A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  Nevertheless, his mother should have known better.

  Melchior talked uninterruptedly until dawn, and this was the only moment when the cool, steady stream of his narrative was stemmed by an impassable emotional barrier.

  His chest rose, and his gaze, still holding my eyes, turned inward and seemed to say, No, no more, the rest he couldn't let go.

  His eyes filled with tears, he choked up, he seemed about to break into sobs or into loud accusations.

  But laughing through his tears he yelled that I shouldn't take this seriously, nothing should be taken seriously.

  Then, more quietly, almost finding his way back to his earlier tones, he said that every whore and every faggot had a mother and a soul-stirring story.

  It was all sentimental junk, he said.

  And several days later it was this story I continued telling Thea as we drove on that dark highway toward the city.

  It's true, I did make a few unavoidable alterations: the mental state of a child prodigy was meant as a kind of introduction, a framework, and also, I tried to speak in impersonal tones, as if talking about a person neither of us knew.

  But the impersonal tone and the attempted objective approach conjured up an abstract element in the story, one that allows us to weave the strands of personal causal relations into a larger and more general chronology which we tend to label—because of its impersonality and immutability—a historical process or the force of destiny, or even divine predestination; by insisting on this unalterable and impersonal viewpoint, which of course is an emotional rather than intellectual device, I tried to cover up my shameless betrayal of Melchior; I was retelling his story as if it were but a trivial episode in a larger history that, with its relentless flow of repetitions, kept extinguishing and giving birth to itself.

  It was as if I had a bird's-eye view of a city; in it I could see an attractive young woman and a violin; I could see the cracks and empty spaces that history had cut out for itself and, using its own materials, would ultimately have to patch up and fill in; I could see a pretty little theater and inside the theater an orchestra pit and musicians in the pit, but at the same time I could also see a far-off pit, a trench somewhere near Stalingrad; in one pit I could see the vacant seat of the first violinist, and in the other pit a soldier wrapped in rags just about to freeze to death.

  And looking down like this, from the bird's-eye view of impassive history, I would consider it a matter of little consequence that a few musicians disappeared from the orchestra pit and others vanished from the family bed and some people were hauled off to concentration camps and others to the front; details were beside the point, for history or fate or Providence ordered all this with one curt command: fill the empty space, music must be made in the orchestra pit, and in the trenches there must be shooting, and other pits and trenches were there for burials; someone has to fill in for the first violinist, no seat must remain empty, and the replacement must play the same music, wear the same historical disguise of white tie and tails, to make the changeable look permanent; and it must be made to appear negligible, barely worth mentioning, that French POWs from the neighboring camp have been ordered to occupy the chairs left vacant in the orchestra pit, and if, as a reward for ensuring unbreakable continuity, the guards should take these prisoners over to the Golden Horn Inn, this should not happen as if by accident, as if out of compassionate human concern dictated by fate or Providence or history, but for the sole reason that for a brief hour the new first violinist could slip into the innkeeper's second-floor apartment—the innkeeper himself was breathing his last on the snowy steppes of Stalingrad—and believe that it was for his sake that history skipped a beat.

  But history or fate or Divine Providence never skips anything and filled the space the innkeeper left behind in his conjugal bed, and in this sense it again matters very little that in that bed an attractive young woman and an attractive young man experience something they rightfully call fateful love; they keep saying they would rather die than live without each other, and describe their feelings in such extreme terms because they are describing fate's own design.

  Seen in this light, it's quite irrelevant to ask whether or not the quietly drinking guards noticed this impermissible breach of regulations, it's no problem for history temporarily to intoxicate a couple of slow-witted soldiers, or bribe them, or make them overlook a sudden burst of passion, so that it can use them later, once sobering light was shed on the terrible deed, to beat to death the French miscegenist, which would again create a vacancy in the historically important orchestra, but it's all right, history would fill that gap, too, later, when it would return somebody to the city, someone who had been banished on charges of sexual perversion.

  So I don't think, I said to Thea, that the mother's blindness, viewed from this loftier perspective, could be faulted in any way, because whatever she had lost with her husband's disappearance she more than regained from her lover, and whatever she seemed to have lost when he was gone, too, she was compensated for, thank God, by the fruit of her womb, even though the gift thus received she would have to return one day.

  Thea said quietly that she'd understand me just as well even if I didn't make a point of blaspheming in such a complicated, roundabout way.

  And she continued to pretend that she wasn't really paying attention to what I was saying.

  The day his teacher ordered him away from the window, Melchior went on with his story, the girl waited for him downstairs; for a while they just looked at each other, but then he didn't know what to do, for although he was glad to see that they had managed to deceive his teacher, he was also terribly embarrassed, he still doesn't know why, maybe because he was wearing short pants, anyway, he couldn't think of anything to say, so he started walking away, swinging his violin case, but then the girl yelled "Idiot!" and he turned around.

