A Book of Memories

The Year of Funerals

I couldn't cry; the last time I cried was about a year and a half earlier at my mother's funeral, when the frozen clumps of earth began raining down on the coffin, knocking and rumbling, echoing inside it, and I felt the rumbling in my brain, in my stomach, in my heart, the dreadful noise knocking apart an inner peace of the body I hadn't even known before, making me aware — abruptly, with no warning — of the misery of my physical existence.

And if up to then no crying, emotional upheaval, fear, joy, or shock could touch this darkly unconscious inner peace, from then on everything seemed to function as it turned inside out: colors, shapes, surfaces, and textures that could be described as beautiful or ugly simply lost their meaning, yet the stomach went on digesting with nervous spasms when food was shoved into it; the heart beat cautiously, as if looking out for itself, to pump the blood through the veins; intestines grumbled reluctantly, stinking as they twisted with irritation; urine stung the skin it issued from; with each breath the raw pain of having a body wanted to escape the lungs but couldn't, and remained within; and this anxiety— for no physical function could expel the soul's oh so profound pains— made me hear my own breathing, which sounded as if any minute I might gasp my last breath; I was nauseated by my own physical existence, yet every nerve in my body was trying to gauge what was happening inside me, or what else might happen, though outwardly I remained calm, impassive, nearly indifferent to everything around me, and of course I couldn't cry, either.

From time to time, however, something did break to the surface, like phlegm coughed up, and each time this happened I hoped that the warmth of the tears would take me back to the radiant oblivion of childhood, where the gentle strength of an embracing arm can offer consolation; but it was that very thing, that embracing warmth, that was missing, and what forced itself through from time to time was not crying but bursts of cold, wrenching shivers that no one would have noticed had anyone cared to watch me, because they passed quickly and with scarcely an external sign.

Actually, I was playacting, even finding pleasure in my new role; it pleased me that I was burdening no one with complaints about my physical and mental anguish.

On the afternoon about which I'd like to speak, now that I'm nearing the end of my story, I was lolling in bed and aware — if it's possible to describe the state of fatal anticipation with such an intimate word — of silence, a silence in which one feels the total absence of grace; that's the kind of silence that pervaded the house as the cloudy December twilight was descending, softly, heavily; considering the state I was in, this was the most welcome time of the day, since light repulsed me at least as much as did the sensations of my own body or darkness itself, and only the dimness of dusk promised relief; all the doors were wide open, no one had turned on the lights anywhere in this suddenly alien house where, because of the coal shortage, the radiators were only lukewarm, and now and again Aunt Klára's powerful voice reached me from the distant dining room, as she kept up her unrelenting dialogue with Grandmother's silence, which had become more or less permanent: the day Father took my little sister away from her and put her in an institution somewhere near Debrecen, Grandmother had stopped talking; although I could not make out the faraway words, not that I was listening especially, my ears did register this curious, one-way, emotional pulsation that, in another sense, seemed to echo my mother's voice, as if something of hers had lived on, something familiar and vaguely reassuring.

This was the twenty-eighth day of December in the year 1956; the reason I remember so clearly is that the next day, the twenty-ninth of December, was the day we buried Father.

When the doorbell rang for the second time, I heard footsteps, the door opening, and muffled words; a short while later, not to make it too obvious that I didn't care who might be coming or what else might happen that day, I sat up in bed; Hédi Szán was standing in the doorway.

If I wanted to be more accurate, I'd have to say that an awkward creature with arms much too long dangling at her side was standing there, a human form in the dimness reflecting off white walls, a little girl dressed as a woman, a frightened child who bore little resemblance to the beautiful, captivating, grown-up, womanly Hédi I had once known.

She stood there in her mother's fur-collared coat, an ancient coat fished out of mothballs, but everything she had on looked wrong, and she appeared to be exhausted, in need of sleep; her hair — that luxuriant, beguiling golden mane that used to flow and bounce with every step she took, its thick strands rippling with her slightest move, that fragrant forest I so enjoyed sinking my fingers into — was now hanging down like a piece of strange fabric, a limp and colorless frame for her face; her skin was chapped by the cold, she seemed to shiver with fright, looking as if she had got into a predicament against her will; perhaps she was very much like everyone else in those days.

But I wasn't really interested in her loss of beauty, the beauty she perhaps never possessed, or in her coat; it was the look in her eyes that hurt so much, seeing her so frightened and unsmiling; I smiled at her so she wouldn't see my own pain; it was her helpless empathy that hurt, that pathetic attempt learned from adults to wade into other people's suffering without feeling the suffering itself.

I felt my whole being recoil from her in protest and dread, because I knew why she had come.

Still, there was one calming aspect of her appearance, rather appropriate to the circumstances: she was wearing hiking boots and thick socks folded down at the ankles.

She said hello and I must have done the same, though I remember only my forced smile, because I wanted to give her one of those bright, carefree smiles that used to be ours, to smile at her as if nothing had happened and nothing could happen so long as we both had this smile; we took a few steps toward each other, then stopped, hesitated; it seemed odd and repulsive to both of us to meet this way, in roles that made us remember, and remind one another, of all that had happened; there had been too many tragedies, too many deaths; to get over the hard part, I laughed and said it was really nice of her to come, after all, we hadn't seen each other since my mother's funeral.

