A Book of Memories (108 page)

No, I won't go on like this, I won't. That's what I kept saying to myself. I didn't know what the denial was referring to, or what it was I didn't want to go on with. I simply kept repeating the words. And let my head drop, my arms dangle. My legs were thrust out in front of me. Still, I couldn't let go completely, couldn't yield to my own exhaustion. A stern pair of eyes judged me self-indulgent, a show-off. As if I were playing in some cheap melodrama, with my limbs dangling, puppet-like. And I wasn't playing my role well and would have liked to get out of it. A fever was coming on, I was sweltering and shivering in the coolness of the enormous room. I fell into a deep sleep.

I was awakened by the horrible thought that I'd been left behind. As if they had yelled "Fire!" and run away. It wasn't even a thought or a cry but an image that I recalled, sharp and detailed, of that girl opening her door slowly and, contrary to my expectation, not looking back. For a moment I didn't know where I was. I jumped up and tried to figure how long I'd been asleep. Not too long, I decided. I can't get this woman out of my mind, I must see her. I'll run after them if I have to. Or sit and wait for her in front of her room. I wasn't thinking of my childhood, revisited just now in the features of my friend. Yet the feeling was definitely a childhood feeling. As when everybody went off to play but didn't tell me because they wanted to exclude me. If this is my room number, I figured, and the numbers keep going up, then hers must be such and such. While dialing the discovered, or inferred, room number, I looked at my watch. It was six-thirty. I'd slept for twenty minutes.

Hello.

There was just a hint of hesitation in that hello. As if she didn't know what language to use. But this one word made my heart leap with fright. It began to function. It was made of pure joy, in the shadow of an unknown fear. I heard her voice for the first time. From the moment I had gotten onto the elevator she'd said not a word to the others. I had no way of knowing what her voice was like. She had one of those female voices that have a very strong effect on me. It seemed to come from deep inside her body, a voice with a very strong, solid center, whose surface was nevertheless smooth and soft. It wasn't gentle, for that it was too proud and assertive. When I think of it, I see a dark, hard marble. A marble can fit snugly into the palm of your hand, a marble is something you can lift easily. But a marble is nearly impossible to penetrate. And if you do, it's no longer a marble.

I introduced myself, apologized, was very courteous, and very elaborately explained that I'd changed my mind and would like to join them. I rattled on. She listened patiently. She remained a silent island I lapped around with my words. I said I didn't know my friend's room number, that's why I called her. Though that wasn't the only reason. If she'd be kind enough to give me the number. I should hurry up, then, she said by way of reply. Yes, do hurry up. I used the familiar form of address, she stuck to the formal one. When I tried again, she pretended not to hear the more intimate form. She meted out her silences as reservedly as she did her glances in the elevator. She let me go on, but she was brushing me off.

I wouldn't attach importance to this brief conversation if what followed had been merely another one of my moderately gratifying adventures. But what followed was a bitter four-year struggle. I could also call it an agony, a series of hopeless quarrels, the low point of our lives, certainly my own darkest period up to that time. It would have been all that if it hadn't also been filled with the hope of newfound happiness. Yet the joy we found in each other only reached us unexpectedly, catching us by surprise, sometimes for weeks, at other times only for days, hours, or brief moments. We strove for it but could never really achieve it. What remained was the agony. The agony of missed happiness, or perhaps the joy of agony.

