by Peter Nadas
Stars shone brightly in the spring sky; it was getting chilly.
I knew I just had to get up sometime; she also, stood up but didn't stop talking; later, I walked across her room, and she came after me and continued talking.
I walked into the hallway; I already opened the door for you, she said; I looked back at her, and she was still talking and didn't even lower her voice.
I closed the door and began running toward the staircase, still hearing her voice; I ran down the stairs and out of the building, and on the trail continued to run toward the railroad tracks, where just then a well-lit but empty train was screeching terribly as it made its turn.
It was getting late.
The yellowish light of streetlamps cast a soft, festive shine on all that whiteness.
The snow's reflected light made the sky look lighter, yellower, and wider, the softness of the glow toning down every sound; on high, from behind the thinning edges of the dark slow-moving clouds every now and then the moon showed its cold face.
It must have been around midnight when I got back to the flat on Wörther Platz.
In the lobby I shook the snow off my shoes; I didn't turn on the light in the stairwell.
As though anyone, at any time, even at a late hour like this, could demand to know what I was doing here.
First feeling and moving aside the tongue-like lid over the opening, I carefully slipped my key into the lock.
Not to wake him, should he already be asleep.
The door lock snapped back in the dark, that was all the noise I made.
Careful not to make the floor creak, I reached the coatrack almost without a sound, when he called out from the bedroom that he wasn't asleep.
I sensed that he had left the bedroom door open because he wanted to see me.
Yet he didn't want to pretend to be asleep, either; he himself would have been offended by such a pretense.
I hung up my coat and walked in.
It was a pleasant feeling to be bringing in the chill of the snow and the smell of winter.
The bed creaked as he made a move; I could see nothing in the dark, but assumed he was making room for me. I sat down at the edge of his bed.
We were silent, but it was a bad silence, the kind one should never get into, even if the conversation replacing it is forced or trivial.
He finally broke the silence and in a hollow voice said he wanted to apologize for hitting me; he was truly ashamed, and he'd like to explain.
I didn't want his explanation, or, I should say, I didn't feel I was ready for it; I asked him instead what he had thought of the performance.
He couldn't say that he liked it or that he didn't; it just didn't do anything for him, he said.
And Thea?
She wasn't bad, he said vaguely; she was probably the best of the lot, but he couldn't feel sorry for her, or hate her, or admire her; nothing.
I asked him why he had run away.
He didn't run away, he just wanted to come home.
But why did he leave me there, why didn't he wait for me?
He could see we needed each other, she and I; he didn't want to disturb us with his presence.
I couldn't leave her there, I said; Arno had moved out, for good this time, and he didn't leave anything in the apartment, not a pencil, not a handkerchief; but it had nothing to do with me.
He lay silently on his bed, and I sat just as silently in the dark.
And then, as if he had heard nothing of what I told him, or found nothing new in the little that he did hear, an episode in a life that no longer concerned him, he continued where I had interrupted him before; he would like to tell me something, he said, a simple thing, really, but also difficult, he couldn't tell me here, could we go for a walk?
Now, I asked, go for a walk now? in the cold? for I really wanted to skip the explanations.
Yes, now, he said.
The night wasn't even that cold.
We took our time; with slow, leisurely steps we walked all the way to Senefelderplatz and crossed the silent Schönhauserallee, and where Fehrbellinerstrasse touches Zionskircheplatz, we turned and went along Anklammerstrasse and then followed Ackerstrasse, until the street came to an end.
On our nocturnal walks we never chose this route, because we'd find ourselves facing the Wall.
While we were walking, I looked at the streets, stores, and houses with the eyes of a professional, as if all this were only the locale of my invented story and not a place where my own life was unfolding.
I plundered my own time, and wasn't displeased with the looted treasures of an imagined past, for it stopped me from being overwhelmed by the present.
Along this stretch of the street the Wall was also the brick wall of an old cemetery, and beyond it, in a mined, floodlit no-man's-land, stood the burned-out skeleton of a church destroyed during the war, the Versöhnungskirche, the Church of Reconciliation.
It was beautiful how the moon shone through the bare ribs of the bell tower, penetrated the hollow nave, and made some broken pieces of stained glass glimmer in the rose window.
Yes, it was very beautiful.
The two friends were standing next to each other and watched both the church and the moon.
A little farther away, a border guard's footsteps sloshed softly in the wet snow.
They saw the guard; he took four steps in front of his booth, then four steps back; and he noticed them, too.
The whole scene was so strange, I almost forgot Melchior might have something bad to tell me.
Very gently he lowered his arm onto my shoulder; his face was lit by three different lights: the moon, the yellow streetlamp, and the floodlight, but they cast no shadows, for all three sources of light were also reflected by the snow; and still, it wasn't light around us, there was only the glimmering of a many-colored darkness.
So I'm leaving, he said quietly, it's all arranged; two-thirds of the cost, twelve thousand marks, has already been paid; for ten days he'd been waiting for the confirming message.
He was waiting for a phone call, after which he'd have to go for a walk; he'll be followed, will meet a man smoking a cigarette who will be heading straight for him; he'll have to ask the man for a light, and the man will say he doesn't have his lighter on him, but he'll gladly help.
It was a good thing he left the theater in such a hurry; as soon as he got home he received the phone call and he did what he was supposed to do.
