A Book of Memories (9 page)

"Come over later," he said, his voice a little higher and thinner, which meant a great many very contradictory things at once; the unnatural intonation seemed more important than the meaning of the words, suggesting that he was ill at ease, that nothing was as simple as he would have liked to believe, and that no matter how far he had managed to get away from me with his glance, I still had a hold on him, my very silence forcing him to make the kind of concession he otherwise wouldn't have dreamed of making, and also implying that our reconciliation could not be taken seriously, that therefore I shouldn't even think of accepting his vague invitation, in fact should consider it a polite warning that I had no more right to set foot in his house now than I had had before; but the words had been uttered, and they referred to an earlier afternoon when his mother had been shouting from the window and I was holding two walnuts in my hands.

"Krijztian! Krisztián, where are you? Krisztián, why must I keep screaming? Krisztián!"

It was autumn, we were standing under the walnut tree, the garden was glowing yellow and red in the twilight heavy with mist, and he was holding a large flat stone which a moment earlier he had used for cracking walnuts, but because he hadn't even left himself enough time to straighten up, I couldn't be sure if the next moment he wasn't going to bash my head in.

"You people haven't managed to steal our house yet, you got that? And as long as the house is ours, I will kindly ask you not to set foot in it ever again, you got that?"

There was nothing funny about what he said, yet I laughed.

"You were the ones who stole this precious house of yours, from the people you used to live off; it's no sin to steal back from a thief; and that's what you people are, you are the thieves!"

Some time had passed while we weighed the consequences of our words, but no matter how deliciously pleasurable it had been to say them, it was clear from his anger and my calm though abstract satisfaction that all this was nothing but revenge, a reprisal for barely noticeable injuries that had accumulated in us during our brief but all the more passionate and stormy friendship; for months we had spent just about every hour of the day in each other's company, and it was my curiosity that had helped me push past the glaring inequalities between us; so our quarrel was the inevitable reverse of our intimacy, but, plausible explanations notwithstanding, this unexpected outburst took both of us so far afield that turning back was impossible; and as improbable as it may have seemed, I had to drop the two walnuts I was holding and hear them plop down on the wet leaves while his mother went on shouting, calling him, and I started for the gate, quite pleased with myself, as if I had settled something once and for all.

He looked straight into my eyes and waited.

But that final attempt, that ambiguously phrased last sentence, also distanced me from the moment which otherwise I could not and would not want to leave; I had to sense the growing distance not only through his eyes but in myself as well, even if his evasive invitation had no stronger an impact than a fleeting memory does, a sudden flash, no more, a mercurial fish which, thrusting itself above the motionless surface of the moment, takes one breath in the strange environment and, leaving a few quickly subsiding ripples in its wake, sinks back into the world of silence; still, that sentence was a reminder, marked out a turning point, emphatic and compelling enough to be a warning that what was happening to us now was but the consequence of a previous occurrence and would have as much to do with events yet to happen as with those that had occurred earlier; no matter how much I yearned or insisted, it was absurd to think I could remain in the moment that gave me such joy, such pleasure, even happiness; the mere fact that I was forced to experience the quick passing and disappearance of my happiness indicated that, though I may have thought I was bound to it, in truth I was no longer there, had already stepped out of it, and am only now thinking about it; yet I could not answer him, though his posture still suggested a willingness to accept a reply, and at this point I would have liked to, since I thought I could not go on without replying; and he was standing there as if he were about to take the first step, but then, flinging his schoolbag over his shoulders, he suddenly turned around and started for the bushes, going back in the same direction, toward the same spot whence he had first appeared.

A Telegram Arrives

My progress was far from steady
—each new gust of wind forced me to stop, and it was all I could do to stay upright while waiting for it to subside—so it must have taken me a good half hour of pressing forward on the embankment before I realized that something had changed ominously.

