A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  Of course it wasn't so simple to leave, and I doubt she wanted me to obey her and go; her silence only increased the tension between us, and as if she had meant to add to it, she kept repeating herself, "Go now, there's a good boy, go, will you?" sometimes pressing me even harder to herself, in the guise of an embrace, holding on to me, hoping to delay the moment when prompted by some inner sense of propriety I'd get up and somewhat dazed but also relieved stumble into another room; but not yet—rather than spoiling the moment, I wanted to stretch it out, hold my face in my own breath, which her body had heated, in our common breath that made me feverish, too, and to position myself so that my mouth could brush against the skin of her bare arm, say in the curve inside her elbow, which is an especially soft spot, or her neck, where, in contrast, the mouth could explore the tensing muscles and tendons, and maneuvering further still, making it look completely accidental, pry open her mouth, and with the inside of my lips and the tip of my tongue feel the taste and smell of her skin.

  She didn't pretend not to have noticed these amorous gropings, but didn't want to expose my sly little tricks, either; she never made believe that she took them to be the bumbling, simpleminded signs of a child's love or that they made her feel uncomfortable; neither did she retreat behind the protective shield of illness, pretending that only physical weakness made these dangerous excesses of mutual tenderness possible and necessary—no, she didn't do any of this, but responded simply and naturally by softly kissing my ear, my neck, my hair, wherever she could reach; once, burying her head in my hair, she remarked that she could smell the little male animal in my hair, a whole school of itching little males, and that she rather liked it; it was a smell I hadn't noticed before, but from then on searched for, wanting to experience the cause of her fleeting pleasure; all along she was giving me a live demonstration of naturalness, pointing out the natural boundaries of naturalness, because even when she used words to interrupt and thereby cool the ardor of our physical contact, the interruption appeared as natural and appropriate as the contact itself, not a defense or protest but a sensible rerouting of emotions that had no other outlet.

  "All right, then," she said somewhat louder, and laughed a little for having come this far, "all right, maybe I'll try to tell you what I couldn't tell you before, listen: what I wanted to say was that I wasn't alone in that meadow; we were lying there in the tall grass, the sun was shining, with hardly any clouds in the sky, only those very light summer clouds that hardly move and you could hear the insects, wasps and bees, but it wasn't as nice as you might imagine, because every now and then a fly landed on my skin, and though I'd move an arm or a leg and it flew away, it would come right back, in the midday heat flies are always that pesky, try it sometime, and it was noon then; it's as if on purpose they won't let you enjoy whatever it is you want to enjoy, all that beauty, they simply won't have it, maybe because they also want to enjoy something just then, your skin, for instance, but again I'm not telling you the story I wanted to tell you; I can feel it myself, it's not for children, especially not you; one should keep quiet about everything, anyway; well, three of us were in that meadow, and there really was such a meadow, we came in a boat and tied it up at a prearranged spot where we were to meet the others, but we got there first and stretched out in the grass, quite a distance from one another, two men and me; and when you walked into the room and I woke up—came to, rather, yes, that's the right word, I hadn't been asleep at all—I was inside the picture, just then I saw the three of us from above, the way you do in a dream, and saw how terribly, how infinitely beautiful all this was then, because everything in the world is beautiful, though for me then it was sheer hell, a stinking swamp, and not because of the flies but because we couldn't decide who I really belonged to."

  "And Father?"

  "Yes, he was there, too."

  "And how did you decide?"

  "I didn't."

  She may have wanted to say something else but she didn't, as though she couldn't utter another word, not a single word ever again—that's how abrupt her silence seemed.

  And I couldn't ask her to go on; we both tensed up, lying there like two logs, or like two stalking beasts frozen in a moment of indecision, not knowing which will first pounce on the prey.

  Saying more would have meant going beyond all possible limits; as it was, we had come very close, helplessly skirting, if not actually arriving at, the very last border.

