A Book of Memories (51 page)

What was I laughing at, he asked, looking at me with his transparent blue eyes; what's so funny? he repeated somewhat louder, now he'd get it from his mother, it was a fine glazed jug.

A glazed jug, yet! reveling in the liberating effect of spoiling and destruction, I had to laugh even harder, and precisely because you don't know what you're doing but are free in that you're doing it unknowingly and unintentionally, I had to do something more: my joy was so intense that laughter alone didn't suffice, and his mere existence, the sparkle of his blond, brushlike lashes, could only increase the pleasure of my laughter, now bordering on hysteria, and still this wasn't enough; letting indecency run amok, I needed to draw Kálmán into the merriment, to share my pleasure with him, not to mention that at that moment laughing for me was but kissing Krisztián on the mouth; so as I was rolling around the ground next to the dead mouse, laughing even at my own laughter, I suddenly grabbed his feet, which surprised him so much he toppled onto me.

That was it: the joking, the laughter, the kissing, the joy of unforeseen revenge all ended when, still falling, he seized my neck with both hands and Krisztián's mark vanished from his face without a trace, and although I quickly locked my arms around his back and arched my body to throw him off with one heave, my laughter had obviously released a current of obstinate and implacable hatred in him so powerful that I had neither the strength nor the skill to subdue it, and I realized, with the last spark of rational thought in me, that I'd have to resort to more treacherous, baser tactics, though to do so right away would have been shameful
—first I'd have to struggle, display courage and resourcefulness, flaunt my manhood, abide by the allegedly civilized rules of properly declared hostilities; but I couldn't shake him; he was squeezing my neck so hard that the sound of the wind began to fade, darkness was descending on me, like a red rainfall, his body was becoming unbearably heavy; I gasped and choked, and I got angry, but what was that compared to the raging hatred directed not only at me or my laughter but also at Krisztián—I could clearly sense this even at the moment when he fell on me—for humiliating him so; his innocent, good-natured, patient, considerate self went haywire, he wanted to choke me! get back at me for the injury received from Krisztián and take revenge on me for Maja, too; no, there was nothing funny about this, he meant to stifle me, to knock the laughter out of me for good, along with Krisztián and Maja; he pressed down on me with every ounce of his body, which was both an advantage and a disadvantage: I couldn't kick him in the balls, couldn't move my legs or move him, but for a moment I could catch my breath, and that loosened his grip on my neck, and I tried to use that favorable moment to break the stranglehold by yanking my head out of his hands, so I began knocking my forehead against his head; the two skulls collided with terrific force—a whole shower of stars—and I couldn't capitalize on the advantage of my desperate counterattack because I was dazed and in pain, and I missed my chance: he still had me pinned down, and to incapacitate my head, he struck my face with his elbow; all I could do was jerk my head sideways; I felt my nose begin to bleed, and my open mouth was touching the dead mouse! do criminal statistics include records of children murdering other children? but I'm sure he wanted to kill me—no, I'd better qualify that, he didn't want to, I don't think he wanted to do anything just then, for raw fighting instincts had displaced will, intention, and premeditation— and if I hadn't felt the dead mouse on my lips, the limp little body all but dangling into my mouth! if this humiliation, which took the fight out of the realm of the usual daily horseplay, hadn't mobilized the deepest, most artful cunning—when, sensing complete physical defeat, one is ready to try anything, seek the most desperate solutions—I'm sure he would have killed me, I don't know how, maybe choking me or bashing in my head with a stone, though that wasn't the uppermost question in my mind at the moment, I had no question at all, there was nothing, everything we might call the controlled function of the conscious mind had vanished, dissolved in the haze of the battle; in a split second, in a flash, the prank, the childish swagger, the game of rivalry and provocation had turned into a life-and-death struggle, an extreme situation in which the mind can summon the body's untapped resources precisely by rejecting all means of moral control as unnecessary, throwing off all restraint, no longer wondering whether what is possible is also acceptable, considering the body's capabilities no longer from the standpoint of conventional moral order, as a