A Book of Memories (68 page)

As soon as she mentioned the Vietnamese and the blacks, I stood up and because I really did want to help her, I would have liked to put my hand on her trembling shoulder in an attempt to calm her, but the mere possibility of physical contact made her body recoil violently, her screaming climbed higher and higher into shrill squeals, and she began groping so frantically for the knife floating in the bowl among the cut-up vegetables that I thought I'd better pull my hand back, and fast; having completely lost my linguistic presence of mind
—the words wanted to slip out in my native tongue, and I was literally snatching them back with my tongue—I stuttered, and mumbled that she shouldn't get excited, if she liked I'd move out at once, but my quiet words only added oil to the flames, she kept on screeching, the pitch climbing ever higher; I left the kitchen, she followed me with the knife, and screamed her last words into the blackness of the cavernous hallway.

Inundated by waves of applause, the conductor finally took his place, looked to the right, looked to the left, arched his back, and, as if getting ready to swim, raised his arms into the light beams over the music stands; silence fell on the theater, a warmly expectant silence; onstage cold dawn was approaching.

Leaning very close to the Frenchman, I whispered into his ear: As you can see, we are in prison; in the soft dimness his face remained motionless.

I did catch his surprise, lasting only a split second, before the thunder of the overture's first chords seemed to beat back the surging waves of applause, pound them into us, shatter everything showily theatrical, sweep it all away, silence it, shut it out; the four crashing chords, as the earth split open, seemed to make all our strivings petty and laughable; and then, following a consummate silence, the breath caught at the sight of horror in the gaping abyss was released through the mouth of a clarinet in a soaring melody of longing that began in the depths and rose tenderly, lovingly, yearning for grace, was taken over by gentle bassoons and imploring oboes, still rose, seeking freedom; and though the sigh is thrown back by the craggy walls of the abyss, like a furious thunder, the sigh itself swells, gathers strength, now flows like a river, fills the holes and cracks of evil fate, the whole abyss; but roar and rage as it may, sweep away crags and stones, it is helpless, its strength is that of a mere brook against the powerful force that allowed it to swell, the one that rules it, the one that it can never overcome
—until that bugle call; from somewhere, from above, from far away, from outside, the familiar, long-awaited yet unexpected, unhoped-for bugle call is sounded: triumphant redemption itself, the simplest, ludicrously symbolic redeemer, the sound of freedom in which the body can strip itself, as it does with bothersome clothes when making love, down to its bare soul.

When the overture ended I finally felt free to move; until then it would have seemed improper, but now the Frenchman and I leaned back in our chairs at almost the same time; he grinned at me, pleased; we both approved of what we'd just heard, and with this joint approval peace was restored between us; a thin strip of light fell through the openings of the fortress wall
—morning—a thin strip of stage sun lit up the prison yard.

Later that Sunday morning we didn't have much to say to each other: Melchior was ashamed of his grin, his little acts of cruelty, and we exchanged a few words when we set the table for lunch, but we ate quietly, studiously avoiding each other's eyes.

We hadn't yet finished our meal, there was still a bit of cauliflower, some mashed potato, and a piece of meat on his plate when the phone rang, and looking annoyed and mumbling under his breath, he dropped his knife and fork, though there was just enough curious anticipation in his quick response, the way he reached back for the phone, pretending to be irritated, to make clear that his grumbling and annoyance were meant for me; he was apologizing to me in advance.

Still, in all fairness, he didn't like it when our meals were interrupted, because eating together was first of all not the taking of necessary nourishment but the performance of a ritual that gave significance to the time we spent together and dignity to our relationship.