  They were standing facing each other again, and then the girl asked him to come to her place because she'd like him to play once just for her.

  He thought that was a terribly dumb thing to say; these things couldn't be mixed up in such a crude way, so all he said was "Idiot yourself."

  The girl shrugged her shoulders and said, All right, then, in that case he could kiss her right there.

  And from then on she waited for him every day, even though they decided each day that she wouldn't do it again; with arguments and intonations borrowed from his teacher he tried to explain that this competition was an awfully important thing in his life and they shouldn't be doing this now.

  Actually, no; it happened just the other way around.

  He recalled that on the first day, when they were both so excited they didn't know what to do with one another and talked instead to hide their excitement, they were standing in the old, dry moat, in the midst of garbage, bushes, debris of all kinds, it was all very smelly, and the girl was telling him how much she loved him and was willing to wait for him for the rest of her life, and since this competition was now more important than anything else, they should just break up and she would wait for him, and they both felt that this was a terribly beautiful sentiment, yet she was there every day, waiting for him.

  And there was one more thing he had to confess.

  Though at the moment he had no idea how to talk about it sensibly.

  We were sitting motionless, but his gaze was running headlong inside me, and I was backing away and stumbling with my own blinking glances, trying to get away, jump out of the way of his words, as if we were blindfolded and chasing around an elusive object that slipped away just as one of us touched it.

  The capacity of our modesty was at issue now, and the laws of spiritual modesty are far stricter than those of physical bashfulness, which is as it should be, since the body is perishable matter, but once it starts revealing itself as not matter, then suddenly its limited, finite nature becomes frighteningly infinite; in panic I fled from this boundless thing, not wanting to see the thing I myself had forced into existence.

  His words r
emained sharp and deliberate, so many thrusts and parries, but no coherent sentence emerged, nothing more than so many powerful unfinished allusions, statements, exclamations, as well as their negations; questions and doubts that only I could understand, inasmuch as one can understand modestly fluttering scraps of words stirred by the repressed mental energies of another human being.

  These confused, clipped, suppressed, and still meaningful words referred to the relationship between a long-buried memory now springing to life and another, prudently unspecified recent experience—that of meeting Thea, whose name he couldn't bring himself to say; there was, after all, a huge gap of ten years between the two experiences.

  I was lucky enough to have heard two versions of how they got to know each other.

  No more of that, he said.

  Not even with me, he said.

  He said that comparisons never made any sense.

  And still, he said.

  With her ... the guilty silence now had to do with Thea; this whole unfortunate mess started with that.

  He didn't want to be tactless or ridiculous, yet he couldn't be anything else.

  He didn't want to hurt her, but that's exactly what he was doing.

  He just didn't want those kinds of feelings anymore, it seemed.

  This state of affairs lasted about a week, he said pensively, and I could tell by looking at him that he was referring to two different times at once, one ten years and the other only a few months earlier, more correctly, the events of ten years ago coming aglow in those of a few months ago.

  There is no memory without the recurrence of emotions, or conversely, every moment of lived experience is also an allusion to a former experience—that is what memory is.

  The two recollections converged on his face and settled down, one superimposed on the other, each fueling the other, and that made me feel such relief and satisfaction, as if at long last we had hit upon the true topic of our conversation, the one we had been blindly groping for until then.

  Needless to say, this little digression I did not mention to Thea in the car.

  But he did want to tell me the end of the story, because one day his teacher opened the door, and though he tried to look very solemn, his expression was so desperate that Melchior knew right away that the end he'd always feared was at hand.

  He indicated that he should put the violin down, they wouldn't be needing it, and led him into another room.

  The teacher sat down but let Melchior stand.

  He then asked how Melchior had been spending his evenings.

  For once he stood firm and wouldn't say anything, but then his teacher calmly enumerated the days of the week and told him precisely, to the minute, when he had come home each night.

  He made no mention of the girl, not even a hint, simply ran down the list: Monday, 9:42; Tuesday, 10:28; and so on, like that, very slowly, without comment. Melchior, wearing his short pants, was standing in the middle of a rug, and when he heard the list he just passed out, right there, in the middle of the rug.

  What made him faint was the sudden thought that this respectable, horrible, worshipped, old, handsome, gray-haired, unfortunate man had been following him—a mere child, an untalented nobody—sneaking after him, tailing him day after day, and he must have seen everything, everything.

  It was probably just a dizzy spell, a blackout lasting no more than a few seconds.

  He came to, smelling his teacher's familiar scent from very close up; he was kneeling over him, and his face remained an unforgettable image: a spider at the moment the longed-for green fly is caught in its web.

  The teacher was hugging and kissing him, so distraught with fear that he almost cried, whispering, begging him, imploring him to trust him, for if he didn't he would surely die, he was already dead, they had killed him, and amid these frantic whispers he also blurted out that no one really knew who Melchior's real father was, so why not consider him his father and trust him like a father.

