A Book of Memories (72 page)

With our guffaw we transformed into sounds the coarseness and violence inherent in joy, especially in shared joy, a form of communication which, transmuted by humor, promised a more powerful pleasure than the prospect of consummating the act
—and one always grabs for the larger chunk of pleasure, or at least tries to, so I roughly pulled him to myself, and he just as roughly pushed me away; like two crazed animals, we began fighting on the couch.

In reality there's no such thing as perfect symmetry or total sameness; a transitional balance between dissimilarities is the most we can hope for; although our scuffle wasn't at all serious, it did not turn into an embrace, for the same reason that he had pushed me away: up to that point, wishing to keep up the pretense of perfect symmetry, I had accepted the less comfortable position so he could rest comfortably in my arms, but that was like telling him he was the weaker one, which, in turn, was like telling him he wasn't as much of a man as he'd like me to believe, forgetting for the moment that letting him have the better position gave me much more pleasure; yet precisely because there is no perfect symmetry, only a striving for it, there can be no gesture without the need for another to complete it.

The fight turned into a real one; though we both tried to keep it playful, it became increasingly rough, and it boiled down to a question of who could push, shove, squeeze, or throw the other off the couch, gaining a decisive and incontestable victory. The blanket got caught between us and then must have slipped off; naked and sweaty, we kept pummeling each other as much as the cramped space would allow; laughing when we started, we slowly turned silent, only now and then emitting what we imagined to be battle cries, trying to threaten each other with the sound of certain victory at any moment; we tumbled over each other, biting and scratching, thrusting our legs against the wall, straining against slippery skin, against shoving and twisting hands; the couch creaked, the springs moaned and groaned, and in all probability he was as happy as I to see that in this struggle for victory all the real pain we had caused and all the hostility we had felt toward each other rose to the surface out of some hitherto unseen netherworld.

Our bodies, which only moments earlier had given such symmetrical and palpable proof of their desire for each other, now found
—without our noticing the change or the moral dangers hidden in it—a different kind of occupation, just as elementary and passionate, and this change completely transformed our feelings, turned them inside out, I might say: my muscles and bones, without the tenderness of desire, were now communicating with his muscles and bones in the language of violent emotions.

Until with a huge thud I wound up on the floor.

I tried to pull him down with me, but he punched me in the face, and then, pushing against my face, worked himself back up on the couch.

He was on his knees, grinning down at me; we were both panting, and then, since neither of us knew what to do with our respective victory or defeat, he suddenly flipped over and lay on his back, and I also lay on my back, on the soft carpet; in the sudden silence we kept breathing, waiting for the panting to subside.

As I lay there with my arms spread wide, and he lay up there also breathing hard, with his arms spread wide, he let his hand hang down, maybe inviting me to touch it; I didn't, I let it hang right in my face, that's what made it nice, the lack of touch, this little gap that could be closed at any time; it seemed to me I had seen the ceiling before, the way the late-afternoon light, broken into three separate strips by the arched doorway, was chasing the shadows cast by the swaying branches outside; I had seen this dead hand before, twisted on its wrist; incredibly, everything happening now seemed to have already happened to me here once before.

At the time I neither found nor looked for an explanation, though the image was not so far from my feelings that I couldn't have reached it, but sometimes the mind, keeper of all memories, does not provide the place of a stored item, only hints at it; for some reason the mind would not call the desired item by its name, and it's very considerate of the mind to be in no hurry to spoil an otherwise enjoyable situation by clearly identifying secret data relevant to it.

Perhaps if I had reached out and held his hand.

For twice in a row, as if compelled to free himself of some deathly anxiety, some choking, harrowing pain or insane joy, he let out a howl so powerful it made his whole body contract, as if all his strength were being forced into his chest and throat, he roared, he bellowed himself into the silence of the room, which hit me as unexpectedly as any blow or grace of fate would; long seconds must have passed while, unable to move or to help, I watched the agony of the large, prostrate male body: the truth is, I thought he was playing, still fooling around; his hand was still hanging down, his eyes were open, glazed over, staring into space, and his feet were flexed.

