A Book of Memories (26 page)

She didn't look at me after that.

Yet it seemed to me that only her look might still save me.

If only it could be made to last, if only time wouldn't pass without it, because that look of hers, that ultimate self-revelation, and the way she gazed, the way we looked at each other, might clear up the confusion within me, explain my unfulfilled yearnings, my sins, committed yet irredeemable, my endless lies
—for I had to lie all the time to protect myself, which was petty and humiliating, and I was terrified, too, of being found out; I was suffering and saw no way to be free of suffering, because it wasn't only that I had to lie, deny myself everything that could give me pleasure, no, none of this: I could never have what I liked, and I had to live as if carrying a heavy, burdensome stranger with me, hiding my real self under this dead weight; in my infinite desperation I did try to share some of my pain with my mother, but so much had accumulated I couldn't possibly tell her everything, wouldn't even know where to begin, and anyway, I couldn't be that open with her, since she had plenty of complaints about me having to do with the very secrets I was hiding from the world, mainly out of consideration for her, a consideration I felt was justified because despite her irritation, her anger, complaints, and even disgust with me, she wished to see in me some unattainable perfection and for this reason was even stricter with me, at times more cruel, than with anyone else; the only thing that relieved the harshness and made it acceptable was that I had my private language with Mother, just as with my little sister, in which we could avoid words we judged irrelevant or meaningless, a language of touching, at times touching with our very tongues, the language of our warm skin, of our bodies; if I earlier mentioned a sickness of mine, I might risk another guess: that perhaps it was her sickness, and my sister's, which in some mysterious way penetrated and permeated my own being; these two disparate yet to me closely related illnesses might have been the consequence of the pervasive imbalance and uncertainty in my immediate surroundings, the physical manifestation of the fact that everyone was sick, which for a long time didn't bother me, which I accepted as the inevitable condition of my life, indeed finding my mother's illness rather beautiful and loving it; she must have infected me with that sense of grandeur one finds in illness while I was holding her hand or gently sliding my own over her bare arm, when I'd sit on the floor by her bed, put my head on her lap, or simply rest it on the sheet and breathe in the smell, the mixture of febrile warmth, sweat, and medicine emanating from her body, from her silken nightgown, a smell that was always there no matter how frequently the room was aired, and listen to her breathing, letting her hover between sleep and wakefulness, until my own breathing took over her strange, soft, fluttering rhythm, the rapid rises and slow falls; I got used to the smell to the point of no longer finding it repellent; sometimes she would speak to me softly, opening her eyes just a little, then closing them again: "You are beautiful," she would say, and I was always as astonished by this phenomenon in the bed as she must have thought my presence most pleasing; there was her white face sunk deep in the white pillows, her thick auburn hair neatly spread out, with strands of gray flashing through around the temples, and her smoothly rounded forehead, fine nose, and, above all, the heavy eyelids with long lashes which she would lift lazily as if in a daze, so that for a fraction of a second her crystalline green eyes appeared, looking at me so brightly and intently that her illness seemed a mistake, an illusion, a game, but when the lashes were lowered and the green eyes were once again covered by the blue-veined flesh of the eyelids, their color an ever-darkening brown, something, I don't know what, seemed to make her sick again, though the gaze remained on her sick face, along with a wan smile on her lips, which was meant for me, a mere hint of a smile, and "Tell me," she'd say at moments like this, "tell me what's been happening," and if I didn't reply, because I couldn't or didn't want to, she would continue by herself: "Should I tell you what I've been thinking about just now? did your sister eat her dinner all right? at least I didn't hear your grandmother yell; I'd rather you didn't stay long today, I feel weak, maybe that's why I thought of the meadow again, I wasn't asleep, I was standing in a great big beautiful meadow and wondering why it looked so familiar, I distinctly remembered having seen it before, and that's when you walked in," and she would stop, take a quick breath, as I watched the blanket on her breast rising and falling; "I probably would never have thought about it otherwise, because when you live, new images take the place of old ones all the time, but for some time now I've had the feeling that nothing's ever happened to me, never, though of course lots of things have, and you know I've told you much of it already, still, it's almost as if they didn't happen to me, they're only so many pictures, and while I'm in the pictures, somehow it's more important, or it says more about me, or it's more like me that I lie here in this bed, that this picture doesn't change, I lie here the same way, and if I look out the window I see the same things, now it's getting dark, now it's getting light, always the same picture, and in the meantime I can traipse around in my old pictures because there are no new pictures to disturb the old ones," sighing deeply, the rising air breaking the rhythm of her words: "I don't even know why I'm telling you all this; you should be able to understand it, still I feel a little guilty telling such things to a child, I'm philosophizing, I guess, which is kind of ridiculous, but I don't think there's anything sad or tragic or serious that should be kept from you, it's simply natural, and I never denied myself anything I thought was natural and I should do it"; laughing at this and opening her eyes for a moment, she would take my hand as if telling me to go ahead and do everything I felt to be natural: "Let's just stay like this now, quiet, all right? I'm tired, and I can't get that picture out of my mind, the one I wanted to tell you about but couldn't, just as you don't tell me much, either, though I always ask you, beg you to tell me things, and I understand perfectly when you'd like to tell me this or that but feel you must keep quiet, I even know what those things are that you keep quiet about, because all we can hope for is that the same kinds of things are happening to both of us, there is no difference, always the same things must keep happening, even the feelings are the same, only the pictures change; we understand each other even if we say nothing, that's how it is, and now let's be quiet for a little while, all right? and then go, darling, all right?"

