by Peter Nadas
What virtues should I have, how could I be completely different from what I am, to win her away from this miserable character. It was almost like asking how I might make myself as repulsive as he seemed. But the provocative reality of his face disturbed me and kept me captive—independently of the woman. As if with his features he was playing a game, and I had to accept unconditionally the rules of this game. While I was thoroughly ashamed for him and had no idea what to do about it. Still, I felt I was accepting something unfamiliar, willingly entering something I knew nothing about. Thin men like him seem always to wear shirts at least two sizes larger than their neck requires, which makes them look very vulnerable and fragile. But your surprise is all the greater when you come up against their tenacity, shrewdness, and aggressiveness. At the same time, I discovered that what until then I had thought was just a dark shadow on his forehead was a black spot full of ominous little lumps. As he leaned forward, his elbow still resting on the car’s roof, his dark shiny hair fell over the hideous blotch on his forehead. As if it explained the dread he aroused in me, although I could not think of the name of the skin disease.
The streetlamp on its cable was swinging in the wind directly above us. Shadows from the hair fallen over his forehead stretched into his face, long fingers reaching into him at the whim of the swinging lamp. Occasionally, light flared up on the dark surface of his eyes. As if he were saying something in tune with the swinging lamp, nodding along with its rhythm, but then it turned out he’d said nothing, after all. As if he wanted to ask which of us would put up with this situation longer. Come on, push your beaver up just a little. It was a provocation but not a challenge because he was without armor too. Let’s see how far we get, he seemed to say, how far with each other. Which to some extent referred to the woman but not completely, because with his look he touched my face, reached in among the various layers of my character. His posture called to me, his sheer gaze commanded that I do the same. As if both of us were looking into the same mirror, and in my surprise I had no choice but to lean closer, yet what I saw was not my own disgustingly familiar mug.
I can’t deny that the beauty of the face surprised me. It probably surprised me with the keenness of its intelligence. Some profiles say nothing; the sudden turning face-to-face is what takes your breath away. Or the other way around: you are disappointed when an impressive profile belongs to an unimpressive face. His beauty looked out at me from the drawn, bony face of a day laborer. As if he were looking at me from the depth of several centuries. He wore a white shirt buttoned to the very top, as road workers on the Great Hungarian Plain do on holidays; he was flaunting his stubbly chin and his gauntness. His features were symmetrical and harmonious; a long face, somewhat oriental, with almost motionless eyes. It was surprising how much undisguised suffering had been carved into his features. He seemed like a reticent man, or at least he wanted to seem like one. And not only the suffering of the soul had been carved undisguised into his features, but also deprivations of the body, penury, his inhibitions, the stifled, freewheeling fury of his possessiveness.
I had not had experiences like that, yet all this was not unknown to me, not distant, because the secret passion of sufferance brought me close to him. To a person who perhaps denied his feelings as passionately as I did. Denial had written horizontal wrinkles into the skin of his forehead. It was enough to raise his eyebrows a bit, as he did just now, looking inquisitive, to have his forehead show a piling up of centuries-old furrows, darkened by the spot of the skin disease. His eyebrows were beautiful, thick, dense, dark, very strong and manly. This man is a wolf. As I searched my mind for the name of the skin disease, I remembered that it had something to do with the wolf or with legends of bloodthirsty wolves.
Denial and experience left nothing distrustful or indistinct on his face; they planted radially expanding dry lines at the corners of his eyes and surrounded his thin lips with two aggressively sharp grooves. The features that denial and experience had drawn on his face did not allow him to hide his emotions or his affections. He must have been too sensitive to be truly reticent and negative. His intentions and his faculties were separate. I wanted to lean closer to him just as he too seemed to be offering himself up; with the flexibility of thin people, and with his openness, he somehow wound up closer to me. I wanted to have a glance between the dark shadows; I put my elbows on the car, with a movement meant to be as effortless as the ones his body had suggested.
He could not have anticipated that my interest in the characteristics of men was so uninhibited; I surprised and astonished him, but he accepted it immediately, with no revulsion. But I felt I was in danger, I’d got myself into danger, now I would abandon my upbringing, give up something to hold on to. It may have seemed to him that I was deliberately imitating his movements when the opposite was the case: I was guided by the raw feeling of attraction as, leaning on my elbows just as he was, I stared into his face or into the core of his soul. The only difference was that I put my chin in the palm of my hand instead of propping it up with my thumb.
He must have enjoyed managing to bend me this way.
That’s how we were staring at each other; the wet car roof glittered dully.
If his skin had not been so translucently tender and at the same time his stubbly cheekbones had not been so strong and wild, if his aggressive chin had not been marked by a charming cleft, if he did not have finely cut eye sockets, if no winding, lumpy, coarse vein ran down from his temple, and if his visage had not been buffeted by contradictory emotions, then he would have remained painfully vulnerable: a face on which every secret feeling and every humiliating experience may be quickly seen. However, as things were, one could see all the things which the man felt but which, in his own well-conceived interest, he deliberately, stubbornly, and brazenly denied.
