A Book of Memories (63 page)

She said I should go back with her.

I said nothing.

Then she let go of my hand.

She said I should put on her cap, but I shook my head; it was silly, but I didn't want to wear a red cap.

Then at least I should take her gloves, she said, and pulled them out of her pocket.

I took them from her and put them on; they were knitted woolen gloves, nice and warm, and red, but that I didn't mind.

This frightened her, and she started begging and pleading; it wasn't for her sake but for her parents', and no, it wouldn't be a sign of weakness; she said all sorts of things, speaking quickly and quietly, but the valley snapped up even these tiny sounds.

The echoing sounds made me shiver, and I felt that if I let a single sound escape me and it echoed like that, I'd have to turn back myself.

She was scared, she said, scared to go back alone; I should walk her back a little way.

A little way, way, said the valley quietly.

Quickly I started off, to continue, to make her stop talking, but after a few steps I stopped and turned around; perhaps like this, from here, it might be easier for both of us.

We stood like that for a long time, from the distance we couldn't see each other's face anymore, it was much better this way.

For me it was better if she went back, yes, to let her go, and perhaps she sensed that for me it wasn't at all a bad thing if she went back; she began to turn away, slowly, and then she turned around completely and began to run; she was sliding on the snow, looked back and ran, and then I kept looking at her for as long as my eyes saw what they wanted to see; maybe she turned around again, or stopped, or walked faster, or ran, a dark little spot hovering over the blue snow, until she disappeared altogether, though I still seemed to be seeing her.

For a while I still heard her steps in the snow, and then I only thought I heard them; they were no longer footsteps but the cold breeze fingering branches, echoes of creaking, snapping sounds, secret crackles; still, I wouldn't move from my spot, waited for her to be gone, walking her back in my mind, away from here, wanting her to disappear completely.

A tiny, cold scraping in my throat still hoped she'd turn around; and if she did, then she should reappear just about... no, not yet; now, now the little spot should appear! but nothing did.

And I was glad I was rid of her, because this did not mean that I'd lost her, on the contrary, this way I'd possess her for good, precisely because I had the strength to stay alone.

The road was waiting, and I did take it, though I don't think it would make much sense to describe the details of my flight.

My foolishness had me believe that I was the story, and this bleak cold night merely its setting, but in fact my real story played itself out almost independently of me or, more precisely, occurred parallel to my own little adventures.

It was eight in the evening when we'd left home, I remember hearing the church bell, and it must have been a little before ten when she got home, just about the time I left behind the cliffs of Ord
ő
gorom and reached the wide plain that starts at the foot of the mountain; I was glad to see the dim lights of Budaörs, which were far away, but it wouldn't be hard to stay on course in their direction.

I found out later that she sneaked into her room unnoticed, threw off her clothes, slipped into bed, and was almost asleep when they discovered her; they turned on the light, started yelling at her, but not wanting to give me away, she said she'd had a headache and gone out for a walk; then she started to cry, her mother slapped her, and she was so afraid of what might happen to me that she told them.

By then I had reached Budaörs via a long, dark, winding road that was hardly more than a pass, very like an unpaved trench, with frozen cart tracks; tall thickets on either side gave some protection, and it seemed warmer there than in the open field, but also spookier, because I never knew what might be lurking around the next bend, and also because I kept thinking I was going in the wrong direction, and by way of consoling and encouraging myself I decided that if I did reach the distant lights I'd pay for a night's lodging somewhere, I had the money, or simply ask to be allowed in for the night, but reaching the first village houses brought no relief, because a dog dashed out from one of them, an ugly, frostbitten mutt with a stringy stump for a tail, and it kept following me, yapping and snapping, with every step I took I had to kick so it wouldn't get at my pants; it kept baring its teeth, snarling and yelping, and that's how we passed by the village inn, where they were just pulling down the shutters; two women and a man gave me a long stare, wondering why the dog was following me like that, it looked suspicious to them; and I quickly gave up the idea of looking for lodging there.

In the meantime, Livia's father put on his coat and went over to my house.

It must have been around midnight when I left the village and when Livia's father rang our bell.

With its legs spread wide apart, the dog stood barking away, in the middle of the street leading out of the village, which sloped slightly, while all around us the crisp outlines of silent hills were etched against the shimmering sky; I realized the dog had stopped following me, wouldn't snap at my legs anymore, and I was safe, I was all alone, incredibly happy to be able to breathe freely; as the barking turned into a long, soft whine behind me, I marched out of the village so jauntily that I even forgot how cold I was, and of course the excitement and the walking were warming me up a little.

At home they were waiting for the ambulance to take Mother to the hospital.

Livia's father was standing in the hallway, telling them what had happened, when the ambulance arrived; János went with Mother so Father could stay home and call the police.

Having lost track of time, I kept dragging myself along the silent road and didn't even realize that what I now wanted to hear, with all my young and immature being, was the sound of an approaching car, which first I thought I'd flag down and, whatever its destination, ask for a lift, but since I was afraid to do that, I got off the road, stepped into a ditch, into ankle-deep snow, and waited for it to pass.

It zoomed by and I thought they hadn't noticed me, but then I heard the screeching of brakes, of wheels, and the car spun around on the slippery road, banged against the shoulder that was slightly higher than the road, and, rebounding, slid into a stone marker; the engine stopped, the lights went out.

After the sounds of screeching, skidding, and banging, there was a split second of silence, then the two front doors flew open and two dark coats were running toward me.

I tripped and slid down the side of the ditch, and then started running on the frozen ground of a snowy meadow, spraining my ankle in the effort.

They grabbed me by my coat, near my neck.