I never asked him, or myself, how he ate when I wasn't there, but I don't imagine it was very different; most likely he set the table with the same meticulous care, but probably without making such a point of it, or being so demonstrative, a conclusion I came to after our weekend visits to his mother, in his native town, when during those meals among the old furniture of the dining room, I could sense from each gesture, from the tidiness of the table setting and the manner in which food was served, the several-centuries-old Protestant eating habits
—frugal, giving each bite its due—that were second nature with them, a tradition that Melchior not only continued but in my presence deliberately exaggerated with his discriminating fastidiousness; but that Sunday, as we ate in silence, I could observe his movements for the first time, the rhythms of his chewing and swallowing, as if through a keyhole, because we were trying so hard to retreat into and isolate ourselves, not disturb the other with our presence, that we were each in separate and complete solitude, and then it became clear to me that his systematic and elaborate ways, his exaggerated decorum and solemnity, which extended to every meal, indeed to every so-called routine activity, were not so much signs of some affectation whose origin and nature I could not fathom and therefore tended to misunderstand as something meant for me, more precisely for us—the exaggeration being there for extra emphasis, that with his ceremoniousness he was marking the time we spent together, measuring and consecrating it, that with every move he made he was gauging our time, counting back from a terminal point that could be ascertained and calculated to the day, down to the hour; and he wanted to celebrate each moment, make it as festive and as aesthetically pleasing as possible, so that when it was all over between us, in a time beyond the terminal point, each moment could become an easy-to-recall, tangible, usable memory.

A candle was burning in an antique silver candlestick, which he put on the table not only because of its beauty and festive look but to avoid having matches or a lighter on the white damask tablecloth for our afterdinner cigarettes; no mundane object should profane the artificially created flawlessness that meant to shut out this world he felt to be alien and despicable; he put flowers on the table, and we pulled our damask napkins from monogrammed silver napkin rings, he would allow no ordinary wine bottle on the table, and though it was not necessarily good for the wine, before the meal he transferred it into a decorative crystal flask; yet there was nothing stiffly formal about our meals, as one might expect as a consequence of this meticulousness; he ate with gusto, chewing each bite carefully and helping himself to huge portions, and if I left something on my plate he'd polish that off, too, down to the last crumb; and without ever becoming drunk or even tipsy, he guzzled his wine from a tall glass.

It was Pierre on the phone, and after swallowing my last bit of food and looking for an excuse to leave the room so as not to disturb them, I began collecting the dishes; they were talking in French, which had an electrifying effect on Melchior having nothing to do with Pierre's person; I won't deny the possible influence of my jealousy, but at such moments he looked to me a changed man, became eager and ambitious, gave up his natural attractiveness for an acquired casualness, turned into a kind of model student who in hopes of the teacher's praises is willing to sing a whole octave higher than his own range, and while the whole class is in stitches even holds his neck differently so he can pronounce each word properly, pursed his lips, pushed the words out, not so much pronouncing as thrusting them out, kneading them, motivated by the desire to sound as perfect as he can while speaking a foreign language and by the need to find another potential self that only flawless pronunciation and phrasing could coax out of him; seeing him like this made me feel a bit ashamed for him, but also reminded me of similar behavior of my own; he leaned back comfortably, settling in for a long chat, motioned to me to leave his plate on the table and not to take away his glass either.

In the kitchen I arranged the dirty dishes on the table next to the sink but didn't wash them
—I wasn't so permissive or magnanimous as to leave them completely to themselves—I could have gone to the bedroom, but didn't, and when I went back, they were still chatting, or more precisely, Pierre was talking for what seemed like a long time, with Melchior listening and smiling and absentmindedly picking crumbs off his plate and licking his fingers.

I opened the window and leaned out, not wanting to understand even the few French words I did catch, but letting him know I was there.

In this game, this ambitious linguistic game of his, in which he tried to raise part of his personality and shift it into a different identity, there was a subtle message for me, but after our conversation earlier that morning, my ears registered its subtleties in a new way.