Raw strength overwhelmed his refinement, responding crudely to his weakness. A born self-destroyer, a cool, clever ignoramus. He was put together well enough so one could not take one’s eyes from him and could not know just where one stood with him.
A dangerously long time passed without either of us saying anything.
The mutually risky game was precisely a challenge to take an open-eyed account of each other’s traits and abilities, not furtively or in secret; we should do it openly, the way animals do. Now I remembered that the oddity on his forehead, lupus in Latin, was called wolf skin in Hungarian. This name summed up my presentiment. He would be the wolf in the tale. For which one instantly feels pangs of conscience. How could I link physical attributes with a moral judgment; how could I be so unfair. The reflection of everything he could see on me quickly showed in his eyes and in the bitter lines framing his mouth. As if the aversion-provoking mark on his body was telling me that I had no chance in the current situation. There was a mildly vibrating mockery at the corner of his eye; still, I didn’t know what he saw or how he judged me. I only sensed he wanted something other than what is usual or acceptable in a relationship between two people. Perhaps his lumpy wolf’s spot filled me with disgust and his look with abject terror. I did not want to acknowledge the delight, the contemptuous satisfaction with which he was watching my face. And if, nevertheless, I opened my mouth, if I couldn’t bear the silence anymore or his supercilious and brazen visage, then the secret game would be over, because I’d refused to take a risk on the next moment, on my future.
I asked him what floor they lived on; in my confusion I looked back at the building and saw a light go out in a room on the second floor and another light go on in an adjacent room. I hated my own hoarse, hesitating voice.
He asked me in return, ready to attack, why I was asking. His glance was distrustful, as if he feared an ulterior motive.
I didn’t understand what he could be afraid of; I didn’t want to understand how I might possibly have offended him. I said, I asked because I’ve been in this building before, which is to say I know it pretty well.
He asked, when, why, how did I know the building. He was not inter
ested in questions, and he would definitely not answer any of mine. As he spoke he pushed himself away from the car, stepping back a little, but did not let go of the open door, didn’t let it slam shut.
As if I had to follow his every move, I straightened up too.
In his leather coat, he became like an experienced interrogating officer.
I said, it was pretty long ago when I was here last, but it wasn’t just once or twice then, because my childhood is connected to this neighborhood. The woman who taught me, my piano teacher used to live here.
I see, the piano teacher, that’s very interesting, he replied sarcastically and aggressively, as if he had to retaliate instantly against my piano lessons. He hoped I’d had nice successes. My childhood must have been very happy.
I hastened to reassure him that that was not at all the case; though I got some idea of the instrument I never really learned to play well; and I didn’t understand why I was making such an effort to keep up this chatter. I said the only reason I asked was that I’d be interested to know if my piano teacher still lived here. She was a very kind, older German lady. More correctly, she was a very strict woman, I was pretty afraid of her. If she still lived here, he might know her. But I didn’t understand why I was making this report; what on earth was I explaining myself for. In Budapest apartment houses people don’t know one another, or they pretend they don’t. It was unpleasant to hear my anxious voice. Perhaps, if he knew the story of my childhood, he might be more forgiving. I won’t tell them the story. But I could not give up my false conversational style completely.
She had one of those silver-handled, black-lacquered canes, I explained; because of an accident or some illness, she limped heavily. Her hairdo and her cane made her look very refined. And the piano was in the same room where just a minute ago the light went on.
I received a short, dismissive, openly sarcastic laugh as a reply. Which meant that my refined manner, intended to smooth over all inequalities, had failed to convince him.
People who like to hide and be mysterious take every banal question as a frontal attack against them. But however I looked at them, my questions seemed harmless. People like that see a secret motivation behind every word or movement; their thinking is nothing but their own projections. Or perhaps he paid no heed to my questions so that he could ignore my presence altogether. I could not help thinking that this man might be involved in some sinister affair and I’d better keep clear of him.
Or jealousy had driven him crazy, in which case I should be more considerate.
I was angry.
I failed to understand how I could accept his surliness. Nothing should be the way I might like it, and certainly not the way his wife would. As if he were taking revenge and enjoying it immensely. Which was quite understandable, and I willingly reached out to him with my loquaciousness, to ease the tension between us, not to let the situation remain so raw; we needn’t be so vulnerable to each other. If we were already at this point and did not know how to wriggle free of each other, then at least we should give some acceptable form to the useless few minutes we were spending together. It’s really not such a big deal. But for him, it seemed, the very suggestion of a form was unacceptable and ridiculous; he judged contemptible the very method with which I meant to save what could be saved.
Every hypocrisy of the sunken bourgeois world crawled to the surface. He obviously was not familiar with what he so profoundly hated. He was a believer in openness and brute force, but at best, guided by such a belief, we could have a fistfight. I had to be the understanding party, after all, since I had elbowed my way into their life. And in that case, what was I doing trying to tone down my own surliness with this chattering tone of mine.
He could easily give himself over to any danger since he was not afraid of altercation. He saw no reason why he should let propriety restrain his emotions. He was not even afraid of running over someone with his car. I am always on guard, listen carefully, wait to see how things develop, and make myself believe that I might somehow blunt the sharp edge of existence; I continually talk beside the point. Go ahead and consider him surly, uncouth, or immoral, said the gaze, but his response was that despite my proposed method I was nothing but a wriggling worm.
