A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  Already as a young child I had to think carefully about the ways of thinking, or rather to be careful and not necessarily really think the things I said out loud. The reason I don't describe this intellectually demanding self-manipulation in terms that would suggest any kind of emotional involvement is that I am quite aware that concealed behind my perceptiveness and discernment—developed in circumstances I mentioned above— lie a good deal of resignation and self-discipline, all dictated by necessity.

  When young, all living things are passionate, and their passionate hope of mastering the world is what makes them attractive. How passionate that hope is, how and to what extent it is realized, is what determines the distinction they make between what is ugly and what is beautiful, and how they call the good beautiful and the bad ugly. By now, however, nothing in me would make my view of things an aesthetic one. Whatever I see or experience, however intimate, I do not judge as beautiful or ugly, for I simply do not see them as such. At most I feel a quiet gratitude, reminiscent of warmth, for things I find favorable, but even that feeling cools very quickly.

  I may have been filled with passion at one time, and it may be gone now. It's possible that something is already missing, gone from me forever. And it's also possible that this missing trait, or its excess, for all I know, is what made me appear cold and aloof even as a child. I can't claim that too many people love me, but most consider me a fair-minded person. Yet in view of my friend's poignant analysis, I am compelled by fair-mindedness to ask whether I may not appear to be fair-minded because I always manage to keep my distance from my own endeavors as well as from the people who love me, so that I can avoid having to identify with them while still retaining my control over them.

  I am not fortunate enough to be the ideal embodiment of any one life principle. I might have become a most vicious cynic if not for the continually recurring absence or surfeit of emotions from which I suffer terribly.

  A few days before my high school final exams, I decided to demolish the tile stove in my room, and I did manage to take it halfway apart. I got home from my girlfriend's house very early in the morning. I always had to sneak out of her place to make sure her unsuspecting parents would know nothing about my being there all night. I was alone in our house; my mother had gone to visit relatives in Debrecen. That stove had been bothering me for a long time. I felt it was in the wrong place, and I didn't really need it. At night it poured all its heat on my head, and I couldn't open my door all the way because of it. So I took a big hammer, and could have also used a chisel, but all I could find was a cramp iron, which served the same purpose. I began to take the thing apart. The broken tiles I threw out the window into the garden. But dismantling the stove's inside ducts proved to be more complicated than I had thought. And since I had made no preparations at all for this messy job, my room began to fill up with dust, debris, and soot. Soon everything was covered: the carpet, the upholstery, the books, my notebooks, and my carefully worked-out answers to previous finals that were lying on my desk. When I stopped for a while, coming out of the hypnotic pull of my feverish activity, and looked about, I couldn't see the mess around me as an inevitable natural by-product of this kind of work; I saw it as sheer, repulsive, unbearable filth, the boring filth of infinite emptiness. This feeling assailed me as suddenly as had the idea of dismantling the stove. I was staring into the sooty, stinking, mangled body of a once useful man-made structure. I must have been halfway through when I stopped. I thought I was sleepy and tired. I closed the window, threw off my clothes, and climbed into bed. But I couldn't fall asleep. I tossed and turned for a while, tried to curl up, but I couldn't roll or fold myself up, couldn't make myself as small as I would have liked to. I don't remember thinking about anything else. And I don't know if I'd call my awful wish about shrinking a thought. I had to get up, because it was impossible to lie there awake without being able to fulfill this wish. And without giving myself time to weigh the situation properly, I began to swallow, almost indiscriminately, the pills I found in my mother's medicine cabinet.

  I needed a lot of sleeping pills and tranquillizers. After a while I could no longer swallow without water.

  Today it seems that I may be the one remembering the incident, but not the one it happened to. First I drank the water from a vase, then from the little trays under the houseplants. Why I didn't just go into the kitchen is still beyond me. I was overcome by nausea. And dry retching. As if I had no more saliva in my mouth. I would have been afraid to throw up on my mother's furniture. I fell on my knee, and with my hands clasped on the back of my neck I laid my head on the edge of the sofa. I tried with all my strength to calm my heaving stomach. I don't remember anything else. If my mother, prompted by an odd premonition, had not returned a day earlier than planned, I wouldn't be here to talk about this. My stomach was pumped, the tile stove reassembled.

  I had never before attempted anything so crazy, and certainly don't intend to ever again. Yet whatever else my actions may have led to—joy, grief, happy resolution, or indecision—the group of emotions usually referred to as angst has become a permanent part of my psychic makeup.

  And this in spite of the fact that until then I had never had feelings even remotely resembling angst. But I don't wish to dwell on them, not only because I am not clear on their origins, but because otherwise I appear to be a well-adjusted man with a cheerful disposition, and to me this genuine appearance is more important.

