A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  Unexpected as the knocking was, it still seemed as if I had been waiting for it—not surprising, since the circumstances made it inevitable, it had to happen; but when it did, when I heard the knock, I didn't feel like hastening events; I did not rush to get dressed—in fact, that didn't even occur to me; I stayed as I was, undisturbed, absorbed in scrutinizing my body, as if there had been no knocking at all; oddly enough, I suddenly remembered something seemingly very remote: I thought of Thea Sandstuhl, I even had time to recall a single gesture of hers: in trying to trace points where random thoughts converge, we may rediscover the psychic miracle that makes the distant appear close, as if merely a matter of simple, mechanical associations; I thought of the afternoon I became acquainted with Melchior, and the knocking I heard I took to be a direct consequence of his escape; the particular moment that came to mind was when during rehearsal Langerhans had impatiently clapped his pudgy hands and in his unpleasantly high-pitched voice said, "Enough! I told you not to stick that hump so high!" and, tearing his gold-rimmed glasses off his pasty face, flew into a rage; and Thea remained as she was, a prisoner of her own gesture, much as I was now, in front of the mirror; on other occasions, after such directorial interruptions, Thea astounded those watching her with her ability to shift emotional gears with incredible ease and speed: she could be crying, screaming, or gasping amorously in one moment and in the next listen obligingly and attentively to the director's latest instructions; it was as if there were no boundaries between her various emotional states, one flowing naturally from the other, or as if bridging the gap between them, making smooth transitions, posed no difficulties for her, which in turn aroused the suspicion of outside observers that she was not present in any of these situations—though she appeared most subtly convincing in all of them; but that afternoon she overwhelmed us with the slowness of her transition, involuntarily demonstrating in pure form the fine gradations through which we can force our emotions to move from one subject to the next: the voice reached her body like a delayed jolt; Langerhans's admonition had already been uttered, but she, with the contradictory emotion of a moment ago, was still pointing the heavy sword at the bare chest of Hübchen, kneeling before her; she made her move as if she hadn't heard what she had to have heard, giving us a sense of the sharp line dividing inner drives from external pressure; her body gave a start only when the response already seemed late, and only then did it freeze in an attitude of innocent, appealing embarrassment.

  She looked lovely in a tight-fitting, richly laced, purple dress which at once emphasized and concealed her body's tense, uneasy lines; her neck and torso tilted a little, as though the director's voice had indeed pushed her, kept her from touching the desirable naked chest before her, from following through on her inner urge to deliver the lover's stab; but she also could not yet do what the director, for some inscrutable reason, wanted her to do: that she slowly lowered the sword she'd been gripping with both hands, its tip clanging to the floor, did not mean she was able to choose between her inner urge and the outside command, but merely that she was sidetracked by a deeply ingrained impulse to obey, turning her response into a clumsy display of obedience; Thea considered herself an intelligent actress and always spoke with contempt of colleagues who, amateurishly, wanted to "live" their parts: "Oh, him, the poor thing, he identifies, he becomes the character, his tears flow so much I feel like scratching his ear to make him stop or asking him if he needs to take a crap; but the audience eats it up, it's grateful to him and wouldn't think of disturbing him, after all he's a true artist, the genuine article, we can see with our own eyes how much he must work and suffer for this noble art, poor thing, how he suffers for us, can't you see, the idiot lives the part for us because he can't do it for himself!" these were some of the things she had said, but now her embarrassed body and unembarrassed glance revealed how much she had been captured by the situation, which had nothing to do with the method of acting that is based on "living the part" yet required of her a degree of inner fervor which, despite her firmest intentions, made her open, vulnerable, oblivious to her professional experience and technique; it was this tension that made her so suitable for the situation created not by her but by Langerhans's crafty aggressiveness.

