A Book of Memories (109 page)

We probably needed that tiny delay. It made the mad race that followed that much more frantic. Our mouths were good only for catching our breath, but our feet could giggle and clatter away on the pavement. Dashing across streets and roads, weaving through crowds without bumping into anyone while your feet, your arms, your eyes became alert sensors, jumping on and off sidewalks. Feinting and dodging smoothly, the man was galloping ahead and sending us a message with his every move. Whatever he had been unable to tear from himself with laughter he was now pouring into his running. With his shoulders squeezing and thrusting, his neck craning, and his back straight, he not only controlled the situation but played it out for us. It looked as if at any moment he would cross the finish line; having pulled away from his rivals, he was already in the straightaway, unchallenged. That's how he kept playing with us. He'd change direction with lightning speed and careen into a side street. Somewhat confused, we'd follow, but just then, without curbing his leaps, he'd disappear into an open door. The woman had a funny way of running; she wasn't clumsy, yet she seemed heavy and sluggish as she filled the trail cut for her by the man. Not until the next day did I check the name of the street.

It was cool in there. Dark. Smell of cats. We crashed against the flaking plaster. Watching one another's eyes and body. I could still beat a retreat, but I seemed to have run the trembling out of my limbs, and a quiet but sober voice told me to stay. If not now and not like this, it would happen some other time, some other way, so why not get it over with? We were panting. We were looking at one another as if we were at the end, and not at the beginning, of our story. Everything was calm. There was nothing to be afraid of. The woman sneezed into this panting silence. Which would have been cause for renewed laughter, but the man raised a finger to his lips and, as if to continue this warning gesture, started up the stairs.

Through the slats of lowered blinds, the hot afternoon sun streamed into the completely empty apartment. A slight breeze was also blowing in through the open windows and doors. In the long hallway and three large interconnecting rooms there was not a single piece of furniture. Except for a couple of mattresses thrown on the floor of the largest room, with pink and not altogether clean bedding: a turned-up blanket, wrinkled sheets, just as he must have left it in the morning. On picture hooks left on the wall hung a pair of pants, a shirt, and in a corner there was a pile of shoes. I knew we were beyond all rules and conventions. I was ignorant of what was to follow, yet I made the first move. I flung myself on the mattress, lay on my back, and closed my eyes. Showing them just how inexperienced I was
—not that they could have had any doubt about that—whereas they seemed to be familiar with the ritual. During the time I spent in that apartment not a single word was spoken. But no explanations were needed. I knew I was in one of those flats whose occupants had left the country the previous December, or early January at the latest. And the man had to be a squatter. He couldn't have been a friend or relative of the former tenants, because then they would have left him something: a chair, a bed, a cabinet. He must have broken into the abandoned apartment, for if he had bribed the caretaker and got the key to the apartment, then he would have let us laugh freely in the stairway.

I have no way of figuring how long I may have stayed in that apartment. Perhaps an hour, maybe two. The three of us were sprawled out in three different positions on the mattress, two of us on our back, the woman on her stomach, when at one point I sensed that I was in the way. The feeling just came over me, even though neither of them gave a signal or made a move. Perhaps they began radiating a different sort of calm, and the energies passing so evenly between the three of us until then simply changed course. As if with their special calmness they were detaching themselves from me. They both seemed to want it this way, and I knew that with my more restless repose I could no longer find my place between them. Very gingerly I slipped my finger into the inside curve of her drawn-up knee. I was hoping she might be asleep. If she was not, she'd squeeze my finger by closing her knee. She stirred. First she turned her head toward the young man, and then she drew her knee up even higher so as to escape my finger. The man slowly opened his eyes and with his look said what the woman had told him with hers. There was no mistaking their message. It would have made no sense to experiment further. I should have felt very hurt, but what made the rejection bearable was that in the young man's eyes there lurked an almost paternal encouragement. I lay on the mattress, quite defenseless, yet my fiercely persistent erection could not have been offensive, as it was alluding to our joint endeavor up to that point. Nevertheless, standing in that state would have been awkward. I waited a little; I closed my eyes. But this way I sensed even more strongly what they had hinted at just before, that they wanted to be alone. I gathered up my scattered clothes, and while I was pulling on my shirt, my shorts, my pants, and buckling my sandals, they both fell asleep
—I didn't think they were feigning.

They did nothing to offend me. Still, for the next two days I felt as if I had been cast out of paradise for having committed a mortal sin. It wasn't the expulsion itself that was so hard to bear. After all, I left of my own free will, doing what I felt was best for me. Still, I would have liked to hold on to my newfound bliss. The following noon I went back to the house on Szinva Street. The blinds of the second-story windows were still drawn. I was hoping the woman would open the door. I imagined her being alone in the flat. The little brass disk moved in the peephole, and the man could see my face. Slowly, very considerately, he let the disk swing back into place.

I dragged myself down the stairs, trying not to make any noise. I didn't understand what he could have meant by the encouraging look he'd given me before. Feeling cheated, I roamed the neighborhood for two days, waited, hung around the house. Had I given myself completely over to my pain, I suspect many things in my life would have turned out differently. Pain would have given me a chance to think through what had really happened in there. And if I had thought it through, I might have reached the frightening conclusion that I had learned to make love from the body of a man
—not exclusively, but from the body of a man also— and this despite the fact that I have never, not then or at any other time, touched another man's body. And except for a bashful curiosity I have no desire to do so. Nevertheless, through the woman's body we did communicate. In trying to possess the woman, the other male body instinctively sought a common channel in which all our bodies could flow in a common rhythm. And that was the experience they deprived me of, but they also deprived themselves and each other of it. Something did happen, but what they took from me they could make use of only between themselves. Just as later, when I was with others, I made good use of what I'd learned from the two of them. The paternal encouragement in the young man's look referred to future times—it wasn't an invitation for me to come back.

