A Book of Memories (14 page)

Water was gushing and gurgling through the gutters on the eaves, on the steep rooftops snow was thawing, turning to slush, and there I was, schoolbag in hand, standing in front of the mirror.

Maybe it was navy blue, an old, mustered-out military overcoat with a single gold button under its wide collar, which mysteriously remained while all the other buttons had clearly been replaced.

And perhaps it was that gold button sparkling on the dark coat that made me think of him, again of him, as he was walking toward me across that snow-patched clearing, and the painful mood of that moment touched me once more; it was the same hour, and then, too, I'd been standing like this in our hallway and had not the slightest hope that the pain I felt for him and because of him would ever pass; I kept looking at myself in the mirror and believed that everything, everything, would forever stay the same, and indeed nothing really changed: the snow had been melting then, just as it was now, and to avoid having to walk home with him, I again took the route through the woods and, just as then, my shoes got soaking wet; I seemed to be hearing the very same sounds from the dining room, the sounds I heard then and always: against the background of clattering and clinking dishes, the annoying silly squeals of my little sister, my grandmother's voice, untiringly chiding and regularly interrupted by Grandfather's good-natured growls
—sounds so familiar that one understands them without really hearing, without paying attention; it must have been this multitude of similar occurrences that made it seem that there was no difference between then and now; slowly the pain returned, but it was that strange and unfamiliar coat on the rack that suggested that I wasn't standing here then but now, after all, though it also evoked the futility of my struggle against the love I had for him, which I always hoped would pass, and if it wasn't then but now, perhaps this, too, would somehow also pass.

But Mother was still lying in her bed the way she always had, her head sunk into large white pillows, apparently asleep as always, opening her eyes only when someone entered the room.

And this time, too, I headed first for her room, just as I'd been doing ever since that day
—where else could I have gone?

But back then, the first time, I had done so quite unintentionally
— doltishly raw instincts led me there, I'd say; until then I'd always have my lunch before visiting Mother, and only from that day on did it become my habit to sit on the edge of her bed and hold her hand, waiting until my little sister was fed and the dishes cleared away before stepping into the dining room, so that I'd find only one setting on the table, mine, and I'd be alone, spared the sight of my sister, which was more and more burdensome, for what had seemed natural or nearly natural before was now turning repulsive: I hear myself saying "before" and "now," involuntarily dividing time into periods before and after the kiss, for that kiss, I now realize, caused fundamental changes in many aspects of my existence, ordering my affinities into a different sort of naturalness, but at the time whom else could I have turned to if not to my mother? the pain I felt over Krisztián stemmed not only from his inability or unwillingness to return my secret affections but mostly from the fact that these emotions and longings had inescapable physical manifestations—in my muscles, my mouth, fingertips, and, let's admit it, also the pressure in my groin, for is there an instinct stronger than the one to touch, to feel, to smell, and even to possess what can be touched, caressed, and smelled, possessed with one's mouth, devoured? but all these desires to touch I had to consider as unnatural, something peculiar to me, which separated me from others, isolated and branded me, even if nothing would have been more natural to my own body, which I alone could feel; I had to be ashamed of that kiss and of the desire to kiss; however subtly, he had managed to communicate this to me, once he could distance himself from me and, to a certain extent, from his own true impulses; because for a moment something did erupt from the deep, but it had to be suppressed, and he did suppress it; it had to be concealed, and he concealed it, even from himself, whereas I kept recalling it, relentlessly, obsessively; one might say I lived by it, but how could imagination satisfy the palpable desires of the body? and aside from Mother, who else was there around me whom I could touch and feel and kiss and smell as freely as I would have liked to kiss him?

