by Peter Nadas
"We'll wait for you to change, okay," I said quietly, "and then we can still talk about tonight, but hurry up."
She was still looking at me: the wrinkles of her smile, the furrows around her eyes, the closely meshed curved lines that seemed to relieve the darker, deeper grooves of bitterness and suffering around her mouth were still meant for me, but as she withdrew her arm from mine, slowly, making sure the transition was appropriately considerate, therefore beautiful, a flicker in her eyes already indicated that she wouldn't have time to reward my graciousness; as soon as she got what she wanted she no longer felt she needed to pay attention to it, she was already gone; and though she did want to hurry, it wasn't because I had asked her to, or because she had to change, but because there was something else she had to do.
"I hope you don't mind, but I won't be going with you, count me out this time," Frau Kühnert said, and not even her exemplary self-discipline could hide the hurt and reproach in her voice; by this time Thea had torn herself away from me and was running down the long corridor, only to disappear in Hübchen's dressing room, but she yelled back, "I've no time for you now!"
Frau Kühnert, as if she had just heard a terribly funny joke, burst into an openmouthed laugh, what else could she do? there is a level of rudeness and insolence to which we cannot respond with hurt or indignation, because we sense that it is the manifestation of the most profound affection and, canceling out our other intentions, actually makes us happy; she stepped closer to me, and as if searching for her friend's just vanished presence, she seized my arm impulsively, unthinkingly; as soon as she became conscious of it, her ringing laugh collapsed into an embarrassed grin, and the grin, without the tact or subtlety of a smooth transition, hardened into a groundless gloom.
When I was looking not at Thea's face but at anyone else's, I found every face, including my own, coarse and vulgar, their expressions hopelessly awkward, conveying feelings crudely and obviously; at this moment, for instance, I would have loved to withdraw my arm from Frau Kühnert's hand, and she would have liked to retract her sudden gesture, but we remained in the void left behind by Thea—and didn't know what to do with it. In her confusion, clearly heightened by my own reluctant response, Frau Kühnert addressed me with a crude and verbose openness that was not only unwarranted but embarrassed us so much as almost to unite us, though it was a union neither of us desired.
"Please don't go with her," she said, or rather shouted, squeezing my arm, "I'm asking you not to interfere in this."
"In what?" I asked with a silly grin.
"You don't know this place well enough, and it's just as well, you don't have to know it, but I get the feeling sometimes, and please don't take this personally, I get the feeling that you don't always understand what we're saying, and that's why you might think she was, I don't know, crazy, but please understand that this can't be explained, because it's madness, believe me, the whole thing is madness! I always try to hold her back, I do what I can, but sometimes I must also give in to her, otherwise she couldn't go on playing the whore, because that's what it's all about, don't you see? if she couldn't do it, she would really go crazy, so please, I beg of you, don't take advantage of your position; if not you, it would be somebody else, she'd be doing it for somebody else, can't you hear them in there?"
We could indeed hear wild noises from Hübchen's dressing room, his screams and Thea's shrieks, objects falling over and crashing, skittish giggles, ripples of slightly forced laughter; then the door slammed shut, and for a moment it seemed the little room discreetly hushed up the sound of their secret doings, but then it flew open again; although I understood perfectly well what Frau Kühnert was talking about, the role she offered me suited me fine; after all, is there any event that can't be understood even better, any detail that doesn't contain potentially more significant, further details? if I went on playing the fool, I might just stumble on new details, discover hitherto unfamiliar connections—or so I hoped.
