the reason I called her smile strange is that it had neither disdain nor mockery but, if anything, perhaps a touch of sadness, meant more for herself than for me: a wise smile, a mature smile that tried to solve this seemingly insoluble problem not with the superficiality of force but by sensibly accepting the notion that when you are unhappy in a given situation, when you get no satisfaction from it, then you must, without repudiating anything, change it.

The slightest change in our situation holds out hope; even a restless little stirring can offer hope.

And this is so even if the new situation, like the one Maja was now offering to me and to herself as she headed for the other room, seemed at least as insoluble, and ethically as disastrous, as the previous one; still, it was a change, and change has an optimism of its own.

There I sat on her rumpled bed, my heat still feeling hers, all that heat and energy which ultimately had been conducted nowhere stayed in me, in the bed, in her, while the room looked back at us impassively, coolly; I could not break out of that heat to obey her summons now, and not only because my body wasn't presentable but because her smile generated new waves of gratitude and realization in me.

Today this realization seems more like obtuseness, and I think the reason I felt such great but by no means obligatory gratitude was that she was a girl, and though I didn't feel like poking around in her father's papers, I knew I was going to follow her.

It was as if she knew better, knew that our secret search would produce the same aching excitement in our bodies that could not be gratified before.