A Book of Memories (17 page)

Dawn was slowly approaching; outside, the wind raged on.

My clothes were drying on the radiator and I was standing naked examining myself in the mirror of my hotel room, when there was a knock on the door.

I knew it was the police, and I shuddered, not because I was afraid but because I was naked, yet I didn't care that much, I was totally absorbed in the sight of my naked body, and my shudder wasn't so much a response to the knock, a habitual reaction dictated by decency, as an outward manifestation of total inner exposure which at that moment held my attention more than any anticipated event possibly could.

Why did this particular wish surface
—the wish to go home—if not completely unexpectedly, then surprisingly and with such far-reaching implications? why did the body, seeking its own safety, choose to save and have my consciousness articulate this word "home" and why did it both seem so inane and yet also carry a most profound meaning, even if I was at a loss to say what?

Before the knocking, I had to touch the bruise on my forehead to feel what I was seeing in the mirror, to feel the mild pain this superficial cut caused, to perceive the sight and its physical sensation simultaneously; then I passed my finger down the bridge of my nose, my lips, my chin, not ever forgetting that the full-length mirror screwed to the closet door reflected the whole body, just as the story of a single touch always has the whole body for both its hero and its setting; though I tried to guide my finger at an even pace, it seemed to linger on my lips, or maybe the effect of the touch went deeper; then I reached my neck; a small lamp with a waxed-paper shade stood on the night table behind me, and in its faint yellow light the mirror showed the contours of my body more than its detailed, full image: proceeding along the arched rim of the collarbone from the shoulder, I descended into the soft hollow formed by the neck muscles where the bones meet, whence my finger would have moved rapidly across the chest hair toward the dip of the navel, and along the abdomen's gentle bulge to reach and firmly grasp the genitals, the most satisfying spot of physical self-awareness; but my body started, acknowledging the knock on the door.

In truth, I hadn't the slightest desire to go home, none whatsoever; in this regard, my behavior on the previous night had been very telling: in the almost totally dark entranceway Frau Kühnert, blanking out the attractive nakedness of her face, pushed her glasses back on her nose, and the faint light from the paper-capped wall fixture behind her, as if reflected in her glasses from the inside, made her eyes disappear; I could barely see her face, but I sensed her unexpected retreat, maybe from a conspicuous shift in her posture; my rebuff, ostensibly a response to her lengthy plea and explanation, alluded to our possible lust for each other and she wasn't going to endure so gross a humiliation, for all her inclination to servility; her neck stiffened, straightened, and now, looking down at me, she seemed to be retreating to the safer and more conventional forms of social intercourse appropriate for the relationship between an attentive landlady and an ever amiable, pleasant lodger; she straightened her back, too, eliminating the slightly stooped posture meant to protect her breasts
—she was finding her way back to that tactful formality which had characterized our former contacts; but the moment I felt this about to happen, happening, already having happened, I felt like someone who has suddenly lost control of himself, who realizes that with sheer will he has destroyed something far more important than his will: I'd finally managed to sever the imperious, coarsely sensual bond between us that might have led to hate or to love; a moment ago, with some recklessness either one would have been possible, it was only a matter of decision; but this, this switch to unpleasantly cool formality, was totally unexpected; against my better judgment, I would have liked quickly to return to the dangerous but potentially more valuable form of behavior which Frau Kühnert was ready to abandon, but which became markedly important, given the tension and pressure it produced in my groin, and this importance was being plainly communicated to me—not to the point of a full erection, but more in the form of a threat with a hint of possible extortion; when I told her I was going to disappear for good, I was actually alluding to the possibility of suicide, not to going home; and I wasn't disappointed, for this unclearly phrased, ambiguous statement had exactly the effect on her I intended: she was surprised, though I don't suppose she understood what I really had in mind; the secret intention I had been nursing for months, which had matured into a decision, must have deepened my voice so that I could imply the necessary sincerity and seriousness to draw her back into the magnetic field she had been trying to escape; what I was hoping to accomplish, aside from gratifying my ego, I cannot say—perhaps, in light of my imminent death, I wanted to be pitied, or perhaps it would have been too unpleasant to be left alone with the telegram, though I knew that whatever it said, it could not change my mind; in answering her questions, eager and weighing every possible danger I might be facing, I did not say what I really wanted; I didn't tell her, for example, to leave me alone, that nothing mattered anymore, that she was too late anyway, but if she wanted she could take off her pullover and let me close my eyes at last, I didn't want to see anything, I didn't want to know or hear anything anymore, so let's try to work on a single moment, and why not this one, we should be able to manage that much—but instead of saying that, I reminded myself of a previously attempted solution and I described my intended return home as a reassuring form of disappearance; of course, this was only another way of avoiding her, and myself, because at that moment the word "home" meant nothing more than a distant hope of no real significance; I used it then as a tactful lie: and here in the mirror of the hotel room was this body now, and though neither its sight nor its palpable feel could convince me of the importance or necessity of its continued existence, yet I could not have named anything to prove my unavoidable presence more than this image in the mirror.

