A Book of Memories (28 page)

It was as if I had to touch Mother with my mouth and Father with my hand.

And on his belly my hand had to open if it wanted to press down on his firm protrusion.

From there it was just one more downward slide, hindered momentarily in his pubic hair, and then I was pressing my palm over his genitals.

The moment had two very distinct parts.

When his body moved, not indifferently, willingly even, and he awakened.

And when with a sudden violent jerk he pulled away and let out an ear-splitting scream.

As when one finds a clammy toad in his warm bed.

By morning our sleep deepens, coarsens, and if I hadn't roused him from this deep morning sleep, he might have had a chance to realize that he was the hero of that same
Bildungsroman
in which nothing that is human can be alien, so that on the one hand what happened was not so unusual as to elicit his most violent feelings, and on the other, if he didn't want his impulsive response to have incalculably serious consequences, if he didn't want to elicit a similarly violent response from me but, as a reasonable educator, wanted to achieve a positive effect, he would have acted with much greater understanding and tactful shrewdness, for he must have known what every human being over forty can be expected to know, especially a man, namely, that everyone must at least once, literally or figuratively, symbolically or with one's bare hands, touch that organ; at least once everyone must violate his father's modesty
—to keep it inviolable perhaps?—yes, everyone does it, one way or another, even if the ordeal leaves him no strength to admit the act even to himself, the denial being dictated by natural self-defense and a moral sense that surfaces only in extreme situations; but Father was startled out of sleep and because of his first, instinctive move must have felt betrayed by his own nature and could do little else but scream.

"What's got into you? What are you doing?"

And he kicked me out of bed with such force I landed on the floor on their blanket.

For a long time afterward my inner world was ruled by the silence of criminals, the mute, tense silence of anticipation which, as one waits for consequences and retribution, makes the act seem more irrevocable and therefore somewhat wonderful and thrilling, but no punishment was forthcoming; no matter how closely I watched them, I could detect no indication that he even told Mother about the incident, though in other situations when I was caught in some mischief, they always tried to present a united front, though I must say they never succeeded so well that I couldn't discern some subtle differences in their positions; now, however, they professed complete innocence and seemed truly united, acting as if nothing had happened, as if I had dreamed it all, both the touch and the scream, and while waiting for the spectacular retribution I failed to notice the consequence, far more serious than any punishment could have been; looking back now, as a reasonable adult, I ask myself just what sort of punishment I was expecting: a bloody, merciless beating? what kind of punishment can be invented in a case like this, when it seems that a male child has fallen in love with his own father? isn't the terrible, unrequitable, physically and emotionally devastating love itself the greatest punishment? at any rate, what I failed to notice, maybe couldn't have noticed, or what I had to pretend not to notice, was that after the incident Father became even more aloof, carefully avoiding every occasion that might have called for physical contact; he didn't kiss me, didn't touch me, and, come to think of it, didn't hit me either, as though he felt that even a slap might be construed as responding to my love for him; he withdrew himself from me
—but so inconspicuously, his reserve so perfect, lacking all outward signs, no doubt some great fear making it so perfect, that I myself sensed no connection between his behavior and its cause, and maybe he didn't either; I even managed to forget the underlying cause, just as I forgot that I had discovered him in bed with Maria Stein in the maid's room—maybe he forgot that, too; the only threat that remained with me was the unassimilable knowledge that this was the kind of man my father was: not enough of a stranger to leave me unresponsive and not affectionate enough to love me; so when he opened the door to let me into the bathroom, what I could read in his unsmiling face, in the blatant nakedness of his body, was this reserve and mistrust, a well-disguised shyness, a fearfulness, and a reluctance, too, indicating that he was opening the door only at my mother's urging though it didn't sit well with him, he didn't find my peeking and eavesdropping so easily forgivable; instead of this daring family coziness he would have preferred to send me back to my bed—"All right, out!" he might have said, and as far as he was concerned that would have been the end of it, but vis-à-vis Mother he appeared to be at least as vulnerable and defenseless as I was with him, which of course was a source of comfort to me, and if there was the slightest hope of my ever squeezing in between the two of them, it could only be through this tiny opening afforded by his willingness to please Mother, to gain her favor, to satisfy her needs; I had no direct way of reaching Father.

