by Peter Nadas
No matter how big the trouble he was in, how hard he laughed at himself for his miserable saving ideas, the verity of his dream remained more realistic. Perhaps because it was on Isolde’s bed, in Isolde’s bedroom that his shame had caught up with him.
Disgrace.
But his shame also clarified connections that until now neither he nor anyone in his family could have understood, and no one in all of Germany could have, either. He even understood, at last, that this was the reason he could not speak German in his dream. He’d rather be a different man. It was also more pleasant to escape from his shame, back into his dream, which, despite his being awake, had not stopped. The dream literally forced itself on him, as if whispering seductively, if you want me to, honey, I can take you even deeper. It was very clear now: the others remained unsuspecting to this day about the paper box because they are truly innocent.
Isolde was alone when she found it in the fruit-drying shed. Who else would have found it.
There could hardly be anything clearer than this.
He also found it interesting that his dream reworked the relationships among his relatives. He turned his great-grandfather, whom he could hardly have known, into his grandfather, and the older brothers into cousins. The dream showed Isolde too, as a cousin, though she was his aunt. It’s clear that my aunt Isolde kept her secret to herself, but her career, so strongly out of tune with the family’s general financial situation, one could understand only from the dream.
He appeared to be dreaming again, even though he was awake and free to be euphoric about having finally found the explanation.
Isolde’s father accepted the paper box, rode his bicycle to the farm, hid the box there, but the following morning three inmates freed from the nearby camp killed him in front of his house. When four years later Gerhardt Döhring returned from a POW camp, he did not believe the desperate explanation according to which the concentration-camp inmates must have taken the mysterious paper box with them and the family members knew nothing about it. How could he have thought his older brother was so stupid as not to hide the box properly. It must still be around somewhere. He could not have hidden it so stupidly that those miserable inmates would find it right away. More than once, they helped him turn the whole farm upside down, the cellar, the attic; they tapped the chimneys, the walls, all the floors. Twice they carried all the firewood out of the woodshed and back again. The fruit-drying shed they searched from top to bottom at least three times. Not by accident. They dug in the more suspicious places. Still, Gerhardt refused to accept the cold fact that there wasn’t any paper box anywhere. In the family, they knew about every possible and actual hiding place in the house; in the wall of the fruit-drying shed was a secret hollow, made 150 years ago for just such a purpose, but the paper box was nowhere to be found. Who could have imagined that two weeks before Gerhardt Döhring’s return, Isolde had found the box, Isolde, a mere child.
Barely a few weeks after his return from the POW camp, the entire town became frightened of Gerhardt Döhring. Even though strangers could not have known anything about the paper box.
Without authorization he conducted a secret investigation of the extraordinary events that had occurred during the last weeks of the war. Not alone, but with two good friends and the hero of Sedan, his own father, who was a lawyer, after all, and on whose pockmarked face Gerhardt, from his early childhood, had been observing and touching with his fingers the strange and hostile history of the world. The four of them held the view that the fact of the occupation could not retroactively justify major crimes; those who disobeyed orders, traitors, saboteurs, and deserters could not escape the appropriate punishment. And the four of them had to deal with these matters behind the backs of the occupiers and as quietly as possible. Of the deserters who managed to survive the first years of the occupation, two vanished without a trace, and to dispel any doubt about the cause of their disappearance, a third one was found dead. There was another unsavory affair Gerhardt Döhring was keen on uncovering. If the two hospital barracks had been properly set on fire, why did they not burn down completely, and how could the prisoners have escaped from them. He sought answers to these questions as frenetically as to those about the paper box.
In his dreams, however, he had to admit that Gerhardt Döhring had not been mad, contrary to the family’s opinion. He was tormented by being unable to avoid his own story, but only a lack of acceptable solutions to his problems later drove him to insanity. Defeat could not be redeemed by murders. Now he could see this with absolute clarity, but it only made him experience the intolerability of his newfound knowledge. With this knowledge, he would follow into madness the old man who lived in him.
The fruit-drying shed was heated up twice a year.
When fruit was plentiful, the first heating would last and continue into the second one, and together they would take a whole month. It was quite possible that in the fourth year, after having been heated to a red-hot state twice a year, the paper box simply went up in flames.
Of Döhring’s two daughters, Isolde disliked housework more than her sister did.
After the horrible death of their father, all the heavy work was left to the only son. The widow tried to keep things equal among the three of them. She was always after Isolde, would not let her shirk her duties or slacken at the expense of her siblings; that winter too it was Isolde whom she sent alone to the farm to put the drying racks in order. This job did not necessarily require two people. And if Isolde was afraid, well, let her get over it. As she was pulling the racks out of their slots, she noticed a few sparkling objects among the charred remnants of the paper box inside a pan that usually caught dripping fruit juice. She didn’t know what to think. A few minutes later she found the large pile of gold in the secret hollow. It was clearer than daylight who and in what circumstances must have hidden it there.
For the first time in his life, he was sure about something.
Even though he had been the cause of many terrible things.
