A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  "The only reason I am going to tell you is that we promised we wouldn't keep any secrets from each other."

  And like someone who has managed to hurdle the first and most serious obstacle posed by her own sense of shame, she sighed, even smiled a little, using this smile to find her way back to my face and, looking straight into my eyes, continue what she had started: "He wrote to me, sent me a letter, Livia brought it over last night, that I should come, too, on account of the costumes, you see, and that we'd meet in the woods this afternoon."

  Now I had the upper hand, because I knew that this wasn't the whole truth.

  "You're lying."

  "And you're completely off your rocker."

  "You think I'm a fool and can't tell when you're lying to me?"

  I grabbed her wrist and simply yanked her hand off me, she had no business pawing me like that, but I didn't let go of her completely, I just pushed her away—she shouldn't be the one, certainly not with her transparent little lies, to decide just how close we should get—and I made this move though her affection expressed by such proximity, letting me feel her breath on my mouth, and even her dangerous lying that might have deceived just about anybody else pleased me very much, yet it was as if I had realized that the body, seductive and warm though it may be, never wants to possess another without attaching some moral conditions to this possession, and that precisely for the sake of a perfect and total possession, so-called truth is more important than the warm body or its momentary closeness; this truth, of course, does not exist, yet one must strive for it, for this inner truth of the body, even if it turns out to be only provisional, ephemeral; and so I acted like a cool-headed manipulator, deliberately and ruthlessly interfering with the process in the interest of some dimly perceived goal, rejecting the body in the hope of regaining it more completely sometime in the uncertain future.

  There is no harsher move than pushing someone away, deliberately, contemptuously: I lost her mouth, I gave up my attraction to her beauty in favor of a deeper attraction, but I did it in a shrewd, calculating way, so that she should be even more beautiful when I got her back, when she'd be all mine, because it was my rival, of course, the usurper, the stranger who was also my double, Kálmán, whom I had to evict from her mouth when I insisted that this perfectly formed mouth should not lie; therefore, I hoped to gain as much through the harshness of my gesture as I had to lose by it.

  "Forget it, it's not that important," I said to her mercilessly.

  "Then what d'you want from me?" she cried out, choking with anger, and snatched her wrist out of my hand.

  "Nothing. You're ugly when you lie."

  Of course lying did not change her looks—if anything, her wounded feelings made her more beautiful; again she shrugged her shoulders, as if she were not at all interested in how I happened to see her at any given moment, a nonchalant shrug that was in such stark contrast with what she must have been thinking that she had to lower her lids, chastely, her wide-open, always astonished eyes disappearing behind the lazy, thick lashes, leaving her mouth free to rule her face.

  I couldn't have wished for anything more at this point than to watch her motionless mouth: perhaps what made this mouth so unusual was that the upper lip, a perfect twin of the lower one, arched straight toward the little groove running down from the nose to the edge of the lips, without the two usual peaks breaking its rise or the tiny hollows at the mouth's edge interrupting its downward slope; the symmetrical pair of lips formed a perfect oval.

  A mouth ready to whistle, sing hauntingly, or chatter endlessly, and full cheeks framed by a mass of springy brown curls all added to her cheerful, carefree, and unself-conscious demeanor; she turned around and without relaxing her narrow shoulders still raised in a shrug headed for the door, but then unexpectedly changed course and, instead of walking out, threw herself on the bed.

  It wasn't a real bed but a kind of divan that doubled as a bed where during the day a heavy Persian throw rug covered the bedclothes; it was soft and warm, her motionless body fairly sank in it, clad in the maroon, flower-patterned dress she had filched for the afternoon from her mother's closet, which was in fact a tiny sunlit room with built-in white floor-to-ceiling wardrobes, all filled with pleasant-smelling dresses, one of our favorite places for rummaging and exploration; her bare legs, dangling helplessly from the divan, almost glowed in this stuffy dim room, and what made the sight even more inviting was that her skirt rode up to her thighs, and as she lay there, hiding her head in the protective embrace of her arms, she began to cry, making her shoulders, back, and even gently curving backside shake and quiver.

  Her tears didn't move me much, I was familiar with every possible variant of these crying sessions: the simple whimpers, the even, inconsolable sniffling, and the furiously rising huge outbursts that she invariably carried to unbearably ugly, sloppy, snotty crescendos of bawling, followed by slow, talkative denouements, quiet shivers, stifled tremors of exhaustion that made her body spongy-soft and relaxed until, without noticeable transition, she found her way back to her usual self, which was, if possible, even stronger and more confident—and fully satisfied.