  When one is asked to define family origins, one begins by making selections among one's ancestors. When I am asked that question, I usually say I come from a military family. As if all my forebears were professional soldiers, whether generals or privates. Which may be an impressive notion but does not reflect reality. It's a little like saying one comes from an old family. Every family is equally old. It's true, though, that the sons and daughters of different peoples climbed down from the trees at different times. For instance, the Incas and the Hebrews did it much earlier than the Germans, and in all probability the Magyars did it somewhat later than the English or the French. But from this it does not follow that a family of serfs of a certain nation is not as old as a prince's family in the same nation. And just as a nation distinguishes between racially identical families on the basis of social status, so does an individual when he begins to choose among the motley group of his ancestors, based on the personal evaluation of his own interests, desires, and ambitions. This peculiar mode of selecting one's ancestors—tailor-made for the person doing the selecting—is something I noticed in my friend's manuscript, too.

  The only way he can maintain the equilibrium of his personality, splintered by extreme contradictions, is by observing himself, by continually scrutinizing the origins and causes of the unconscious forces raging within him. But for this all-important psychological self-analysis he needs the kind of balanced and sober perspective that, because of his unbalanced state, he does not have. He is trapped in a vicious circle. He can break out of it only if, for the duration of his self-analysis at least, he adopts the perspective of a person or group of persons in his surroundings who have the stability he needs. This is the reason for the decisive role his maternal grandfather plays in his life story, this liberal bourgeois who, even in very dangerous conditions, remained a model of moderation and self-discipline. And it is also the reason he views with mixed irony and affection that tenacious, stoic, and uncompromisingly respectable bourgeois woman, his grandmother. Through them he would like to identify with something to which his real-life situation no longer entitles him. Still, this is how he selects his origins. He chooses to trace this one line back to his past, though in principle he could have chosen a number of others. While I was reading the manuscript, it struck me that his leaving out his other set of grandparents couldn't have been completely unintentional. I'm not suggesting he did this because he was ashamed of them or because they weren't as important in his life as his maternal grandparents.

  On weekends or summer mornings sometimes we would ride out
on a streetcar to visit them in their home in Káposztásmegyer.

  After completing my university studies I began working for a foreign trade company. For about ten years I traveled to many parts of the world. Yet when I think of travel, what comes to mind first is that rickety yellow streetcar and the two of us bumping along on its open platform. Sometimes, on long plane rides, I'd be wrapped up in some technical reading, and this old image would suddenly flash before me. And I'd feel as though I wasn't even flying but riding across the globe in that yellow streetcar. Rattling along old Váci Road, interminably.

  The old man was a disabled veteran of the First World War who managed to retain his robust physique, despite his handicap; he had a booming voice, and his pockmarked nose was a blazing red from steady drinking. Though he was nearly seventy, his hair was just beginning to turn gray, and he still worked as a night watchman at the waterworks, where he also lived with his roly-poly wife in a basement flat. This grandmother had a habit of sending telegrams to her grandson: I am making pancakes today. Come for Strudel tomorrow. If I said it was these visits, this environment, that cemented and sustained our friendship, I wouldn't be far from the truth. If too long a time elapsed without anything happening, I'd ask him: Are we having apple fritters? To which he would respond: No, apple pie. Or he'd simply turn to me and say: Apricot dumplings. And all I had to ask was when. We developed a whole language of our own that no one else could understand. And it had to do with more than just delicious food.

  In those days I got very excited about machines, things mechanical, anything moving, not to mention making things and setting them in motion, and nothing could satisfy these interests more than what I found at the waterworks. But my friend's enthusiasm was roused exclusively by my unquenchable curiosity. He must have known that with the promise of a visit he had an emotional hold over me and could even bribe me. All he'd have to say is nut roll, and I'd forget everything else and be off and running. The shop stewards, soberly dressed in shirt and tie, even their apprentices in their undershirts, were as inexhaustibly patient as I was infinitely curious. They showed and explained everything to us. It must have been tremendously gratifying for them to realize that in the final analysis most questions can actually be answered. The general overhauls were the most exciting times at the plant. On these occasions extra help was hired from the neighboring villages. Girls and women in rubber boots and hitched-up skirts got busy scrubbing and scraping the tiled walls of the emptied water tanks; greasy-faced men and pimply-faced shop boys cleaned and repaired the disassembled machines. There was a lot of laughter, horseplay, telling of coarse jokes, teasing, and pawing. As if they were all participants in some ancient ritual. They kept inflaming themselves and each other, men doing it to men, women to women, men to women, and women to men, as if this stimulation had as much to do with the work at hand as with something very different, something into which we, two young boys, had not yet been initiated. It was like some strange work song. To be able to do justice to their daytime labor, they had to sing out of themselves their nocturnal lyrics. But the two of us could wander about freely in the fascinating, outsize engine rooms built at the turn of the century, and in the pristine park planted around the giant wells, in the echoing halls of the storage tanks where everything was so spotless, so sparkling clean, we never dared do anything but stand and quietly watch the water level rise and fall, the surface remaining strangely motionless.

  He has nothing to say in his manuscript about this very early, almost idyllic period of our friendship. I confess I first found this conspicuous omission so insulting I felt myself blushing every time I thought of it. For more than once we spent the night there, with the two of us sleeping in his grandparents' onion-smelling kitchen on a rather narrow cot. I once read in an ethnographic study that when in the cold of winter children of poor Gypsies cuddle up with each other on the straw-covered floor, their parents make sure that boys lie next to boys and girls next to girls. I don't think that this clinging brotherly warmth, which later my friend desperately pursued all his life, was something he intended to forget.