Unexpected as the knocking was, it still seemed as if I had been waiting for it
—not surprising, since the circumstances made it inevitable, it had to happen; but when it did, when I heard the knock, I didn't feel like hastening events; I did not rush to get dressed—in fact, that didn't even occur to me; I stayed as I was, undisturbed, absorbed in scrutinizing my body, as if there had been no knocking at all; oddly enough, I suddenly remembered something seemingly very remote: I thought of Thea Sandstuhl, I even had time to recall a single gesture of hers: in trying to trace points where random thoughts converge, we may rediscover the psychic miracle that makes the distant appear close, as if merely a matter of simple, mechanical associations; I thought of the afternoon I became acquainted with Melchior, and the knocking I heard I took to be a direct consequence of his escape; the particular moment that came to mind was when during rehearsal Langerhans had impatiently clapped his pudgy hands and in his unpleasantly high-pitched voice said, "Enough! I told you not to stick that hump so high!" and, tearing his gold-rimmed glasses off his pasty face, flew into a rage; and Thea remained as she was, a prisoner of her own gesture, much as I was now, in front of the mirror; on other occasions, after such directorial interruptions, Thea astounded those watching her with her ability to shift emotional gears with incredible ease and speed: she could be crying, screaming, or gasping amorously in one moment and in the next listen obligingly and attentively to the director's latest instructions; it was as if there were no boundaries between her various emotional states, one flowing naturally from the other, or as if bridging the gap between them, making smooth transitions, posed no difficulties for her, which in turn aroused the suspicion of outside observers that she was not present in any of these situations—though she appeared most subtly convincing in all of them; but that afternoon she overwhelmed us with the slowness of her transition, involuntarily demonstrating in pure form the fine gradations through which we can force our emotions to move from one subject to the next: the voice reached her body like a delayed jolt; Langerhans's admonition had already been uttered, but she, with the contradictory emotion of a moment ago, was still pointing the heavy sword at the bare chest of Hübchen, kneeling before her; she made her move as if she hadn't heard what she had to have heard, giving us a sense of the sharp line dividing inner drives from external pressure; her body gave a start only when the response already seemed late, and only then did it freeze in an attitude of innocent, appealing embarrassment.

She looked lovely in a tight-fitting, richly laced, purple dress which at once emphasized and concealed her body's tense, uneasy lines; her neck and torso tilted a little, as though the director's voice had indeed pushed her, kept her from touching the desirable naked chest before her, from following through on her inner urge to deliver the lover's stab; but she also could not yet do what the director, for some inscrutable reason, wanted her to do: that she slowly lowered the sword she'd been gripping with both hands, its tip clanging to the floor, did not mean she was able to choose between her inner urge and the outside command, but merely that she was sidetracked by a deeply ingrained impulse to obey, turning her response into a clumsy display of obedience; Thea considered herself an intelligent actress and always spoke with contempt of colleagues who, amateurishly, wanted to "live" their parts: "Oh, him, the poor thing, he identifies, he becomes the character, his tears flow so much I feel like scratching his ear to make him stop or asking him if he needs to take a crap; but the audience eats it up, it's grateful to him and wouldn't think of disturbing him, after all he's a true artist, the genuine article, we can see with our own eyes how much he must work and suffer for this noble art, poor thing, how he suffers for us, can't you see, the idiot lives the part for us because he can't do it for himself!" these were some of the things she had said, but now her embarrassed body and unembarrassed glance revealed how much she had been captured by the situation, which had nothing to do with the method of acting that is based on "living the part" yet required of her a degree of inner fervor which, despite her firmest intentions, made her open, vulnerable, oblivious to her professional experience and technique; it was this tension that made her so suitable for the situation created not by her but by Langerhans's crafty aggressiveness.