  This familiarity with her crying styles didn't mean of course that I could deny her my sympathy, for I knew she was capable of crying even when I wasn't looking; she had given detailed accounts of her solitary crying sessions often enough, lacing them with a healthy dose of self-mockery, including the candidly revealing admission that crying, an unabashed and self-indulgent flaunting of pain, was no small pleasure, and what's more, she liked to cry in Livia's company, too, finding her a similarly sympathetic, gentle, somewhat more objective provider of solace than I; still, something about her crying was directed only at me, some playful, exaggerated quality made to order, as it were, a theatricality prompted by my presence; her cries were part and parcel of our mutual dishonesty, an important element in the elaborate system of lies and pretenses that nevertheless had to be enacted with the utmost care and conviction, the very fraudulent games which we played in the guise of total honesty and openness; it was as if with these cries she was trying out, in front of me and for me, the part of the weak, helpless, easily injured, refined woman she would one day become, although in reality she was cold and hard, calculatingly cruel and shrewd, and while in beauty no match for Hédi, she acted so very tough and aggressive, so stubbornly possessive of everything and everyone, that she seemed to dominate us even more than Hédi did with her beauty, although that, too, was a charade, as she must have known I knew; she was rehearsing a role, and those flounced and frilly dresses and silky fabrics for which we both had developed a deep liking were the appropriately feminine, external supports for the role, and stealing them added a further element of excitement to her clandestine acts of transformation, because she wanted to be exactly like her mother; I started toward the divan with the most confident steps, for in my assigned role I had to be strong, calm, understanding, a trifle brutal even, in short, absolutely masculine, a role promising so many playful pleasures that, however false it was, I had no problem assuming it.

  And perhaps it was this deliberate readiness for falsity that made me different from other boys.

  I was so much in tune with the source of her femininity, I had the impression I was just playing at being a boy, and my playacting might be exposed at any time.

  As if there was no dividing line between my maleness and my femaleness.

  It seemed to me it wasn't I who did this or that, I wasn't the one who acted, but only chose between two pre-prepared patterns of action inside me, one for boys and one for girls, and since I was a boy, I chose the male pattern, naturally, but could just as easily have chosen the other one: I could now ask her, for example, in a rough, no-nonsense voice, what in God's name was the matter with her, though I knew perfectly well what the matter was, and if she didn't answer I could demand even more forcefully that she stop the hysterics, tell her sarcastically that her idiotic bawling and hollering was a sheer waste of time, or I could sta
rt swearing and make as though her crying annoyed the hell out of me, which it didn't; or I could switch, take the part of a girl friend and tell her that if she still wanted to see her darling Kálmán, that disgusting fat slob— and that was what she wanted to do, wasn't it?—though I had no idea what she could see in him, his name was enough to make me puke, but if she still wanted to see him, she'd better mind her lovely face and not mess it up with all that disgusting blubbering, because then he wouldn't like her nearly as much as she would like him to; all the while Maja, trusting herself to the undulating waves in the opening movement of her crying, seemed to be waiting for just these harsh words, the precise content of the rudeness hardly mattering, just needing symbolic slaps to prove to herself that she was indeed weak, as I needed to swear to prove I was strong, and as soon as she got these bracing slaps, she released the pent-up energies of a well-practiced performance, turned on her side, lowered her arms, and, switching to deep-throated bawling, finally showed me her face, so contorted by tears and screaming that it deserved some real sympathy.

  As if there was a degree of falsity where the false began to appear genuine.

  "What do you all want from me? Why are you screaming? What do you want? Why? Everybody, everybody keeps tormenting me!" she screamed, her scream turning into a howl that sounded quite real, giving me a perversely wonderful pleasure since her howling had to do with both Kálmán and me: it was her wavering and vacillating between the two of us that was real, though for me it still remained a game I could observe from the outside; but now, rolling back on her stomach, she buried her head in her arms again and began her rise, this time without the slightest inhibition, into regions of higher, truer, more real sobbing; I stood over her, fascinated and mesmerized, as she manipulated, slowly, gradually, with finesse, what may have seemed like a game a moment ago into a passion of suffering, and though her body at first resisted, having no real cause for suffering, and refused to cooperate, now it did, and the clever maneuver worked: sunk deep in the soft bed, she was suffering, she was trembling and writhing, this was no longer just a game; yet still I made no move, still tried to preserve the calm air of a confident male, did not reach out toward her, didn't touch her or comfort her, though the sight truly shocked me, because she kept tearing and biting the blanket and, like an epileptic, jerking and tossing her head while her legs dangled lifelessly over the edge of the bed, and she seemed to be having an attack, trapped in the unrelieved tension between total self-revelation and total self-defense; and my fear, dread, and shocked immobility hiding behind benevolent indifference were more than justified, because I was the one who wanted this to happen, I had provoked it with my words, teased the secret madness out of her so that I could feel my power over her, vanquish, in her body, that other boy within me who was too tenderly and cruelly familiar to make me truly jealous—it was all for me, then, only for me, but that voice! the shrill sobs swelling into screams seemed to be issuing not from a single source but from two different voices, as if behind the pitiful bawling, broken by the rhythmic writhing of her body, there was another, shrieking voice that grew piercingly, unrelentingly, thinner and reedier; it was unbearable, and I felt everything about to crumble and slip out of my control.

  And when I lay down next to her on the soft divan, leaning over her and cautiously touching her shoulder, I was not motivated by tenderness or empathy—if anything, she disgusted me, I hated her, and feared she might go on like this forever; and though I knew all crying must come to an end sometime, its effect on me was so powerful, the sight and sound so immediate, that my former experiences failed to reassure me and I thought, Yes, she will go on like this, she won't stop, ever, whatever had been hidden and now surfaced accidentally will become permanent, and Szidónia will walk in and I'll be found out, and the neighbors will come trooping across the garden, because everybody could hear her, and they'll call a doctor, and her mother and father will come, and she'll still be carrying on in her red dress, and they'll find out that this dreadful thing was all because of me.