Of course it wasn't so simple to leave, and I doubt she wanted me to obey her and go; her silence only increased the tension between us, and as if she had meant to add to it, she kept repeating herself, "Go now, there's a good boy, go, will you?" sometimes pressing me even harder to herself, in the guise of an embrace, holding on to me, hoping to delay the moment when prompted by some inner sense of propriety I'd get up and somewhat dazed but also relieved stumble into another room; but not yet
—rather than spoiling the moment, I wanted to stretch it out, hold my face in my own breath, which her body had heated, in our common breath that made me feverish, too, and to position myself so that my mouth could brush against the skin of her bare arm, say in the curve inside her elbow, which is an especially soft spot, or her neck, where, in contrast, the mouth could explore the tensing muscles and tendons, and maneuvering further still, making it look completely accidental, pry open her mouth, and with the inside of my lips and the tip of my tongue feel the taste and smell of her skin.

She didn't pretend not to have noticed these amorous gropings, but didn't want to expose my sly little tricks, either; she never made believe that she took them to be the bumbling, simpleminded signs of a child's love or that they made her feel uncomfortable; neither did she retreat behind the protective shield of illness, pretending that only physical weakness made these dangerous excesses of mutual tenderness possible and necessary
—no, she didn't do any of this, but responded simply and naturally by softly kissing my ear, my neck, my hair, wherever she could reach; once, burying her head in my hair, she remarked that she could smell the little male animal in my hair, a whole school of itching little males, and that she rather liked it; it was a smell I hadn't noticed before, but from then on searched for, wanting to experience the cause of her fleeting pleasure; all along she was giving me a live demonstration of naturalness, pointing out the natural boundaries of naturalness, because even when she used words to interrupt and thereby cool the ardor of our physical contact, the interruption appeared as natural and appropriate as the contact itself, not a defense or protest but a sensible rerouting of emotions that had no other outlet.

"All right, then," she said somewhat louder, and laughed a little for having come this far, "all right, maybe I'll try to tell you what I couldn't tell you before, listen: what I wanted to say was that I wasn't alone in that meadow; we were lying there in the tall grass, the sun was shining, with hardly any clouds in the sky, only those very light summer clouds that hardly move and you could hear the insects, wasps and bees, but it wasn't as nice as you might imagine, because every now and then a fly landed on my skin, and though I'd move an arm or a leg and it flew away, it would come right back, in the midday heat flies are always that pesky, try it sometime, and it was noon then; it's as if on purpose they won't let you enjoy whatever it is you want to enjoy, all that beauty, they simply won't have it, maybe because they also want to enjoy something just then, your skin, for instance, but again I'm not telling you the story I wanted to tell you; I can feel it myself, it's not for children, especially not you; one should keep quiet about everything, anyway; well, three of us were in that meadow, and there really was such a meadow, we came in a boat and tied it up at a prearranged spot where we were to meet the others, but we got there first and stretched out in the grass, quite a distance from one another, two men and me; and when you walked into the room and I woke up
—came to, rather, yes, that's the right word, I hadn't been asleep at all—I was inside the picture, just then I saw the three of us from above, the way you do in a dream, and saw how terribly, how infinitely beautiful all this was then, because everything in the world is beautiful, though for me then it was sheer hell, a stinking swamp, and not because of the flies but because we couldn't decide who I really belonged to."

