A Book of Memories (82 page)

We pressed ahead, jostled our way out onto the boulevard.

Defining myself in terms of concepts
—my grandparents' strict moral concepts that regulated emotions and passions to fit their middle-class way of life, my parents' more elusive ideological and political concepts—was a not unfamiliar exercise expressing well the kind of upbringing I had, and so it was natural that the self-definition with which I tried in this crowd to separate, indeed sever myself once and for all from my father, quickly changed me back into a small child, for my concern about him, the child's need to identify with him, sympathize with and understand him, proved to be the stronger bond, since ultimately it was with his concepts of myself that I had to justify being here, in this crowd, now, in this situation—or was it our shared grief over Mother's death? as we were finally thrust through the bottleneck and began to run to catch up with the people in front of us—the most elemental need in a crowd is to close ranks—my stuffed schoolbag kept knocking against my legs, my drawing board and long T-square flapping awkwardly from side to side, subtracting something from the revolution, reminding me of my helplessness and confusion, trying to make me admit that this was not for me; each tug and knock seemed to be tapping out this message as rhythmically as they had tapped out revolution just minutes earlier; I felt I had to get home, if only to be rid of these bothersome objects; no problem, I kept telling myself, we were moving in the right direction, I was running among people who did not appear to be bothered by thoughts like mine; I'll get across Margit Bridge somehow, I told myself, and then get on a streetcar, though I was sure I wouldn't find Father at home.

What also seemed reassuring in this plan was that my home was far away, well outside this area that was becoming dangerous even emotionally, up on the hill, far above the city.

And I guessed right: he turned up only a week later, and until then we had no news of him, not even a telephone call, nothing.

It happened on a late afternoon while I was standing with Krisztián in front of our garden gate; it was on the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth of October, and we were discussing the makeup of the new government
— no, it was the twenty-eighth, now I remember, because I had a loaf of bread under my arm, it was the day the bakeries reopened, a Sunday, the first time Kálmán's father's bakery had fresh bread again; Krisztián was telling me how he had managed to get back from Kalocsa, giggling nervously as he told the story, and I knew that the giggles were meant to cover up our efforts not to talk about Kálmán; the year before, after a long struggle, Krisztián had gotten into a military academy; his greatest wish had always been to become an officer, like his father; they happened to be in Kalocsa, on fall maneuvers, when the revolution broke out, and the cadets were simply let go, right in the middle of the field; of course, they had to get rid of their uniforms, because people kept mistaking them for members of the National Security Service, and it was right about then that suddenly Krisztián said, Look, there's your father! and sure enough, down by the hedges, where our garden adjoined the restricted area, Father was hurling himself over the fence.

Embarrassed and blushing over his embarrassment, Krisztián said goodbye; I'd better be going, he said with a last giggle, and I understood well that he didn't want to witness this clandestine homecoming, so he left quickly in the descending dusk, and that was the last time I ever saw him; in the meantime, Father was hurrying up the hill, but instead of cutting across the lawn he followed the curving path of bushes along the edge of our garden and came up under the trees; from a slight jerk of his head I could tell he had seen me; he looked not at all the way I had imagined him during those anxious days of his absence, and I knew, as somebody once told me, that nothing ever is the way we imagine it; he was wearing somebody else's clothes: under a thin raincoat he had on a light summer suit, crumpled and ragged-looking and spattered with mud though it hadn't rained for a week; his face was covered with heavy stubble, and I would say it was almost calm except that his body seemed soft, turned light and pliant by some curious inner excitement that was neither fear nor bewilderment, there was something of a wild animal's resilience and sprightliness in him, and I also noticed he had gotten even thinner over those past few days.

The white summer suit was the first thing I touched, even before he had a chance to kiss me, an involuntary move, and I don't know how one's eyes can distinguish one white summer suit from all other white summer suits, but I was quite certain that he had come back wearing János Hamar's suit, the same suit János Hamar had worn when he came to see us straight from jail the previous spring, the suit he'd had on when years earlier two strangers had asked him to step into a black limousine in front of the Office of Restitution, the same suit in which he knelt by Mother's bed five years later, only hours after his release; this meant that he and Father had been together, again, and he must have lent Father his suit, must have helped Father, maybe helped him hide out, perhaps they even fought together in that armed group Father and his friends had organized a few months ago; when I abruptly extricated myself from the embrace of this summer suit, I happened to say something that prompted him to slap me twice in the face; he hit me unerringly, the movements of his arm and hand loose, coldly, with a force that nearly knocked me over
—but more about this later, I told Melchior, it wouldn't make sense just yet.