Now he rose slightly; his chest, filled with air, heaved and quivered, the heaving and quivering coursing through his whole body and then rippling back; I saw he wanted to scream a third time, perhaps hoping to expel what he'd failed to eject twice before, because if he couldn't, his heart would break.

Maybe the reason I couldn't move or help was that he looked beautiful.

And not only was he unable to scream the trapped air out, but all the oxygen seemed to have been used up by his lungs, now swollen to bursting, and no fresh air could enter them; to keep from choking, his body tried to straighten out, jump up, run off, or maybe just sit up, but without enough oxygen it had no strength, only reflex motions seemed to be at work, struggling with themselves, until the straining muscles finally squeezed out a sound, high-pitched but clearly coming from a great depth, a whimper, a broken, breathless whimper that grew longer and stronger as he managed to take in more air.

Shaking, looking ugly, racked by bursts of loud sobs, he wept in my arms.

We do well to praise the wise inventiveness of our mother tongue when it speaks of pain as something ripping open; language knows everything about us; yes, we do make caustic remarks, our hair does stand on end, and the heart does break; in these set phrases language condenses thousands of years of human experience, knows for us what we don't know or don't want to acknowledge; with my fingers, with my palm on his back, I did feel that something inside, in the hollows of his body, really had ripped open, as if the membrane of a mucous organ had been slashed through.

My fingers, my palm could see into the living darkness of his body.

Something ripped open with each new burst of his sobbing, and still there was more to be ripped open.

Years were ripping out from under the membrane of time.

In a half-sitting position he leaned toward me as, perched on the edge of the couch, I clumsily pulled him to me, and with his forehead on my shoulder, the hot waves of his sobs flowed down my chest, his nose was pressed to my collarbone, and his lips, wet with snot and saliva, were clinging to my skin, and of course I whispered all sorts of tender nonsense into his ear, trying to calm and console him, and then did just the opposite: sensing not only that my body could give no strength to his but that any show of so-called selfless love would only divert or stifle the pain that had to come out, I told him to cry, yes, he simply had to cry, and with my voice as well as with my enervated body I tried to help him cry.

How ridiculous all our intellectual babble had been.

For the first time I could feel what I already knew, that behind his cool sobriety he was clinging to me with all his might, in the brief pauses between sobs his lips were glued to my skin, his pain turning this contact into bites, though he meant them to be kisses, and for the first time I could feel that there was almost nothing I could give him; with this realization I was actually brushing his hands off me, which he felt was only natural but in turn made me want to try the impossible.

By the time he'd calmed down a little and the pauses of his childish sniveling had grown longer between the fits of sobbing, an aging little boy's face was sitting atop his mature man's body.

I laid him down, tucked him in, wiped off his smudged face, including the snot
—this was a face of his I didn't want to see—sat at the edge of the couch, holding his hand, doing what the stronger one is supposed to do, and even enjoyed a little the illusion of being the stronger one, and when he calmed down completely, I picked our clothes off the floor and closed the window.

Like a very sick child who feels the caring presence of his mother, he dozed off and then fell into a deep sleep.

I sat in his chair, at his desk, where in the growing darkness my pen lay untouchable on top of my notes on a performance; I kept staring out the window; by the time he began to stir and opened his eyes, it was completely dark.

The tile stove in the meantime warmed up the room again; both of us were depressed, and quiet.

I didn't turn on the light; my hands found his head in the dark and I said we could go for a walk if he felt like it.

He said he didn't feel like it at all, and didn't know what it was that had happened earlier; what he'd really like to do was go to sleep for the night, but we could go for a walk.