supervisor might, but only and exclusively from that of its own survival: in a sense, that's a matchless vantage point, God looks the other way at such moments, a wonderful lookout point for the memoirist, even if the inevitable lapses in conscious functioning keep us from remembering specific decisions, specific questions, and answers from our inner dialogue, and we can recall only random images and chaotic feelings, for in that state the mind has no purpose other than to preserve the body and therefore has no will either, so what is left is a bare shape which, being unaware of itself, is not even our own; more precisely, we are no longer in control of it, and it is making decisions about and for us; it's no accident that poets so delight in singing of the connection between love and death, for never do we experience our body's autonomy so purely as when we fight for our lives or in the moment of love's consummation, when we experience our body in its most primeval form, with no history, no creator, obeying no law of gravity, without contour, able to see itself in no mirror, having no need for any of this, becoming a single, explosive dot of pure light in the infinity of our inner darkness; so I wouldn't want to give the impression that at that moment I was thinking about what I was doing; no, it is only now, out of the shards of pure sensation preserved by memory, that I am trying to assemble this pretty little series of actions—which also happens to reveal some of the dark spots of my character, and of course I realize that as soon as I say dark spots I am exercising the memoirist's inevitable moral judgment, nothing but the moral distortion of the story, after the fact, similar in nature to the way we view great wars in retrospect, ennobling what is ignoble, adding the moral requisites of courage and cowardice, honesty and treachery, steadfastness and dereliction, but then, it is our only chance to retrieve the amoral period of a state of emergency, tame it, refit it into the humdrum morality of our placid daily life; if in my pain I had closed my mouth, I'd have bitten into the mouse, with the blood from my nose dripping on the tiny body, and the possibility of this must have struck him as so bizarre, so repulsive, yet also so sobering that for a fraction of a second he relaxed his grip: there was something odd about this momentary relief, maybe a touch of uncertainty, but it held out no promise of escape, merely opened a crack through which the soul could witness the total defeat of the body; no, in this very short interval I did not think of Maja, although being defeated by Kálmán might also mean I'd be at a hopeless disadvantage with her; when you taste defeat, when the soul is in flight, you grasp at the very thing you had abandoned, which in this case was laughter, and I simply had to laugh, more freely and brazenly than before, but silently, and out of this bubbling, frantic laughter, which mocked his murderous intent, his victory, his strength, and made me feel his skin and the warmth of his bare body, directly out of this perfidious and hideous laughter flowed the movement of my hands: I tickled him, and the joy of seeing his reaction caused me really to bite down on the dead mouse, at the same time as Kálmán grabbed my head with both hands and began banging it against the ground, which didn't bother me, because the treachery of the soul had handed me the key to the situation: I kept laughing and tickling him, I was retching and spitting, he could have held my hand down only by rolling off me, which would have robbed him of his victory, but he couldn't take the tickling; he banged my head hard four times, very quickly, I felt as if a sharp stone had torn into my skull, and then he began to howl; I tickled him and he howled, how he howled! starting out as a cry of victory, exploding out of the deadly force pent up in him, and now feeding on itself, then at its loudest, at the peak of his triumph passing over into a whimpery laugh; his skin, his twitching body, his very flesh tried to repel this laugh, but the howling had become a kind of defense mechanism: on the one hand he tried to scare me with it, and on the other he hoped it would help him get over the unwanted laughter, but as he tried to evade my tickling fingers and abruptly arched his body over me, I was able to complete the move begun but thwarted earlier: I managed to get up, thrusting out my hip and kicking against the ground at the same time, while he, enervated by the tickling, giggled and whimpered and let himself be turned over, and we kept on turning over and over, screaming, laughing, clinging to each other; tugging and pushing each other we rolled off the trail and into the bushes, and by then his dog had turned up, greatly excited, barking and snapping at us, and that definitely determined the kind of outcome our fight would have.