The more he succeeded in adopting the cadences of the foreign language and losing the intonations and accents of his own, which had eaten themselves into his face, his lips, his throat, his posture, the further he moved from the ease with which one speaks in one's native tongue, which was natural, because one never speaks in perfect sentences or with flawless diction in one's own language but chatters away freely, obeying some strong inner purpose and personal sense of equilibrium, the perfection expressed being rather the innate one of a linguistic community, its infinitely broad yet inviolable consensus; in one's own language even a clumsy sentence includes the extremes of total abandon and strict constraint, freedom within the commonly accepted bondage, and in this sense there's no mistake or false intonation, can be no linguistic error, for every mistake or lapse or false turn is an allusion to something real, a mistake, a falseness; but with him it was different: the more imperfect and unnatural he became in this strange, mimicking perfection, the more perfectly he acted out the message that I, who knew him only in his native tongue and in the gestures and demeanor that were part of it, didn't really know him at all, that he was not to be identified with himself, because here he was, I could see for myself, capable at any moment of this kind of metamorphosis, and I shouldn't trust the person I thought I knew, he was two different persons with two different languages, who could choose at will between the two, so try as I might to pin down his emotions, or blackmail him with myself, and especially with Thea, it wouldn't work, a part of his soul would always be free, off limits to me, in a whole different world, a secret realm I couldn't even glimpse, there was no use being jealous, because if he didn't love this particular Frenchman, he must love the Frenchman within himself who was his real father and in whose language his own soul could and wanted to speak; I might look upon his life as a distant accident of history, but I was too dense to understand anything, didn't understand that this fatal physical and spiritual split was his real story, that over the German father he had to choose the French father killed by the Germans, his soul over his body, his body over his mother tongue, not only because that man was his real father
—who could possibly care about the sperm of an unknown man!—but because the justice of the story demanded it, he had to reject the German father whom he hadn't had a chance to know either, whom he loved, whose picture he would stare at for hours, whose name he carried, and who in a trench or in some snow-covered field had frozen to death.

And if up to that time even the moments of tension between us had been pleasant, this drawn-out telephone conversation excluding me in more ways than one managed to render them unpleasant; for a few more minutes I let my face be warmed by the feeble winter sun
—it had been receding since midmorning and was now only a thin strip of light on Melchior's eyes and hair and on the wall over his head—then I withdrew into the study, took out the blanket from under the pillow, lay down on the sofa, turned to the wall, and, like someone who has finally found rest and solace, wrapped myself in the soft blanket, for perhaps he was right: I didn't take his story quite seriously, and considered his undying hatred for Germans a form of self-hatred stemming from very different causes, just as he shut himself off from the heartrending story of my life, at times shedding real tears over it but in the end making the cold remark that he saw in it nothing but merely the personal, and of course in that sense moving, consequence of the final collapse of anarchistic, communistic, socialistic mass movements caught in the struggle between two superpowers, we were both unfortunate products of that same collapse, two odd mutants, he said, and laughed.

Slightly offended, I reminded him of the special aspects of Hungarian history, offended because of course nobody likes his entire existence to be seen as the symptom of a disease, even an aberration of European proportions, but all my arguments proved futile, he stuck to his guns and launched into a comprehensive geopolitical analysis in which he elaborated on his theory that the 1956 Hungarian uprising
—he said uprising, not revolution—was the first and most substantial symptom, one might even call it a turning point in contemporary European history, signaling the collapse and liquidation, the practical demise, of all traditionally motivated struggles, and while at the time the Hungarians appealed very heroically but just as foolishly to a traditional European ideal, that ideal, as it turned out, no longer existed, all that was left of it were a few slogans and a few Hungarian corpses.

Several thousand dead and executed people, I put in reproachfully, my own friend among them.

These ideals and principles, he continued as if he hadn't even heard me, had ceased to be viable with the end of World War II, except that Europe, ashamed at having been unable to defend itself but also euphoric in victory, failed to notice that at the Elbe River the soldiers of the two great powers were already representatives of two superpowers, embracing over the charred corpse of Hitler.