I was talking to Melchior's eyes.

One of his hands was grasping mine on a leather strap, and with his other hand he was holding another strap, so that his raised arms opened wide the wings of his coat, shielding our faces, our hands, the secret gestures of our forbidden love from the other passengers; our faces were very close, close enough to feel each other's breath, but I was talking not to his face and certainly not to his mind but to his eyes.

And not even to a pair of eyes; what remains with me is the image of a single enormous eye hovering in the breath of my own words, a single beautiful eye, obliging yet twinkling with an inner urgency, and also concealing its light of comprehension each time it blinked, resting, waiting behind the beautiful fluttering membrane of its lid, seeming uncertain, groping, and suspicious; and each time it reopened, it would spur me on, impelling me to forget all the small details because he wanted to see the larger perspective; as it was, there were too many things to take in at once: not only did he have to imagine unfamiliar characters, orient himself in unknown locales, reconcile uncertain time frames, follow a very personal, therefore disjointed account of events which up to then he knew only from rather generalized historical descriptions, but he also had to contend with the unpleasant addition of my linguistic lapses, to deduce from my excited, often incorrectly used phrases just what it was I really wanted to say.

It had happened the previous summer, I told Melchior, about three weeks after Father had been suspended from his position as state prosecutor: one Sunday morning about thirty guests arrived at our house, filling the street outside with their parked cars, all men except for one young woman who came with her father, a glum, sickly-looking, elderly man who, rocking in a chair, said not a word during the entire meeting, waving his hand once to silence his daughter when she was about to say something.

I made use of a little family byplay to sneak into Father's study, where the assembled men were smoking, standing about in small groups, arguing or simply chatting; they seemed to be old friends having one of their get-togethers; alter a short while Father stepped into the kitchen to ask Grandmother to make coffee, but as luck would have it, Grandfather was there, too, and before Grandmother could respond with a reluctant but obliging yes, Grandfather broke their years-long mutual silence and, turning red and gasping for air in sudden irritation, told Father that unfortunately Grandmother had no time to make coffee, as she was on her way to Sunday services, and if Father insisted on offering coffee to his unexpected guests he should serve them himself.

Father had indeed made his request as a boss would do to his secretary, so the response caught him by surprise, all the more so since it was perfectly obvious that Grandfather wasn't refusing an innocuous request on Grandmother's behalf but simply found it distasteful to have any close contact with that group of men; It's all right, Father stammered, he appreciated the concern, and as he hurried out of the kitchen, pale with anger, he did not notice me tagging along, or maybe the unpleasant interlude made it difficult for him to object to my presence.

In any case, I positioned myself near the door leading to my room, where the young woman in her attractive dark silk dress was leaning somewhat uncomfortably against the doorpost.

I could tell from Father's vigorous yet controlled stride, from the sharp thrust of his stooped shoulders, from his hair falling over his forehead, or perhaps from the determined air with which he pushed his way through the smoke-filled room, that he was getting ready for something extraordinary, something he'd had his mind set on for a long time; he shoved his armchair out of the way, took his desk keys out of his pocket, opened a drawer, but then, as if suddenly uncertain, did not pull it out but slowly lowered himself into the chair and turned toward the company.

The sight of this change in his movement and the look in his eyes spread like a tremor throughout the room; some of the men fell silent, others lowered their voices, still others looked over their shoulders and purposely finished their sentences or even began new ones, while Father sat motionless, staring vacantly into the air.

And then, with a motion that started slowly but suddenly turned quick as lightning, he yanked out the drawer, grabbed something inside, and, with his fist, from which the grip of the pistol was sticking out, shoved the drawer home, pulled his hand back, and slammed the pistol down on the empty desktop.

One loud bang, followed by silence, an offended, pitiful, dazed, indignant silence.

Outside, the trees stood still in front of the open windows, and one could hear the intermittent hiss of the sprinklers, the water hitting the lawn.

