Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

Then without a word she left the room.

I never loved her as much as I did then, and I loved her because she was a girl, which may not be so great a foolishness as it at first sounds.

When after long minutes my body was finally ready to move, to shift position, and walking through the deserted dining room I entered the study, she was standing by her father's desk with her back toward me, waiting — she couldn't start without me.

The enormous desk, with many drawers of various sizes and compartments in various positions, unattractively dark and unadorned, took up almost the whole room, looking like an old, overweight animal on short thin legs.

I shouldn't close the door, she told me quietly but impatiently, her tone almost hostile; it was fairly late, which meant her parents might be coming home soon.

She needn't have said that; we always left the door ajar, to give us some cover but also so we could hear approaching steps; the study was like a mousetrap, a dead end, the innermost room in the apartment, a kind of pit, as it were, from which there was no escape; you could leave here only by backing out, invariably bumping into an overstuffed chair as you did.

No matter how much we tried to discipline ourselves, as soon as we sneaked into this room our breathing turned loud, choppy, almost whistling, and we had to hold things too firmly, too deliberately, to hide our trembling movements, but the effort betrayed us anyway, making each of us vulnerable to the other, and that's why we spoke hostilely even when there was no reason for it, and somehow, in here, we each considered every move made by the other to be clumsy, wrong, sure to spoil everything.

It's hard to say which one of us was in greater danger; in her house, she was, I suppose: any incriminating evidence found in this room would have exposed, first of all, her father; consequently, irritated as I was, I felt I had to be more considerate with her than she might be with me; on the other hand, if we were caught red-handed, I'd be far worse off, because I had even less right to touch things in this room than she did, which is why I positioned myself so that if I heard footsteps I could be the first to slip out; even if it meant abandoning her, I had to have that slight advantage.

Of course I was a little ashamed of this attitude, but didn't have the courage to give up my advantage; I projected the worst possible scenario: if I heard footsteps only at the last minute, I'd quickly grab and hold the doorknob, like someone just standing there, observing her, not touching anything but the doorknob; I admit, even as an imagined scene this was very cowardly.

Yet our frantic excitement, the almost intolerable tension, could not be allowed to affect our activity; there was to be no haste but painstaking precision, infinite circumspection, we could not behave like amateur burglars who ransack the whole house looking for money and jewelry and then clear out leaving a huge mess behind; the nature of the work was such that we couldn't expect quick results and there was no detail we could afford to overlook; so in spite of all our excitement and impatience, we learned to exercise self-control, to be humble and meticulous, and we turned ourselves into expert sleuths.

Regardless of its boring familiarity, we first had to inspect the area under investigation, a procedure with a definite order, if not rules of its own; at their house she directed the work, while at mine it was my job cautiously to pull out the drawers — in each case the host had to assume responsibility for the operation's physical aspects — and together we had to ascertain whether there were any notable changes since the last search; generally two weeks, sometimes a whole month went by before we could reinspect each desk, a long enough period for substantial changes in the contents of some drawers: objects and papers might disappear, temporarily or permanently, the old contents might be differently arranged, or entirely new objects might replace the old ones; in this respect we had a harder time at her house, because her father, while not exactly untidy, was not nearly so neat and methodical as mine, who did not make our job harder by carelessly reaching into a drawer or poking around impatiently in another or pulling out something from the bottom of a pile.

To start with, Maja quietly pulled out the drawers while I watched over her shoulder, pulled them out one by one, without haste but not slowly either; we were familiar with each other's ability to observe, the pace with which to record what was observed; we knew how much time we each needed to take in the object as well as the direction of our search, to fix in our minds a picture of the drawer's inside, its overall shape that would enable us to make quick comparisons; and it was at such times that, without saying a single word, we had our most professional debates, touching on the very essence of our work; what was at stake was the integrity of our voluntary work as agents, and the heavy political responsibility that went with it: once in a while we might have pushed back a drawer too quickly, without noticing (or, worse, pretending not to notice) possible changes in its contents; at such moments the other person, with a mere glance, ordered a halt and demanded a correction; our roles changed according to the location — in my house she kept an eye on me, here I was the fussy one, though we made sure the control remained impersonal, and wanted to keep it skeptical but not mistrustful, overlooking the regrettable and unavoidable fact that, instinctively, against our better judgment, we were each protecting our respective fathers, which of course could prejudice our work; a drawer whose contents looked suspiciously different or that had been obviously gone through nervously, or the mere sight of a new batch of papers or an odd-looking envelope was enough to make us edgy, and it was the job of the other, acting as controller, to get us over this edginess so characteristic of amateurs, and to do so subtly and delicately, with the sober gravity of a glance reminding us of our commitment to professional honesty and objectivity, helping us overcome our intrusive albeit understandable filial bias; at the same time we couldn't seem sarcastic, aggressive, or rude; in fact, sometimes, for the sake of our ultimate goal, we'd even be slyly complaisant and act as if we hadn't noticed something the other one didn't want or dare to notice, and point it out only later, as if by chance, unexpectedly, and then pounce on the crucial item with all the rectitude of true conviction.

Only after these preliminaries could the real work begin: the close examination of notes, letters, receipts, papers, and documents; we never sat down but stood next to each other, in the shared sphere of each other's heat and excitement; we read the stuff together and in unison, devouring with greedy curiosity what were for the most part routine and boring, or fragmentary and therefore largely incoherent, pieces of information, and only when it was clear that the other didn't understand or might misunderstand something and therefore draw the wrong conclusion did we break the silence with a few whispered words of explanation.

We were not aware of what we were doing to each other and to ourselves; in the interest of our stated goal we didn't want to acknowledge that as a result of our activity a feeling was forming, like some tough stain or film, a deposit on the lining of our hearts, stomachs, and intestines; we did not want to acknowledge the feeling of repulsion.

Because it wasn't just official and work-related documents that we came across but all sorts of other material that we did not mean to find, like our parents' extensive personal romantic correspondence; here, the material discovered in my father's drawers was unfortunately more serious, but once we put our hands on it and went over it thoroughly, painstakingly, with the disinterested sternness of professionals, it seemed that by ferreting out sin in the name of ideal purity, invading the most forbidden territory of the deepest and darkest passions, penetrating the most secret regions, we, too, turned into sinners, for sin is indivisible: when tracking a murderer one must become a murderer to experience most profoundly the circumstances and motives of the murder; and so we were right there with our fathers, where not only should we not have set foot but, according to the testimony of the letters, they themselves moved about stealthily, like unrepentant sinners.