by Peter Nadas
There was nothing left for us to say, and I felt that we would never need to say anything to each other again.
It was more than enough that I could stand there while he relieved himself, listening to the long, cascading sounds of his rich stream.
Because when the first of the litter was already out and he quickly got out of the stall, and I stepped aside, raising the lamp high, there was a single moment when our eyes locked, and while our movements crossed, our looks were caught up in the sameness of pure bliss, and that moment grew so long, became so intense, that real time seemed to have slipped away, as if everything that had still remained trapped in us from the struggle could break free only in our sudden oneness; it was the insanity of a grin that the lamp was illuminating: our faces were very close, his eyes vanished in the grin, I could see only his mouth and teeth, his sharply protruding jaw, his drenched hair matted on his forehead, and the sudden appearance of his face so close to mine made me realize that this face was a double of my own, because I was also grinning to myself with the same eager, insane grin, and it seemed that the only way we could break out of the frozen time of our grin and truly enter our oneness was if we were to fall on each other.
If for the sake of this oneness we would love each other.
And it still wouldn't have been enough; even with that we couldn't have measured up to the pig's victory.
Instead, we broke into a dialogue.
Into the laughter of words.
I almost broke the glass, I said; the little thing must have been lying in the wrong position, he said; and I asked him why he started yelling like that, what the hell was he yelling about; his father couldn't have done it better, he said; first I thought the pig was only sick, I said, and it was lucky about the umbilical cord, and I didn't know where the rag was; that was one smart pig, he said.
The dog was running about the yard, yelping and running, round and round it kept running in ever widening circles, which was also part of the same kind of conversation.
The porch lamp shed a sober light on us.
In a daze, exhausted, we made our way slowly up the steps.
Water was still steaming in a pot; while waiting for the afterbirth to come out, I had put it on so he could wash the pig's teats in warm water.
He went to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down.
First I looked at the things in the kitchen: the white enamel stove, the apple-green cabinets, and the pink eiderdown on a narrow cot, then I put the kerosene lamp on the table; because we left the door behind us open, there was a slight draft and the lamp was giving out more smoke than light; then I also sat down.
There we were, just sitting and staring into space.
God's prick, he said quietly after a while.
We weren't looking at each other, but I felt he didn't want me to go yet, and I didn't want to leave.
And his swearing, sounding like someone making quiet amends, was addressed to me.
Kálmán seldom cursed and, unlike the other boys, rarely used foul language; I can recall only two other instances—when he talked about Maja, saying what he would do to her, and the thing he'd told me in the school bathroom.
That I could eat Prém's prick for lunch.
That last one remained with me like a stinging insult, like a wound that wouldn't heal; I forgot it, but could not forgive it.
By blurting out that seemingly harmless obscenity, he joined forces with Krisztián and Prém, but could he have done otherwise? no matter how much it hurt, I couldn't really blame him, for I sensed in his act the permanent and in many ways exciting uncertainty inherent in all human relationships; for it seemed to be the way of the world, or maybe the spirit of our times, that you could never tell your friends and foes apart, and in the final analysis everybody had to be considered an enemy; it was enough to recall the fear and hatred I felt while passing by the fence of that restricted area with the dogs to make me realize I had no idea where I myself belonged; and there was the pain of knowing that because of my father's position the other boys labeled me a stool pigeon even though I had never betrayed anyone; but Kálmán, by allowing himself to join the other boys with that statement, betrayed the deepest secret of our friendship—even if the others could not have known what he meant when he'd said I could eat Prém's for lunch, couldn't have known what he was alluding to, but still! as if he had said in front of all of them, which was more than shameless betrayal, that I'd once held his in my hand; he said it as though I had no other wish in the world than to eat it for lunch! as though what had happened between us hadn't been by mutual consent, as though he hadn't himself initiated it.
He got up, kicked the chair out from under him, and took a bottle of brandy and two glasses from the kitchen cabinet.
He denied the act with the same unthinking courage that he'd displayed when his hand had reached toward me that time.
To avoid embarrassing himself in front of the others, he renounced his own most intimate gesture; but now, as if trying to make up for his betrayal by those swear words, he seemed to be thanking me for being here.
Which released such a flood of emotion that the less said about it the better.
And I could not tell any of this to Maja, just as I could not talk about girls while resting my head on my mother's arm.
Without a word, the two of us got drunk on the brandy.
