A Book of Memories (31 page)

I didn't defend myself, I didn't even notice when she stopped screaming, what's more, I didn't try to hold her down, and I restrained myself
—our relationship never had a more honest moment—I let her claw and bite and kick and scratch and tried to respond to her every move with the gentlest of touches, soft caresses and kisses that bounced off her, given the unevenness of the fight, just as her clumsy, broad-stroked, girlish punches missed me; still, I was the girl and she the boy, in this situation at least, in the way she glowered and bared her teeth and tensed her neck muscles; in the sudden silence that followed, only her loud panting, the groans of the mattress, and the thud of punches could be heard.

She tried to push me away, pressing her fist against my shoulder, off the divan, onto the floor, but when my hand clasped her naked thigh, it was as if her hate-filled resistance and raging fury had suddenly left, unexpectedly even to her, flowed out, evaporated from her limbs, and her body relaxed in an instant; as if seeing me for the first time in her life, she seemed genuinely surprised that I was so close to her and that she liked it; she opened her eyes wide again, no longer whitely insane but familiarly inquisitive.

She held her breath.

As though she was anxious not to let even her breath touch my mouth, not if we were this close, this hot.

The bare skin under my hand quivered a bit, as if she had just realized my hand was there.

And how could my hand have gotten there?

Then she burst into tears again.

As if the closeness and the warmth had brought on the tears, but now there was real pain behind them, a quiet, I'd even say wise, pain.

A pain that had no hope of finding relief in the heat of another outburst, and indeed never turned into a real cry comparable to the earlier one, but remained a quiet whimper.

Still, this voice touched me more deeply than the earlier voices, and I somehow caught it from her: a long-drawn-out whine did leave my throat though my cry could not burst forth but only choked me, because in my chest and in my thighs a firm and eager but also paralyzing force, preventing total yielding or weakening, was pushing, thrusting me toward her; if before I had assumed or suspected she was foisting a nonexistent, imaginary pain on her body, using it to deceive and distract me so that she could obtain my surrender, I now realized this assumption was unfounded, because something was causing her real pain
—I was the cause of her pain, the fact that she loved me as well.

I edged closer to her, and rather than objecting to this she helped me by slipping her arm under my shoulder, gently hugging me to herself, and simply to return the gesture I let my hand slide up her thigh, my fingers slip under her panties.

And we lay there like this.

Her burning face on my shoulder.

We seemed to be lolling in some spacious, soft and slippery wetness where one doesn't know how time passes but it's of no importance anyway.

With my arms I was rocking her body as if wanting to rock both of us to sleep.

With my little sister, too, I used to lie like this, in a time beyond memory, under the desk, when I was experimenting with those pins and she, looking for a place to hide and finding it with me, screamed in pain and terror as she flung herself on me, as if by entrusting her pitiful, twisted, and by all appearances disgusting body to me, she was trying to say she'd understood my cruel games and was even grateful to me, since I was the only one who, through those games, had found a language she could use; that's how my sister and I kept rocking each other, half-sitting, half-lying on the cool parquet floor, until we fell asleep in each other's arms in the late-afternoon twilight.

"One day you'll realize you've been tormenting me for no good reason," she whispered later, her trembling lips almost touching my ear, "because you never believe me, but there's nobody I love as much as I love you, nobody."

She sounded like that other voice, out of that long-ago afternoon, straight out of the body of my little sister, a shrill but lilting voice, tickling my ears; it felt as though I was hugging my little sister's formless body, knowing it was slender Maja I was holding.

In the meantime, she kept buzzing and bubbling in my ear, gratefully, softly, unstoppably.

"Like yesterday, I told him he could bully all he wanted, you were my number-one love and not him, I told him straight out; I told him you were good and kind, and not mean like them, and I know he's doing it with me just so he could tell Krisztián about it, I told him he's definitely number two."