This city in the middle of a well-kept park which is Europe
—to continue and amend with my own impressions his fascinating line of thinking—struck me more as a unique memorial to irremediable destruction than a real, living city, as a frighteningly well-preserved ruin of romantic park architecture, because a truly living city is never the mere fossil of an unclarified past but a surging flow, continually abandoning the stony bed of tradition, solidifying and then flowing on, rolling over decades and centuries, from the past into the future, a continuum of hardened thrusts and ceaseless pulses unaware of its ultimate goal, yet it's this irrepressible, insatiable vitality, often wasteful and avaricious, destructive yet creative, that we call, approvingly or disapprovingly, the inner nature or spirituality of a city's existence; but this city, or at least the sector of it I had come to know, showed none of these alluring urban characteristics, neither preserved nor continued its past, at best patched it up, sterilized it out of necessity or, worse, obliterated it, ashamed; it had become a place to live in, a shelter, a night lodging, a vast bedroom, and consequently by eight in the evening was completely deserted, its windows darkened; from behind the drawn curtains only the bluish flickering of TV screens reached the street, the puny light of that small window through which its residents could glimpse another, more lively world across the Wall; as far as I could tell, people preferred programs coming from the other side, thus isolating themselves from the locale of their own existence much as Melchior did or tried to do, and for understandable reasons preferred to peek into that other, improbable and titillating world than take a look at themselves.

And if at such a late hour, or later, in the dead of night, we descended from our fifth-floor nest to the lifeless streets below, our echoing footsteps made us feel our loneliness, isolation, and infinite interdependence more acutely than we did in the apartment, where behind locked doors we could still pretend we lived in a real city and not on top of a heap of stones declared to be a war memorial.

Some more advanced mammals, like cats, foxes, dogs, wolves, and the like, use their urine and excrement to mark out territory they consider their own, which they then protect and rule as their homeland; other less developed and less aggressive animals like mice, moles, ants, rats, hard-shelled insects, and lizards prefer to move about on beaten tracks, in ruts and burrows: we were more like the latter group, compelled by the almost biological conditioning of our cultures, by our reverence for tradition, and by our upbringing, which could be labeled bourgeois; we flaunted our finicky tastes, our penchant for refinement, and, with a hesitant intellectual relish rooted in our affinity for fin-de-siècle decadence, chose only those routes that in this city could still be considered appropriate for a leisurely old-fashioned walk.

When one's freedom of movement is restricted, then in the very interest of maintaining the appearance of personal freedom one is compelled
—in keeping with one's needs—to impose further restrictions on oneself within the larger restrictive limits.

In our evening or nighttime walks we made sure never to wander into the new residential areas, where we would have come face-to-face with the palpable form of the coercive principle that lacked all notion of human individuality and that considered people, quite pragmatically, beasts of burden and, mindful only of the bare necessities of rest, procreation, and child care, packed them into grim concrete boxes
—No, not that way! we'd cry, and choose routes where one could still see, feel, smell something of the city's ravaged, continually deteriorating, patched-up, blackened, disintegrating individuality.

I might say that we took our walks through the stage set of individuality's Europe-size tragedy, though in the end we could choose only between the bleak and the bleaker
—that was the extent of our freedom.

For instance, if we walked down Prenzlauer Allee, an empty streetcar would clatter past now and then, or we might see a Trabant chugging along, its two-stroke engine belching noxious little fumes
—and of course Prenzlauer Allee was a tree-lined avenue, an
allée
in name only
—after a good half-hour stroll we'd come to an empty lot as big as a city block, riddled with bomb craters and overgrown with weeds and shrubs, going around which we'd turn into Ostsee Strasse or, better yet, Pistorius Strasse farther up, and pass the old churchyard of the parish named after St. George, and after another twenty minutes through various winding side streets, we'd reach Weissensee, or White Lake.

This small lake in whose murky, polluted water sluggish swans with filthy feathers and attentive wild ducks swam after crumbs thrown by passersby, was surrounded by a cluster of trees, the remains of a formal garden of an elegant summer palace that used to stand there, replaced now by a nondescript beer hall.