The wind wasn't blowing straight at me but at a slant off the sea, which I countered by moving sideways, head and shoulders thrust into the wind, at the same time using my upturned coat collar to shield as much of my face as I could from the spray sent up by waves crashing on the rocks, though I still had to keep wiping my forehead, where the spray collected into drops and the drops, heavy with salt, formed into rivulets that gushed into my eyes and down my nose into my mouth; I might as well have closed my eyes, for I couldn't see anything, yet I did want to see the dark, as if seeing this particular darkness gave some sense to the otherwise senseless act of keeping them open; at first, only translucent gray splotches and thin strips of wispy clouds rushed past the moon, coming offshore and racing over the open waters on their way to a destination hidden in infinity, their haste, for all the graceful grandeur of their movement, made positively laughable by the impassive calm of the moon; when more massive clouds appeared, denser and thicker but no less agile, it was as if a single projector on a giant stage had been blocked by scenery, and it grew dark, completely dark, the waters had nothing to reflect, and there were no more white streaks drawn in the distance by white foamy crests; but then, just as quickly, it all turned light again, and then dark again, dark and light, always unexpectedly and unaccountably, dark and light and then darkening again; it's no accident that I've mentioned the stage
— there was something theatrical, indeed dramatic, in the peculiar phenomenon of the wind above driving the clouds in exactly the opposite direction it was compelled to be blowing down here, a tension between the desires of heaven and earth—but the tension lasted only until some decisive turn occurred in the seemingly unalterable course of events on high—who knows what it was? perhaps the wind changing direction somewhere or, above the waters, getting entangled in the piled-up clouds, turning them into rain and dashing them into the ocean—and then the spells of light grew shorter, those of darkness grew longer, until, abandoning earth and water to their own darkness, the moon vanished altogether.

I could no longer see where I was going.

This way the game seemed even more exciting, for in the meantime, forgetting my fears, I had taken what is usually called the raging of the elements to be a game that embodied or substituted for the opposing forces struggling inside me, and with my own feelings thus projected into a living metaphor, I could pretend to feel secure, as if everything I witnessed were but a delightful spectacle of illusions put on solely for my amusement.

I admit, it was a pretty piece of self-deception on my part, but why shouldn't I have imagined myself to have the major role in this majestically grandiose hurricane when, in fact, for weeks I had been able to think of nothing but that I must put a violent end to my life; what could have been more reassuring now than to see this raging world locked into its own darkness, for all its destructive energies unable not only to extinguish itself but even to harm itself, with no real power over itself, just as I had none over my own self.

Recollecting the previous night, the night before my departure, the night of that certain yesterday
—I hasten to emphasize this, because my encounter with the sea shifted the temporal dimension of all my previous experiences into such a soothing perspective that I would not have been at all surprised if someone had told me, "Oh no, you're quite wrong, you arrived not this afternoon but two weeks, nay, two years ago"—I must reassure myself that very little time had elapsed between my departure from Berlin and that stroll on the beach, and though this does not mean that the pleasant confusion about time could untangle my snarled emotions, the sight of the stormy sea in the night did provide a haven in which I could reflect on what had happened; so I thought of that previous night, now fading into a gentle distance, of arriving home at not too late an hour and in the dark stairway—they still hadn't repaired the lights— fumbling so long with my keys that of course Frau Kühnert, always in the kitchen at that hour, fixing her husband's sandwich for the next day, pricked up her ears; alarmed at hearing her hurrying down the long hallway, I still could not fit the key into the lock, and she stopped for a second, but then, beating me to it, threw the door wide-open and, holding a green envelope in her hand, smiled at me as if she had been long preparing to welcome me, as if she'd been waiting for this very moment, and before I had a chance to step inside, say good evening, and thank her for her trouble, she handed me the envelope, blushing as she did so; and at that instant, thanks to the ludicrous protection which the proximity of the sea raging in that starless night may have given me, I ceased to feel the faintness, bordering on loss of consciousness, which had gripped me while I was standing in the doorway and which had not left me until now; I was even amused, because the scene of my taking the envelope from a shouting Frau Kühnert registered as an overly sharp, totally unfamiliar picture.

"Telegram, my friend, you've got a telegram, a telegram!"