I saw that he saw through me.
But that made me see him even better.
Now he is demonstratively silent, now he preaches shamelessly; he plays simultaneously with rejection and allurement, now he is talkative, now taciturn, because it’s important for him to remain unpredictable. He’s playing a calculated game with others as well as with himself, but his calculations are strictly confidential. I was even excited by the unpleasantness of the game, with him attacking me at my most vulnerable point. Because of my attempts at restoring predictability, he practically ran me down. As if saying to me he not only knew another world in which the rules of human contact were different in every imaginable way, which is to say unpredictable, but also knew me better than I could possibly know myself, and therefore, if I were brave enough, he’d offer to me this secret and unpredictable world.
He was afraid his wife would make thirty-eight minutes out of the eight she had promised, he said. She had a knack for it, for taking her time. She’s happy when she can make you wait for her. So now he’d leave me to myself and go upstairs, just to be sure she wouldn’t take even longer.
Every one of his words insulted me. I did not want to converse with him about his wife; I did not want to agree to it. Not in the tones he used, and not in any other tone. He was looking for a cheap way to squeal on his wife. To make her out as just a woman who always makes you wait. That made me even more ridiculously stubborn; I kept asking him insistently whether they lived in that second-floor apartment where my piano teacher had been.
And how long had they been living there.
But it was as if he hadn’t heard my questions.
Affably he said that he wouldn’t lock the car door. Should I change my mind and decide to leave—he saw I couldn’t make up my mind—would I first honk the horn briefly but nice and loud, to call him. The car shouldn’t be left unguarded for too long. And with that he let go of the car door and it slammed shut. He left me there; I was very confused.
I was cursing because I really couldn’t decide what to do. His words were like a coup de grace. He let me know that he had read everything on my face. If I left now, my defeat and humiliation would be complete. But it wasn’t going to be different if I stayed. His gait was beautiful, with long, smooth, and very decisive steps. He disappeared into the dim lobby, and then I heard his running steps echo in the stairs. Without thinking much about whether it was appropriate, I took off after him. As if I were claiming, completely unreasonably, that I was the one who was entitled to this building—but by building I did not mean the building.
And I certainly wasn’t going to guard his car.
Not even a bright summer day could chase away the terrible dimness from this lobby. I wanted to find out which floor he was going to, where he kept the woman captive. I already had seen how he did it, and with what. As if I could diminish the extent of humiliation I had inflicted on myself, I clung to this knowledge.
The moment I stepped into the lobby, stinking with cat urine and a musty exhalation from the basement, I froze. As if some vestige of bashfulness was stopping me.
I’ve no right to do this. Or perhaps the memory of an old fear.
With their claws sliding on the stone floor, grating and scratching, two cats disappeared down the steps leading to the basement, a dark and a lighter flash in the semidarkness. In the light of the single naked lightbulb, a black cat was chasing a red angora one.
I could hear that he did not stop on the second floor, but just then the number 5 bus rolled across the cambered cobblestones in front of the building and its noise blasting into the lobby overwhelmed the echoes of his receding footsteps. Over the racket, I could just make out a soft slamming of a door somewhere. It might have been on the third or even the fourth fl
oor. Which again reminded me of the little girl from the fourth floor, Ilonka Weisz, and she in turn reminded me of a room in their apartment, facing the courtyard, its curtain drawn against the bright summer sunshine. Of my shame, which I haven’t been to tell anyone since then, and of the afternoon sunshine’s indifference to my shame. As I was looking at the familiar patterns of these walls in the pale light of the single bulb, I could be sure of one thing, that Uncle Pálóczky was no longer alive; only in his absence could everything become so filthy.
And then there was quiet, the light went out in the stairwell, but above the empty, yellow courtyard glittering in the wetness the wind was making great noises. There was another naked lightbulb in front of me; this one, above the list of tenants, was always lit; otherwise, darkness everywhere. Had old Pálóczky been alive, there would have been order and cleanliness, and a shade for the bulb. And the garbage cans wouldn’t have been standing like this next to the entrance either, uncovered and stuffed to overflowing. I felt as if they could not humiliate me because I wouldn’t fall into their trap. And as if the senselessness of this evening was not happening to me. Or, could I be in a different building, after all. As a child, I hadn’t noticed how seedy and run-down the place was. In the interim, the proportions changed, and the building seemed to resemble another one that was, who knows why, very familiar from a long way back.
Only ten years have gone by since then.
Or it was as if someone had told me the story of his life, from which I’d know that there was a building like this, with a piano teacher in it, where a little girl, with her little red skirt swishing on her buttocks, lured a little boy to the fourth floor, where that terrible thing happened. Just as the present evening was a useless and unavoidable disgrace. Where ten years ago he first had to pass by the foul-smelling entrance to the basement and no matter how carefully and quietly he came through the main gate, he’d still startle the cats stalking each other just as I saw them now. The red cat wasn’t familiar, but the black one was, as if the Pálóczkys’ black cat were still alive.