A Book of Memories (33 page)

It soon became clear that Thea only appeared to be paying attention to me
—just as I appeared to be listening only to her—which made me feel as good as if it were real and complete, which flattered me; her body was light and delicate and I felt, not for the first time, that I'd like to press it into myself though I knew that it was the kind of body that mustn't be held too hard, its melting softness with its touch of firmness yielded only if we ourselves remained soft and gentle, if we managed somehow to refine and attenuate our own forcefulness; yet she did sweep me off my feet, as they say, and while giving her proof of my rapt, almost obsequious attention, I was really bent on finding out how she did what she did, how she could produce this perfectly exquisite play of appearances, these irretrievably effective situations, and at the same time always remain outside them; where was she, I wondered, when she had no more gestures under her control; then again, I too was only appearing to be as respectfully, almost lovingly attentive as Frau Kühnert thought I was: but this whole business, which in the end turned into a deadly serious game of pretenses, began at the moment when, about six weeks before this little scene in the corridor, Langerhans first led me to the small director's table and sat me down next to Frau Kühnert in his own empty chair—which he never used because during rehearsals he would pace up and down, scratch his chin, whip off his glasses, then push them back on again, as though he weren't even there and was doing something other than what in fact he was doing—at any rate, from that moment on I had been in a state of continuous excitement.

But exactly how and when she showed up at that table I cannot remember, for as soon as I took my place, a place that as time went on I found more and more unpleasant, she was already there
—or could she have been there before and I just hadn't noticed?

It's possible she was there from the beginning, or maybe she came over later; either way, I had the feeling from the start that she was there because of me, and this apparent oversight or lapse of memory is but further proof that the mechanics of emotions, about which we are so curious in this novel, are obscured by the very emotions operating in us, so that we can never say anything meaningful about it; it's almost as if every occurrence were obstructed by our own sharply focused attention; consequently, in retrospect, we recall not what happened but the way we observed what happened, what emotional response we had to the event, which itself became hazy and fragmentary under our observation; we do not perceive a happening as a happening, a change as a change, a turning point as a turning point, even though we expect life to keep producing changes and dramatic reversals, for in each change and reversal, however tragic, we expect redemption itself, the uplifting sensation of "This is what I've been waiting for," yet just as attention obstructs the event, change is obstructed by anticipation, and thus the really momentous changes in our lives occur unnoticed, in the most complete silence, and we become suspicious only when a new state of affairs has already got the better of us, making impossible any return to the disdained, abhorred, but ever so secure and familiar past.

I simply didn't notice that from the moment Thea appeared I wasn't the same person I had been before.

As I say, she was standing there next to the raised platform, leaning her elbow on the table, as if I weren't even present, continuing an earlier conversation that for some reason had been cut short; as I looked at the face I knew from photographs and movies, a scene suddenly flashed through my mind: lifting the covers, she climbs into somebody's bed, her small breasts swinging forward as she does
—true, she was ten years younger then, but now her looks were completely unfamiliar, like seeing the face of someone very close to us, a lover or our mother, for the first time; what I sensed was a combination of intimate familiarity and complete unfamiliarity, natural curiosity and natural reserve, feelings so strong and contradictory that I couldn't but yield to them all, at the same time pretending to have yielded to none of them, and from that moment on I paid attention only to her and nothing else, even keeping her smell in my nose, while pretending to pay attention to everything but her; oddly, she too acted in very much this same way, though for different reasons that became clear to me only much later, pretending not to notice that my face was but a few inches from hers, that she felt the heat radiating from my face, that it was really me she was talking to; of course she went on talking to Frau Kühnert, nonchalantly continuing their earlier conversation, but shaping her words, modulating her intonation so that I, having dropped into the middle of the story, would find her telling of it interesting precisely because of its bewildering incomprehensibility.