Of course I didn't think all this through, I couldn't have. I found diversions, I avoided my pain. My urge to return to that place I sublimated in much more conventional ways. I formulated a code of behavior for myself. I never again indulged in pawing, grabbing, kissing, or running after girls; no courtship, no pining, no writing of love letters for me. Be smart, I said, with the encouraging paternal glance I had acquired from that stranger. I may not have been fully conscious of the origin of this high-handed, knowing glance, but I used it all the time. In some ways, I still do. And the girls, at least the ones I've wanted something to do with, have always proved to be smart.

I became part of an open world in which the laws of exclusive possession and appropriation do not apply, in which I enter into a mutual relationship not with a single chosen individual but with everybody. Or nobody, if you like. At the same time, my mother, ever since I can remember, all but forbade me to return her affection, which was, now that I think of it, a clever and instinctively cautious move on her part. In me she loved the man she had lost, but only through a tragic deception could my emotions have compensated her for that loss. She spared me from the pangs of love, and that is why it took me a very long time to understand that suffering is as much a part of a human relationship as pleasure is. I resisted tooth and nail every form of suffering. And it didn't occur to me that anyone expected me to reciprocate intense feelings; after all, my good looks earned me special privileges. Not that my looks could in any way make up for the indignities I had to endure on account of my family origins. But the tension between my social situation and my physical looks was enough to make me want to take root in a world that, whether it adored me or rejected me, did not lay claim to the whole of my life.

The devotion and admiration were meant for my physical attractiveness, the rejection for my social position. Unlike my friend, whose greatest ambition was to get to know, conquer, comprehend, bond another human being to himself and make that person his own, my own need to know and possess was fueled not by an overwhelming, self-effacing desire to understand, to identify totally with another being, but by the ambition to create order in my own affairs. We each lacked half of ourselves. I had a home, but not a homeland. He had a homeland, but not a home.

When it came to practical, expedient self-control, I was no less irrational than my friend. This self-control became my freedom. I used the natural affection of others as a means to an end, and to the same extent I curbed my own inclinations if they didn't fit a given situation and might hamper me in realizing my goals. So much for my moral justification. I never expected more from another person than I was willing to give of myself. I preferred to get less. I trained myself to be so sensible, so hard-nosed, that the very possibility of love was out of the question. My first adventure in physical pleasure most likely determined my subsequent experiences, but it was only part of a process. If one is forced to use oneself as an instrument, one remains an instrument in relation to another person as well. The quality of my first sexual adventure I consider to be identical with the quality of my ambitions. But I am neither so stupid nor so insensitive as to have let the need for love die in me completely. Except I couldn't have any experience in love
—it would catch me unprepared— because I acquired my experiences in affairs and relationships. And that's how things stand with me.

Actually, it was that visit to Rákosi's residence that gave me courage to apply for admission to the Ferenc Rákôczi II Military Academy. I didn't understand, and still don't, how they happened to pick me for that honor, but they did, and that meant that the impossible could happen. I didn't understand, because I knew that before summoning me to the principal's office they had to have clarified my family background. Or if for some reason they had neglected this, why did they disregard my principal's explicit warning? The reproachful gesture of his finger, the way he pointed to the little box next to my name in the class grades book and made sure everyone saw it, can never be forgotten. Cows are branded, not out of some conviction, but out of the practical necessity to distinguish one from the other.

Even as a child, with my still limited comprehension, I concluded that the system I lived under could not possibly regulate life by enforcing the inhumanly rigid and passionless rules it had devised. I sensed that only in the gaps and loopholes of this incomprehensible and absurdly rigid set of rules could I develop my own potential. True, I couldn't decide whether they fell into my trap or I into theirs, but I wasn't eager to know. I did know, however, that I wanted to get into that restricted zone. And the very people who created restricted zones were the ones to get me there. The condition of entry was my knowledge of Russian, yet it would never have occurred to me to study the language seriously if my father hadn't perished in a POW camp or maybe in that bullet-riddled automobile. The only way I could crawl through the tiny gap they offered me was by cunningly revealing something of my real intentions. If I could appear trustworthy enough to be able to go on being insincere. My knowledge of Russian and my pretty face got me in, and all they asked for was a trifle, that I pledge my faith. And why shouldn't I have considered myself worthy of speaking any foreign language? It's true of course that in the process I wound up rejecting my father and betraying my friend. But the system compensated me for my pledge of faith and for my services. It revealed its weakest side to me. Namely, that for all its professed ideals, it can make soup only from the vegetables that grow in its own garden.

If all this had happened a year earlier, or had the restricted zone really been significantly different from its surrounding area, if they had led us into a marble hall instead of a conventionally furnished living room, if the cocoa were not lukewarm and the disgusting skin on its surface hadn't reminded me of the milk we got in the school lunchroom, if the cream had been whipped properly and wasn't limp and slightly sour, or if I hadn't suddenly had the impression that the reason the much-feared and respected couple seemed in low spirits had nothing to do with lack of sleep but most likely with a simple domestic quarrel they had to suspend because of our arrival, if, in other words, the visit hadn't turned out the way it did, it would never even have occurred to me that the small gap I was offered could accommodate all of me. The system's forbidding sternness seemed to leave no room for the contingencies of human life. No wonder, then, that seeing so much ordinary action and mundane behavior in the restricted zone would make me all the bolder. In exchange for new and exciting opportunities, I was ready to give up my childish fantasy of someday becoming an officer in some army. I was in, inside the gap, I could feel its proportions and believed I could make decisions according to its rules. But all my calculations proved false. They rapped my knuckles very quickly.