A Book of Memories (71 page)

He was allowed to have his own servants accompany him on his last journey, and now one of them offered to put a blindfold on him, but he very gently pushed away the trembling hand holding the kerchief and, lifting his eyes heavenward, said. Into Thy hands I commend my spirit.

The two headsmen placed the condemned man's neck under the blade, the two servants stepped back, and in that instant the prince fainted and sank into the arms of his attendants.

They laid him on his bed, but not until midday did he regain consciousness.

At the king's instruction, Katte's mutilated body had to stay on the block, in the prince's sight, until late in the evening.

When he came to and looked out from his bed, the prince saw the stump of the neck sticking out from the naked torso and the bloody head in the basket.

His body was racked with fever, and he began to wail so piteously, making sounds so piercing, that for a moment the sentries on the ramparts looked at each other in alarm, then he lost consciousness again.

Lieutenant Katte's body was placed in a casket that evening and buried in the fortress wall.

Crouching near the wall of his cell, the prince cried for two weeks, now and then accepting a little water but refusing to take food, and even after his tears dried, he remained silent for months, and when he spoke again, he said no, he wouldn't take off the brown suit, and when the brown suit turned to shreds on him, the pain crawled under his skin.

In my anger I must have dozed off by the time they finished talking on the telephone, because it was the motionless silence in the room that woke me.

I imagine that after he hung up he stayed in his chair for a while, ruminating; I could hear only his silence, the segment of lingering silence in which he sorted out and stored away what had been said and heard, and for this reason it seemed that what I was hearing was not the silence of his presence but his absence.

And after my startled awakening I must have sunk back even deeper into that state of slumbering that hovers on the border of sleep and wakefulness, because the next thing I knew Melchior was pressing himself against the wall and squeezing me out a little as he climbed under the covers.

Trying to settle in, he squirmed and wriggled some more, very slowly and considerately so as not to wake me, but I didn't feel like giving up my place or making the closeness inviting, and I let him have only as much space as he could squeeze out for himself, I didn't open my eyes, I pretended to be fast asleep.

For a while he lay motionless, pressed to the wall, with my drawn-up knees against his belly; I could have relaxed a little, making believe I moved in my sleep, but because I was awake I continued all the harder to fake being asleep.

I could let him have a little room, he said out loud, exposing my pretense and letting me know he knew I was awake.

I was trying to loosen up, not to be so obvious about my shamming.

Sticking one of his arms under my neck and hugging my back with the other, he wanted to pull me to himself, but my drawn-up knees made that impossible, giving him neither the intimacy he was looking for nor enough space to rest comfortably.

For a while he seemed to be reconciled to his discomfort, to the impossible position of his body, and stopped squirming; resting his forehead on my shoulder, he began to breathe with a quiet, even puffing and wheezing, as if trying to breathe himself to sleep, then suddenly he let out a growl and pulled his arm from under my neck; Just you wait, he said, I'll show you, and with that he yanked the blanket off both of us, pushed himself away from the wall, and slipped off the couch.

He was getting undressed, I heard the swish of his shirt, the pants being unzipped, how he quickly threw all his clothes on the floor, then he leaned over me, fumbling around my waist and unbuttoning my pants, grabbing them at my ankles to pull them off while I made no move on my own, my body simply yielding to his forceful movements; he peeled the socks from my feet, reached under my behind, and raising it a little pulled off my underpants.

To get to my shirt he had to crawl back, creep back on his knees on the inside of the couch next to the wall, and since the point of the game was for me to pretend to be asleep, he now had more room to maneuver, because when he yanked off my pants he also straightened out my legs and now they had to stay that way
—moving, like pulling up my knees again, would have been breaking the rules of the game.

He had to pull out my hand, which I'd stuck under the pillow, straighten and lift my arms, and pull out the shirt from under my back and shoulders, and he had to fight my body weight with every move; he was panting, grunting, and moaning, also part of the game, though I really had let myself become such a dead weight that his job couldn't have been easy.

