A Book of Memories (90 page)

This was neither the frugality of someone trying to deny himself all but the tiniest delights nor a sensualist's wallowing in pleasure; this was Melchior's tendency
—doubtless the result of a puritan upbringing—to reflect on things very carefully, and continually to modify his goals as well as the means by which to achieve them; he wanted to be part of every occurrence, never to allow things just to happen to him, to be fully conscious of them, to give meaning and emphasis to his own existence every step of the way, to transcend the here and now with his reflections and ideas, to grasp and hold on to existence itself.

When I was with Thea, anything could happen, which also meant that nothing ever happened, though of course some things did, whereas with Melchior I had the feeling that whatever happened had to happen just that way, every occurrence was the right one, but it also seemed as though it had been decided beforehand what these occurrences might be.

I don't know what sentence or minor turning point in my story struck a chord in him, but his body, tense from uneasy attention, moved as if suddenly he had found my head resting on his lap uncomfortable; nothing changed, he did not loosen his muscles or reach out to touch me, he maintained his disciplined composure, but something intensely disquieting lay behind his restrained calm.

When telling someone about one's life, it's not at all unusual to find similar situations in the other's life, even if, in the intimacy of sharing, our story may appear unique; the reason we tell each other stories in the first place is that we are sure the same story is there, lying dormant in our listener.

And no matter how mature and content with his present a person may be, no matter how complete and foolproof his isolation from his own past may seem, upon hearing such an apparently unique story he cannot resist: his own similar stories will come to life and demand to be heard, as if he himself had exclaimed, gesticulating like a child, Hey, I've got one of those! and that joyful discovery of kinship is what makes two people in conversation keep cutting into each other's words.

If we view these stories, submerged in the events of our lives, from another, broader perspective, if we consider telling them as activities indispensable to maintaining our mental health, we could also say that in finding them to be common, even in just the telling of them, we measure the weight and validity of our experiences, and in the similarities appearing in these shared and jointly measured experiences we may find some regularity bordering on prescribed rules; so, telling stories, relating and exchanging events in our lives, any kind of storytelling
—whether it's gossiping, reporting a crime, spinning a yarn while having a drink, or gabbing with neighbors on the front stoop—is nothing more than the most common method of ethical regulation of human behavior; to feel my kinship with others I must tell about my uniqueness, and conversely, in kinship and similarities I must find the differences that set me apart from everyone else.

There was a girl, he said, cutting me off with the kind of impoliteness that is mitigated by the relevance of the comment, I probably remember the house where his violin teacher lived, he pointed it out to me, well, this girl lived across the street; he no longer remembered how the thing had started, but after a while he noticed that the girl knew exactly when he would arrive for his lesson, because at just that moment she would appear in her window and stay until the lesson was over.

She watched him in an odd pose, or at least it seemed odd to him then, leaning against the window frame with her outturned palms and her tummy, and pulling her shoulders up she rocked back and forth very slowly; he always positioned himself so his teacher wouldn't notice their little game.

I had the feeling that a tremendous weight shifted in his body as he spoke, and when after a short pause he took a puff on his cigarette I could see in the brightening glow his self-conscious reticence giving way to a lighthearted tenderness, with which he was yielding to his memories.

And as he spoke, I also thought of his odd-sounding poems, not that in his poems he didn't show the ability for sudden shifts, soaring bravely then plunging to the depths; if anything, he must have been frightened by the force of these abrupt shifts, by the sharpness of his vision, because he'd hurl himself into a linguistic realm so burdened with abstract concepts that neither his past nor his present could appear there in plain, undisguised form; the weight or rarefied air of abstract thinking stifled the language that might have expressed anything simple or based on raw sensual experiences.

She was a beautiful girl, he went on after a pause, or at least he thought so at the time; since then she'd put on a lot of weight and had two awful children; anyway, she was about his height, which for a girl was pretty tall, and when he had a chance to take a closer look, he noticed that her hair, tied in a ponytail at the top of her head, began as blond fuzz around her forehead; and when he thought about her once in a great while, it was always this blond fuzz he saw; she had a strong, well-shaped forehead; her name was Marion.