Yet we had no greater desire than to preserve for a lifetime the profound feeling of having found each other. Compelled by painful need, we set conditions for each other and failed to notice that we were breaking, crushing each other with them. She demanded absolute faithfulness from me, while I would have liked her to accept my infidelities as proof of my faithfulness. In vain I explained to her that I had never loved anybody as much as I loved her, but to counter these feelings of unfamiliar quality I needed at least the semblance of freedom. I could no longer live without her, but with her I turned into something like a faulty communicating vessel: if, with the greatest effort, I gave up my freedom and, complying with her condition, didn't even look at other women, my alcohol intake promptly shot up; if, however, I reduced my alcohol consumption by getting entangled in meaningless affairs, then the tension between us became simply unbearable. Our mutual degradation was greatest when she should have felt most secure, for that's when she used the most underhanded methods to spy on me, to probe and snoop, for which I beat her up. I did this twice, and it took a great deal of self-control not to do it more often. But her suspicions even at these times were not completely baseless. What made her jealous were not my occasional lapses but my enforced fidelity. Similarly, I didn't raise my hand to her because she got her girl friends to spy on me but because I couldn't comprehend why she didn't understand me. She sensed and felt everything. I couldn't make a move without her sensing its subtlest meaning. And she knew that the fidelity she forced on me caused intolerable tension, that it turned my behavior false and unnatural, because I wasn't used to giving up anything. But whenever her jealousy managed to drive both of us to distraction and I couldn't help seeking relief in some silly affair with no strings attached, then she wanted to break with me for good. She was capable of uttering not a single word except a morning hello, for weeks on end. Of letting all my questions go unanswered, pleas, threats, pledges, and promises. As if punishing me just for being alive. As if playing only to lose triumphantly, so that I'd have to play to win, though she'd never let me. Her real victory would be to push me out of her life completely, though she knew I could never push her out of mine.

The distorted values of my youth came back to haunt me with a vengeance. Because my actions were determined not by aesthetic or ethical principles but by sheer necessity, for me the line between freedom and license became forever blurred. Then, after four years like that, in the lull of one of our cease-fires, we quickly got married. Since then another six hopelessly difficult years have gone by.

One thing I know: that November evening, in a most curious way, I entered a very dark period in my adult years. The meeting turned me into an insecure, anxious adolescent, which I had never been. And the reason had obviously to do with my character and natural inclinations, but also with an accident of fate. A complete life must include lost or stolen time, but what one doesn't actually live through cannot be made up afterward, and there's no point blaming yourself or anyone else for it. Until the age of sixteen I wasn't all that interested in girls. I found their admiration as self-evident and natural as I did the uncritical adoration emanating from my mother. If for some reason I lost one girl's admiration, another one would take her place. And if necessary I could easily have a third or fourth. I accepted the aggressive signs of my biological maturity with the understanding that I'd neither resist nor make too much of them. It still seems odd that my brand-new manhood called attention to itself not in dreams or even in relations with girls but while riding on public transportation, on bumpy streetcars, and buses taking sharp and sudden turns. I wasn't ashamed of it, didn't even try to curb it, at most I'd put my briefcase in front of me. But at times the excitation came on so suddenly and was so acute that to prevent a minor accident, I'd have to get off in a hurry. And this was enough, because the physical tension, the body's excitement, wasn't directed at anyone in particular; it seemed independent even of me and had to do only with the bumpy ride.

In 1957 summer came on us suddenly. In the city quite a few houses still lay in ruins. Charging out of spring, this summer's hot explosion seemed to release energies of life the devastated city badly needed. When the school year had resumed, Mother and I had several hysterical fights, but in the end she won. She didn't let me go back to the military academy and enrolled me instead in a local high school in Zuglo. One afternoon, after walking a new school friend home on Gyertyán Street, I got on a streetcar. When I think of this afternoon
—it must have been the end of May—I see great big chestnut trees with their erect, candle-like white flowers reaching to the sky.

As always, I was riding on the open platform. The sliding doors were left open, the warm air rushed unhindered through the almost empty car. Across the platform stood a young man. His clenched fists were casually sunk in his pocket, his legs spread wide for support. On the other side of the open door was a young blond woman in a light, almost see-through summer dress. Bare, very shapely legs; on her feet white sandals. Holding on to the straps, she had nothing on her except the tram ticket. This, or perhaps something else, made it seem as if she had no clothes on or that her dress made little difference. First I watched the woman watching the man, but as soon as she noticed my curious glance and raised her bright, impudent blue eyes at me, I switched to the man or, more precisely, avoided her brazen look by turning in the man's direction, while he followed the woman's glance to register this developing interlude between the two of us. He was slender, ordinary-looking, of average height. The most conspicuous thing about him was the dark smoothness of his face and skin. A smooth, shiny forehead and, between his fists thrust into his pockets and his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, somewhat paler but still very smooth arms. The kind of smoothness that had to be, I felt, more than skin-deep. Having followed the woman's glance, he had to look at me. But then, prompted by an indescribable bashfulness, I had to look away. I returned to the woman, for I wanted to see what her eyes had to say about all this.