And while he planted himself firmly on the soft sagging couch and, with his knees spread wide apart, leaned over me, I was assailed by the raw smell of his body: clothes hold in body scents and isolate them from the outside world, but when they are removed, the subdued exhalation of the body, like a swollen river from behind a dam, surges forward in wild and abundant streams.

He pitched the shirt he'd just pulled off me somewhere, and then, with a sigh, sank down next to me; my arms were still raised over my head, my out-turned wrist was touching the wall, in this way giving him a little room on the pillow as well, and he pulled up the blanket caught between our legs and spread it neatly over my back, then tucked it behind his own; from the window left open in the living room we felt waves of a cool breeze, and emitting sounds of pleasure, he used the blanket to wrap us tight into the heat of our own bodies and then, slipping one arm under my neck again and hugging my back with the other, he lowered his head onto the pillow, next to my face.

I didn't open my eyes; there was one more prolonged moment, full of expectations, before body would touch body; lying parallel and turned to one another, each waited for the other to give up his moral principles as they are expressed in decisions and intentions, because it wasn't my clothes he had peeled me out of but rather my hurtfulness, my pride, and my anger, my resolve that if I couldn't stay with him I'd want to be all by myself; and even though in this game of undressing it was my passivity that had enabled us to come together again, pretending that my limbs were lifeless betrayed a lack of conviction, a reluctance to give up my advantageous position or give in to his closeness, his smell, and his warmth; and of course all this harked back to our morning conversation, which had been cut short when we grinned at each other our most obnoxious grin.

But his activities were no less ambiguous either, for the more determined and purposeful an activity, the more clearly it betrays its true intent: he was bowing to my will, not exactly apologizing but, swallowing his pride, trying to make amends, and for him, this act of getting intimate, this undressing ceremony, meant that his emotions, best conveyed to me through our bodies, made him perform the gestures of the most Christian humility, which was by no means an act of abasement, any more than the ritual of washing a person's feet is, and if after all I wasn't going to reciprocate the gentle aggressiveness of his humility, then he had no further move to offer, that was the limit beyond which there were only unyielding moral principles detached from the flesh.

And then I did move my raised arms, slipping one under his neck and wrapping the other around his back; at the same time he pried open my knees with his, slipped his thighs between mine, his head was on my shoulder, his groin over mine, and thus our two bodies, turned completely toward each other, met along the full surface of their skins.

And this meeting was so abundant in instincts, emotions, and intentions that the fractional moment in which skin touched skin, heat reached heat, and smell mingled with smell to make a closer fit physically impossible was like a deep, painful groan of happiness and good fortune, eliminating distance and division; that's how parallel lines must feel in infinity.

The harmony of the two bodies expressed in this single touch, bridging their differences and bending their moral reserve, was as powerful and wild as physical fulfillment, yet there was nothing false in this harmony, no illusion created that just by touching, our bodies could express feelings that rationality prevented us from making permanent; I might even say that our bodies coolly preserved their good sense, scheming and keeping each other in check, as if to say, I'll yield unreservedly to the madness of the moment but only if and when you do the same; but this physical plea for passion and reason, spontaneity and calculation, closeness and distance, took our bodies past the point where, clinging to desire and striving for the moment of gratification, they would seek a new and more complete harmony.

Our bodies' uncertainty became the only certainty, and that was good enough; desire-filled body watching the body's lack of desire; and the more satisfaction each body found in this watching, the more relaxed they both became, the more comfort they found in each other; I may have fallen asleep a few minutes after he did; just before falling off, I could hear the breeze ruffling the poplar's yellowing leaves, and his ever more regular, even breathing.

We slept in each other's arms, with his chest on mine, thighs pressed together, his head on my shoulder, his hair in my mouth, our legs entwined under the blanket; we had to be this close not only because the couch was very narrow but also because the hard horsehair mattress slanted down on the side and we had to hold on to each other even in our sleep so as not to fall off.

