A Book of Memories (100 page)

The old man was a disabled veteran of the First World War who managed to retain his robust physique, despite his handicap; he had a booming voice, and his pockmarked nose was a blazing red from steady drinking. Though he was nearly seventy, his hair was just beginning to turn gray, and he still worked as a night watchman at the waterworks, where he also lived with his roly-poly wife in a basement flat. This grandmother had a habit of sending telegrams to her grandson: I am making pancakes today. Come for Strudel tomorrow. If I said it was these visits, this environment, that cemented and sustained our friendship, I wouldn't be far from the truth. If too long a time elapsed without anything happening, I'd ask him: Are we having apple fritters? To which he would respond: No, apple pie. Or he'd simply turn to me and say: Apricot dumplings. And all I had to ask was when. We developed a whole language of our own that no one else could understand. And it had to do with more than just delicious food.

In those days I got very excited about machines, things mechanical, anything moving, not to mention making things and setting them in motion, and nothing could satisfy these interests more than what I found at the waterworks. But my friend's enthusiasm was roused exclusively by my unquenchable curiosity. He must have known that with the promise of a visit he had an emotional hold over me and could even bribe me. All he'd have to say is nut roll, and I'd forget everything else and be off and running. The shop stewards, soberly dressed in shirt and tie, even their apprentices in their undershirts, were as inexhaustibly patient as I was infinitely curious. They showed and explained everything to us. It must have been tremendously gratifying for them to realize that in the final analysis most questions can actually be answered. The general overhauls were the most exciting times at the plant. On these occasions extra help was hired from the neighboring villages. Girls and women in rubber boots and hitched-up skirts got busy scrubbing and scraping the tiled walls of the emptied water tanks; greasy-faced men and pimply-faced shop boys cleaned and repaired the disassembled machines. There was a lot of laughter, horseplay, telling of coarse jokes, teasing, and pawing. As if they were all participants in some ancient ritual. They kept inflaming themselves and each other, men doing it to men, women to women, men to women, and women to men, as if this stimulation had as much to do with the work at hand as with something very different, something into which we, two young boys, had not yet been initiated. It was like some strange work song. To be able to do justice to their daytime labor, they had to sing out of themselves their nocturnal lyrics. But the two of us could wander about freely in the fascinating, outsize engine rooms built at the turn of the century, and in the pristine park planted around the giant wells, in the echoing halls of the storage tanks where everything was so spotless, so sparkling clean, we never dared do anything but stand and quietly watch the water level rise and fall, the surface remaining strangely motionless.

He has nothing to say in his manuscript about this very early, almost idyllic period of our friendship. I confess I first found this conspicuous omission so insulting I felt myself blushing every time I thought of it. For more than once we spent the night there, with the two of us sleeping in his grandparents' onion-smelling kitchen on a rather narrow cot. I once read in an ethnographic study that when in the cold of winter children of poor Gypsies cuddle up with each other on the straw-covered floor, their parents make sure that boys lie next to boys and girls next to girls. I don't think that this clinging brotherly warmth, which later my friend desperately pursued all his life, was something he intended to forget.

I remember that on hot summer days his grandfather would unlatch his wooden leg, and slapping the horrible stump staring out of his cotton shorts, he'd begin extolling the advantages of an artificial leg. For one thing, it doesn't stink. No bunions, ever. If it creaks, he oils it. Can't do that with a real one. And another thing: the leg will never be hit by gout, that's for sure. At worst, woodworms would get to it. There was only one thing he was sorry about. Booze made him feel nice and tingly all over. Including his asshole. Only the leg didn't join in with the rest of him.

As for me, I selected two dead soldiers out of all my ancestors, which included small-town tradesmen, humble peasants of the Great Hungarian Plain, headstrong Calvinist schoolteachers, newly rich mill owners, and sawyers turned industrial entrepreneurs. The two soldiers were my father and my maternal grandfather. And that's how we became a military family. Because soldiers were different. Besides those two, there were no other professional soldiers in our family. What is more, I couldn't have had any memory of either of them.