She stopped for a moment, as if she didn't dare come out with it, but then, like a whiff of hot air, assailed my ear: "But you are my baby, and I love to play with you so much! and you mustn't be mad when I pretend to be in love with him. He interests me in some ways, yes, but it's all a game, I'm only using him to tease you, but there's nobody, nobody I love as much as you, believe me, certainly not him, because he's a brute beast and not nice to me at all. Sometimes we could make believe you're my son. I often thought I'd like to have a little boy just like you; I can't imagine him any other way but as a sweet, kind, innocent, blond-haired little boy."

She fell silent again, her gushing coming up against real emotions.

"But you can be a bastard, too, you know, and that's why I cry all the time, because you want to know everything and won't let me have my own little secrets, even though you and I have the greatest, the biggest secret of all, and you can't possibly think I'd ever betray you, because that secret is more important to me than anything else, and will be forever. But you keep secrets from me, too; don't you think I know that it's not Livia you're after but Hédi, and that you don't give a shit about me?"

Nothing changed, we kept rocking and swaying, but something urged me to let myself be seduced completely by this voice; it seemed that I was no longer rocking her, but that she was rocking me with her voice, lulling me, and I had to keep us on the threshold of sleep.

"Now you can tell me about it," I said in a loud voice, trying to rouse myself from the pleasant torpor.

"What?" she asked just as loud.

"What you two did yesterday evening."

"You mean night."

"Night?"

"Yes, night."

"Are you going to lie to me again?"

"Well, almost night, late in the evening, very late."

It sounded like the beginning of another digression, which interested me as much as the story itself, but she didn't continue, and I stopped rocking her.

"Tell me."

But she didn't reply, and somehow even her body fell silent in my arms.

Melchior s Room under the Eaves

With soft lively steps he moved about the large room like someone going through very familiar motions, each step he took making the all-white, ostentatiously white, floorboards creak slightly, his pointed black shoes looking especially worn and battered on this startlingly white floor and on the thick, deep-red rug; he seemed to be preparing an unfamiliar secret ritual or initiation ceremony; rattling a box of matches, he began to light candles and with a politeness bordering on stiff formality offered me a comfortable-looking armchair
—would I care to sit?—there was a hint of intrusiveness in these unnecessarily elaborate preparations, his scrupulous politeness notwithstanding, as though he were making it all too clear that he wanted the time we were about to spend together to be exceptionally pleasant and comfortable and with his movements was making me a virtual part of his little plan, as he threw off his jacket, loosened his tie, undid the top buttons of his shirt, and, looking thoughtfully around the room to see what else needed to be done, unself-consciously scratched his chest hair, enjoying himself as though I weren't even there; then he walked through the pretty arched doorway into the entrance hall and fiddled with something there, which mystified me even further, after which soft sounds of classical music swam into the room from concealed speakers, but I didn't want to yield to this fastidiously yet crudely staged atmosphere and chose to remain standing.

He came back to turn off the overhead light, and that surprised me
—in fact, to be honest, since I took it as too hasty an allusion to something we were still anxious to hide, even from ourselves—frightened me, though by then candles were burning in sconces and candlesticks and we weren't in sudden darkness, at least thirty tall tapers making the room both churchlike and reminiscent of wartime blackouts, and he drew together the heavy red brocade curtain, its fleur-de-lis pattern glimmering gold in the candlelight, the rich ruffled fabric covering the entire height of the wall from floor to ceiling.

He enjoyed his movements, and because his limbs were long and slim
— long arms, long fingers, long thighs in rather tight slacks—his movements were not ungainly; he touched objects with a sensual, even voluptuous pleasure, as if in coming into contact with them even these routine gestures caused him a kind of elemental joy, yet in making this subtle, over-subtle play for objects, suggesting cozy intimacy, he seemed to have me in mind as well, as if he had to prove something not only to himself but to me, trying to demonstrate—surely the game was not without purpose— how one could and should live pleasurably in this place, what rhythms were required by these surroundings, to show me in minute detail that this rhythm was as much his own as were the objects themselves; but for all the openness and genuine amiability his moves implied, I sensed a certain tense anxiety, and not only because the less-than-perfect ease of this shameless exhibitionism had a hint of obtrusive familiarity in it, but also because behind the exhibitionist's easy self-assurance, superior air, and secret delight, I couldn't help noticing a certain touchy tentativeness, as if he were watching me from the protected forward position of his superiority, trying to see whether I was really interested in the intimate tokens of trust he was offering me, whether he mightn't have made a mistake.