At the same time, whenever I had to look at this hideous countenance, my little sister's face, I had to sense, especially after that kiss, that no amount of medication, administered in carefully measured doses, would ever alter it; the usual family explanation about hormonal imbalance could be nothing but a merciful deception, deceiving only ourselves, for what she had was not some cold, not even a sickness, just as I wasn't suffering from a sickness, we both were what we were; and she seemed unaware, luckily perhaps, of her abnormality
—she was happy and carefree, yielding to every momentary stimulus, so to be able to love her, I should have accepted all this as most natural, but to do that would have been equal to holding up a mirror to my own nature, suspect of being somehow abnormal, confirming that it was indeed abnormal, deformed; I'd have to acknowledge it, and then there would be no turning back, all the more so since my little sister's face, for all its deformity, also carried our family features, she was a living caricature of us—impossible not to notice—and although I wasn't prepared to go on lying about it, neither could I any longer suppress my revulsion and fear.

If I looked at my little sister long enough
—and I had ample opportunity to do so, for sometimes I was forced to spend endless hours with her—I sensed in her a kind of primeval patience coupled with an animal's docility: no matter what game I'd invent for her, no matter how simple-minded—it didn't have to be more than the repetition of a single gesture—she would, in Grandmother's words, "get on with it very nicely"; she had the capacity to enjoy the recurrent element in things repeated without being bored, she enclosed herself within the circle of repetitions, or to be more precise, she shut herself out of her own game, acting as if she were a windup doll, and nothing could then disturb her and I could observe her well: for example, we got under a couple of dining-room chairs and I would roll a colored marble across the floor so that she would have to catch it in the opening formed by the chair legs and then roll it back the same way; this became one of her favorite games and I also came to prefer it, partly because following the marble's path absorbed all her attention and, since it wasn't too hard to catch the marble, she could go on squealing to her heart's content, and also because all I had to do was repeat mechanically the same gesture: I was there, playing with her, doing what was expected of me, yet if I wanted to I could cut myself loose, pretend I wasn't there, retreat to more pleasant, imagined landscapes or events, possibly escape into coarser fantasies; or I could do just the reverse—turn my full attention to her but observe only the phenomenon, not her, identify with her, drink her into myself, feel in her distorted features my own, recognize my own helplessness in her persistent, obdurate clumsiness, and I could do this with cold detachment, from the outside, free of emotional involvement, yet also enjoy this cold scrutiny, toy with the thought of being a scientist observing a worm so as to be able, later, not only to recall the mechanics of the worm's locomotion but to experience the organism observed as if from within, to internalize its very soul, to feel the force that causes one movement to grow from another, creating a whole series of movements, so that by slipping under the protective membrane of this alien existence I could simultaneously live both it and my own existence; watching my little sister was like observing a translucent green caterpillar as it clings gently with its tiny feet to a white stone: at our touch it suddenly hunches up, shortening its body, the tip of its tail almost reaching its head, and sets itself in motion by means of this curled-up mass, inching its way slowly forward; as a form of locomotion this is no more odd or laughable than our own attempt at outwitting the pull of gravity and overcoming the impediment of our own weight as we carefully place one foot in front of the other; indeed, if we concentrate long enough and manage to relax into a wormlike state, we might easily imagine and can even feel such clinging little feet on our own bellies; our rigid spine might grow softer, more flexible, and if our concentration is powerful enough to discover these possibilities in our own bodies, then we are no longer merely observing the caterpillar but have ourselves become caterpillars.

At this point I may as well confess that there was a time when my sister's condition did not depress me too much, when I didn't think about why, following my parents' custom, I never called her by her name or talked about her simply as my sister, when I didn't question the nature of that peculiar game of hide-and-seek which compelled us to indicate, through an exaggerated show of affection, that no matter how much she might have appeared to be at the center of our family, in reality she was all but excluded from it
—as our proper sense of maintaining family equilibrium required, when the tension, fear, and revulsion engendered by my own exclusion and strangeness had not yet alienated me from her and from myself; and at that time my experiments with my sister were certainly not confined to mere observation but took more practical, one might say, aggressively, physical forms, and even though they sometimes went beyond certain civilized limits and therefore had to be kept secret, more of a secret than the kiss—some of what happened I had to keep secret even from myself—I still don't believe I acted inhumanely toward her; I became far more inhumane later on, in my revulsion and by the air of indifference I forced myself to assume; I daresay that our earlier relationship was somewhat humane precisely because of my ruthlessly honest curiosity.