  Melchior cried, protested, trembled; after he managed to calm down somewhat and his teacher thought it safe to let him go out on the street, he saw the girl waiting for him, but he ran off without a word.

  Luckily, his mother came home very late that night.

  By then he had managed to pull himself together; he told her that they should move somewhere else, anywhere, and look for another teacher, any teacher, because this one was no good; he didn't say anything else; he couldn't think of anything else except that his teacher was an evil man, but this he didn't dare say out loud, so in response to his mother's every question he kept repeating that he was a rotten teacher, as if they were talking about his musical education and not about his life.

  His mother's lack of suspicion was the last straw, the final proof that no one was there to help him, not even his mother, and everything that really mattered in his life had to be kept secret.

  He let himself be comforted, tucked in, and put to sleep; in spite of his misgivings, he let her go through the motions with which an uncomprehending mother can show her love in such a situation.

  Having listened to all these minor details, Melchior said, I could no doubt guess what happened next.

  Occasionally the girl appeared in the window, cautiously, timidly, because she meant to show him that she understood and was willing to wait for him, but the waiting caused so much pain it was best to block it out.

  The day before the competition he and his teacher took the train to Dresden; he wasn't going to reveal what happened that night in the double bed of the hotel room, he'd say only this, that not before or since had he seen a man struggle so mightily with himself, and that his strength held out as long as it could.

  It wasn't really a hotel but a quiet, old-fashioned boardinghouse somewhere outside the city, in a secluded valley, with somber little turrets and latticed balconies, like a quaint, forgotten, haunted castle.

  They got there by streetcar from the railroad station; their room was large and pleasantly cool, and everything in it was white: the washbowl, the oval mirror, the marble washstand, the pitcher filled with water, the bedspread and the curtains, too; outside their window dense foliage rustled all night long.

  He was speaking rather haltingly now, as it ready to break off at any moment, but he couldn't find his way back to silence, because after each word he thought would be the last, there was still another.

  He asked me for a cigarette.

  I found the pack, gave him a cigarette, and put the ashtray in his lap; I also looked for a position to support myself and something to cover up my bothersome nakedness and to warm my feet, numb with cold, so I moved to the other end of the sofa, leaned against the wall, pulled over the blanket, and slid my ice-cold feet under his thighs; he went on, still speaking haltingly, but compelled to carry on with the story.

  Now I probably understood, he said, why he had asked his mother who his father was; his teacher's odd remark must have preyed on his mind.

  It was also odd, he said, pausing long enough to take a puff, that three years later, when he was home from the university during a break, his mother still didn't seem to understand anything, and with stupefying innocence told him how his teacher had killed himself, talking about it as if it were a trivial piece of news.

  He made no response; instead, he quite casually announced that in a few days they'd have a guest, he'd invited a classmate of his, and to avoid any misunderstanding, he pronounced the guest's name, Mario, very distinctly, in case she thought he said Marion.

  And then, as if she finally understood, and this, too, happened while she was standing by the sink, the dish she was drying stopped in her hands.

  It doesn't matter, darling, she said; this way you'll always be mine.

  Once, long after that day, she repeated the same sentence to me.

  Melchior's pauses grew longer, but he couldn't stop.

  Some crazy delusion would have you believe that the events of the world happen just for you, he said, everything, including things that happe
n to other people; his experience, your experience are also mine, all mine.

  The reason for this, he went on, may have to do with the fact that the first thing every living thing takes into its mouth is its mother's milk-filled breast; and that's why we want our father's red-veined cock in our mouth, too; everything alive, everything that can be stuffed or poured into it, whether it's sweet or salty, everything that assures life and is essential to it must be ours, we must possess it, make it our own.

  I understood well why he couldn't stop; the more forgiving and understanding toward his mother and his teacher, the more he was tempted by a secret, unacknowledged desire to shift the moral burden of his experiences partly onto history, something conveniently intangible, and partly onto the two all-too-tangible people closest to him; but because his moral standards would not allow him simply to hate these two people—one absolved by death, the other his mother, after all—and also because he had no penchant for self-hatred, he had no choice but to see himself as a victim of history.

  But a victim that talks is always a little embarrassing, his accusations comical, just because he is talking, whereas real victims of history, as we know, are always silent.

  And that is why he could no longer abide this place, I understood that now; that's why he had to risk everything and try to get away, reject and sever all ties with his own history, or die for the hope of a new beginning, even letting himself be shot like a dog while crossing the border.

  As we reached the city we both stopped talking, withdrawing into our own silences; side by side, there were two interconnected yet separate silences.

  I felt a slight excitement in my stomach, in my bowels, as if my conscience had shifted its activities to those places; I was anxious to calm these rumblings and growlings, to ease the urge to pass wind, which was all the more difficult since Thea remained mysteriously and unpredictably closed and aloof—I couldn't tell what effect my response had had on her.