A Book of Memories (2 page)

But as I was answering him he did suddenly look into my eyes, and although his interest settled not on what I was saying, it was a genuine look, and I should have appreciated it, because whenever a glance seeks what lies beyond our words
—as in this case, for example, it sought to discover the relationship between my writing and the fact that, being a man, I was in love with another man, and I believe this was going through his mind as I spoke—when, in short, attention abandons the strands of meaning in the subject discussed and tries to grasp something of the speaker's emotional essence, then that moment must be cherished and taken very seriously.

But I knew full well that I had already stood like this once before in some room, facing and being completely at the mercy of another man.

Arno, who had apparently put up with all of Thea's quirks, was now trying with that very glance to get around the burdensome roles she had forced on us; it was impossible not to notice it in his beautiful dark-brown eyes, but I was too preoccupied with my own memories, and paid more attention to what Melchior was whispering about me to Thea than to what I was saying to Arno about my writing, which is why I didn't realize that his glance could have at last freed us both, for he was looking at me with a child's eyes, curious, open, and eager, and with some well-chosen words, or with none at all, we could have turned our conversation into not only a pleasant but also a meaningful one; yet I took no notice of this glance, I did not reciprocate, and having reached the end of my report, I managed to muddle up my own question; wanting to be polite, I settled for what was convenient, simply repeating the question he had addressed to me, and became aware of the rude indifference inherent in this repetition only when I suddenly lost his gaze, as in an odd self-mocking gesture he quickly tapped his temples with both hands, which he then turned palms forward and dropped resignedly.

This waving of the hands signaled no disparagement of his own avocation or work but was, rather, an expression of wonder, of being wounded and embarrassed, a renunciation of ever being understood
— "Oh, I'm just a mountain climber," said the gesture, and indeed, it seemed to have come from a hiker being routinely asked what the hike was like and was the weather all right—but what is there ever to say about a hike or the weather?

Arno answered me, of course
—after all, he too had had the benefit of a solid middle-class upbringing that teaches you to bridge moments of inattention, confusion, even hate, with innocuous chitchat—and he spoke as native Berliners do in general, producing words as if gargling with mouthwash; but even if I had managed to pay attention to him—Melchior was whispering to Thea about what I had cooked for lunch—even if I had understood what Arno was saying, his body language, his stooping posture told me that it was nothing interesting, mere talk, just keeping the conversation going, and at one point I lost even his voice, partly because I was fuming about Melchior's intimate disclosures and wanted to find a way to get him to stop, shut him up, but also because I realized or thought I realized why this neatly lined face talking at me looked so familiar: it could have been my grandfather's face, if my grandfather had been born a German, a face exuding seriousness, patience, humorless self-respect, a democratic face, if there is such a thing; and so I lost not only the gist of what he was saying but the sound of his voice, and he stood before me like an empty husk; the only thing I could grasp was that he was still wary of me, careful not to say anything that might be interesting, not to embarrass me by saying anything I really ought to listen to, and even before Thea had finished setting the table he gave up on me; I was left standing, leaning against an armchair, rocking back and forth, and Arno, excusing himself, quickly returned to his room.

How nicely these autumn images overlap.

Never more solitary experiences.

Experiences related to my past, but the past is itself but a distant allusion to my insignificant desolation, hovering as rootlessly as any lived moment in what I might call the present: only memories of tastes and smells of a world to which I no longer belong, one I might call my abandoned homeland, which I left to no purpose because nothing bound me to the one I found myself in, either; I was a stranger there, too, and not even Melchior, the only human being I loved, could make me belong; I was lost, I did not exist, my bones and solid flesh turned to jelly; and yet, despite the feeling of being torn from everything and belonging nowhere, I could still perceive myself to be something: a toad pressing heavily against the earth; a slimy-bodied snail unblinkingly observing my own nothingness; what was happening to me was nothing, even if this nothing contained my future and, because of the successive autumns, some of my past as well.