"Close the door," he said, and turned around to sit back in the tub, words that for me, still unable to decide whether to go in and still standing motionless in the doorway, were an ambiguous gift but a gift nonetheless, and even the reluctance in his voice, intended more for Mother than for me, could not completely spoil my happiness, because I had won without hoping for victory; and the sight of his body turning sideways was yet another new experience, a striking flash, to be enjoyed and suffered only until he lowered himself into the water; if earlier I said that from the front his body looked perfect, well-proportioned, attractive, and beautiful, I now have to add something that natural modesty makes even more difficult to articulate, or could it be that it isn't modesty at all but the strange desire to see our parents, in both body and mind, as the most perfect creatures on earth, even when they are not? is that the reason that experience forces us to see beauty in ugliness or, if we cannot abandon our inextinguishable yearning for perfection, at least to be more forgiving and understanding of imperfection, learning from the human form that everything seemingly perfect also contains a tendency for the distorted, the twisted, and the deformed? is this, after all, what gives our feelings their unique character and flavor? and not only because no single human being can embody perfect harmony of form but also because perfect and imperfect always go hand in hand, are inseparable, and if, disregarding the most obvious imperfections, we still try to worship a person as perfect, is it simply our imagination playing tricks on us?

When I looked at my father sideways, it turned out that whatever had seemed perfect from the front now appeared misshapen: his shoulder blades protruded prominently from his bent back, he looked stooped even when standing straight, and if I weren't afraid of the word, I'd say he was only a breath away from being a hunchback, yes, a hunchback, which we usually find exceedingly repulsive; I'm convinced it was pure accident that he wasn't, as if halfway through its work nature could not decide whether to fashion an ideal or a grotesque human form and left him to his fate, and he, recognizing this fate, tried to blot out or at least correct the effects of this dark hoax of nature, though his efforts were only partially successful, despite his undoubtedly very real suffering and almost unseemly industriousness and zeal: the body, the human form, however devoutly we may expound in our Christian humility on the externality of the flesh and the primacy of the soul, is so potent a given that already at the moment of our birth, it becomes an immutable attribute.

But with the utter partiality of a lover, I loved this, too, liked inhaling beauty and ugliness in the same breath and experiencing with equal sensitivity and intensity both attraction and repulsion; his imperfections made him perfect to me
—nothing could better account for his obstinate seriousness, his formidable alertness, the eagerness with which he went after everything he judged wayward, unlawful, criminal, and therefore ugly and perverse than his slight flaw, his tiny would-be hump, in the absence of which he would have become just another pretty face and no more; but this way he was a man forever on guard, emotionally rather dour, physically somewhat cold (for all his sexual excesses), and very intelligent, as if in the retreat forced on him by his physical attributes, his attentiveness longing for but unable to cope with tenderness had grown so acute that no plan or motive, however cunningly concealed, could escape his scrutiny, and the energy lost in that retreat returned most aggressively in his sensitivity and intellect, enabling him to uncover the subtlest of connections; he was perfect then in trusting his intuition to let his abilities and natural gifts complement one another; one could only rarely discover in him an insincere attempt to be what he was not, and though then I knew very little about what the work of a state prosecutor actually entailed, I couldn't imagine a more appropriate setting for that body; I liked to see him encased in the severity of his dark gray suit, his long fingers gathering up his papers from a gleaming desktop under the glare of chandeliers turned on even during the day, the cut of his suit being perhaps only a slight deception, in the cleverly placed shoulderpads that compensated for the irregular curve of his back; in the long marble-faced courthouse corridors there were usually very few people around, now and then a messenger hurrying past with heavy file folders, and sometimes small clusters of people standing about in front of one of the huge doors, taking not the slightest notice of one another; dignified, dusty boredom prevailed except when clanking footsteps broke the silence and grew louder until in one of the bends in the winding corridor a handcuffed prisoner appeared led by two guards, only to disappear behind one of those huge brown doors and then enter the courtroom; I liked to see his back receding down the dim corridor, in his back rather than in the more ordinary beauty of the rest of his body, where everything that I felt was refined, distinguished, and intelligent in him seemed to be concentrated—to complete the picture, I should say something about his shapely and muscular backside, whose graceful curve was quite feminine, and his firm thighs, and the protuberant veins branching off under the golden hairs of his leg, and the arching foot with its long, delicate toes—but still, it was his back; his walk was soft, supple, vigorous, like that of a beast delighted to feel in the soles of its feet the limber, ready weight of its body, but Father seemed to carry his intellectual burdens and worries, which I imagined had to do with pursuing justice, not in his feet but on his back, as if his strength lay in the curvature of his back, and I so very much wanted to be like him, to possess his imperiousness, his strength, not just the beauty and symmetry leading to and radiating from his loins but his rarefied spiritual ugliness, too, so for a while I tried to imitate his stoop as I walked down the far less impressive corridors of my school the way I had seen him walk in the courthouse.