If one could learn the most important things in life, one would still have to learn how to keep quiet about them.
We sat there for a very long time, staring drunkenly at the kitchen table, and for some reason, after his swearing, we didn't look into each other's eyes anymore.
Even though those words cleared up everything, for a lifetime; above all, they spoke of ultimate loyalty, of how no one could ever forget anything.
He started fidgeting with the lamp, trying to put it out, but though he lowered the wick the flame would not go out, it only started smoking even more; and then he took off the glass cover so he could blow out the flame, and while he was blowing it—he had to make several attempts and he started laughing because he couldn't hit the flame, always blowing next to it—the hot, smoke-darkened glass slipped out of his hand, fell, and broke on the kitchen floor.
He didn't even look down.
It felt good to hear the sound of breaking glass shattering into a thousand pieces.
Later, it seemed to me I was quite alert as I drifted into this pleasant state of feeling good, or as I simply got lost among my own thoughts, though I couldn't have said what I was thinking about or whether I was thinking at all; the feeling of sensations dulled by drunkenness had become this state of thinking without thoughts, and I didn't notice that at one point he got up, put a large wash bucket on the floor, and poured the leftover hot water into it.
The image wasn't blurred, only distant and uninteresting.
And he simply kept pouring the water.
I'd have liked to tell him to stop pouring, enough.
Because I didn't notice that he was now pouring some other water into the bucket.
From a pail.
And I also failed to notice when he threw off his long johns and stood stark naked in the wash bucket; the wet soap slipped out of his hand and scooted under the kitchen cabinet.
He asked me for the soap.
I could hear in his voice that he was also drunk, which should have made me laugh, except I couldn't get up.
The water splashed and sloshed, and by the time I managed to get up he was already scrubbing himself.
His wasn't nearly as large as a horse's, but rather small, solid, and thick; it always stuck out, overlapping his balls, pushing out his pants; he was busy soaping it now.
I was already on my feet, and realized it hurt, really hurt, that I'd never know whose friend I really was.
I don't know how I made it from the table to the wash bucket, the decision must have carried me unnoticed over the time necessary for the trip; I was standing before him, motioning to him to give me the soap.<
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This closeness, past love's passion, was the kind I had longed for with Krisztián, this nearly neutral feeling of brotherhood which I had never managed to reach with him and which is as natural as seeing, smelling, or breathing—the genderless grace of human affection; and perhaps it's no exaggeration to speak of the warmest gratitude here, yes, I was grateful and humble, because I got from Kálmán what I could never hope to get from the other, and what's more, I didn't need to humiliate myself or be grateful to him; gratitude was just there all by itself, simply because he was there, the way he was, and I was there, just the way I was.
He looked at me hesitantly, tilting his head a little, trying to look into my eyes, but could not catch my glance, yet he understood me immediately, because he thrust the soap into my hand and crouched down in the wash bucket.
I wet his back and began scrubbing it carefully, I didn't want it to be dirty.
I knew the only reason Prém said that idiotic thing was because his was so big; Krisztián sometimes asked him to show it to us and we would stare at it, laughing with pleasure at the possibility that it could be so big.
I was indescribably happy that Kálmán was my friend, after all.
I got a whiff of the pigpen's smell rising from his sudsy back; I had to rinse him really well.
And the only reason Prém had said what he said was to stop Kálmán from getting close to me, to make sure he remained their friend.
But the soap slipped into the bucket, sank, and disappeared between his spread legs.
That minute I hated Prém so much, I just had to go outside for a breath of fresh air.
My foot felt something soft.
I hated him so much that I felt ill.
It was the dog, sprawled out on the porch and sleeping peacefully.
My hands were still soapy.
I was lying on the ground, and someone must have turned off the light, because it was dark.
The stars had disappeared, the muggy night was silent.
For a long time I thought I should be going home now; go home; I could think of nothing else.
But in the distance the sky flared up with lightning, followed by sounds of rolling thunder.
And then my legs were carrying me, my head was pulling me, my feet felt a path that was leading to some unknown destination.
As the rumbling thunder brought the flashes of lightning closer, the air itself swirled and thickened, the wind howled into the tree crowns.
Only when my mouth felt something hard and cool, the taste of rust, only then did I realize that I'd gotten home: below, among the trees I could see the familiar windows all lit up, and this, then, must be the gate, its iron hinge must be in my mouth.
It was like entering a place that was already familiar for the first time, as if I had seen before what now seemed so strange.