And at last, he was startled to wakefulness by the horror of his dream, which showed him things no one had been able to decipher.
While taking in the bedroom and its open doors glimmering in the yellow and red reflections of the nocturnal city, he still hoped a little that shitting in his pants was part of his dream.
But it was, along with its stench, part of reality.
He pulled up the wide, striped pajama pants to his knees, held them together, and stepped off the bed; it could drip only to his knees. Plenty of it remained on the bedding. He took small steps, managing to carry the sausage for a few paces, squeezed between the cheeks of his buttocks, but the moment he reached the nearby bathroom, it fell out, fell apart, and he had to scoop out the pieces with his hand from the diarrhea-filled pajama pants.
By then, everything was dripping and became smeared everywhere, as blood would be after a brutal murder.
Le nu féminin en mouvement
He had had it up to here with them.
He saw clearly that the morality, loyalty, and devotion he had demanded of himself were nothing but shameless hypocrisy, lying, and cowardice. Simply put, I’m gay—he should have said it out loud.
I’m looking at the men, he now admitted to himself.
Still, he couldn’t accuse himself of anything.
It would be closer to the truth to say he didn’t know his way around women and, though he was looking for nothing more than their company, was frightened of them. He couldn’t specify what he was frightened of, and would have been hard put to draw up the orographic and hydrographic maps of his fear, but he grew so intent on observing what men did, whether they were as frightened as he was or what made them luckily enough not frightened, that he could not pay attention to anything else.
To be able to see them openly, without reserve; there should be nothing he didn’t know about them; how do they do it, that’s what he wanted to know; that’s what he caught himself wanting to know more than anything else.
> Every single man got him excited.
I’m a lousy little liar, he thought, alarmed, always have been; in an undertone, he kept speaking and breathing on the windowpane, while what he really wanted was to go down, cross the boulevard, and talk to that woman. Perhaps what frightened him so much was the possibility that suddenly somebody, an unknown woman, simply with her sheer existence, might give him pleasure. For whom he felt nothing and whom he did not love; how could he without knowing her; yet he was in love with her. But how can one be in love in such circumstances. He wanted to possess her. Could that be the sum total of that much-admired thing called love. It’s not only me; everybody is selfish, mendacious, evil.
His aunt Nínó too, everyone, every woman is a traitor, they are born traitors.
But even with sentences like these, he could not find the right place for his own betrayal because the moment he’d said he did not want it, had had enough of death, he’d simply managed to evoke even more intensely everything it would be best to forget.
As if he were shouting at himself, asking why did you let Nínó leave with that other woman, that dumb slut, why didn’t you go with her yourself, but the question could mean only one thing: why is your life so miserable. His protest notwithstanding, death would reach out to him with the hand of his aunt. And there was no point in making excuses for himself, that Nínó couldn’t care less about the death of that old fascist either; all she cared about was the inheritance for her loathsome evil little son, nothing else.
It could not have been anything but an illusion or wishful thinking to imagine that there existed human relationships lasting more than a few seconds. They’re nothing but snorting pigs, all of them. And they dare call it love when they wallow in the slop, snorting their heads off, and that’s what they value above everything else.
I’m not going. I am not going anywhere. I am not.
He went on turning these words over in his mind a long time after the foyer door had slammed shut behind the two women and complete silence had finally descended on the apartment.
Ilona did not move, but her presence or absence made no difference. He looked through her as if she did not exist. In his eyes, Ilona was no different from anyone else, a born traitor. A born servant, a whoring female who could not take her own fate into her hands so she rented it out to others.
He pressed his forehead against the windowpane again. The reflected masses of the sky moved brightly across the dark sidewalk.
Nowhere, you understand, nowhere. For himself, he had to convince Nínó of his rectitude.
I’m not going.
Down on the street, the cab was still waiting for the women.
What could they be doing so long in the stairwell. As if they had forgotten why they were supposed to hurry. In the farthest room facing the street, reclining on the professor’s abandoned sofa, Ilona was weeping. Now she could mourn her shattered life. It felt good to hear her little moans.
Downstairs, in front of the apartment building, the two women were crossing the street in a hurry, leaning into the wind. That’s what he’d been waiting for. As far as the eye could see there was nobody around, the boulevard was empty; Oktogon Square remained deserted. Let them go. I’m not going anywhere. He bade them farewell with these irritated words, emptied of meaning, while it was clear to him that lying to himself was in vain. Going nowhere. As soon as they were out of sight, he’d take his coat and be gone. Nothing to wait for anymore. He’s finally free. He’d face any risk. Actually, it was hard for him to call the dying man an old fascist pig, but by using that appellation he had liberated himself. Broken with his family.
At last he could tell himself that he was breaking with his family, that was the word, break, with which he supported his rebellion or, rather, made himself realize there was no way back.
The younger woman literally leaned into the wind, walked sideways against it; the older one, as though enlisting her entire body in her defense, doubled over and scurried forward as if making an escape. They both wore hats, Gyöngyvér’s a firm tiny round box decorated with bits of lace, of the kind usually called a pillbox, Lady Erna’s soft and woolly, wide-brimmed and large.