  It was a vicious circle: when Hübchen tore off his rough shirt, the sight of his naked body must have stunned her, caught her unprepared, so she couldn't ignore it, and even though they must have rehearsed that scene at least ten times and might go over it a hundred more times, it would always wind up on the same emotional track chosen by Langerhans, who had, very slyly, also taken into account Thea's abilities and desires.

  The knocking on the door of my hotel room now turned to banging, pounding fists.

  "If you stick it up so high, then she, too, can see it!" Langerhans yelled, and it was hard to know whether he was truly fuming or this moment was simply a pretext to make the already heavy air of discipline in the rehearsal hall even more oppressive; the makeup man, who liked to sit at the edge of the director's platform, so that in time I had become familiar with his fuzzy, freckled pate, sprang up and ran to the lighted acting area, his white robe fluttering like wings, while Langerhans's anger seemed to subside with each sentence he spoke, until he had regained the whispering and rather mannered speech that was his trademark: "What we need now is for her to see his beauty, nothing else!" he said, still yelling; "We need only his beauty now," he added more quietly, "so that the woman should be willing to spread her legs for him right here, onstage, do you understand?" he was whispering now, with a soft, dainty motion replacing his glasses on his flat nose, "so it should be much lower, as I showed you."

  But the improbably open look in Thea's eyes began to waver and fade, releasing Hübchen's near-naked, let's just say pleasingly proportioned, body; only when the director and the makeup man were already standing next to her to take a better look at the ill-placed hump—and not even then—could she turn away or move; it became almost palpably clear that a very powerful emotion could not find an outlet and she didn't know what to do with it, nobody seemed to want it, she had to wait until it would be repressed or help arrived, just as I was standing there in the hotel room, listening helplessly to the insistent banging on the door, realizing that all this time I had been looking at myself with Melchior's eyes; and that's exactly how Hübchen must have felt: he didn't budge either but remained on his knees, looking into Thea's eyes, and then rather awkwardly, foolishly, burst out laughing, braying like a teenager, which anywhere else might have caused embarrassment but here nobody paid attention to real feelings and emotions which, like the chips and shavings of the work being shaped on the stage, were flying in all directions; it wasn't as if Hübchen's body and amazing, creamy-white, hairless skin had aroused ordinary, offstage feelings in Thea—though that would not have been so unusual, because women like to boast, even at the risk of losing out by such statements, that the beauty of the male body has scarcely any effect on them, their contention being borne out, apparently, by the truth that bone structure, muscle definition or the lack of it, even flabby softness have no discernible effect on sexual prowess (one need only note that after penetration the body's external features lose importance and become mere conductors, mediators), though the symbolic value of the visual experience is far from negligible; beauty is the advance payment on desire, an invitation to pleasure, and there is no difference between the sexes in their preference for what is firm, well shaped, supple, and strong over bodies that are shapeless, flaccid, washed-out, and feeble; in this sense the sight of the human body is not a question of aesthetics but of vital instincts: not only could Hübchen's body be called perfect, but Langerhans, with calculated and characteristically almost perverse shrewdness, had Hübchen's trousers made with a low waistband to make it look as if they had slid down accidentally, leaving his bony hips and gently sloping belly bare and suggesting that he wore nothing underneath; and though he wore soft leather boots and the cleverly shortened pants on top, one had the impression of total
nakedness, and only at his groin did one's glance stumble on discreet covering.

  Thea finally looked at me.

  She probably couldn't see me, I sat too far away in the hall, and her glance could not easily pass over the sharp line separating light and darkness there, but the vague feeling that somebody was sitting calmly, watching her, and not without empathy, was evidently enough for her to retreat from unpleasant, all-too-human openness into the more secure role of the actress; anyway, I had the feeling that my sheer presence was of some help; at almost the same moment, a bit later, Langerhans must also have noticed her poignant confusion, and rather gently, but with the professional aloofness of a man who knows that the psychological maintenance of his actors is part of his job, he placed his hand on her shoulder, squeezed it encouragingly, helped her recovery along; and Thea, sensing the warmth of a strange body, suddenly tipped her head sideways without otherwise altering her position in the slightest, touching the hand with her face and locking it between her face and shoulder.

