A Book of Memories (118 page)

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 moon; 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.