But then I decided to walk into the bathroom, after all, and I closed the door just as he told me.

He sat back in the tub, and Mother, who just then re-emerged from the water, started laughing; their movements spilled more water onto the floor.

"Just throw off your pajamas and join us," she said, as if this was the most natural thing in the world.

And when I climbed into the tub and positioned myself between their drawn-up knees, the water overflowed again, the bathroom was awash, slippers began to float, which made all three of us laugh.

It was one of those sudden outbursts of laughter, a spontaneous eruption that dissolved the residue of suspicion and fear and timidity in us, canceling out every warranted and unwarranted anxiety, tore that scrim, that veil between external reality and the more powerful inner verities to which I alluded earlier, seemed to liberate our bodies from the confines of their weight and inertia, lifting us into a higher sphere where there is free passage between the reality of the body and that of our desires; there we were, in a tubful of cooling, lukewarm water, three naked bodies
— though only a single mouth seemed to do the laughing, as though the rollicking laughter with its undertones of sly devilry had burst forth from the same giant mouth, as if the identity of our liberated senses endowed us with one common mouth!—and caught between Father's outspread knees, I had my feet between Mother's open thighs under the sudsy and murky water that was gently lifting her large breasts, making them float and bob on the surface; then Father pushed me, and Mother pushed me back, and with each push the water sloshed and overflowed, that's what made us laugh actually, this bit of silliness; at the same time, the giant mouth seemed to be swallowing the three naked bodies, devouring them, disgorging them, and sending them down a dark gullet of pleasure, only to bring them up again in tune with the rhythm of laughter as the laughter burst, rippled, and soared, only to dip and scoop up from still deeper layers of the body the hidden and hitherto unimagined treasures of its pleasure and then, with even greater lung efforts and from an even greater height, to let loose its indigestible joy just as the water kept running over and out of the tub.

But in all fairness, for the sake of truth and completeness, I should correct any impression that my life at that time consisted solely of blank despair, shameful cruelties and defeats, and unbearable, yes, unbearable suffering; to counteract the admittedly one-sided nature of my account I must stress that it wasn't so, really wasn't, because joyful, pleasurable experiences were just as much part of my life, and perhaps the reason suffering leaves a deeper mark is because suffering, relying on the mind's ability to think and therefore brood and mull things over, stretches out time, while true joy, avoiding conscious reflection and confining itself to sensory impulses, grants itself and us only the time of its actual existence, which makes it seem fatefully accidental and contingent, always separate and wrenched from suffering, so that while suffering leaves long, complicated stories behind in our memory, happiness leaves but flashes in its wake
—but away with this analysis getting bogged down in the details of details, and away, too, with the philosophy that seeks the meaning of details, though we may need it if we want to ascertain the richness of our inner life, if it is rich why not take pleasure in observing it? yet precisely because this richness is infinite, and the infinite belongs among the incomprehensible things of this world, we are tempted, in our hasty analysis, to pronounce a perfectly ordinary, ultimately natural event to be the root cause of all our injuries, obsessions, mental illness—let's say it, the cause of our disabilities—and we do this because we lose sight of the totality of an event in favor of certain arbitrarily chosen details, and terrified by the abundance of these, we call a halt to our search at just the point where we should go further, our terror creating a scapegoat, erecting little sacrificial altars for it and stabbing the air in mock ceremony, causing more confusion than if we hadn't thought about ourselves at all; happy are the poor in spirit!—so let's not think, let's submit freely and without preconceived notions to the pleasant sensation of sitting on the floor next to Mother's sickbed, our head leaning on the cool silk counterpane so that our lips can rest on the bare skin of her arm; we can feel her delicate fingers in our hair, a slight tremble, a pleasant tingle of our scalp, because in her embarrassment she's dug her other hand into our hair as if to console us, to see if she can lessen the impact of her words with this idle gesture, and though the tingling slowly takes possession of our entire body, what she has said cannot be taken back so easily, since we, too, have suspected that our father may not be our father, and if she couldn't decide between the two men, this suspicion may become a certainty, but about that, understandably, nothing further can be said, so let us be quiet, and then we may feel precisely that everything her words evoked in us as memories—and that have already subsided, however important and decisive they may be—are only in the background of our emotions and true interests, because in the space where we are trying to grasp them and reflect on them, where real events are taking place, there we are completely alone, and they—those two men and Mother—do not and cannot have anything to do with it.