  And they stayed that way, their images reflected on the huge, slightly raised glass panel covering the walls of the rehearsal hall.

  Hübchen was still kneeling, with the makeup man bent over him trying to remove his hump; Langerhans was watching his actress's face; and Thea, still clutching the lowered sword, rested her head on her director's hand.

  The tableau-like scene seemed infinitely tender, but the greenishly sparkling glass backdrop made it look stiff and cold.

  It was late afternoon by now, only a few of us were left, and it was so quiet you could hear the hum of the radiators and the gently tapping rain on the roof.

  "There's nothing wrong with my seeing his hump," Thea now said; although there was a cooing tone in her voice as she tried to match her emotions to his touch, Langerhans wasn't going to be taken in so easily and cheaply; he withdrew his hand with undignified haste and blushed, as he always did when contradicted: "It seems you still don't understand your own situation, Thea," he said quietly, his voice devoid of emotions not relevant to the subject at hand (it was this voice that made him so detestable and unapproachable): "You shouldn't worry about yourself so much, you know; after all, what can happen? Nothing. Go ahead, don't be afraid to be a little more vulgar, it's okay, we're talking business here, plain and simple. You'll simply sell your body, that crack between your legs, to be exact, because that's all you've got left, that slit. Your life has finally revealed its true nature to you. That's all there is, that hole, that body, and nothing else. He's killed your husband. So what? He's killed your father-in-law. Big deal. He's also killed your father, but that doesn't matter either, because you're scared, because you're all alone. They're all dead, but you're alive, and when he tears off his shirt you can see he's quite attractive. You don't even want to see his hump. So his offer sounds like a good deal all around. Be a slut, my dear, and don't try to be his mother."

  "But even a slut could be a mother, have you ever thought of that?" Thea said, even more quietly.

  "Go ahead, catch your breath. Take your time."

  "You're being very nice."

  "No, I'm just trying to understand you."

  "But what should I do with all that phlegm? while I'm doing all that cursing it just builds up, almost choking me. What should I do? I think I should be spitting at that point. It was dumb to cut that. I'll choke on it, I'm telling you. What should I do?"

  "Swallow it."

  "I can't, I just can't."

  "You can't spit on the glass, if that's what you had in mind."

  Thea shrugged her shoulders. "You still need me?"

  "We'll take a short break," Langerhans said.

  I got up from the chair on which I had been comfortably swinging back and forth; Thea was heading toward us.