That's why he'd asked that crazy boy for a light, he thought he had botched something along the way; there was no phone call yet, it was only the tension that made him do it, I must understand; what with all that waiting, he had a hard time controlling himself, that's how it happened, I shouldn't be angry with him, that's why he hit me.
I don't know when he lifted his arm off my shoulder.
But why do we have to do this here? I whispered; let's get away from here; why here?
The guard didn't come closer, but after every four steps he stopped and looked at us.
I'm still at home, he said in his familiar old voice.
Yes, at home, I repeated.
It wasn't that he was afraid to tell me any of it; he wouldn't want to do it as originally planned.
He wouldn't want to leave without a word of explanation.
He won't say goodbye to anyone else, won't remove anything from his apartment; he's written out a will, but they'll confiscate all his things, anyway, let them! so it was a kind of symbolic will, and he wants me to take it, but only after he's left.
Maybe he'd go to see his mother one more time, but he won't tell her either; it would be nice if I went with him—but not if it's too hard for me—because with me there it would be easier to keep quiet about all this.
He's supposed to get his last instructions three days from now, and by then he won't have time for anything.
That's why he was telling me these things now.
I don't quite know when we turned away from each other and looked only at the mo
on; I said he didn't need to be concerned about me.
In the next three days I would do whatever he wanted me to, whatever was for the best.
I shouldn't have said this, because it may have sounded like a quiet reproach.
We fell silent again.
Then I said, the quotation may not be exact, but according to Tacitus, Germanic people have this belief that fateful enterprises should be embarked upon under a full moon.
Those barbarians, he said, and we both laughed.
And then a tentative, quickly and mutually checked movement of ours made me understand why he had to tell me this here, at the Wall, in this light, within sight and earshot of the guard: we couldn't touch each other anymore.
I said I'd better go back to Schöneweide now.
He thought it was a good idea; he'd call me, he said.
By the following morning most of the snow had disappeared; dry, windy days followed, at night the mercury dropped below freezing.
I was sitting in the Kühnerts' apartment, on the second floor of the house on Steffelbauerstrasse; I left every door open and was mulling over all sorts of crazy plans.
The last hours of the third night we spent together; we sat up in his flat as in some waiting room.
We did not turn on the lamp or light a candle; now and again he said something from his armchair, now and then I did from mine.
At three-thirty in the morning the telephone rang three times; before the fourth ring he was to pick up the receiver but not say anything; according to the prearranged plan the person at the other end had to hang up first.
Exactly five minutes later there was a single ring and that meant that everything was all right.
We got up, put on our coats, he locked the flat.
In the lobby downstairs he picked up the trash-can lid and casually dropped in his keys.
He was still playing with the fear that gripped us both.
In the glass-enclosed Alexanderplatz station we took the city line that went out to Königswusterhausen.
When we got to Schöneweide I touched his elbow and got off; I didn't look back at the disappearing train.
He had to stay on till Eichenwalde.
They were waiting for him at the Liebermann Strasse cemetery, and from there he was taken, on Route E8, to the Helmstedt—Marienborn crossing, where, in a sealed casket, with documents certifying that the casket contained a disinterred body, he was shipped across the border.
It was raining.
In the evenings I'd walk to the theater; on the soppy carpet of fallen leaves the soles of my patent-leather shoes would soak through a little.
In the abandoned apartment the refrigerator kept humming quietly; when I opened its door, the bulb lit up helpfully as if nothing had happened.
The telegram contained only three words, which in my language is a single word.
Arrived.
The next day I left for Heiligendamm.
I did not take the police warning seriously; I waited until my visa expired, until the very last day.
Two years later, in a picture postcard filled with tiny letters, he informed me that he was married, his grandparents had died, unfortunately; their little girl was a month and a half old.
The postcard showed the Atlantic Ocean and nothing else, only angry waves reaching all the way to a blank horizon; but according to the printed inscription the picture was taken at Arcachon.
He hadn't written a poem in a long time and was less given to deep thoughts; he was a wine supplier, dealing exclusively in red wine; he was happy, though he didn't smile as much anymore.
And the other one was standing, still in a strange house, with this news in his hand, looking now at the written side of the card, now at the picture.
So it was that simple.
That's what he was thinking, that it was that simple.
That simple, yes, everything was that simple.
The Author
PÉTER NÄDAS
Péter Nádas was born in Budapest in 1942. He lived for a good part of his adolescence in an orphanage, his mother having died of cancer, and his father, a state prosecutor in the Communist government, having committed suicide shortly after the Hungarian uprising of 1956. A Book of Memories took him many years to write, and another five years simply getting it past the censors. When it was finally published in Budapest in 1986 it caused a sensation.
About the Book
This extraordinary magnum opus seems at first to be a confessional autobiographical novel, claiming and extending the legacy of Proust and Mann. But it is more: Péter Nádas has given us a brilliant psychological novel that comes to terms with the ghosts, corpses and repressed nightmares of Europe's recent past. It is made up of three narratives: the first is that of a young writer who describes his adolescence in Stalinist Hungary in the 1950s, his beloved father's suicide after the 1956 uprising, and his fated love for a German poet; the second is the narrator's own fictional character, a refined belle époque aesthete and revolutionary anarchist whose emotional experiences mirror the narrator's; and the last that of a childhood friend of the narrator who meets him in Moscow many years after their youth and who seems to offer a more objective account of their friendship. These brilliantly coloured lives, each of which casts light on the others, are interwoven to create a powerful work of tragic intensity. A Book of Memories is a radiant and unforgettable achievement.