A Book of Memories (95 page)

Rushing to act, with lips dry and rough, eager and wild, we fell on each other as if in that fraction of a moment we wanted to make up for all the meaningless wasted time that was now behind us, all the time we had not spent together; in great haste we had to get around all the blind alleys and detours of our mutual attraction and aversion, we had to prevent any separation again; at the same time it seemed that all our previous detours now gained meaning precisely from this dry and hasty eagerness, as if we had to keep avoiding each other so that now, with all the obligatory pretense and falseness behind us, passion could be real passion, and dryness could be the parched longing for each other, a desert in which the only drink would be the other's mouth; and when lips met lips the encounter should take a new turn, one of tenderness, of leisurely, melting softness; and though each tiny dry crack could still be felt, let the joy of discovery relieve the tension and allow the separate streams of the saliva of anticipation to flow into each other.

Our tongues delivered, and out of each other's mouth we drank the fluid our lips needed.

Our arms followed suit in a spontaneous move to squeeze and hold tight.

With both hands she gripped the back of my head as if she wanted to stuff it all into her mouth, swallow it whole
—how she used to make fun of just such things!—while I slipped my arms under her open coat and drew her close; this move was still the trickery of self-conscious thinking; as if we were trying, with fitful groping and exaggerated squeezes and holds, to avoid experiencing how closed our bodies still were; as is often the case, the energy spent on avoidance made us sense all the stronger what it was that we ought to be avoiding.

The mouth itself, however, made no attempt to avoid the unpleasant feeling of the body's frustrating confinement; the lips' parched desire for one another was so intense as to preclude all but the mutual quenching of their thirst; for the mouths there was nothing to avoid with their craving, with their irresistible coming together when, in the joyful moment of finding each other, their saliva of anticipation mingled and lubricated the two surfaces, the better to slip into and slide over each other, thus foreshadowing the possibility of even greater pleasure ahead, and, ignoring the grips and holds of the hands, alluded to the climactic moment of mutual gratification that every tension-racked body strives for.

For a fraction of a second, even the tips of our tongues cleaved together, and the feeling beyond joy found in this firmness, like a foretaste of what was to come, flooded our bodies, obliterating all selfish designs and willfulness; yielding to the heat that can relax the muscles and fill the blood vessels under the skin, both of us shuddering and enervated, we stepped across the protective layer of outer surfaces.

In the interior landscape opened up by a kiss everything is sharply visible yet suspended in a mutable state; nothing resembles the external landscape our eyes are used to.

It is a feeling of being in an empty space; of course, one tries involuntarily to define one's place in it, and relative to one's position there is up and down, and background and foreground can also be distinguished; the background is generally dark or a blurred gray; there are no palpable landmarks, no forms familiar from dreams or reveries, only spots, flashes, and glimmers that, being in an empty space, appear to be flat rather than round, and they seem to follow a geometrical pattern as they separate from and then blend into the soft, probably infinite background of existence.

It's as though every sensation had its geometrical equivalent, and in these forms and shapes, in these visual codes, I could recognize another person's emotions and sensory capacities, needs and peculiarities, for in this interior landscape the boundary between me and the Other is blurred, the two merge, yet the feeling remains that the Other is the empty space and I a single spot or shape or streak in it.

She is the space and I am a restlessly but not impatiently moving configuration in it, ready to adapt myself to her space.

I am the space and she is a restlessly but not impatiently moving configuration in it, ready to adapt herself to my space.

Her promise is my promise.

And this promise, made to each other's body, we did honor, quite recklessly, a few days later.

The Nights of Our Secret Delight

I would have said no and no, and again no, if someone at that moment, in the words of the ancient philosopher, had called life a rushing river, insisting that nothing could ever be repeated, the water was always different, and you couldn't dip your hand in the same river twice; what was is already gone, and replacing the old was something new, itself becoming old instantly, and then new again.

If it were really so, if we could experience the irresistible rush of the new unaffected by anything else, if the old did not cast its shadow on the new, our life would be one ceaseless wonder; every moment between day and night, between birth and death, would be a thrilling miracle; we couldn't distinguish between pain and pleasure, hot and cold, sweet and sour; there would be no boundaries, no borderlines between our most extreme sensations, because there would be no in between, and thus we'd have no word for the moment, no division between day and night, and out of the wet warmth of our mother's womb we wouldn't come wailing into this cold, dry world; and in death we'd only crumble like stones scorched by the sun and lashed by icy rain, for there would be no slow decay, and no dread, and no language either, for words can name only recurring phenomena; in the absence of recurrence we wouldn't have what we like to call intelligent discourse, only the divine gift, the ineffable joy, of permanent impermanence.

And even if it were so, for as children we all felt the urge, in a darkening room, to catch time at its word, to really understand just when, at what precise point, day turned into night; in the invisible and vanishing dimness we did try to grasp and hold on to the apparently simple meaning of words, so even if we did make ourselves believe that there were no boundaries, no division between day and night, even then, after a time, yes, after a time, slipping off the hard wall of divinely permanent impermanence and running back to the softer realm of human thought, we'd have to concede that it is night, even though we couldn't tell just when it got dark; the eyes perceive the difference but never the dividing line, and maybe there is no such thing at all; yet it is night, because it is dark, it is night because it isn't day, just as it happened yesterday and the day before, and we fall asleep in the reassuring yet disappointing knowledge that soon it will be light again.

The sense of the permanent and the sense of the eternal may be part of our divine inheritance, yet I feel that it's just the other way around: our human senses and the emotions stemming from them are too crude not to feel the familiarly old in everything new, not to sense the future in the present, not to discover in every new physical experience a story already known to our body.