He finished his cigarette, threw it on the ground, and to crush it with his shoe had to lift my head, but he lifted it as if it were a strange, troublesome object; I had to sit up.

I must excuse him for interrupting me, he said, he really didn't have anything more to say, it was cold, let's move on; and I should continue my own story, his wasn't important at all, he didn't even know why he'd thought of it.

On the way home not a word was said; we were listening to the sound of our footsteps.

Back in the apartment all the lights were on, just as we had left them.

It was very late, and we both pretended that by being busy, doing routine little things, we could bring to a close this useless day.

While he was undressing in the bedroom, I cleared off the remnants of our dinner; when I got to the kitchen with the dishes, he was standing naked by the sink, brushing his teeth.

In the yellow lamplight his body looked pale, colorless, his loins were like a curious bunch of curls, his shoulder blades an exaggerated protrusion; framed sharply by his bony pelvis, his stomach appeared sunken, and his long thighs were thinner than they should have been, that is to say, out of proportion to the rest of his body, at least when measured against some ideal male physique; he looked frail and forlorn next to my still clothed body, though he would have looked just as frail to me even if I, too, had had no clothes on, for he seemed so remote, standing there with his naked body as if he were not present at all, not even in his own body, and I seemed to be observing, from the sympathetic and neutral distance of brotherly feeling for human frailty and fallibility, a body I was otherwise crazy about.

As usual, the window was open; walls and rooftops seemed jammed together in the darkness of the night; from the lit-up stairwell anyone could have looked in, but this never bothered him.

Taking the toothbrush out of his mouth he glanced back at me, and with his mouth still foamy with toothpaste he said he'd sleep on the sofa.

Later, in the dead silence of the bedroom, I found I couldn't take this unexplained silence of his; tossing and turning I couldn't fall asleep; I went over to him and thought I'd lie down next to him if he was already sleeping.

In the dark I asked him if he was asleep.

No, he wasn't.

The drawn curtains let in no light.

The darkness was neither inviting nor forbidding; I found the edge of the sofa and sat down; he didn't move.

He didn't seem to be breathing.

I used my hands to take a look at his body; he was lying on his back, his arms comfortably folded on his chest.

I placed my hand on his folded arms, nothing more, just the weight of my hand.

Maybe you're right, he said in the dark.

I didn't understand, or rather didn't dare understand, and pushing my voice only to the edge of audibility I asked, Right about what?

Then he suddenly moved, pulled out his arm from under my hand, sat up, and switched on the reading lamp.

The wall lamp with its silk shade illuminated him from above, highlighting the deep-toned, irregularly knotted Oriental rug that framed the sofa.

He thrust his back against the rug, the blanket slid down to his belly; he again folded his arms over his chest, and with his chin lowered he seemed to be looking up, although he was looking straight at me, our eyes at the same level.

The warm glow of the lamp shone through and whitened his unruly blond curls, stretched shadows across his face; the shadows drifted over his muscular chest, forming spots on his arms and on the white bedding.

He looked beautiful, as beautiful as a portrait of a pensive young man who for some mysterious reason has been stripped to the waist and who is contemplating himself rather than the world around him.

A portrait in which everything is balanced in the extreme: light is answered by lovely shadows, blond curls by dark chest hair, light skin by a dark background, the fiery colors of the background by the stark white and cool blue of the eyes, the gentle slope of the shoulder by the firm horizontals of the folded arms; it was beauty one can accept without understanding it.

We looked at each other the way an experienced doctor might look at a patient, with a deep, calm look, checking the face for possible signs of possible symptoms but betraying no emotion in the process.

I felt we were reaching a very deep and very dark point in our rambling exploration of each other's self; for weeks I had hovered over the most sensitive regions of his life, and now I had reached my goal; I had challenged him and he, against his better judgment, took up the challenge; but in this murky region he dug in his heels with such energy that it was as if he were plotting some terrible revenge, which is why it didn't bother me that I was sitting naked at the edge of the sofa, the awkwardness of my naked body and my defenselessness, I hoped, protecting me from a possible revenge.