It was a vicious circle: when Hübchen tore off his rough shirt, the sight of his naked body must have stunned her, caught her unprepared, so she couldn't ignore it, and even though they must have rehearsed that scene at least ten times and might go over it a hundred more times, it would always wind up on the same emotional track chosen by Langerhans, who had, very slyly, also taken into account Thea's abilities and desires.

The knocking on the door of my hotel room now turned to banging, pounding fists.

"If you stick it up so high, then she, too, can see it!" Langerhans yelled, and it was hard to know whether he was truly fuming or this moment was simply a pretext to make the already heavy air of discipline in the rehearsal hall even more oppressive; the makeup man, who liked to sit at the edge of the director's platform, so that in time I had become familiar with his fuzzy, freckled pate, sprang up and ran to the lighted acting area, his white robe fluttering like wings, while Langerhans's anger seemed to subside with each sentence he spoke, until he had regained the whispering and rather mannered speech that was his trademark: "What we need now is for her to see his beauty, nothing else!" he said, still yelling; "We need only his beauty now," he added more quietly, "so that the woman should be willing to spread her legs for him right here, onstage, do you understand?" he was whispering now, with a soft, dainty motion replacing his glasses on his flat nose, "so it should be much lower, as I showed you."

But the improbably open look in Thea's eyes began to waver and fade, releasing Hübchen's near-naked, let's just say pleasingly proportioned, body; only when the director and the makeup man were already standing next to her to take a better look at the ill-placed hump
—and not even then—could she turn away or move; it became almost palpably clear that a very powerful emotion could not find an outlet and she didn't know what to do with it, nobody seemed to want it, she had to wait until it would be repressed or help arrived, just as I was standing there in the hotel room, listening helplessly to the insistent banging on the door, realizing that all this time I had been looking at myself with Melchior's eyes; and that's exactly how Hübchen must have felt: he didn't budge either but remained on his knees, looking into Thea's eyes, and then rather awkwardly, foolishly, burst out laughing, braying like a teenager, which anywhere else might have caused embarrassment but here nobody paid attention to real feelings and emotions which, like the chips and shavings of the work being shaped on the stage, were flying in all directions; it wasn't as if Hübchen's body and amazing, creamy-white, hairless skin had aroused ordinary, offstage feelings in Thea—though that would not have been so unusual, because women like to boast, even at the risk of losing out by such statements, that the beauty of the male body has scarcely any effect on them, their contention being borne out, apparently, by the truth that bone structure, muscle definition or the lack of it, even flabby softness have no discernible effect on sexual prowess (one need only note that after penetration the body's external features lose importance and become mere conductors, mediators), though the symbolic value of the visual experience is far from negligible; beauty is the advance payment on desire, an invitation to pleasure, and there is no difference between the sexes in their preference for what is firm, well shaped, supple, and strong over bodies that are shapeless, flaccid, washed-out, and feeble; in this sense the sight of the human body is not a question of aesthetics but of vital instincts: not only could Hübchen's body be called perfect, but Langerhans, with calculated and characteristically almost perverse shrewdness, had Hübchen's trousers made with a low waistband to make it look as if they had slid down accidentally, leaving his bony hips and gently sloping belly bare and suggesting that he wore nothing underneath; and though he wore soft leather boots and the cleverly shortened pants on top, one had the impression of total nakedness, and only at his groin did one's glance stumble on discreet covering.