  I remember that on hot summer days his grandfather would unlatch his wooden leg, and slapping the horrible stump staring out of his cotton shorts, he'd begin extolling the advantages of an artificial leg. For one thing, it doesn't stink. No bunions, ever. If it creaks, he oils it. Can't do that with a real one. And another thing: the leg will never be hit by gout, that's for sure. At worst, woodworms would get to it. There was only one thing he was sorry about. Booze made him feel nice and tingly all over. Including his asshole. Only the leg didn't join in with the rest of him.

  As for me, I selected two dead soldiers out of all my ancestors, which included small-town tradesmen, humble peasants of the Great Hungarian Plain, headstrong Calvinist schoolteachers, newly rich mill owners, and sawyers turned industrial entrepreneurs. The two soldiers were my father and my maternal grandfather. And that's how we became a military family. Because soldiers were different. Besides those two, there were no other professional soldiers in our family. What is more, I couldn't have had any memory of either of them.

  Of my father we had few photographs, of my grandfather quite a lot. One of my favorite activities as a child was to study these pictures.

  Today, in the family stories that grew up around the figure of my grandfather, it would be all but impossible to separate the exaggerations from the real events that serve as the bases for them. But I believe that the special light radiating from him, intensified a thousandfold by a return glow, had to do not only with his outstanding abilities, his interrupted— and therefore considered to be very promising—career, but also, most probably, with his physical attractiveness. Slapping me affectionately on the thigh or kissing me on the cheek, my older relatives would tell me, a satisfied twinkle in their eyes, that I would never be quite as handsome as my grandfather. But my mother would always say, in a playfully captious though no less pride-filled voice, that at least in appearance I took after Grandfather; she was only sorry I wasn't quite as bright. But both statements were seductive enough for me to start believing that this resemblance was important; I had the feeling I was following in somebody's footsteps, and I also had the desire to measure up to this somebody. Somebody who in a sense was myself, although I had no way of judging whether or not my efforts in this direction were to my advantage.

  We had a big magnifying glass in the house, the kind used by map-makers. It had belonged to Grandfather and came to us after his death. With this magnifying glass I examined the various photographic likenesses dating from different periods of his life. It may be that I have no feel for aesthetics, but one thing is certain: I could almost never see as beautiful what others called beautiful. So it's no wonder that, as opposed to my friend's general outlook, a landscape, object, or person said to be beautiful might give me food for thought but in no way would excite me. The reason I spent so much time with my grandfather's portraits was that I realized that what others considered attractive in me evoked highly unpleasant thoughts. If two lines are parallel to each other, they meet in infinity. Two that are not parallel can meet here, right before my very nose. The person I resemble most I can meet only at some hypothetical point, but one who is different I can meet anywhere, anytime. Looking at my grandfather's face made me seek not the validity of the two complementary principles familiar to me but that of a third one. I found his face and his build almost repugnant, even though my instincts told me that we were very much alike. It was mostly his eyes that frightened me; his look made me shudder.

  I haven't held the photographs of my grandfather in my hand for at least twenty-five years.

  Was it true? Did introspection evoke such fear, horror, and revulsion in me, hurling me toward dangerous inner conflicts in which I could no longer control my will to serve my own interests? Or did I resemble him so much that the very resemblance made him repugnant? Could I have been thinking about the short distance separating the living and the dead, and about our hypothetical
meeting? Was it, therefore, the faintheartedness with which I viewed myself that tormented me and kept me from appreciating beauty? I don't feel qualified to answer these questions. Or rather to answer them I'd have to think and talk about certain details of my life that wouldn't be to my liking.

  The experiences of nearly forty years have convinced me that psychological reticence has its existential advantages. At the same time, ever since my friend's death I've been curious to see whether I could reach a self-knowledge similar to his, but without letting myself be destroyed in the process, as he was, and also without becoming dishonest.

  I'm at the threshold of abstraction, and stretching my sense of modesty to its limit when I divulge, in the interest of shedding a brighter light on this whole question, that women who may otherwise rate me as a very good lover in every sense of the word sometimes, in the midst of love-making, driven by frenzied desire, try to violate my lips with theirs. And when I silently deny them this pleasure, they often urgently ask why. Why don't you let me? Because I don't want to. That's what I usually say. If I answer at all with words. I admit my conduct may seem arbitrary, but for me this silent denial is as deeply instinctive as it may be for someone else to resort to a kiss, silently, instead of words. I don't feel the need to reduce the gains of my personal and racial survival instincts at the expense of maintaining my personality's independence. With a kiss I'd lose my control over myself and my lover. A less than conscious force would take over, one I could never fully trust.

  And if I were to classify women's reaction to this singular foible, if I asked how seemingly very different people respond to having no gratification for a basic emotional need, which I personally find almost beside the point, then, based on my experience, I would differentiate among three types of behavior.