This music teacher, he said after a few moments of silence, and his voice, rising out of the deep warmth that had been meant for me a short while before, became dry, cool, and detached, as it he intended to talk about someone other than himself; on his face there was no trace of the tender inwardness with which he'd started this story only an hour before, he wasn't talking to me or to himself, it was an image that was talking, someone who could handle himself the way a scientist handles a dead but preserved insect, sticking it on a pin and placing it in his collection, in its phylogenetically and morphologically proper location, but with the pin playing a greater role in the activity than the insect itself or its taxonomic place.

He was first violinist in the theater orchestra, just like his real, his French father, whom he knew nothing about at the time; the man was a mediocre musician and an even worse teacher, but in the local circumstances he was the best, and after the well-meaning and dignified Frau Gudrun, his previous teacher, a real relief; it was as if a magic door had opened for him and he had stepped from the den of a musical spinster into the hallowed halls of art; the teacher was a cultured, well-educated man, well-informed, sophisticated, well-traveled, almost a man of the world; he swam, played tennis, had valuable contacts which he knew how to cultivate without being at all pushy, making it seem that he was doing a favor to others, a confirmed bachelor and a famously gracious host, everyone who was anyone in town, or those who came to perform in town, considered it their pleasant duty to stop by his house, it became almost
de rigueur
to get a quick taste of his unselfish kindness, to bask in his bonhomie and in his sparkling wittiness, which was validated by genuine suffering; for above all, he was a good person, about the way Richard III would have been good if in those good old days of the interwar years he had decided not to be a villain but resolved instead to be infinitely, unbelievably good, for it was all the same, being good or evil; with his goodness he could tease a sweet melody out of the most horrid march.

And Melchior did not mean this as his afterthoughts; he was trying to recall exactly how he had felt at that time.

It was in those days that he first saw that play, most likely in a poor production; for him it seemed a monstrous, scarifying tale of evil, because they put a huge, pointy hump on Richard's back, two humps in fact, he seemed to be carrying two uneven mountain peaks under his coat; and he didn't just limp, his legs were twisted from the hip and he shoved and thrust them out in front of him, wincing with pain and yelping like a dog with every step he took; of course this was a slightly exaggerated directorial idea, for pain doesn't necessarily lead to evil, but it was effective all the same; in any case, his teacher always reminded him of that actor; his eyes seemed to play tricks on him, because he saw his teacher as a very handsome and attractive old man, though he was about forty-five at the time, slender, relatively tall, pleasant-smelling, with a dark complexion and bright dark eyes, but his long, mane-like hair, carefully swept back like an artist's, was almost completely white, the kind of white that children expect old men to have.

When he got carried away while holding forth on some of his theories, his hair would part in the middle and fall into his face, and then he'd smooth it back with artistic little gestures of his hand, for he could never get so carried away as to give up creating the impression that everything was just fine, and why wouldn't it be? these theoretical discussions, often lasting for hours, were fascinating, farsighted, passionate; the critical products of an analytical mind are always moving and inspiring, but when the time came for actual exercises, when something he knew had to be conveyed, when he actually had to show how to play something, to point out what was right or what was wrong, then, behind his magnanimous wisdom there appeared envy, an inexplicable animal selfishness, a fit of possessiveness, and even more than that: mockery, gloating, a miserly grin, as if he had possessed one of life's treasures so rare that its essence couldn't be penetrated; and he wouldn't part with it, he savored it, and he took pleasure in watching his pupil's frustration; moreover, he rationalized his behavior by stating flatly that there was no such thing as technique, he didn't have one, nobody did! and whoever said he did was no artist but merely a technician, so there was no point trying so hard; one had to teach oneself to develop one's own particular technique, though that, provided this self-education was successful, was no longer mere technique but a sense of existence wrested from and projected back into matter itself; it was the very essence of things, the utmost essence, the instinct of sheer self-preservation.