And then I started running, rejoicing in the elemental pleasure of running, with the wind against my body, heading straight for the thicket, and he quickly took off after me; I knew he mustn't catch me, for although my running, my having to flee from him, was an admission of his victory, it was also a way of striking back, of getting even; with his dog running after us, the race was turning into a game, a reconciliation, a mutual acceptance of a tie in the contest; and then, like a young male animal fresh from a successful struggle for his female, exhilarated by my victorious escape and enjoying the swiftness of my body as I bobbed and weaved among the trees and ducked the lashing branches, the resiliency that gives running the sense of freedom, delighting in the sudden twists and changes of direction, I did think of Maja, saw her running, fleeing from Szidónia across their garden and down the slope; it must have been our laughter, the inner similarity of the image, that made me think of her, and I felt as if I were Maja because my tactics, my stratagems were not those of a boy, and there was Kálmán, tramping, clattering, panting right on my heels, the dry twigs cracking under our feet, the branches and leaves swishing, brushing, flying against our bodies; he couldn't catch me, though; I quickened my pace, wanted him to feel my superiority in the increasing gap between us; and that's how we reached the clearing at whose farther edge, but still under the trees, the boys had set up their tent.

When I suddenly stopped and turned back toward him, he was shaking, not laughing at all; his face was pale, which gave his tanned skin a strange, blotchy look; he was trembling all over, and we were both out of breath, panting into each other's face; I wiped my nose with my fist and was surprised to see it bloody; I reached back to find that blood from my ear had trickled down my neck, but I was too excited to pay any attention to that now, and I saw that he was excited, too, although we looked into each other's eyes with seeming indifference.

I knew he knew what was afoot, I could sense it while we were still running; we understood each other.

Seeing the blood made him a bit uneasy, scared even, but by wiping my fist on my pants I showed him that this was of no importance, I didn't care, and it shouldn't bother him either.

It was a good thing that because of the wind they couldn't hear us running; I motioned to Kálmán that we should hide behind a bush and he should do something about his dog; from the thicket we watched them in silence.

The dog kept watching us, not understanding the reason for this sudden stop; there was a danger that it might give us away with its movements or bark at us in its disappointment.

And the only way this thing could work was if they remained completely unsuspecting.

The tall grass of the clearing was undulating in bright, shiny waves.

If everything stayed the way it was.

Krisztián was standing at the lower edge of the clearing, holding a long, leafy branch in his hand and working on it with his characteristic intense concentration and flippant elegance; he was using a bone-handled knife, a veritable dagger he was very proud of, for it allegedly used to be his father's; he was stripping the branch of its leaves, probably making it into a skewer. Not far from him, Prém was sitting up in a tree, saying something to him that we couldn't make out because of the strong wind.

Sounded like something about bringing more planks.

But Krisztián didn't answer, he'd only look up absentmindedly from time to time, letting Prém go on, holding the branch away from his body and aiming at the spots where in tiny nubs the leaves join the branches, flicking his blade to make the leaves drop off.

It occurred to me that I had never before seen them alone like this, although from their hints, casual remarks, and vague allusions I knew they were inseparable; but no matter how closely I had watched them or tried to figure them out, everything between them remained a secret, their hints and allusions expressive of an intriguing collusion; it seemed that there was them and then there was the rest of the world, or rather another world, completely separate and inconsequential, peopled with dull, inferior strangers; and if anyone tried to get close to them, they'd accommodate the intruder for a while, like two ballplayers perfectly attuned to each other's thoughts and intentions, playing politely and graciously, if only to keep themselves amused; their shared life, thus hidden from others, may have been the source of their self-assurance and sense of superiority; one had to assume that theirs was the true life, the splendid real life we all long for, which remained and had to remain hidden, since they were its sole keepers.

How I longed for him, how grievously he was hurting me; I wanted him to be mine, or at least mine, too; I fantasized about that life and about being a part of it.

Their tent stood under the trees; I saw a blue bucket lying on its side, a shovel stuck into the ground with its handle rising straight up, a woodpile prepared for the evening camphre, tall grass swaying gently in the wind, and farther away, the red spot of a blanket spread on the ground; and Krisztián, standing on the lower part of the clearing, slapping at his back, probably shooing away a pesky fly, and Prém sitting in the tree
— there was something so ethereally calm and serene in this picture as to suggest a secret, mysterious message, but I hoped to discover even more exciting secrets about them.