"I'm very sorry, but I haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about," I said, stretching my innocent grin to idiotic proportions and pretending to be a little indignant—offended, too, of course; the strategy worked, because my befuddlement, which always flatters my interlocutors, pushed her in the direction she had meant to go anyway; she felt she could speak freely now, since she was talking to an idiot, and, moreover, she could also release all the anger and frustration that had built up during that telephone conversation: "You don't understand, you just don't understand," she whispered impatiently, her sidelong glances taking in the bustle around us, "that's exactly what I mean, you couldn't possibly understand, and you shouldn't, because I don't want you to, because it's private, but if you really want to know, she is passionately, desperately in love—do you know what that is? have you ever been?—well, she's desperately in love, no, she thinks she is, she's made herself believe she's desperately in love with that boy"—she jerked her head angrily in the direction of the telephone—"and it's not enough that he's twenty years younger, he's even gay, yet she got it into her head that she'll seduce him, because she never loved anyone so much, not like this, I mean she could go to bed with the idiot in that room, with anyone, with you, but she wants him, don't you see? wants him because she can't have him, so there, now you can understand, and I'd really like you to leave right now, please don't be offended, just leave, because then maybe I can still hold her back, I can't bear to see her being humiliated, I just can't, can you understand?"
There was something false in this outburst, for she obviously enjoyed letting me in on something she should have kept and even wanted to keep quiet about, yet her passion was so deep-felt, so genuine, I couldn't ignore it; her abnormally large eyes were bulging at me from behind her glasses, which slid halfway down her nose: the upper rim of her glasses seemed to be cutting in half the watery-blue bloodshot eyes, and the lower half of the eyeballs became frightfully magnified and distorted under the thick lenses; this was the passion of goodness, love, and concern, expressed openly and unambiguously, not to be shaken even by the realization that the expression of goodness also needed a measure of falseness. Frau Kühnert needed, and wanted, to enjoy the knowledge that she was the only one of Thea's friends who was not patently selfish and greedy, who was not prompted by ignoble motives, who accepted her unconditionally for what she was, who truly understood her, and the total understanding of another person, an initiation into her secrets, was, after all, the only real satisfaction one could and should receive in return for selfless giving and attention; her hand, which a moment ago was holding me fast, was now steering me, pushing me forward, and I obediently started walking toward the exit, but at the same moment the two of them were suddenly in the corridor again, flushed and out of breath, still caught up in their pleasurable roughhousing, still panting; with his hand on his crotch, Hübchen was trying to back away while Thea, with a wet towel in her hand, assumed a fencer's posture, and lashing out with the towel, she pursued the little idiot—as they called him among themselves—letting the towel sting whenever it hit his naked body; but when she sensed, like a flash seen only from the corner of her eye, in which direction I was headed, she produced one of her most extraordinary transitions, dropped the towel, and yelled after me, "Where do you think you're going?" and letting her victim get away, she dashed after me.
But what she had intended as a final, victorious assault turned into a quiet farewell.
By the time we got to her car for the short ride to the opera house, to catch the new production of Fidelio, it was a subdued Thea who was with us; she rummaged around in the dark for a long time until she finally found in the glove compartment the glasses she needed for driving, and what a sight they were! greasy, dusty, the lenses uncleaned for ages, with one of the sidepieces missing so she had to stretch her slender neck even more, watching every move of her head, carefully balancing the spectacles lest they slide down her nose; it was late evening, the streets were empty, a strong wind was blowing, and in the halos ringing
the streetlamps you could see the rain coming down at a slant; none of us was talking; from the back seat where I sat, somewhat discomfited by this silence, I kept watching her.
Now she seemed to be playing no role; it was a rare moment, a welcome intermission, though possibly it was Frau Kühnert's confidential disclosure that made me see her like this, serious, self-absorbed; she was probably dead tired, too, and seemed vaguely distracted, her limbs automatically going through the motions needed to drive, she was paying so little attention that when she was about to turn from the almost completely dark Friedrichstrasse to the better-lit Unter den Linden, she stopped, as she was supposed to, and signaled; the little red light on the dashboard began to flash, but as if an endless stream of cars had filled the avenue and she couldn't cut in, we just sat there waiting as the red light kept flashing and clicking in the dark, fresh gusts of wind whipped the rain against the car door, the wipers squeaked and ticked as they flattened the water running down the windshield; if Frau Kühnert hadn't said, "Maybe we can go now," we might have spent even more time at that intersection.