Of my father we had few photographs, of my grandfather quite a lot. One of my favorite activities as a child was to study these pictures.

Today, in the family stories that grew up around the figure of my grandfather, it would be all but impossible to separate the exaggerations from the real events that serve as the bases for them. But I believe that the special light radiating from him, intensified a thousandfold by a return glow, had to do not only with his outstanding abilities, his interrupted
— and therefore considered to be very promising—career, but also, most probably, with his physical attractiveness. Slapping me affectionately on the thigh or kissing me on the cheek, my older relatives would tell me, a satisfied twinkle in their eyes, that I would never be quite as handsome as my grandfather. But my mother would always say, in a playfully captious though no less pride-filled voice, that at least in appearance I took after Grandfather; she was only sorry I wasn't quite as bright. But both statements were seductive enough for me to start believing that this resemblance was important; I had the feeling I was following in somebody's footsteps, and I also had the desire to measure up to this somebody. Somebody who in a sense was myself, although I had no way of judging whether or not my efforts in this direction were to my advantage.

We had a big magnifying glass in the house, the kind used by map-makers. It had belonged to Grandfather and came to us after his death. With this magnifying glass I examined the various photographic likenesses dating from different periods of his life. It may be that I have no feel for aesthetics, but one thing is certain: I could almost never see as beautiful what others called beautiful. So it's no wonder that, as opposed to my friend's general outlook, a landscape, object, or person said to be beautiful might give me food for thought but in no way would excite me. The reason I spent so much time with my grandfather's portraits was that I realized that what others considered attractive in me evoked highly unpleasant thoughts. If two lines are parallel to each other, they meet in infinity. Two that are not parallel can meet here, right before my very nose. The person I resemble most I can meet only at some hypothetical point, but one who is different I can meet anywhere, anytime. Looking at my grandfather's face made me seek not the validity of the two complementary principles familiar to me but that of a third one. I found his face and his build almost repugnant, even though my instincts told me that we were very much alike. It was mostly his eyes that frightened me; his look made me shudder.

I haven't held the photographs of my grandfather in my hand for at least twenty-five years.

Was it true? Did introspection evoke such fear, horror, and revulsion in me, hurling me toward dangerous inner conflicts in which I could no longer control my will to serve my own interests? Or did I resemble him so much that the very resemblance made him repugnant? Could I have been thinking about the short distance separating the living and the dead, and about our hypothetical meeting? Was it, therefore, the faintheartedness with which I viewed myself that tormented me and kept me from appreciating beauty? I don't feel qualified to answer these questions. Or rather to answer them I'd have to think and talk about certain details of my life that wouldn't be to my liking.

The experiences of nearly forty years have convinced me that psychological reticence has its existential advantages. At the same time, ever since my friend's death I've been curious to see whether I could reach a self-knowledge similar to his, but without letting myself be destroyed in the process, as he was, and also without becoming dishonest.

I'm at the threshold of abstraction, and stretching my sense of modesty to its limit when I divulge, in the interest of shedding a brighter light on this whole question, that women who may otherwise rate me as a very good lover in every sense of the word sometimes, in the midst of love-making, driven by frenzied desire, try to violate my lips with theirs. And when I silently deny them this pleasure, they often urgently ask why. Why don't you let me? Because I don't want to. That's what I usually say. If I answer at all with words. I admit my conduct may seem arbitrary, but for me this silent denial is as deeply instinctive as it may be for someone else to resort to a kiss, silently, instead of words. I don't feel the need to reduce the gains of my personal and racial survival instincts at the expense of maintaining my personality's independence. With a kiss I'd lose my control over myself and my lover. A less than conscious force would take over, one I could never fully trust.

And if I were to classify women's reaction to this singular foible, if I asked how seemingly very different people respond to having no gratification for a basic emotional need, which I personally find almost beside the point, then, based on my experience, I would differentiate among three types of behavior.