It seemed she had received some frozen shrimp from the other side, from across the Wall, from the western half of the city
—this odd, convoluted reference, uttered in the rehearsal hall noisy with preparations for the day's work, made her announcement sound unreal, like a line from a fairy tale or cheap thriller, forcing one to imagine that as soon as one stepped out the door, one would bump into the wall, The Wall, about which we rarely spoke, and behind which were tank traps, coiled barbed wire, and treacherously concealed mines which a single careless step could set off, and beyond the sealed strip of no-man's-land lay the city, the other city, a fantasy city, a ghost town, for as far as we were concerned it didn't really exist; and yet the little packet of frozen shrimp did make it across a border guarded by machine-gun-toting soldiers and bloodhounds trained to kill; actually, they were brought over by a friend, I didn't catch his name but gathered he was a pretty important person over on the other side, and a great admirer of hers; when she cut open the package and emptied its contents on a plate, the shrimp looked to her like pink caterpillars which, just as the poor critters were about to spin their cocoon, a terrible ice age had descended on; she had seen shrimp before, but for some reason—she didn't know why—she now found them disgusting, they turned her stomach, she thought she was going to throw up, what was she going to do with them anyway? and wasn't it disgusting that we gobbled up everything? wouldn't it be nicer if one was, say, a hippo and ate only crisp, tasty grass? but those taste buds on our tongues were filled with mean little cravings, they wanted to taste sharp things and sour things, sweet and tart things, they were ready to burst, these buds, that's how hungry they were, they hungered for tastes that didn't even exist— she was babbling on, unstoppable; what was really indecent in her view was not people fucking in public but people openly stuffing their faces, and she finally decided, even though she still felt nauseous, to proceed as she usually did before cooking, as Frau Kühnert well knew, laying out all the ingredients on the kitchen table, nice and neat, because this way she could actually see the additional flavors alongside each other, could savor all of them with her eyes as well as her tongue, that's what's called stimulating the palate; to her, cooking was also playing, improvising, and the show must go on, not even a good puke could stop it; anyway, she decided to whip up some potatoes first, but not just some ordinary mashed potatoes, mind you, she enlivened the boring taste of spuds, milk, and butter with grated cheese and sour cream, then spread the hot puree on a big plate, scooped out the middle with a spoon, and filled it with the shrimp she had first sautéed in herb butter, and that's how she served it, with a side dish of boiled carrots seasoned with Jamaica peppers and a bottle of dry white wine, and it was heavenly! simple yet heavenly! ordinary yet quite, quite elegant, "like me!"