  She could not go any further out of sheer tact, and I couldn't have taken any more, so she smiled serenely, beautifully, her special smile for me, but this smile no longer seemed to be a part of a larger whole, a process with a beginning and an end, and I looked at her as one would look at a photograph of a smiling face out of the past, though the moment offered more than the images and random ebb and flow of thoughts evoked by this picture; it may sound like sentimental exaggeration, but this moment was a sudden illumination for me or, anyway, what for lack of a better word we usually call illumination: I saw her face, her neck, the creases and folds of her bedding, but every little detail acquired a story of its own, far richer than I had possibly imagined, and each story possessed a past filled with emotional and visual clues of whose existence I had otherwise been ignorant, and though the stories could not be recalled by ordinary, descriptive means, at this moment I could somehow grasp the clues: for example, there was a picture of me standing in front of the closed bathroom door, late at night, dark, and I wanted to go in but didn't dare, because what I was curious about I knew was forbidden and rightly so, but it wasn't their nakedness—they never deliberately concealed that from me, and I was the one who considered it a secret, the very top layer of the secret; no matter how unself-consciously they might have moved about in front of me, if I happened to see them naked I was the one who couldn't see enough of them, was embarrassed and excited by the delicious sense of peeping, by having to glance at their usually covered parts, which always seemed new and different and which I could never get used to; but what filled me with even more exquisite pain, offended my sense of modesty, and intensified my jealousy of their nakedness was the realization that their matter-of-fact behavior in front of me was part of a piously fraudulent game; I sensed that the two uncovered bodies, whether displayed individually or together, were meant only for each other, never for me, that only with each other could they be truly uninhibited, and I was excluded from their exclusive company, regardless of whether they happened to hate each other at that moment and intended to go for days without exchanging a single word, pretending to be completely indifferent to each other's presence, or whether the opposite was true, that they loved each other and every casual touch and fleeting glance, every burst of unexpected laughter, every knowing smile, bespoke an ineffable tenderness that I could not possibly have anything to do with; I was excluded, bypassed, made superfluous even if they seemed to love me the most at just such moments, with a love that was the overflow of their passion for each other, a treatment that was no less humiliating than being ignored or considered as an unnecessary, bothersome object; so Mother's last sentence, that unexpected confession, whose ambiguity held out all sorts of possibilities but also steered our short conversation toward that tense silence, seemed to illuminate for me the uneven nature of our relationship: she was going to let me have the key to secrets I had tried to unlock whenever I wished their relationship to be less exclusive than they made it appear, whenever I hoped they would somehow let me squeeze in between them; from inside the bathroom I would hear the sound of water splashing, soft words, and Mother's laughter, a peculiar laugh, so unlike all her other laughs, which gave me the intoxicating feeling that I had stood before this bathroom once before, in exactly the same way, in the dark, in my pajamas, and had been standing there ever since, everything that had occurred between these two indeterminate points in time being nothing but a vague dream, which had a beginning that now, as I was waking, I couldn't remember; and then, in a very different voice, deeper and stronger but preserving something of
the playfulness of a high-pitched, squealing laugh, Mother called out: "Who is there in the dead of night, behind that door?" and of course I didn't answer, and thought that maybe the creaking floor had given me away, though I was so careful not to let it creak, or could a physical presence be strong enough to be felt through a closed door? "Is that you, darling? A black raven knocking on my door? Come in, come in, whoever you are!" I couldn't answer, but she didn't seem to expect a reply, for she said, "Speak to me, speak, and come!" practically singing her words, and they were both shrieking with laughter, the water was splashing and purling in the bathtub, spilling onto the tile floor, and I could neither leave nor say something and walk in, but then the door opened.

  It was no mistake or a sensory illusion that made me think just now of having stood like this in a doorway once before; Mother's unfinished sentence conjured up part of an even earlier image, only a flash, really, just her feet, her head on the pillows, but enough to make the abyss I could now look into appear even more attractively bottomless, an image that, while standing in the bathroom door, only my instincts could recall— groping blindly for traces of an existing and carefully stored memory, knowing precisely its time and place, savoring its many flavors, and still unable to locate it—but now, unsummoned and unannounced it appeared, hanging into the other image, the pictures of nakedness affirming the connection between the two: when Father, leaning out of the bathtub, opened the door, my astonished face appeared in the steamy bathroom mirror, he loomed enormous, standing in the tub and leaning toward the door handle, his back, like a red blotch, reflected in the mirror streaked with running drops of condensed steam; both my face and his back were in the mirror; Mother was sitting in the water, rubbing her heavily shampooed hair; she smiled at me, blinking because the shampoo stung, and then, closing her eyes, she dunked her head to wash out the shampoo under the water; then, as now, I felt the same dazed helplessness, as if the pajamas were my body's only defense against feelings that would otherwise leave me naked, the pajamas were more real than I was, and then, too, I started walking in the direction of a remote, hollow, almost inaudible yet very penetrating voice; it was night, I got up to pee, and heard this voice, unfamiliar but not at all frightening, on a silent winter night lit by a cold moon, when the light refracted by the window frames into sharp angles and planes seems to float, and soft shadows seem to soak up all the familiar objects so that you are afraid to cross the sharp border of light, a voice coming from the hallway; my face turned a frightful blue by the moon, I saw it flash for a second in the hallway mirror, I thought someone was screaming or sobbing, but there was no one out in the hall, the voice was coming from the kitchen; I moved on, guided by my own amazement, my bare feet squishing on the stone floor; nothing, the kitchen was dark, something squeaked under the opening door, but then silence, no one there either; still, I felt or imagined the silence of living bodies, as if not only pieces of furniture soaked in the night were standing there and the quiet I heard was not just my bated breath; then, from behind the open door of the maid's room I heard a deep hoarse rattle, and with it the rhythmic creaking and groaning of bedsprings, each creak and groan and thrust seeming to let loose, from deep inside a throat, a high-pitched, ever-rising scream, a cross between a sob and a shrieking laugh; this was the voice that had attracted me, I wasn't imagining it, after all, and one more step was all it would take to look through the open door, and I wanted to look but couldn't; it seemed that I'd never reach the miserable door, still not there, still far away, even though the voice was already with me, so close, so within me, with all its depths, heights, and rhythms, and I didn't even notice when I finally managed to take that longed-for last step and could also see what I was hearing.