I had to look well to see where I really was.
In the cool of the gathering wind, large warm raindrops began to fall, stopped, then started again.
I lay there for a while, in the light under the window, and wished that no one would ever find me.
I kept watching flashes of lightning slide down the wall.
I didn't want to go inside, because I loathed this house, yet it had to be the one and only place for me.
Even today, while attempting to recall the past with as precise and impartial perspective as possible, I find it difficult to speak objectively of this house where people living under the same roof grew so far apart, were so consumed by their own physical and moral disintegration, were left to fend for themselves, and only for themselves, that they did not notice, or pretended not to notice, when someone was missing, their own child, from the so-called family nest.
Why didn't they notice?
I must have been so totally unmissed by everyone that I didn't realize I was living in a hell of being absent, thinking this hell to be the world.
From inside the house I could hear the fine creaks of the parquet floor, other small noises and faint stirrings.
I was lying under my grandfather's open window.
Grandfather switched day and night around, at night awake, wandering through the house, and during the day dozing off or actually sleeping on the couch in his darkened room, and with this brilliant stratagem making himself inaccessible to the rest of us.
If there was a way for me to know when this mutually effective and multifaceted disintegration had begun, whether it had a definite beginning or when and why this commodious family nest had grown cold, I would surely have much to say about human nature and also about the age I lived in.
I won't delude myself; I do not possess the surpassing wisdom of the gods.
Could it have been Mother falling ill?
That was certainly an important turning point, though in an odd way her sickness seems to me to have been the consequence rather than the cause of the prolonged decline; in any case, the family glossed over her illness with the same lies—so vile in their seeming benevolence—they used about my little sister's condition, or Grandfather's asthma attacks, which, according to Grandmother's confidential revelation, no treatment, diet, or medication could remedy because they were simply hysteria.
And all he needed was a bucketful of cold water on his head, she said.
But it would have been as unseemly to talk about the physical manifestations of this slow decay as it would have been to mention why Grandmother never talked to Grandfather, who in turn refused to say a word to Father, the two men passing each other, day after day, without even a greeting, each pretending the other didn't exist, even though Father was living in Grandfather's house.
Maybe it's fortunate, or unfortunate, that to this day I cannot decide what is better, knowledge or ignorance; no matter how much I tried to live their lies and find my place in the system of falsehoods, contributing to the smooth operation of the system's fine mechanism with effective lies of my own, and even if I could not see what had set it all in motion or what was covered up by what, still, over time, I did gain some insight into the layers of deception; I knew, for instance, that Grandfather's illness was real and quite serious, and that any one of his attacks might prove fatal; as Grandmother gravely and passively watched them, I felt she was actually waiting for his death, which could happen any time; and I also knew, of course, that my little sister was incurable, was born braindamaged, and so she'd remain, but the circumstances of her birth or conception—the cause of her condition, if indeed there was one such thing—were shrouded in the conspiracy of my parents' guilty conscience, which is why they were compelled to talk constantly about the hope of finding a cure, as if with their hope they were trying to mask an awful secret which no one must ever find out; it seemed as though every member of my family used lies to hold the other members' lives in his or her hand; and because of an inadvertent gesture of mine, I also knew that what Mother was recovering from was not a successful gallbladder operation.
I was resting on her arm, watching her breathe, and all I wanted to do was touch her neck, smooth my hand over her face—and that's why I'm talking about an inadvertent gesture: she was not asleep, only her eyes were closed, and as I clumsily reached toward her neck, my finger got caught in the cord of her nightgown—it wasn't tied properly or it just came undone—and the light silk material slid off her breast or, more precisely, in that fraction of a second I thought I saw it slide off and saw her breast, that is what I was supposed to see there, but in fact what I saw in place of her breast was a network of ruddy scars, the traces of many stitches.
I heard a clicking sound; someone quickly shut the window above me.
The storm could not have come at a better time; I lay there hoping the downpour would drive me into the ground and I'd be dissolved, absorbed, but instead, the cool rain sobered me up.
I scrambled to my feet, to knock on the window and be let in.
To my astonishment, Grandmother's terrified eyes looked back at me from within the room; on the couch Grandfather was lying on his back wi
th his eyes closed.
While I was waiting at the door, my pants and shirt soaked through, it was pouring, thundering and lightning, and by the time Grandmother finally let me in, my hair was sopping wet.