She was large, fair-skinned, on the verge of plumpness, but still at a point where her well-fed body was in harmony with a deeper vitality; however much food she might stuff into her pleasure-seeking body was sure to be worked off or burned up by other kinds of activity of the same body. Her firm, well-proportioned limbs did not simply fill out her dress but fairly burst out of it. The warm currents of air mussed up her hair and kept lifting her dress. We could see the strong, remarkably white insides of her knees. She'd sway now and then, springing up and down on her feet, relishing our eyes feasting on her. She couldn't have been more than twenty, but she was ripe, solid, everlasting, like a model poured into a heavy statue. By which all I mean to say is that she was at once available and unreachable.

After our glances met for the third time, she grinned into my face, showing her somewhat uneven teeth, and I, involuntarily accepting the grin, passed it on to the man. But I quickly realized I had first received a smoother, more discreet version of that grin from the young man. Now he took my grin and slipped it back to her. And then, simultaneously, we turned away, taking each other's grin with us.

Outside, the broad avenue, trees, and buildings were running after us. And then, again together, we turned back. It would be almost impossible to say where we trained our eyes. The grin we couldn't wipe off by turning away was now growing stronger, and it seemed as if something terribly important was lying on the greasy floor of the streetcar and our eyes had to find it. We were staring not at each other but at a point equidistant from all three of us, sending our grins to the geometric center of the imaginary triangle we formed. And somehow we had to stay together even when we threw back our heads to accommodate the laughter that burst out of us. But the laughter was not equally distributed among us. The woman giggled, tittered, let out little squeals and tiny bubbles of laughter, popping them and sucking them in again. The man was almost silent as he laughed, chuckling at short intervals, as if trying to form words. This stammering, almost talking laughter made me notice on his otherwise smooth face a deep, bitter crease around the mouth that wouldn't let the laugh fully erupt, even though he was shaking harder than the woman or me. Of course I could hear my own runaway horselaugh, too. With it I revealed all my innocence, but I didn't mind. The streetcar was crawling along, though to me it felt as though it was tearing up the tracks. Maybe the only time you feel free is when you don't bother about consequences, when you trust the moment and let yourself go.

The laughter was unstoppable, it terrified itself, its own brazenness made it falter; and we didn't just spur one another on with liberating little jabs; it seemed that we all had our own reserves of laughter, and their variety created such an enjoyable common sound that it would have been senseless to stifle it. Yes, let it come; no one has anything to be ashamed of. And it came, it grew, it hurt, it made us cry. This felt good, because all the while my sheepishness made me tremble; I felt my arms and legs shaking visibly. The streetcar was approaching the intersection of Thököly Road and György Dözsa Road, it slowed down. The young man thrust himself away from me, though he seemed to shove himself out of his laughter. He slipped his fist out of his pocket and raised a warning finger. A single finger held way above his head. We watched that single finger in the air, and in a flash all laughter stopped. The woman let go of the strap and just stood there with her ticket, her impudence gone from her blue eyes. Then slowly she stepped out onto the platform. It was perfectly clear what was happening, and I was trembling too hard to do anything about it. The young man bounced off the still-moving streetcar and looked back not at the woman stumbling after him but at me, taking in with one last sweeping glance my schoolbag, which I placed in front of me to cover my embarrassing state of arousal. There was still time to back out of the situation. For a moment we froze. A pair of huge liquid brown eyes in that smooth face. There was nothing to think over.