"Oh yes," she said quietly, more to herself than to us, and then made the turn.
Those few moments, seemingly very long yet also too brief, that dead time before we turned, meant a great deal to me; I had been waiting for it without knowing it, hoping it would come without knowing that I was hoping for such an ordinary moment, a moment of letting go, of imposing no control, and I myself was too tired and too upset to track this moment consciously or even think about it; it was the case of raw and pure senses perceiving raw and pure senses, even though I had only a side view of her face, and her profile, especially with those sorry-looking glasses, wasn't so memorable; still, it seemed that the streetlights reflecting off the wet pavement altered that face or, rather, changed it back to its original form, in part highlighting its surfaces and in part wiping away the fineness of its wrinkles: this was the face I'd been looking for in her, the face I'd seen before but only in flashes because of its mobility; the face in its entirety had always eluded me; the face I now saw was the face behind the mask, the one that belonged to her eyes; this face was even older and uglier, because it had more shadows, and in the color of the streetlights and because of its own inner immobility, it was a dead face, yet the face of a little girl, unformed and taut, whom I had known within myself and loved tenderly for a long time, a beautiful little girl who kept trying out her charms on me; but it wasn't a face out of my childhood or adolescence, even if the moment and the late-autumn downpour did evoke memories and fill me with nostalgia; this little girl was akin to all the little girls I had ever known, yet in her unfamiliarity resembled me more than people I had actually known and only seldom thought of.
This was probably the reason I had been watching Thea for weeks with such reluctance, as well as with a fascinated revulsion, and all the while inexplicably identifying with her, as if without a mirror I could watch myself in her face, and most likely that is why our relationship, for all our eager interest in each other, remained calm and controlled, making us recoil from even the possibility of physical contact—one can never be directly in touch with one's mirror image, however flattering and intimate it is; self-love can be consummated only through indirect means, via secret paths—but at the moment, which I remember more vividly than many subsequent, far more intimate encounters, a seemingly out-of-place image flashed through my mind, blotting out the real image before me: of a little girl, Thea, standing in front of a mirror, serious and deeply studying the features of her face, playing with them, distorting them, not simply clowning but listening to some inner sensation, trying to see what effect her facial tricks would have on her; this was not an actual memory but a fantasy working in visual images that came to my aid; I simply imagined her, and who can say why I had to imagine this particular situation, in which this little girl, opening up the peculiar gap between her inner perception of herself and her own face, struggled really to see herself in the mirror, see herself as somebody else might, anybody, nobody in particular.
What I may have spotted in her then, and I say this now in retrospect, was the creature, or that layer of her personality, on which she built her pretenses, her clowning and hamming, her chameleonlike transformations, her lies as well as her unceasing, ruthless, and self-destructive struggle against them; this was her only secure ground, the nourishing soil to which she could return when tired, insecure, and desperate, the ultimate home front from which she ventured forth with her games and pretenses, a place so safe she could freely abandon it; for her, then, the short ride between the two theaters was but a brief retreat to this hinterland, so that stepping into the lobby of the opera house she could appear before Melchior with her face and body fully restored, offering him her utmost, her true beauty, the picture of her reconstructed self; and her becoming so beautiful again revealed something about the secret roads she had to travel so that onstage she could at will assume and cast off the most wideranging human characteristics.