As she craned her long neck, revealing well-conditioned yet delicate, skinny, and strangely underdeveloped muscles, almost like a child's, as she thrust her head seductively forward, hunching up her narrow, bony shoulders, arching her body like a cat poised to jump, looking long and steadily into everyone's eyes as if challenging them to be part of a play whose stage would be the face itself, its fluid features and the eyes, and whose director, of course, would be she herself, as she did all this, she displayed plenty of studied coyness, no doubt, but not the usual kind; in this game she did not want to be beautiful and attractive, as other people might, in fact she wanted to look uglier than they were and it was as if she had deliberately made herself look unattractive, or rather, as if her body had a different view of beauty, refuting as false and craven the generally accepted notion that a human body or face can be beautiful and not simply a functionally arranged system of bones, flesh, skin, and various gelatinous substances that have nothing to do with the concept of beauty; and for this reason, although she was preoccupied more with herself than with anyone else, she made no attempt to look beautiful, and her purpose seemed to be to laugh at, to ridicule her own longing for beauty and perfection; with a slight exaggeration we might say she loved making a fool of herself; with her ugliness she annoyed, provoked, and challenged her surroundings, like a mischievous child calling attention to itself by being mean and difficult, though all it wants is to be petted and cuddled; Thea's hair stuck sloppily to her well-formed, almost perfectly round head; she herself cropped it very short, "so it shouldn't sweat under the wigs," she said, and without a single remark from me, she would plunge into endless monologues justifying her peculiar hairstyle: in her opinion there are two kinds of perspiration
—plain physical sweating, of course, when the body for some reason can't adjust to the surrounding temperature because it is tired, worn-out, overfed, or run-down, and then the far more common, psychic perspiration, the sweating of the soul that occurs when we don't listen to what our body is telling us, when we pretend not to understand its language, when we lie and dissemble, when we are weak, clumsy, greedy, hesitant, and stupid, when, defying our body, we insist on doing something only because it's the proper thing to do—it's the clash of wills that produces the heat, and that's when we say we are soaked in sweat; as for her, if there was anything she wanted, it was to stay free, and therefore she wanted to know whether it was her soul that was sweating, she didn't want to blame it on wigs and heavy costumes, even if what she was secreting was the filth and grime of her soul; of course, all this didn't explain why she dyed her hair, now red, now black, using a do-it-yourself kit, and why at other times she neglected it completely, letting it grow and revealing that if she hadn't been touching it up it would be almost completely gray, but then again, what she had wasn't like real hair but instead a thin, frazzled fuzz with no body, probably no particular color to begin with, neither blond nor brown, a slight fluff on a fledgling's head; about the only thing that lent character to her face was her prominent cheekbones, otherwise her features were rather nondescript, her face was dull: a not very high or broad forehead, a somewhat misshapen pug nose whose tip stuck up too much, staring into the world with two disproportionately fleshy nostrils; the lips were wide and sensuous, but they did not blend smoothly into her face and seemed almost as if lifted from another face and placed in hers by accident; oh, but the voice that issued from those lips, from behind the nicotine-stained teeth! a deep, raspy, fully resonant voice or, if she wished, soft and caressing, or hysterically, piercingly thin, as if its tenderness resided in its roughness, the possibility of a howl lurking in every whisper, while her real howls were full of hateful hisses and whispers, each sound implying its opposite, an impression that her face as a whole also gave: on the one hand, her plain features made her look like a worn-out, emotionally unfulfilled working woman whose many frustrations rendered her dreary and uninteresting, and in this respect it was not very different from the faces one saw during morning and evening rush hours on subways and commuter trains, faces sunk in the quiet stupor of fatigue and uselessness; on the other hand, her skin, with its naturally brown coloring, was like a false front, a mask, with a pair of huge, very warm, intelligent, and darkly glittering brown eyes accentuated by very thin lashes; one had the feeling that these eyes belonged not to this mask but to the real face under the mask, and they did glitter, this is no exaggeration; looking for an acceptable explanation, I thought that perhaps her eyeballs were much larger than one would expect in such a relatively small face, or that they were more rounded, more convex than the average eyeball, and that was quite probable, since one did not cease to be aware of their largeness even when she closed her eyes; smooth, heavy, arched lids slid over her eyes, and the mask, full of wrinkles, turned into a kind of antique map of a lively face growing old; on her forehead the furrows ran in dense horizontal lines, but if she suddenly raised her eyebrows, two vertical lines shot up, beginning at the inner tip of the brows, and cut across the horizontal ones, making it appear as though two diaphanous butterfly wings were fluttering on her forehead; only in the hollows of her temples and on her chin did the skin remain smooth, and even on her nose there was not so much a wrinkle as a soft-rimmed indentation that followed the line of her nasal bone; when she pursed her lips, these dips and grooves prefigured the old woman in her; when she laughed, crow's-feet radiated outward from the corners of her eyes; and if in her youth her skin had been overstretched by her protruding cheekbones, the virginal tightness now seemed to be taking revenge on cheeks that were a veritable parade ground of wrinkles, and to know these wrinkles required close and patient scrutiny, because this was not a confusion of lines but a profusion of details so rich it could not be absorbed with a single look.

"We'll wait for you to change, okay," I said quietly, "and then we can still talk about tonight, but hurry up."

She was still looking at me: the wrinkles of her smile, the furrows around her eyes, the closely meshed curved lines that seemed to relieve the darker, deeper grooves of bitterness and suffering around her mouth were still meant for me, but as she withdrew her arm from mine, slowly, making sure the transition was appropriately considerate, therefore beautiful, a flicker in her eyes already indicated that she wouldn't have time to reward my graciousness; as soon as she got what she wanted she no longer felt she needed to pay attention to it, she was already gone; and though she did want to hurry, it wasn't because I had asked her to, or because she had to change, but because there was something else she had to do.