  Of course Father did not appear enormous because he really was enormous, in fact he was rather slight and slender; it's things like the incorrect use of the word "enormous" that now make me realize the powerful inhibitions and self-deceptions, over long decades, that I must grapple with when speaking of things one ordinarily doesn't, or perhaps shouldn't, talk about but which, since they are linked inextricably with the so-called inner life of the boy I once was, are unavoidable; so let's take a deep breath and relate quickly, before one's voice flags, that quite apart from that very early incident which for better or worse had dropped out of my memory for a long time and resurfaced unexpectedly and vividly only when Mother told me about the meadow—yes, the memory of Father's body in the scissors of two female legs on the bed of the maid's room did come back, like a well-kept secret that I mustn't tell Mother even now; I couldn't see the face, but I could see that the squeals of pleasure and pain were muffled because with his outspread fingers Father had thrust a pillow over the head below him; the legs entwining his waist told me that this woman was not my mother, how could she be, what would she be doing there? and because we can just as easily recognize a thigh, a foot, the curve of a calf as we can a nose, a mouth, or a pair of eyes, it isn't surprising that I knew those legs were not hers, and it wasn't her voice I heard from under the pillow—I knew very well who lived in the maid's room—what was startling was that I half expected them to be Mother's legs, not as if I had the vaguest notion of what was actually taking place but awareness yielded to unawareness in my assuming that in such close proximity of mutual pleasure there could be no room for anyone but Mother, thus, what I saw before me, no matter how pleasurable and therefore perfectly natural it may have seemed to a small child, was still repellent; yet all this was not directly related to the perception of Father as someone enormous, an impression that was made on me when, in his usual unsmiling, humorless way, he leaned out of the bathtub to open the door and, as he did, also blocked my way with his wet naked body glistening in the strong bathroom light, towering over me so that my eyes were focused on the darkest part of him, his loins, one might say right under my nose; and I knew, saw, and felt that, as always, not a single unguarded glance or move I made would escape his notice; his wet hair clung to his scalp, his forehead left clean and open, and his gaze—normally tempered and sheltered by strands of straight blond hair and thus engagingly attractive, almost beautiful, though his steely blue eyes made it strong and stern, but the thick mass of hair, which he combed straight back but which kept falling forward as he moved, lending him a casual, boyish look—this piercing gaze dominated his face, an open, attentive, cool, and threatening gaze, as if challenging the world, demanding an explanation from it; it seemed that he wasn't only towering over me but forever looking down from some unapproachable peak, from the heights of his undisputable certainties, from which he could afford to tolerate others' preoccupation with petty desires, instincts, gooey emotions, while he watched and judged, even if he didn't often put his judgments into words; viewed from this perspective, straight on and a bit from below, his body seemed perfect, at any rate what we usually call the perfect male body, and I deliberately used this emotionally neutral word, modestly avoiding the slightest suggestion of a natural attraction, so that I needn't call it beautiful, let alone exceptionally beautiful or, perish the thought, overwhelmingly beautiful—by calling it beautiful we'd have to admit being defenseless, at its mercy, and then, by the nature of things, we'd want to be at its mercy, indeed our greatest desire would be to immerse ourselves in it, to travel down the byways of this body, if only by tracing its lines with our fingers, to make our own with our touch what our eyes can only see: the broad shoulders that years of rowing and swimming had turned so firmly muscular that the otherwise charming protrusions of the shoulder and chest bones were barely visible; the firm shoulders leading smoothly, fluidly yet firmly, to the more articulated musculature of the arms and the well-toned, undulating plane of the chest, where the pregnability of the bare surface was both accentuated and toned down by a profusion of blondish hair, more attractive when wet, for the clinging strands encircled the nipples' darkened areolae like improvised wreaths, guiding our glance farther, to follow either the contours of the torso, narrowing at the waist, or the gently rippl
ing sinews sheathing the ribs, and linger perhaps on the firm bulge of the belly, where the dark hollow of the navel and especially the wedge of pubic hair, pointing upward, might impede a farther descent of our glance, but this delay is far from final, because eyes, independent of will, always pick out the darkest and lightest points, they're created like that by nature, as are all our instincts, and so we finally reach the loins, and if we have a chance to linger, if our glance is cautious enough and he doesn't notice—but of course he will, because in a similar situation his eyes would do the same, but he may be generous and pretend he didn't mind, or, if he did he might turn away and put something there, or drop a word, meant to be casual but inappropriate enough to reveal his embarrassment—or, if his knowledge of human nature was so secure that, suspending all moral considerations, he'd simply let us tarry, then we'd love to linger for a while, scrutinizing this rather intricate region, hoping to savor every detail, to assess its possibilities, knowing well that our eyes' journey thus far had been but a deferment, anticipation, and preparation: now we have reached the most intimate object of our curiosity: this is our place, this is what we'd been longing for, only from here can we draw the knowledge necessary to evaluate the whole body; consequently, it would be no exaggeration to claim that even from a moral standpoint we have reached the most critical spot.