"And Father?"

"Yes, he was there, too."

"And how did you decide?"

"I didn't."

She may have wanted to say something else but she didn't, as though she couldn't utter another word, not a single word ever again
—that's how abrupt her silence seemed.

And I couldn't ask her to go on; we both tensed up, lying there like two logs, or like two stalking beasts frozen in a moment of indecision, not knowing which will first pounce on the prey.

Saying more would have meant going beyond all possible limits; as it was, we had come very close, helplessly skirting, if not actually arriving at, the very last border.

She could not go any further out of sheer tact, and I couldn't have taken any more, so she smiled serenely, beautifully, her special smile for me, but this smile no longer seemed to be a part of a larger whole, a process with a beginning and an end, and I looked at her as one would look at a photograph of a smiling face out of the past, though the moment offered more than the images and random ebb and flow of thoughts evoked by this picture; it may sound like sentimental exaggeration, but this moment was a sudden illumination for me or, anyway, what for lack of a better word we usually call illumination: I saw her face, her neck, the creases and folds of her bedding, but every little detail acquired a story of its own, far richer than I had possibly imagined, and each story possessed a past filled with emotional and visual clues of whose existence I had otherwise been ignorant, and though the stories could not be recalled by ordinary, descriptive means, at this moment I could somehow grasp the clues: for example, there was a picture of me standing in front of the closed bathroom door, late at night, dark, and I wanted to go in but didn't dare, because what I was curious about I knew was forbidden and rightly so, but it wasn't their nakedness
—they never deliberately concealed that from me, and I was the one who considered it a secret, the very top layer of the secret; no matter how unself-consciously they might have moved about in front of me, if I happened to see them naked I was the one who couldn't see enough of them, was embarrassed and excited by the delicious sense of peeping, by having to glance at their usually covered parts, which always seemed new and different and which I could never get used to; but what filled me with even more exquisite pain, offended my sense of modesty, and intensified my jealousy of their nakedness was the realization that their matter-of-fact behavior in front of me was part of a piously fraudulent game; I sensed that the two uncovered bodies, whether displayed individually or together, were meant only for each other, never for me, that only with each other could they be truly uninhibited, and I was excluded from their exclusive company, regardless of whether they happened to hate each other at that moment and intended to go for days without exchanging a single word, pretending to be completely indifferent to each other's presence, or whether the opposite was true, that they loved each other and every casual touch and fleeting glance, every burst of unexpected laughter, every knowing smile, bespoke an ineffable tenderness that I could not possibly have anything to do with; I was excluded, bypassed, made superfluous even if they seemed to love me the most at just such moments, with a love that was the overflow of their passion for each other, a treatment that was no less humiliating than being ignored or considered as an unnecessary, bothersome object; so Mother's last sentence, that unexpected confession, whose ambiguity held out all sorts of possibilities but also steered our short conversation toward that tense silence, seemed to illuminate for me the uneven nature of our relationship: she was going to let me have the key to secrets I had tried to unlock whenever I wished their relationship to be less exclusive than they made it appear, whenever I hoped they would somehow let me squeeze in between them; from inside the bathroom I would hear the sound of water splashing, soft words, and Mother's laughter, a peculiar laugh, so unlike all her other laughs, which gave me the intoxicating feeling that I had stood before this bathroom once before, in exactly the same way, in the dark, in my pajamas, and had been standing there ever since, everything that had occurred between these two indeterminate points in time being nothing but a vague dream, which had a beginning that now, as I was waking, I couldn't remember; and then, in a very different voice, deeper and stronger but preserving something of the playfulness of a high-pitched, squealing laugh, Mother called out: "Who is there in the dead of night, behind that door?" and of course I didn't answer, and thought that maybe the creaking floor had given me away, though I was so careful not to let it creak, or could a physical presence be strong enough to be felt through a closed door? "Is that you, darling? A black raven knocking on my door? Come in, come in, whoever you are!" I couldn't answer, but she didn't seem to expect a reply, for she said, "Speak to me, speak, and come!" practically singing her words, and they were both shrieking with laughter, the water was splashing and purling in the bathtub, spilling onto the tile floor, and I could neither leave nor say something and walk in, but then the door opened.