That autumn, in the back room of the flat on Steffelbauerstrasse, where two maple trees, still green and ripe, stood in front of my window, and where sparrows were nesting above the window frame, in the hollow left by a missing brick, there in that room, that autumn, I should have not only sensed but fully understood the nature of this situation, but I kept grasping at straws, hoping for an extraordinary insight meant only for me, for a new situation to arise, something, a change of mood, a tragedy even, that would at last define me within this indefinable nothingness; I kept hoping to find something worth saving, something that would lend meaning to things and save me as well, deliver me from this animal existence, not be something from my past
—I was sick and tired of my past, the past was a reminder as unseemly as the aftertaste of a belch— and not anything from my future, either, since I had given up on the future long ago, always reluctant to plan ahead even for a moment; no, I wanted something in the here and now, a revelation, a redemption I was waiting for, I can confess this now, but back then I hadn't yet realized that precise knowledge of nothingness should have sufficed.

Thea gave me a lift to this flat, Frau Kühne was her friend, and I spent a lot of time there by myself.

I might say that I was always by myself; never before had I experienced the solitude of a strange apartment the way I did then
—the polished furniture, sunlight breaking through the slits in the drawn curtains, the patterns in the carpet, the shine on the floor, the floorboards' creaks, the heat of the stove anticipating evening, when people of the house came home and turned on the TV.

It was a quiet house, only slightly more elegant than the run-down buildings of Prenzlauerberg, those "gray birds, ancient Berlin back yards," as Melchior wrote in one of his haunting poems, and here, too, were the elaborately carved, dove-gray banisters like those in other places where I lived in Berlin, on Chausseestrasse and Wörther Platz, and the wooden stairs covered with dark linoleum, the disinfectant smell of the floor wax, and the colored stained glass in the windows at every landing, though here only half the panes still had the original intricate floral patterns from the turn of the century, the rest having been replaced by simple hammered glass, keeping the staircase in constant dimness, just like the staircase of the house on Stargarderstrasse where I had stayed the longest and where I had had time to adjust to staircases like this, though not even that house could become mine the way any apartment building in Budapest could have, since its past was missing for me; in various ways this past did signal to me, and I very much wanted to decipher the signals, knowing full well that these games of re-creating the past would not make Melchior more my own; nevertheless, coming home in the afternoon, going up the stairs, I would try to imagine another young man in my place who had come to Berlin one fine day long ago
—the man was Melchior's grandfather, and he became the hero of my daily evolving fictional story, because he was the one who could have seen these stained-glass flowers when they were still new and whole, illuminated by light filtering in from the back yard, could have seen the totality of the patterns, if he had ever set foot in this house and while walking up the wooden stairs fully perceived his present, which is the past of my imagination.

Downstairs, in the dark entrance hall, even during the day you had to press a glowing red button that turned on the feeble lights just long enough to get you to the first landing, where a similar button had to be pressed again, but often I walked up the stairs in the dark, because the constantly glowing little button beckoned to me like a beacon in the night seen from the open sea, and I liked looking at the tiny source of light so much that I preferred not to press the button, so the stairwell remained in darkness, and while I did not know exactly how many steps there were, the creaks proved a reliable guide and the red glow helped me on the landings; I hardly ever missed a step.

I used to do the same thing in the house on Wörther Platz where Melchior lived, walking up the stairs almost every night, with good old Frau Hübner on the third floor looking through the peephole while sitting, I was told, on a high stool, but since I walked upstairs in the dark she couldn't see me, could only hear footsteps, and so she'd invariably open the door to peek out either too early or too late.