The wind kept changing direction; now it rushed into the city from the north and swept across Andrássy Road, now it came bouncing in from the west off the hills of Buda and wreaking havoc on the boulevard. They had to hold down their hats with their gloved hands. Identically, they pressed their pocketbooks hard to their chests. With that same movement, Lady Erna also held together her short fur coat. Gyöngyvér’s broad, long coat, the color of faded violet, had a large decorative button right under the round collar, and if she hadn’t clutched the coat together over her breasts, the wind would have opened it, reached under it, and made it flutter in every direction. Although the two women’s bodies differed greatly in weight, firmness, dimension, and pliancy, looking at them from above, their gaits seemed very much alike.
They both wore high-heeled, narrow, long-tipped pumps; they appeared to be toddling. And with every gust of wind their nylon-stockinged legs faltered a bit.
Before they reached the curb, the cabbie thrust the rear door open from inside and quickly leaped out to help the older woman into his vehicle. This courtesy was surprising because in those days taxi drivers had long ceased to fulfill this basic business obligation. Younger ones probably didn’t even know such a thing was expected. They didn’t say hello or bother with a thank-you when accepting a tip, though they did not refrain from remarks if they found the tip too small. Lady Erna saw the man’s strong profile for only a moment, when he raised his head to see out from under his cap and rain sprayed his face. She thought she might have known him from somewhere; he was about her age.
The three people appeared to be participants in a ritual, performing a sacrificial dance around a large, dimly glimmering cultic insect.
They halted abruptly, colliding gently as they walked around each other, parted by leaning away from one another, paused, and then bent over as the wet wings of the insect closed behind them.
The small, dim thuds could barely be heard behind the closed windows on the third floor.
The moment they slid onto their seats, they filled the tobacco-smelling cab with the fragrance of their perfumes.
The cabbie was a man of the old school; though his face was abundantly supplied with bitter, vertical creases, his playful, watchful eyes evinced a humorous or ironic disposition. Such eyes inspire confidence. He had on a well-worn visored leather cap, which seconds before he had pulled down tightly over his forehead against the wind.
Private chauffeurs used to wear caps like this, a long time ago.
Still, Lady Erna could not shake the nagging thought that this man was a retired secret service officer. But then how, where would she know him from. There was something about people like him; one could tell right away they had been ÁVH men. As former monks and nuns gave themselves away by their sickly pale complexions and overly cautious way of walking. Everyone knew that the mustered-out ÁVH men stuck together and were only waiting to come back to power and take their revenge.
Once the women were settled comfortable in the back and the man turned around, looking at them expectantly, she no longer had any doubts. This is a superannuated ÁVH man. He flicked up the visor of his cap with his thumb and asked where to. Who knows what kinds of thing he must have done in his life. Everyone knew they kept themselves in a permanent state of preparedness and were very influential. This man, with his small graying mustache, was not at all bad-looking. His lips were too pretty. Unpleasant, very unpleasant to ride with such a person, she was brooding to herself, as if to pluck cautiously the familiar strings of dread in her memory.
Or maybe he was Arrow Cross.*
We are going to Kútvölgyi Hospital, she called out, in a voice unlike her usual one, as if making an official announcement through her nose.
The cabbie’s playful glance did not change. One could feel he was not ready to accept this tone.
>
He asked if the hospital would be their final destination.
His wrinkles seemed to radiate all over his face from the inner corner of his eyes.
That’s correct, our trip ends there, came Lady Erna’s short, unfriendly reply, and, so as not to be exposed to the impersonal, penetrating look of those eyes, she turned away.
The driver started the cab, drove across the square, but the tension between them remained, and in the rearview mirror he quickly sized up the other woman too.
She wore a tolerant, slightly suffering, restrained smile. It wasn’t easy to figure her out; the impression she gave was that with her entire devoted being she would go along with and support Lady Erna in everything that might happen. Though it was also obvious she was playing a role, and that Lady Erna did not object to this.
They were sitting too close together. This had never happened before. Which was somewhat embarrassing for both of them. As if trying to keep their bodies at a distance, they did not turn to each other. Gyöngyvér played her role well. Lady Erna, despite her resentment, couldn’t but admire the young woman. Perhaps she envied her son for having her and may even have feared for her. For she knew the relationship could not last and already felt sorry about the inevitable complications of a breakup. She had occasionally helped to speed up the predictable separations. Carefully yet relentlessly she had let her son feel she did not think this was the right woman for him. She admitted that a person from such a low social class, with nothing and no one in the world, who not withstanding dressed so impeccably and showed such diligence in her behavior, well, however silly she might be, she must have talent of some kind.
She must be truly knowledgeable in something to which her son clings steadfastly. No question. Of course, Lady Erna could not even think of these talents without summoning up their opposites. A chameleon, she said to herself, a common little minx who disguises her eagerness and greed in a rather primitive way.