You little motherfucker, you; almost wound up in that ditch because of you!

They twisted my arm behind my back; they both held on to me as, pushing and shoving, they dragged me to the car; I didn't protest.

They threw me on the back seat
—bash your head in if you so much as move!—and had a hard time starting the car, so they kept up their swearing the whole way, but it was so nice and warm inside, my body tingled, and in this tingling softness and with the droning engine, the swearing slowly receded and I fell asleep.

It was getting light when we stopped in front of a big white building, they showed me the dent on the bumper
—they're not gonna be the ones to pay for it, that's for sure, and they'll teach me not to fall asleep at a time like this.

They took me upstairs and locked me in a room.

There I tried to pull myself together; I wanted to think up a story I could tell, but I had to rest my head on the table.

For a while the table felt too hard, I tried to cushion it with my arm, but that was also too hard, and then it turned soft.

A key turned in the lock, I must have fallen asleep, after all; a woman in uniform stood in front of me, and behind her, out in the corridor, I saw my grandfather.

In the taxi, just as we made the turn from Istenhegyi Road to Adonisz Road and drove past the high fence of the restricted zone, he told me what had happened during the night; it was as if not a single night but several years had passed in the interim.

It was a bright morning, everything was melting and dripping in the sunlight.

Mother's bed was covered with a striped bedspread, as it had been years ago, before she got sick.

The way it was covered made it feel as though she no longer lived here.

And my feeling did not deceive me, for I never saw her again.

Description of a Theater Performance

Our poplar tree was holding on to its last leaves, which had to turn their deathly yellow before they could fall; they rustled in the breeze
— too slight to disturb the arching branches, which merely trembled now and again—twirled and twisted on their short stems, bumping into one another.

It was sunny outside and the flickering, twisting spots of pale yellow made the distant sky even bluer; you could see deep into the mistless blue, as though eyes could distinguish between far and near and one weren't staring into a void that ended somewhere only because it wasn't infinitely transparent.

It was pleasantly warm in the room, the fire humming quietly in the white tile stove, and with our slightest move the smoke of our cigarettes sank and rose in thick, sluggish layers.

I was sitting at his desk in his comfortably wide armchair
—he always let me have this special corner of his room—working on my notes, which really meant that while staring out the window through the softly curling layers of bluish smoke, I was trying to recall what had happened during rehearsals the day before, superimposing image on image.

There are gestures and words the meaning and motives behind which we comprehend all at once, and we also notice the minute irregularities that at the moment of occurrence may seem contingent and accidental, cracks and chasms of imperfections that separate the player from the play, the actor from his role, and that the actors, in accordance with the strict rules of their craft, would somehow like to bridge, as if to eliminate the sad truth that total fusion, total identification, does not exist, even if it is the ultimate desire of many a human endeavor.

Already while jotting down my notes, which I was doing rather mechanically, I had realized that the principle I was really interested in, if there was a principle, was to be found not in the obvious, logical unfolding of events, in describable gestures and meaningful words
—although these were very very important, for they embody human events—but rather in the seemingly contingent gaps between the words and gestures, in these irregularities and imperfections.

He sat a little farther away, typing steadily, lifting his fingers from the keys just long enough to take a quick drag on his cigarette; he couldn't have been writing a poem, for the typing was too even and uninterrupted for that, perhaps it was a script for one of his radio programs, though this wasn't likely either, because I never saw him bring home notes or papers from the studio or take anything back with him from home; he moved empty-handed between the two main locations of his life, as if deliberately isolating one from the other; his legs stuck out from under the table, which must have made for discomfort in sitting, but this way the streak of sunlight slanting in from the tall window could warm his bare feet.

And when he felt I was staring out the window too long, he said, without looking up, that we ought to wash the windows.

His toes were long and as attractively articulated as his slender fingers; I liked pushing my fist gently into the arch of his foot and with my tongue touching each toe, feeling the sharp edge of each nail.

I never took notes right after a rehearsal; I waited until late in the evening or, if I managed to get up early, the next morning; to see more clearly the source of, and reason for, the effect a given scene had on me, to gain a better perspective on it, I had to free myself from the effect itself.

I didn't answer him, though the idea of a joint window cleaning did appeal to me.

This note-taking began as a kind of idle diversion, a solitary mental exercise which often filled me with guilt, especially when riding home in the crowded city train, jostled by grim throngs of commuters; I would often think I was enjoying the privileges of the intellectual elite and decide I simply had to stop playing the observer condemned to inaction and should at least try to profit from the bitter fact that for several years I'd been not an active participant in so-called historical events but rather their pathetic victim and in this sense a part of the faceless crowd
— significant or insignificant, it hardly mattered which—an alien, self-hating element, maybe just a giant eye with no body to go with it; yet when this mental exercise became a regular routine it did have an effect on my daily life.

On casually filled pages, out of comprehensible and therefore not wholly uninteresting notes, the picture of a performance in preparation began to emerge; thus, without my noticing the changes occurring within me, I found myself so deep within the labyrinth of my uncertain and risky undertaking, allowing me to experience vicariously the lives of a group of strangers, that it was no longer just a personal obsession to describe the performance down to its minutest details, every word and gesture, each latent and overt connection, to follow the process of realization, to become its chronicler, to respond to their work with my own, which, after all, is the indispensable condition of human fellowship, but within the small community whose activities my notes hoped to follow I also found a place for myself, however peripheral, a role to be played that gave me the joy of having an identity, if only in relation to the people in that theater.

It was Sunday morning, a day of rest, and since it was his turn to make lunch, every once in a while he would kick the chair out from under him, go into the kitchen, come back, and resume banging on his typewriter.