In the house on Steffelbauerstrasse the hallway lights didn't work properly, staying on only if one kept pushing the button, so if Frau Kühnert happened to be in the kitchen when I was ready to go out for the evening, she'd rush out to make sure I didn't walk downstairs in the dark; I tried hard to leave without being noticed, since I knew that Frau Kühnert faithfully reported my every move to Thea, who was anxious to know everything about Melchior, and after a while I imagined that even Frau Hübner was working for Thea and Frau Kühnert, but I almost never managed to move quietly enough for my landlady: "Hold it, my dear sir, I'm here to light your way," she'd say, and run out of the kitchen to hold her finger on the button until I reached the ground floor; "Thanks," I'd shout back, thinking that Frau Hübner must be waiting in her third-floor apartment, half-expecting me politely to say hello as I passed in the light emanating from her place; but if I happened to come home during the night and there was no light filtering in from the street, I had to feel out each step on my way up or use a match, because in this house on Steffelbauerstrasse even the tiny red filament of the button had burned out and could not guide me, and I was afraid of bumping into something live on the staircase.

Melchior had never been in this house.

Come to think of it, he never set foot in the house on Stargarderstrasse either; we were forever hiding or, more precisely, we were trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, which was something I was quite adept at, it came easily to me, a sort of behavior that also alluded, unpleasantly, to my past: once, on a Sunday afternoon in front of the building, when Stargarderstrasse was all but deserted, though anyone could have concealed himself behind drawn curtains, on a dull-gray November afternoon when everyone was sitting at home watching TV, drinking coffee, and we both felt we could not say goodbye, we didn't really have to, we could have stayed with each other, except that we'd been together for three days and our protective shell which kept everything and everyone out was getting thicker and thicker and we had to break out of it, we had to part, spend at least one night alone
—I wanted to take a bath, and Melchior's flat had no bathroom, you had to use a washbowl or the kitchen sink, I felt dirty, wanted to be alone for the afternoon and evening at least, catch my breath, and then, before midnight, run downstairs and call him from a public phone, hear his voice while leaning against the cold glass of the booth, and perhaps go back to his place—and we agreed that he would walk me to the corner of Dimitroffstrasse, and then he'd buy cigarettes at the tobacco shop under the elevated that stayed open on Sunday, but we couldn't tear ourselves away from each other; first he said he'd walk me only one more block, then I asked him to walk another; we couldn't just shake hands, it would have been ridiculous, awkward, and cowardly, but we had to do something; we avoided looking at each other, and then he held out his hand, if only because we wanted to touch some part of each other, and so we kept holding hands; there was no one on the street, but this was not enough, it was his mouth that I wanted, there, in front of the house, that Sunday afternoon.

And the house on Chausseestrasse he also saw only from the outside.

It was a Sunday evening.

I pointed out the window from the streetcar taking us to the theater; on the empty platform he was telling me about the Berlin uprising, and I told him about the revolt in Budapest, our sentences dovetailing smoothly into one another.

He looked up at the window, but I could not tell whether he actually saw it; he kept on talking: to me it was very important then that he should at least know the house, if not the room, where I had first stayed and which, without his being aware of it, had become important in his life, too; but Melchior, though not indifferent to my past, distanced himself from it, he could not do otherwise.

I had been living in the flat on Steffelbauerstrasse for almost two months, was used to it, had even grown to like it, when one morning Frau Kühnert, lighting the fire in the stove, told me that electricians were coming that morning to fix the lights in the staircase, they'd be looking for her, but she couldn't stay home, and I'd be there anyway, wouldn't I? ..."Yes, of course," I replied, still lying in bed while Frau Kühnert knelt in front of the stove and, as she always did when working around the house, quietly hummed to herself; she was right, I spent most of my time at home, except for evenings, and since she was in charge of things concerning the building, she said, the electricians had to see her first, but I should tell them she couldn't stay home, "Who do they think they are, anyway?" and I should explain what the problem was, and whatever happened not let them leave, "the swine," until they fixed the lights.

I stayed home the whole morning, waiting for Melchior to call
—we had only a few more days left—but he didn't call, and the repairmen didn't show up either.