And because I felt this avid, persistent, selfish curiosity in every move he made, however harmonious and confident, however much offered as a revealing confession, his unspoken question was not unjustified, because I did act like someone who couldn't care less about his elaborate show, who'd rather remain within the reliable boundaries of conventional etiquette and did not even note the secret meaning of his gestures; I was so uninterested in him that I would have liked just to close my eyes so as not to see him open up like this and lay himself bare in hopes of a like response, but he, accurately gauging the nature and extent of my fears, was willing to neutralize the signals with other gestures
—in short, was ready to retreat.

But by then we were too far gone, to say nothing of what had led up to this meeting, and an actual retreat was clearly out of the question, for my original mistake was to come up here in the first place and let him stand before me and smile his infinitely trustworthy smile, steady and untroubled, not begging for but offering trust and confidence, its fluttery surface made more sensitively responsive by hidden tentativeness, an all-pervasive smile; it was there in the vertical creases of his lips, in his eyes, but truly inside them somehow, on his smooth forehead, as a shadow in the corner of his mouth, and of course in the ingratiating dimples of his cheeks; so I could not close my eyes, if only because I felt acutely that if I were to do so, or even allow my lashes to droop the least little bit, I'd betray the feeling I'd harbored almost from the very first moment we met, and that would certainly contradict the stiffish posture, a result of my feigned indifference, with which I tried to hide, neutralize, force into the accepted moral order my unequivocal and rapturous attraction to his mouth, his eyes, his smile, the soft depth of his voice, his playfully buoyant walk
—he walked as though he were flaunting it: Look, this is how I walk! he seemed to be saying—how was I to curb and discipline my senses, and thereby keep his movements, too, within bounds? no doubt it was foolish, absurd, to hope that in this situation, in this repellently rather than attractively interesting room, the coy game between sense and sensuality might be checked by some inner discipline; I tried desperately to steer my attention out of the trap of his smile to other things, to focus on the room, hoped to divert my attention by looking for other reference points and, by understanding the connection between them, perhaps I could rescue my mind, now very much at the mercy of my body; but meanwhile, I made the unpleasant discovery that my mouth and eyes had involuntarily borrowed his smile; I was smiling back at him with his own smile, his own eyes; I hadn't closed my eyes, yet I became one with him; minutes went by like this, and no matter what I did or tried to do, I was being carried in the direction he chose to steer us; and I knew that if I allowed this to continue and let his smile freeze on my lips, if I couldn't get it unstuck somehow, I'd soon lose what we call the right to self-determination—if only his all-too-knowing, accommodating, yet indecently high-handed determination hadn't bothered me so much!—my only means of escape would have been to find a clever excuse, say goodbye and get out of there, just leave, but then why was I so willing to come up in the first place? or maybe I should just walk out the door without saying a word? but there was no clever excuse for parting, simply couldn't have been, since we both took care to keep the smooth veneer of conventional social intercourse in this perfectly ordinary situation: two young men facing each other, after one of them had invited the other up for a drink; who could find anything objectionable in that? their mutual attraction, stronger than their bashfulness, was slightly embarrassing, but during the course of a serious conversation, when they'd let the power of their instincts manifest itself as abstract thought, the embarrassment would surely disappear, if only this smooth veneer weren't so transparent! as it was, attempts at distraction only enhanced the sense of intimacy, which I both welcomed and tried to avoid and which our mutual tactfulness—I wouldn't offend him and he wouldn't go too far—also strengthened, everything did, and in the end, however ill at ease I may have felt, all my eager concessions and self-deceptions, my glossing over things, my embarrassment, conspicuous stiffness, and forbearance simply boomeranged.