We were startled out of our sleep at the same time: like someone shrinking back just when he is about to sink into an even deeper sleep, his body shuddered along the length of mine, giving me a start, too; under the pressure of his head and shoulders, my own shoulder and arm had gone to sleep and were now aching; looking instinctively for a more comfortable position, which the body always does, I moved away from him.

Our bodies parted, at the same time feeling the peaceful closeness and harmony in which they had rested until now; they didn't separate completely, just far enough so that a bit of cooler air, part of the outside world, could penetrate the space between us, making us more aware of our bodies' heat.

I think we opened our eyes at exactly the same moment, and because his head slid off my arm and dropped to the pillow, we looked into each other's eyes from very close up.

Since our every little move and sensation remained identical, they became our own because we saw them reflected in each other; I caught the same look in his eyes
—I might call it a neutral look—with which I felt I was looking at him.

We both had had an equally deep and short sleep, which blotted out time, so that our consciousness was somewhat puzzled as it was trying to return to where it had left off, the resulting look in the eyes being not necessarily a sign of muddleheadedness, in fact possibly of very sharp, keen awareness; I imagine this is the way babies look at the world.

I could see in his eyes that this was just what he was seeing in mine; there was no trace of conscious thought for either of us, and the next moment we both broke into a smile, and this, too, was strikingly similar, one originating in the other; I smiled his smile and he mine, which in turn elicited a like response from both of us, turning bashfully away from this unexpected and unwilled intimacy, we bowed, more precisely, lowered our heads resting on the pillow, making forehead touch forehead.

I didn't close my eyes and don't think he did either, or if he did, he probably opened them again soon after.

The eyes, though retaining some of the neutrality of the first wakeful moment, became alert again, ready to return to former activities, and now shifted downward, into the darkness under the covers; the glance penetrated the feelings as it enjoyed the view of a wedge-shaped configuration, observing it from above.

Our two divergent bodies formed the sides of this wedge: two chests, one of which, his, was hairier; two bellies, appearing a little sunken in this position, one of them taut and flat, the other just slightly bulging; and down below, in the narrower part of the wedge, the nestlike softness of the testicles filled out the angle formed by the entwined legs, and the genitals, one, his, larger and longer, and the other, mine, rather comically limp in its shrunken state, were lying on each other as peacefully as did our intertwined arms above.

The geometric shape could not be perfect, though, if only because of our different builds, and I was also lying a little bit higher: our feelings, too, were similar rather than identical: he was more comfortable, I think, his lower body weighing hard on my thigh, and unless I wanted to paint too idyllic a picture
—and why would I?—I'd have to confess that my thigh could hardly wait to be rid of the weight, but in spite of this minor discomfort, we lay there in almost perfectly identical positions; and as we did, aware of and watching this symmetry, the two genitals that had been resting on each other, as if coaxed by our eyes and the geometrical arrangement of our bodies, began to rise, ever so gradually, smoothly; swelling, filling up, lengthening and thickening, their heads crossed, collided, mutually impeded, and then bumped past each other, gaining the feeling of mutual momentum needed for a solitary erection.

The symmetry and simultaneity became clear, unequivocal, and at the same time comical, because what we saw was real, though it also allowed us a glimpse into the workings of our senses, into the almost impassive mechanism of our instincts: forehead bumped into forehead because we turned away so quickly and simultaneously, as if suddenly discovered or exposed by someone, and then we burst out laughing
—again at the same time.

Judging by the sound of it, it wasn't just a plain laugh but a guffaw.

An eruption of joy and coarseness, a burst of joy over the coarseness that a stiff penis, by its very nature, provides in any and all situations, the joy of "See, I'm a man," the joy of a living organism expanding, the ancient joy of belonging to the community of males, the joy of life's continuity; and it was also laughing at the coarse mechanism of exposed archaic instincts, which is called culture and which leads to doubling the enjoyment of raw instincts, because I feel what I feel in spite of the fact that I know what I feel
—and thus I feel more than what I can possibly know.