Our games took place in the afternoon, winter afternoons mostly, when the postprandial silence of the house melted into the deepest hour of swift-descending dusk, when the big rooms stood with their doors wide-open, when the muffled sounds of clanging, clattering, and soft thuds filtering in from the distant kitchen had slowly died away; it was quiet outside too
—rain was falling, or snow, wind blowing, and I could not wander off in the neighborhood or disappear into the garden but lay on my bed or sat at my desk, glancing frequently out the window, my head propped in my hand over some unsolvable homework; the telephone didn't ring; Grandfather was napping in his armchair, his hands pressed between his legs, the kitchen floor was drying in patches; and Mother's head would be sinking deeper and deeper into her pillow, sleep making her head heavier, her mouth would open a crack, and the book she'd been reading would slip out of her hand; these were the unchecked hours of our house, when my little sister was put to bed in hopes that she'd sleep and let us have a bit of peace and quiet, but after dozing accommodatingly for a few minutes, she'd often wake with a start, climb out of her bed, and, leaving her carefully darkened room, come into mine. She stopped in the doorway and we looked silently at each other.

They made her wear her nightgown, because Grandmother wanted her to believe it was nighttime and she had to go to sleep, though whether the room was darkened or not, I doubt my sister could tell the difference between night and day; she was standing in the doorway, blinded by the light, her eyes completely sunken in her puffed-up face; reaching into the light as if she wanted to grasp it, she groped her way toward me, the blue-and-white cotton nightshirt almost completely covering her little body, but you could tell it wasn't just the arms sticking out of the loose-fitting sleeves or her large, almost grown-up feet, but every part of her, her whole body was thick and graceless, small yet heavy; her skin was an unusual white, a lifeless grayish-white, and for some strange reason it seemed to me to be thick and scabrous, as if the visible coarse surface was covering several other layers of finer skin, as if this hard shell, rather like an insect's armor, overlay the real, human skin that was more like mine: smooth, supple, and downy; this skin had such an effect on me that I used every opportunity to touch it, feel it, and the purpose of our games was often nothing more than for me to try to get close, quickly and with no preliminary fuss, to her skin; I could do it, too, without the slightest pretext
—I could simply grab her or pinch her—and if a pretext was needed, it was only to elude my own moral vigilance and make what I wanted to do anyway seem more accidental; of course, the most conspicuously disproportionate part of her body was her head: round, full, insidiously large, like a pumpkin stuck on a broomstick, her eyes two gray dots set in narrow slits, her full, drooping lower lip glistening with abundant globs of saliva that, often mixed with snot, kept dripping from her chin onto her chest, leaving eternal wet stains on her dresses; taking a good look up close, one could see that the black of her pupils was tiny and motionless, which may have been the reason her eyes were so expressionless.

This expressionlessness was at least as exciting as her skin, however, and, insofar as it was intangible, even more exciting, for the lack of the usual signs of emotions differed from what could be observed in a normal pair of eyes which, when trying not to betray emotion, become their own mask, revealing to us that they do indeed have something to hide, suggesting the very thing they conceal; in her eyes nothing gained expression or, rather, it was nothing itself that her eyes were continually and relentlessly giving expression to, the way normal eyes express emotion, desire, or anger; her eyes were like objects one never gets used to; they appeared to be a pair of lenses used for seeing, an impassive outer covering, so when one looked into them and watched their mechanical flutter, one naturally assumed there must be another pair of eyes, more lively and feeling, behind these seeing lenses, just as we would want to see the eyes, the human glance, behind sparkling eyeglasses, convinced that without our seeing them a person's words cannot be properly understood.