If at that moment I had not glanced at her rather than at the telegram
—one automatically glances at anything thrust into one's hand—I might have failed to notice how strange and unusual her smile was, not that she hadn't smiled on other occasions, but with this smile she was trying to conceal her eagerness, an insatiable curiosity which despite all her theatrical experience she could not conceal; the moment the telegram reached my hand—suppressing my emotions I barely glanced at the name and address—I looked at her again, but the smile had vanished: from behind her thin, gold-rimmed glasses, her huge eyes, bulging morbidly from their sockets, seemed to be fixed on one point, my mouth, which she stared at intently and sternly, as if expecting to hear a long-delayed, thorough confession; an expression, maybe not of raw hatred, but of compassionless scrutiny, spread over her face; she wanted to see how I would react to what had to be shocking, though to her incomprehensible, news, and I had the feeling that she had already read the telegram, and felt myself growing pale, at that moment overcome by terrible faintness, though the very thought of giving myself away made me go on controlling myself, because I knew that whatever the telegram said, wherever it came from, this woman already knew or meant to find out too much about me for me to stay here; there was nothing I would more strenuously guard against than someone trying to pry into my life, so in other words, not only was I facing some sort of blow, which I had to endure with dignity, but I also had to find a new place to live.

Frau Kühnert was an astonishingly, fascinatingly ugly woman: tall and bony, with broad shoulders, from the back, especially when wearing pants, she looked very much like a man, because not only did she have long arms and big feet but her backside was as flat as an old clerk's; her hair, which she cut and bleached herself, was combed straight back, which became her but hardly made her look more feminine; her ugliness was so pronounced that it could not be mitigated even by the cunning placement of light sources in the old-fashioned, spacious apartment: during the day the sun was blocked out and heavy velvet drapes covering the lace curtains created a glimmering semidarkness; in the evening, light was provided by floor lamps with dark silk shades and wall fixtures whose glow was dimmed by little caps made of stiff waxed paper; because the chandeliers were never turned on, Professor Kühnert was forced to adopt rather peculiar work habits: he was a short man, at least a head shorter than his wife, and in build her total opposite, almost feature for feature: thin-boned, fragile, and delicate, his skin so translucently white that one could see pulsating purple blood vessels pressing against it on his temple, neck, and hands; his eyes were small, deep-set, and as insignificant and expressionless as his quietly unobtrusive way of doing his scholarly work in his poorly lit study
—work that, by the way, many people judged quite significant—for there was no lamp on his huge black desk, either, and whenever Frau Kühnert called me to the telephone, I could see him rummaging with his long, thin fingers, like a blind man, among piles of newspapers, notes, and books until, by touch alone, he would identify the sought-after piece of paper, pick it out, take it across the room, past the bluish glare of the TV screen, stop under one of the small wall lamps, placed rather high up, and under its pale yellow light begin to read— sometimes leaning against the wall, which I could tell had become a habit with him, because during the day a spot, traces of regular contact left by his head and shoulders, was clearly visible on the yellow wallpaper—until, spurred on by an unexpected idea or simply by protracted brooding, he would interrupt his peaceful reading and return to his desk by the same route to jot something down; Frau Kühnert, enthroned in her comfortable armchair, seemed as unaware of the professor's repeated crossings before the television screen as the professor seemed undisturbed by the incoherent noises emanating from it or by the perpetual dimness of the apartment; I never heard them exchange a single word, though their silence did not seem to be the result of some petty, calculating revenge, and what had turned them mute to each other was not resentment—flaunted conspicuously yet indicating a very fervent attachment between man and wife, the kind of silence which rancorous couples often give as a present to each other in order to extort something—no, their silence had no express purpose, but it is possible that a slowly cooling mutual hatred had stiffened them into this neutral state, although nothing seemed to allude to its cause, since they appeared perfectly content and well-adjusted, behaving in each other's presence like two wild animals of different species, acknowledging each other's presence, but also acknowledging that the laws of the species were far stronger than the laws of the sexes, and since each could be neither a mate nor a prey, communication was also impossible.