  "Maja dear."

  "Your mother's cunt, that's what's dear!"

  "But what is it? Come, don't cry like this. What happened? I'm here. You know I understand. Everything. We promised, remember? You've said it yourself."

  "Fuck your promise!" she said, and she rolled back toward the wall, pulling away impetuously, and I clambered after her, just to make her stop.

  "I'm not going away, I only said that to get you scared, but I'm not, I promise. I'll stay right here. Come on, Maja, Maja! But you can go. If you want to, you can go. You know I always let you do what you want. Why don't you answer?" I whispered in her ear and tried to hug her, flatten myself against her, hoping that the calm of my body would somehow pass into hers.

  But where was my superior manly calm by then! I was also trembling, my voice also shaking, and I didn't suspect that with faultless concentration she sensed everything and that I couldn't have given her greater satisfaction than this.

  At the same time my alarmed tenderness instead of calming her frenzy oddly intensified it, and only at this point could I peer behind her madness and ascertain that, as frightful and uncontrolled as the spectacle seemed, there was plenty of sober and calculating sense left in her; I may have drawn her head close to me with a gesture disguised as one of caring attention, planning slyly to put my hand over her mouth so that no more of that sound should come out, but it was no use, we saw through each other, and she could accurately detect the deceit hidden in my gesture; her body tensed up, she flung me off her and began kicking and pummeling me, biting my fingers hard, as she kept on wailing and shrieking; her face was contorted, almost as if it had become a boy's face, hard, angular, and dirty from tear stains; and if at that moment my quaking fright had not been replaced by a bit of cunning, if I had responded to her blows and kicks with blows and kicks of my own, chances are she would have beaten me thoroughly, for though we never fought in earnest, she was probably stronger than I and, in any case, wilder and more reckless.

  I didn't defend myself, I didn't even notice when she stopped screaming, what's more, I didn't try to hold her down, and I restrained myself—our relationship never had a more honest moment—I let her claw and bite and kick and scratch and tried to respond to her every move with the gentlest of touches, soft caresses and kisses that bounced off her, given the unevenness of the fight, just as her clumsy, broad-stroked, girlish punches missed me; still, I was the girl and she the boy, in this situation at least, in the way she glowered and bared her teeth and tensed her neck muscles; in the sudden silence that followed, only her loud panting, the groans of the mattress, and the thud of punches could be heard.

  She tried to push me away, pressing her fist against my shoulder, off the divan, onto the floor, but when my hand clasped her naked thigh, it was as if her hate-filled resistance and raging fury had suddenly left, unexpectedly even to her, flowed out, evaporated from her limbs, and her body relaxed in an instant; as if seeing me for the first time in her life, she seemed genuinely surprised that I was so close to her and that she liked it; she opened her eyes wide again, no longer whitely insane but familiarly inquisitive.

  She held her breath.

  As though she was anxious not to let even her breath touch my mouth, not if we were this close, this hot.

  The bare skin under my hand quivered a bit, as if she had just realized my hand was there.

  And how could my hand have gotten there?

  Then she burst into tears again.

  As if the closeness and the warmth had brought on the tears, but now there was real pain behind them, a quiet, I'd even say wise, pain.

  A pain that had no hope of finding relief in the heat of another outburst, and indeed never turned into a real cry comparable to the earlier one, but remained a quiet whimper.

  Still, this voice touched me more deeply than the earlier voices, and I somehow caught it from her: a long-drawn-out whine did leave my throat though my cry could not burst forth but only cho
ked me, because in my chest and in my thighs a firm and eager but also paralyzing force, preventing total yielding or weakening, was pushing, thrusting me toward her; if before I had assumed or suspected she was foisting a nonexistent, imaginary pain on her body, using it to deceive and distract me so that she could obtain my surrender, I now realized this assumption was unfounded, because something was causing her real pain—I was the cause of her pain, the fact that she loved me as well.

  I edged closer to her, and rather than objecting to this she helped me by slipping her arm under my shoulder, gently hugging me to herself, and simply to return the gesture I let my hand slide up her thigh, my fingers slip under her panties.

  And we lay there like this.

  Her burning face on my shoulder.

  We seemed to be lolling in some spacious, soft and slippery wetness where one doesn't know how time passes but it's of no importance anyway.

  With my arms I was rocking her body as if wanting to rock both of us to sleep.

  With my little sister, too, I used to lie like this, in a time beyond memory, under the desk, when I was experimenting with those pins and she, looking for a place to hide and finding it with me, screamed in pain and terror as she flung herself on me, as if by entrusting her pitiful, twisted, and by all appearances disgusting body to me, she was trying to say she'd understood my cruel games and was even grateful to me, since I was the only one who, through those games, had found a language she could use; that's how my sister and I kept rocking each other, half-sitting, half-lying on the cool parquet floor, until we fell asleep in each other's arms in the late-afternoon twilight.