  This was the dull part of the day, as always happened when rehearsals stretched into the late afternoon: even if the rehearsal hall's tall, narrow, highly placed windows had not been covered with black curtains, anyone interested in the outside world and looking out through the heavily barred windows would see little besides a few slender chimneys rising above grim walls, darkening in the rapidly descending twilight, and blackened roof tiles across the way, and a sky that more often than not was depressingly, monotonously gray; still, sometimes I'd stand by those curtains for a while, usually after politely offering my chair to Thea, who, when not onstage, liked to sit next to Frau Kühnert at the little table near the edge of the director's platform; my small courtesy toward Thea came in handy because around that time of the day, as late afternoon was turning into evening, insecurity and anxiety took hold of me, nearly suffocated me; we'd call it simple anxiety, I suppose, since I really had nothing to do here, I was only an observer, which after a while proved to be not only exhausting but downright unhealthy; I just had to get up and look for something to do; but the view from the window didn't relieve my anxiety, if only because I went on being an observer—though not of gestures, faces, and accents, which in the artificial light of the cavernous hall had become all too familiar, along with the personal, often secret motives animating them; what I saw from the window, from behind crude iron bars, was a different set of relationships, between walls, roofs, and the sky, and I had nothing to do with them either, except as an observer, yet even here I could see some subtle changes: no matter how relentlessly gray the sky may have appeared, the various shades of light had enough play to emphasize certain details over others, so that the same view in fact was constantly changing, looked new and different; and similarly, under the even glare of the rehearsal lights there were enough surprises to make transparently familiar gestures and responses seem startlingly fresh; in my better moments I could consider myself rich in the accumulated knowledge of these details and the relationships among them, but I had to forgo the natural desire to contribute actively, to participate; my mind may have been producing some very decent ideas, but I had no clearly defined role, no real niche, and this proved to be a fundamental handicap here, where one's place in the strict hierarchy was determined by the role one played, where only rank could give validity and weight to one's observations; in a certain sense I was tolerated only in the chair I occupied, and it wasn't a permanent chair either but an extra one put in for me, temporarily; I was nothing more than an "interested Hungarian," as somebody once said, standing right behind me, not at all concerned that I might overhear this odd characterization, which, come to think of it, wasn't offensive, given its factual correctness, perhaps more accurate than the person who spoke it might have thought; anyway, my situation was not so unusual or unfamiliar; I could have found it highly symbolic that I was deprived of a chance to interfere with the course of events, made a silent witness, an observer condemned to inaction who also had to bear, all by himself, the consequences of his silence and his helplessness, without the chance to blow off steam; I was indeed a Hungarian, in this sense very much a Hungarian: no wonder Frau Kühnert's pleasant attentiveness and Thea's flattering interest were so gratifying.

  Thea stopped in front of us, and by now I was holding the back of the chair, ready to give her my seat; there was something characteristically exaggerated in my politeness—I shouldn't have been so afraid of losing that modicum of goodwill she had shown me—but she wasn't ready to sit down yet, she didn't even step up on the platform as she usually did but, rather, she slid her two elbows to the table and without so much as casting a glance at us leaned her chin on its edge, like a child—-she had to get on her toes to do this—and then, resting her head on her arms, slowly closed her eyes.

  "What a disgusting piddling around all this is," she said softly, without batting her eyelids; she was perfectly aware that her little performance, for all its hamming, was impressive enough to hold us captive; after all, a truly great actress was doing the hamming, by way of relaxing, and it seemed to betray real emotion. Frau Kühnert did not respond, let her go on, and I didn't start for the window, as was my custom, to disappear behind the black curtains, I was curious; she paused effecti
vely, making us wait, then let out a small sigh, giving us time to watch her shoulders gently rise and fall; with her eyes still closed, she lowered her voice even more, making herself barely audible and, as someone yielding to exhaustion but unable to stop the flow of thoughts, continued, savoring her words: "He'll ruin me, he has ruined me, with this disgusting fussing and piddling."

  By now the silence in the rehearsal hall was so deep you could hear not only the rain pattering on the roof and the radiators humming but Frau Kühnert closing her prompt book with a real thump; but she must have meant this rather abrupt gesture as only a prelude to another, more sensible move, because it made as little sense to close the prompt book as it did to leave it open: Frau Kühnert came to the first rehearsal with the full play already memorized, as the actors did, and from then on her only job was to enter the various changes in the text, erase them if necessary, re-enter the final version in ink, and make sure the changes were clearly marked in all copies of the script, and to be on the safe side, she had to sit there with the thick master copy, saving her attention and voice for the moments when someone unexpectedly got stuck, when she would feed them their cues with the eagerness of a good student; this happened very seldom, of course, so now, like one who has finally found real work for which she feels inner motivation, she rested her veiny, masculine hand on the closed book a second, and then gently yet eagerly slid the hand onto Thea's head.

  "Come, darling, sit down here, rest a little," she whispered, and though her words were loud enough to be heard, people were too tired to turn around and give her a dirty look.

  "He wore me out completely."

  "Come, our young friend here will give you his seat."

  They had their game down pat; Thea still didn't budge; her face, like an open landscape anyone could freely admire, was relaxed, absorbed in itself.