But she didn't even bother to turn on the light, didn't say a word, and without paying any attention to me hurried back into Grandfather's room.
I followed her.
But she didn't hurry back to help him; she immediately sat back down on the chair she'd risen from a moment earlier; she was in a hurry to be present when the expected finally happened.
The rain sluiced down in great sheets on the large glass panes, in which a continually flashing blue light illuminated the mysteriously blurred images of trees; approaching rumbles made the glass tremble; it seemed that all the heat preceding the storm had been trapped in this room.
Grandfather's chest rapidly rose and sank, a still open book hung from his hand as if ready to drop, but he seemed to be holding on to it, clutching the last object connecting him to this world; his face was white, glistening with perspiration, and more pearly beads were gathered in the stubble over his mouth; his breathing was very fast, whistling, drawn-out, labored.
The light coming from under the waxed-paper shade of the lamp on the wall above Grandfather's head illuminated his face, as if to ensure that there would be nothing mysterious in his struggle; Grandmother sat motionless in the shadow, in the warm and friendly dimness, peering out, a bit tense, full of anticipation.
Her posture was as stiff as the back of the chair she was sitting on.
Grandmother was a tall, straight-backed woman, a dignified elderly lady, though today, as I backtrack in time, I confess I thought her much older than she actually was; she couldn't have been more than sixty at the time, almost twenty years younger than Grandfather, which I characteristically, having a child's concept of time, did not think such a large age difference then; I saw them both as equally ancient, resembling each other in their antiquity.
They were both lean, bony, and taciturn to the point of virtual muteness, and this, too, I saw as an inevitable, concomitant sign of old age, although they must have become taciturn for very different reasons and their separate silences did not have the same quality: Grandmother's implied a slight hurt, a constantly and emphatically communicated hurt, suggesting that she remained silent not because she had nothing to say but because she was deliberately depriving the world of her words, and would continue to deprive it, this was her way of punishing it, and I dreaded this punishment; I don't know what she was like in her youth, but in searching for the causes of her resentment, I had to conclude that she could not have coped with the fundamental changes that affected their way of life if she hadn't been able at least to flaunt her sense of having been wronged—the changes were simply too great for her—and as a young girl she had been much too pretty not to have believed that she'd be the world's pampered child until the day she died; for a few years after the war they used to be taken into town in a black Mercedes; always gleaming like a mirror and reminding me of a large comfortable coach, it was driven by a solemn-looking chauffeur, properly uniformed, his cap complete with ribboned visor, but of course they had to sell the car, and for years I covered my school texts and notebooks in now worthless stock certificates; once you removed the perforated coupons, the snow-white reverse side was ideally suited for this purpose; and then, unexpectedly, Grandfather closed his law office on Teréz Boulevard, as a consequence of which they had to let their maid go, and for a time after that Maria Stein moved into the maid's room until she, too, disappeared from our lives; finally, to complete the disaster, in the year when most private property was nationalized, Grandfather voluntarily, and without previously consulting Grandmother, surrendered all claims of ownership to their house; Grandmother was so unprepared for this, as Mother once laughingly told me, that when she found out, several weeks after the fact and quite by accident, she simply fainted—after all, the house had been her entire inheritance—and when they finally managed to revive her (it was Mother's older sister Klara who managed to slap some life into her) she imposed the worst possible punishment on both herself and the family: she refused to say another word to Grandfather, ever; what was most ludicrous about this was that Grandfather kept on talking to her, as if unwilling to acknowledge her silence; and in truth, her wounded feelings had to be taken seriously, because she wasn't born to be maid and nurse to three hopelessly ill and two mentally unhinged people—she was convinced that Father and I were not completely normal, and no doubt there was some truth in that; she was not cut out for such tasks, having neither the feeling nor the strength for them, even if she did carry out all her duties efficiently, conscientiously, with all the dignity of her wounded pride, while Grandfather's situation was just the opposite: he may have been silenced by his own inexhaustible patience and uncanny sense of humor; with him it wasn't a matter of wounded pride; more precisely, he did not consider himself the wounded party, it was just that he came to look upon the business of the world as so absurd, crazy, trivial, dull, and transparent that out of sheer consideration he didn't want to offend anyone with his opinions; to such an extent did he dismiss as not serious things others considered dead serious that he learned to hold back his natural responses in order to avoid dispute, and from that, I imagine, he suffered at least as much as Grandmother did from her wounded pride.