Although not in a divine manner, time does seem to stop at such moments; it's as if our foot did not step into a rushing river but trod desperately on some sinking, soft marsh, trying to stay on the surface of deadly boring repetitions, which nevertheless appear to be the single most acceptable proof of life, until our foot loses the battle and quite literally tramples itself to death.

But far be it from me to affect philosophical airs; the only reason I mention all this is to give some idea of an especially overwrought emotional state in which things appear startlingly new and at the same time stiflingly familiar; I found myself in just such a curious state at the end of my two-month stay in Heiligendamm, as I was standing by the handsome white desk in my room
—no, it's no mistake, I had stood and sat in such a state before, in my robe, unshaven, unwashed, waiting for some fateful judgment; now, however, prompted by the coolly inquisitive and somewhat watery eyes of a police inspector, I began to read my fiancée's letter, and even if the situation were not so strikingly similar yet different, even if I hadn't felt those commanding eyes on me, eyes that could read a criminal's mind, her opening line would still have stunned me or, more precisely, would have deepened my astonishment in this wakeful state of bewilderment.

My darling, my dearest, my one and only, wrote my bride, using words she had never used before, the unusual address falling like fiery slaps on my face and, along with the sudden rush of awful memories, making me dizzy; it took all my self-control to keep my head straight on my neck; and as I scanned the rest of the letter, I felt hot perspiration inundating my whole body under the robe; with my hands trembling, I slipped the letter back into the envelope, and to steady myself I grasped the back of a tall armchair, though what I really wanted to do was to flee.

To escape, away from the chaos of my life! which was impossible, of course, if only because of the presence of my strange visitor, to say nothing of the fact that one can never satisfy the animal urge to escape, since from the chaos of one's soul there is no place to escape to.

The reason this worthy officer of the law was standing there by the terrace door, and the reason I so readily complied with his audacious request that I open the freshly arrived letter in his presence, was that that very morning the young manservant, Hans Baader, with a single stroke of a razor had slit the throat of the young Swedish gentleman to whom I had been introduced the day after my arrival, at the luncheon table, in highly unusual circumstances, almost at the very moment Count Stollberg's death was announced; with his throat slit, the young Swede was lying in his own blood on the floor of the neighboring suite; police officials who rode over from Bad Doberan located the murderer in the pitch-dark coal cellar, where, evidently unhinged by his own deed, he was huddling and screaming frantically; within half an hour these same officials shed light on the intimate relationship that had developed between Gyllenborg, myself, and Fräulein Stollberg, and on Gyllenborg's and my special attachment to the young manservant himself; with my courteous and obliging behavior, not completely devoid of a certain condescending haughtiness, I intended to dispel the suspicion that I could have had anything to do with this sordid affair that led to murder.

I thanked my good fortune and my stubbornness for not appearing in those ravishingly beautiful photographs, taken by poor Gyllenborg, that showed the young countess partially clad and the valet completely nude
— photographs that might at any moment come into the hands of policemen who were just then rummaging through his belongings—even though my ill-fated friend had repeatedly asked me to pose, indeed beseeched me piteously, with tears in his eyes, saying that a triad was needed: next to the rough-hewn robustness of the valet's body, my own more delicate angularity, so that, as he put it, "these two extreme poles of health would flank what is so alluringly ill."

I was able to reject categorically all allegations, couched in polite, convoluted legal phrases, according to which my relationship with the valet and Fräulein Stollberg was reprehensibly intimate and my knowledge of the motives behind the crime a virtual certainty; but there was not a shred of evidence that could be used against me; in point of fact, during the two months of our friendship, as if all along anticipating a possible discovery, I always used the terrace door to reach Gyllenborg's room, converted of late into a studio, just as Father, twenty years earlier, in pursuit of his nocturnal secret delights, used to slip into Fräulein Wohlgast's room; consequently, no one could have witnessed my afternoon or nighttime visits there; without making much of a fuss, or even being especially cautious, I characterized the allegations as slander, pure and simple, and with a nonchalant shrug of my shoulders assured the inspector that I had absolutely no idea whether the murdered gentleman carried on any intimate liaisons with the persons in question.

It is true, I added, that I wasn't a close enough friend of the victim to have knowledge of the more intimate aspects of his private life, but I knew him to be a man of taste and breeding for whom it would have been unthinkable
—howsoever he may have been inclined to behave—to enter into such a dubious relationship with a mere servant; I played the innocent, almost to the point of idiocy, but I had to be sure to avoid the dreadful snare, for, the valet not being of age, I could have been charged not only with indulging in perverse sexual acts but also with corrupting a minor; to give my professed naïveté some psychological support, I lowered my voice to a confidential whisper, shrugged my shoulders again, and asked the inspector whether he had had a chance to see Fräulein Stollberg's hands without gloves.

The inspector's unblinking eyes were staring at me steadfastly, and they were the strangest pair of eyes I have ever seen: light and transparent, cold and with almost no color, a curious transition between vaguely blue and hazily gray; the two eyeballs were large and, because of some weakness or chronic ailment perhaps, constantly swimming in a bowl of tears, and this made it appear as if all his ostensibly plainspoken, unassuming questions, as well as my supposedly innocent replies, had filled him with profound sadness, as if everything had pained him
—the crime committed, the lies, even the hidden truths—and all the while his face, and the eyeballs themselves, remained totally impassive and cold.

Using only his eyes, the inspector now indicated that he did not understand my remark and would be grateful for an explanation.

Naturally enough, I assumed that Fräulein Stollberg would not betray me, would hold her peace, perhaps even deny everything, although she herself was somewhat implicated by the photographs Gyllenborg had left behind.

The inspector's silent request prompted me to remain silent myself, and I proceeded to show on my own hand how Fräulein Stollberg's fingers were fused together; that is why she had to wear gloves all the time; like hooves they were, I finally said.