Perhaps it was not a little girl or boy whom I saw in my imagination but a sexless child who had no doubts or misgivings yet, because it couldn't conceive of not being loved and therefore turned to us with such confidence, such faith—this was the child in Thea whom Frau Kühnert loved, whose mother she was—that one could not help reciprocating, if only to the extent of an involuntary smile—and that's how she appeared in the theater lobby, light, beautiful, slender, a bit like a child, ready to meet Melchior, who was standing on top of the staircase with his French friend, towering over the noisy throng of theatergoers; and if Melchior's face still showed a touch of displeasure at the moment when he noticed us, by the time he was hurrying down the stairs toward Thea he began to bask, almost in spite of himself, in the glow of the smile he was receiving from her, with no hint of the mocking cruelty with which Thea had prepared herself for this meeting, no trace of the raw lust with which she had pointed the tip of her sword at Hübchen's naked chest, or of the dread with which she had sought fulfillment in my eyes afterward; likewise, there was nothing to suggest that Melchior was just another "boy" for her, like Hübchen, for instance, with whom she could romp to her heart's content; Melchior was a proper young man, calm, handsome, well-adjusted, unconnected with the theater, a civilian with no inkling of the raging passions she regularly left behind in the rehearsal hall; a very likable young man, jovial, always ready to smile, his bearing straight to the point almost of stiffness, which may have been the result of good breeding or self-discipline; and in the moment the two were approaching each other, it also became clear that we, witnesses to this meeting, simply did not exist.
They embraced; Thea reached only to his shoulders and her thin body almost disappeared in his arms.
Then Melchior gently pushed her away, but didn't let go.
"You look beautiful tonight," he said softly, and laughed.
The voice was deep, warm, ingratiating.
"Beautiful? Dead tired is more like it," Thea answered, looking at him with her head tilted sideways, coquettishly, "I just wanted to see you for a moment."
And after a few weeks had passed, perhaps as much as a month, during which every hour spent alone seemed like a waste of time, we decided to part, we felt we had to; we had to break out of our furtive closeness and go somewhere, anywhere; and if we couldn't part, as we couldn't, we thought we should at least stop spending all our time together here, like this, disdaining and neglecting our obligations and most of the time sitting in this room, under the eaves, a room whose very sight my eyes had a hard time getting used to, because it was at once dreary and stifling; in the candlelight it often struck me as the drawing room of a fancy bordello or some secret sanctuary, the two not being so different; it exuded a cold sensuousness, a curious enough combination of qualities to make one feel ill at ease; it became a more ordinary, livable room only when the sun shone through the filthy windows, showing the fine dust settled on the furniture, on picture frames and inside the folds of the curtains, the fuzz-ba
lls gathered in the corners; the weak autumn light that seemed, because of the flying motes, to be hovering brought with it that austerely beautiful outside world of gray, grim, moldering walls, roofs, and back yards from which Melchior had tried to isolate himself with his softness, his silks and richly patterned rugs and heavy brocades, and to which, by his very attempt to escape it, he remained connected; ultimately, it didn't much matter where we were, we happened to be here and couldn't really go anywhere else, and who cared about the nuances of our differing tastes or about so-called cleanliness? we certainly didn't, if only because this room was the only place that guaranteed privacy, hiding and protecting us; sometimes even going to the kitchen to fix a bite to eat seemed like a big and bothersome undertaking; he had an obsession about always keeping the kitchen window open, and I failed to convince him that odors become stronger in the cold air—he hated kitchen smells and therefore the kitchen window had to be kept open—so we'd sit in the warm room, facing each other; in the morning he made a fire in the white tile stove, I sat in the same armchair he'd offered me the first night I visited him, which became my permanent seat, we sat looking at each other, I liked looking at his hands mostly, the white half-moons of his slender, steeply arched fingernails—I'd scrape their reticulated, hard surface with my own, less tidy, flatter nails; I also liked to look at his eyes, his forehead, his eyebrows, we held each other's hand, and at his thighs, the swell between his legs, his feet tucked in his slippers; our knees touched, we talked, and if I turned my head I could see a slender poplar tree: in the back yard ringed by roofs and bare walls a single poplar tree grew so tall it reached all the way up here to the sixth floor and shot up past the roof, into the clear autumn sky; it was shedding its leaves now, becoming more and more bare every day.