The first is the nervous, fragile, excitable, soulful, and sentimental adolescent type that is quick to take offense and is forever passionately in love; this type withdraws at once, indignantly, breaks down, starts hitting me with her fists and yelling that she knew it, she knew it, she knew I wanted only one thing from her, she calls me a liar and threatens to jump out of the window this minute. I should love her. But no one can love another if it means doing violence to himself. Still, calming women of this type or gratifying them tempestuously is not very difficult. If I can rape them at the height of their hysteria, if I choose the right moment to attack, then everything turns out all right between us. They are masochists waiting for the kind of sadistic animal that of course I am not. Their orgasm is brief, sharp, fitful, and they experience it not at the peak they strive for but on a far lower, rougher ground. These women I like the least. The second type is given to quiet submission. If they trust my body's tyranny, then their otherwise delay-prone pleasure tends to increase, slowly passing through ever higher peaks, until they reach a climax that shakes the very foundation of their being, and its effects last until the next climax. It's as if every inhibition overcome propels them toward new heights of pleasure, and though pleasure persists, inhibition pulls them back, so ultimately it isn't pleasure alone that dominates them. The process is more like pleasure having to run a stressful obstacle race. These are retiring, unpretentious girls, unhappy over their plain looks, carefully avoiding calling attention to themselves, and made somewhat wily by the charmingly merciless infighting so rampant among women. And even if they don't have faith in my masculine dominance, they pretend nothing is amiss. This is when they are most submissive and show complete devotion. And when it becomes clear that this won't help either, because I respond to their devotion not with gratitude, as they do, but with increased alertness and even more careful precision, then they display their tender humility even more openly. They have an ulterior motive for this: to offset my lack of devotion with their all-too-yielding lips, hoping to cajole mine to respond in kind.

By making their mouth my body's most humble slave. And as a consequence, these tedious little affairs end then and there. I feel the greatest pity for this type, but in practice I am most pitiless with them. It is the third type I feel closest to. These women are usually heftier, more solid. They are the large ones, cheerful, proud, passionate, stubborn, and fickle. Our preparations are sluggish. The way lumbering beasts circle and size each other up. Our meeting is devoid of emotional complication. Yet the boisterous crescendo of our pleasure is often checked by the frontal clash of two aggressive natures. At such moments, briefly, the din of battle ominously abates. These spacious and luminous plateaus of stopped time are very precious to me. And they keep occurring, capriciously, unpredictably, putting to the test all my sober attempts to control my impulses, creating the impression that we want not to reach a single peak but to scale a seemingly endless mountain range. It seems as if I've reached a plateau where the vegetation is sparse. And this is not merely a rest stop, a way station where one eats, drinks, gathers new strength. It is when reaching these plateaus that these women feel the lack of something. Or a thirst I cannot slake. Realizing in a flash what has happened, they try to save the day by concentrating their overwhelming and now recoiling passion on my mouth. For they have no intention of losing out just because I happen to have this odd quirk. Coming up against my cold intransigence, they seem to be saying: Oh no? Then here, take this! They want what's coming to them, and I can't say I blame them. And in this new situation I can afford to humble myself a little, if only because the game gives me some pleasure, too, and not merely because I know that now it's not their lips I have to touch, but also because, in a few moments, in the throes of their punishing, vindictive game, they will lose all self-control anyway, and with pleasure multiplied and shared, I can be myself again. And that is how their void is filled with my excess. Like me, they are realists, too. They know that the equilibrium needed for life is achieved not by reaching for an ideal but by using whatever comes to hand. In our resourcefulness we are accomplices, comrades. We thumb our noses at the world's ideals, and always feel sorry for those who are still trying for them. I am grateful to these women. And they are grateful to me for not having to conceal their blatant selfishness in front of me. I could do without them, of course, because experience tells me there is no irreplaceable need in this world, yet I'd say they keep me alive.