Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

There is profound wisdom in the Old Testament's prohibition against casting eyes on the uncovered loins of one's father.

Maybe if we had uncovered this forbidden knowledge separately, each of us alone, we might have been able to conceal it from ourselves — forgetting can sometimes act like a good comrade; but our situation was exacerbated by our attachment, this passionate and passionately suspicious relationship which went far beyond friendship but had not reached love; we got to know these secrets together and, let's not forget! while still sexually unsatisfied: the very object of these secrets was passion and its mutual gratification, and as we know, a secret shared by two people is no longer a secret; with her full knowledge and approval I read through letters written by a woman named Olga and also by her mother, both women writing from the height of emotional and physical rapture, cursing, berating, extolling, admonishing, fawning, and above all imploring her father not to abandon them, and, in keeping with the conventions of such love letters, decorating their words with encircled teardrops, locks of hair, pressed flowers, and little hearts drawn in red pencil; though old enough to sense the raw power of passion, in our aesthetic squeamishness we found all this very repugnant; with my approval and eager assistance, Maja had a chance to acquaint herself with the stylistically more restrained letters that János Hamar wrote to my mother and the ones my father wrote to Maria Stein, but my father and mother also wrote letters to each other in which they discussed their feelings about being caught up in this inextricably complicated foursome; and since all this was revealed to both of us, we should have made some judgment, or at least have appraised and characterized the information, put it in its proper place; needless to say, this went way beyond our moral strength — which otherwise we thought quite formidable.

How could we have known then that our relationship reenacted, repeated, and copied, in a playfully exaggerated form — today I know it followed a diabolical pattern — our parents' ideals and also their ruthless practices, and to some extent the publicly proclaimed ideals and ruthless practices of that historical period as well? playing at being investigators was nothing but a crude, childishly distorted, cheap imitation; we could call it aping, but we could also call it an immersion in something real, for Maja's father was chief of military counter-intelligence and my father was a state prosecutor, and therefore by picking up on hints and remarks they dropped, we were both initiated, almost by accident and definitely against their will, into the professional pursuit of criminal investigation; more precisely, for us it was turning their activities into a game that enabled us to experience their present life and work — which we thought was wonderful, dangerous, important, and, what's more, respectable — and also to bring their past closer, which, judging by the contents of those drawers, was filled with adventure, real-life dangers, narrow escapes, false papers, and double identities — we could see their youth; and if I were to go a little further — and why shouldn't I? — I'd have to say that they were the ones who blessed the knife with which we sought their lives; in this sense, we not only suffered for playing our games but also took great delight in them; we loved being serious, we basked in the glory of our assumed political role, not only filled with terror and remorse but bestowing on us a grand sense of power, a feeling that we had power even over them, over these enormously powerful men, and all in the name of an ethical precept that, again in their own views, was considered sacred, nothing less than the ideal, self-abnegating, perfect, immaculate Communist purity of their way of life; and what a cruel quirk of fate it was that through it all they were totally unsuspecting, and how could they have guessed that, while in their puritanical and also very practical zeal they were killing scores of real and imagined enemies, they were nurturing vipers in their bosom? for after all, who disgraced their ideals more outrageously than we? who put their ideals more thoroughly to the test than we, in our innocence? and since we also harbored the same witch-hunter's suspicion toward them and toward each other, which they had planted in us and bred in themselves, with whom could we have shared the dreadful knowledge of our transgressions, whom? I couldn't talk about things like this with Krisztián or Kálmán, nor could Maja discuss them with Hédi or Livia, for how could they have understood? even though we lived in the same world, ruled by the same Zeitgeist, this would have been too alien for them, too bizarre, too repulsive.

Our secrets carried us into the world of the powerful, initiated us into adulthood by making us prematurely mature and sensible, and of course set us apart from the world of ordinary people, where everything worked more simply and predictably.

These love letters referred openly and unequivocally to the hours in which, by some peculiar mistake, we had been conceived — by mistake, because they didn't want us, they wanted only their love.

For example, in one of her letters to my father, Mária Stein described in great detail what it was like to be embraced by János Hamar and then by Father. In her letter, and I distinctly remember this, it was the stylistic value of the word that troubled me most; I would have loved to understand "embrace" as a hug, a kind of friendly hug and squeeze, but of course there was no doubt that the word alluded to something else, which for a child was a little like watching an animal in heat that suddenly starts speaking — interesting but incomprehensible; the letters Mother got from János Hamar before I was born were no less ardent; this was the same János Hamar who then disappeared from our lives as mysteriously and unexpectedly as Maria Stein did; neither of them came around anymore, and I was supposed to forget them, because my parents wanted it that way; Maja, on the other hand, was visibly pained by the fact that her father was still seeing this Olga woman, even though as far as her mother knew, the affair had ended long ago; Maja was forced to become her father's silent accomplice, though she loved her mother more.

I imagine the archangels covered God's eyes while we pored over these letters.

We made things somewhat easier on ourselves by quickly dismissing the letters as unimportant and silly — how could respectable, middle-aged people scribble such smutty things to each other? — thus extinguishing the flames of our interest, which had been fanned by our own nature, we went about even more desperately looking for crimes that did not exist, at least not in the form we imagined.

Except I couldn't take it anymore: there was nothing premeditated about my decision; it was a sudden and complete indifference toward the whole business, a feeling, that these drawers with all the papers in them no longer interested me; they had before but now for some reason didn't, and I must leave.

While the setting sun still shone outside, a soft dimness was already spreading within; it was nice, and somehow made the large desk loom even larger and more gloomily, and in the fine layer of dust covering its smooth dark surface, I could see Maja's telltale fingerprints.

And there was something else: a strange, unfamiliar, and infinitely light sensation that I in fact existed, not irresponsibly but in full awareness of my responsibilities, and that I should stop doing what I was doing, and it would be not cowardly to stop but, on the contrary, an act of courage; I was still bothered by how tensely and crookedly she drew up her shoulders, that movement bothered me, and so did the traces our search had left behind; it may have been the feeling of being conscious of my body, that earlier erection provoked by her nearness, which now removed me from the childish games that we had transformed into a seemingly serious activity; I don't quite know what it was, except I felt that I must break out of this, and now! it seemed that all I wanted was that these lovely, slender, restive shoulders of hers — I did love it that she looked so impossibly thin in her mother's dress, I liked them more than Hédi's fuller, broader shoulders, which would have no trouble filling out such a dress— yes, I wanted these shoulders to relax, to be like, like.. but just what they should be like my wish failed to spell out; and if I had said anything then, if I had said that I didn't want to go on, her probable reaction would have been quite different from what I wanted.