Someone laughed nervously into the silence, a few uncertain laughs followed, there was a very young army officer there, maybe a colonel, a round-faced, smiling man with a blond crewcut who in the stunned silence stood up, leisurely took off his gold-braided uniform jacket, and, smiling amiably, laid it over the back of his chair; a general shouting began, but the officer, as if hearing nothing, quietly sat back down on his chair and in the general uproar calmly began to roll up a sleeve of his white shirt.

Now they were shouting at Father, pleading with him to stop this nonsense, addressing him by his Party code name. Millet, letting him know how well they realized what he was doing, how they sympathized with his outburst, however hysterical and irrational, but he ought to stop it and come to his senses.

No, no, the events of the last few months had finally restored his senses, Father said without raising his voice or looking at anyone, and this was followed by another silence, hollow yet grating; as a matter of fact, he added, the reason he had asked them to come was that he was still hoping to find a few men in this country who, like him, had managed not to lose their good sense.

Fully aware of his dignity, returned to him by the men's silence, his professional confidence marked by his smoothly flowing sentences, he remained seated comfortably in his chair, his hands on the armrest; he did not wish to create a scene or to give a lecture, he went on very quietly, it was a simple, sentimental human impulse that made him remind those present of their obligations which all of them had taken on themselves, not here and not now but for a lifetime, and, he smiled before continuing, in the present political situation he couldn't see how anyone could possibly ignore these obligations; he wasn't looking into anyone's eyes, his smile seemed to be meandering among the faces with that inexplicably sharp glance which always terrified me, which I took to be the sign of madness or deliberate cruelty or maniacal paranoia; he had a very simple proposal to make, he said, speaking without a pause now, the words rolling out as if from a recording, after due consideration he had concluded that to prevent a possible counterrevolutionary takeover, they should establish an armed group totally independent of the army, the police, and the security forces that would be accountable only to the highest echelon of the government.

The last words hovered in the air, then froze between the two potentialities of unqualified endorsement of a self-evident idea and vehement rejection, and only then did pandemonium break out
—everything from deliberate and accidental knocking over of chairs, pounding on tables, slapping of knees, bellowing, hissing, yelling, shrieking, hostile whistling, guffaws and laughter of all kinds, although some of the guests remained quiet, and the young woman thrust herself away from the doorpost, seeming to want to say something, her face flushed with indignation, while in the middle of the room the colonel was slowly turning his round, smiling face this way and that; the sad-faced elderly man stopped rocking his chair long enough to silence his daughter with a wave of his hand, and then resumed.

I must confess, I told Melchior sixteen years later in that Berlin streetcar, that I hadn't found the scene at all painful, on the contrary, rather enjoyed it, it made me happy, and not only because
—rational consideration notwithstanding, which I'm sure I wasn't capable of at the time—I was impressed by Father's regained prestige, determination, and reckless resolve, qualities that to an adolescent boy are always attractive and admirable regardless of their motivation (even Prém, whose fascist father beat him with sticks and straps, was proud of how strong that drunken beast was); no, my satisfaction had a quite different source: I knew something about Father those men could not have known; they weighed what was happening in political terms, and I weighed it emotionally, I knew that for all his insistence on not wanting to, he was creating a scene, mad performance being the only possible way to escape his own madness, to externalize his innermost insanity, for he was insane, so why shouldn't I have been happy to see this unexpected, purging release; ever since Mother's death, more precisely since János Hamar's return, he had been struggling with this madness; only a few days earlier we had been sitting in the kitchen having dinner when he suddenly looked at me, and I could tell he was seeing not me but someone or something else, something tormenting him, the compulsion to overcome which grew so powerful that his mouth, though full of food, dropped open and he began screaming at the top of his voice, half-chewed bits of food squirting out of his mouth and spattering all over the table, all over my face, and tears streaming from his petrified eyes: "Why, why, why?" he howled at me as I sat leaning against the white-tiled kitchen wall, "why, why?"—he could not stop himself, and as I struggled along with him in that howl, he fell silent just as abruptly as he had started screaming, and it wasn't my touch or hug that calmed him, not my hand or the proximity of my body, I don't know what made him stop, maybe he just resigned himself to being defeated by that someone or something within him, because my hands and body told me he was feeling nothing, he was hard as stone, was no longer there; his head sank into his plate, into the soggy vegetables, as if part of the humiliation he had to endure was soggy vegetables on his plate.