My laugh seemed to increase her fright and she must have taken my words as a reproach; her big eyes welled with tears — who knows how long those tears had been in the making! and to hold them in, and also to keep me from rebuking her further, she threw back her head defiantly, her hair flowing through the air almost as in the old days; no, that's not the reason she had come, she hadn't lost her mind completely yet, she didn't want to hurt me, there was nothing she could say to me, anyway, she just came to say goodbye to us — that's how she said it: to us — because there was a fairly promising opportunity the next morning: someone had agreed for a reasonable price to take them as far as the border town of Sopron, and there they would see, she said, and shrugged her shoulders; she had gone to Livia and to the Hűvöses, and at Livia's nobody was at home, so if I saw her I should tell her — well, just what to tell her? — on second thought, just tell her that she was here and that she left! and since she had come through the woods, she thought she'd drop by Kálmán's, too; then she fell silent and waited for me, her eyes pleading, imploring me to make her believe the unbelievable, and quickly, too, because there was a curfew and she had to get home.

And then she couldn't stop talking, and forcing her tears back, she rambled on about the situation, explaining things in great detail — but about the important thing, the one thing that touched us both most deeply, she said not a word, almost as if trying to protect us; still, she changed, was transformed back to her old self, not beautiful, but strong, which may have been what we had thought of as beautiful in her before.

Yes, I said.

I had to utter this dry, unemphatic yes without a confirming nod, while looking straight into her eyes so she couldn't get away from it, though I felt how cruel it was, even savagely pleasant, to tear someone's foolish hope to shreds, a hope that can't deal with unalterable certainties, cruel even when the other person knows all too well that the yes can never become a no, that it will forever remain a humiliating yes.

There was no need for us to elaborate on this yes; she told me the bare essential — they were leaving the country — and from this terse announcement, which I must say didn't affect me all that much, I also grasped that owing to some possibly tragic occurrence not all three but only two of them were leaving; she used the plural, but without the usual rancor or peevish, childish spite; my ears missed the intonation that used to refer to her mother's lover, who had come between mother and daughter; we didn't have much time, but regarding the lover the possibilities were clear: either he had died or was lying wounded somewhere or maybe had left the country himself or been arrested, because if he had disappeared from their lives for other, personal reasons, the hatred for him would have been there in her voice, and the two women setting out by themselves, entrusting the lover to the care of impersonal history, for me became as much a part of the realm of insensitive yeses as everything Hédi had been able to learn in the past few hours about my own fortunes, and about Kálmán's death, had become for her.

In other words, my yes meant I knew she knew everything she needed to know about Kálmán and about me, there was nothing I needed to add, just as she didn't have to elaborate on her story, for she must have known I knew all I needed to know.

Wide-eyed — no, with eyes opened wide — we looked at each other, or more precisely, we weren't looking at each other but in each other's eyes we were staring at that mutually understood, impersonal, volatile, and for some reason profoundly shameful yes, which could only allude to death and to the countless dead, perhaps in each other's eyes we were looking at the shame of the survivors, the facts that needed no explanation yet were inexplicably irrevocable, looking in each other's eyes as if we needed to gain time, despite our fretful haste, enough time for the glint of disgrace to fade from our open eyes, but fade into what, where to? into talk, clarification, recollections, and explanations? but what was there to recollect or explain if in the moment of saying goodbye we couldn't have a common future and there was nothing to be salvaged from our common past? and if neither of us could even cry, how could we possibly reach out and touch in a truly human way?

So we remained silent, not because we didn't have anything to say, but because the indescribable number of things that needed to be said became incommunicable in our shared despair and shame at our hopelessness; only by severing the bonds of mutual understanding could we escape the shame of our common fate and make an effort to forget.

That living taciturnity became our common future; for her it lay where she was fleeing to, for me here, where I was staying, a not very significant difference; our features were locked into themselves, self-protective and tactfully hiding their own pain, and our eyes, which even in their indifference were caressing and soothing one another, despite their understanding were now forbidden to find the common ground that glances can share; this was going to be our new bond: the will to end it all, even though we were still alive! all this we still had in common, in spite of everything, and we knew we did.

It wasn't just her, it was impossible for me to tell anything to anybody, I couldn't, and I didn't want to.

What died in me was the need to talk to others, rotting away along with the bodies of my dead friends, and she was going away.

The chairs were there, standing around the table in the darkening room, four forlorn chairs around the table, and it occurred to me that I ought to ask her to sit down, as was proper, except that along with those chairs — on which she had never sat, by the way — there also stood between us all those afternoons when she would fly into my room and, without stopping her flow of words, throw herself on my bed and lie there stretched out on her back or stomach.

I asked her, as if this was the most important of all questions, about Krisztián, what would happen to him now that she was leaving, and we both knew this was only my effort to spare us from dealing with the truly crucial questions.

A tiny wry smile appeared around her immobile mouth, wise and sardonic; she must have thought my evasion too crude, too sentimental, superfluous, and she said she had taken care of all that, a supercilious smile on her arching lips; they hadn't seen each other for a long time, she continued, shrugging her shoulders, letting me know she would not say goodbye to Krisztián — another thing, I thought, that would remain unfinished and painful; she would write to him from the free world, she said sarcastically, quoting the phrase so familiar from radio programs broadcasting messages from refugees; besides, the thing they had between them was rather childish anyway, though Krisztián was no doubt handsome, and then suddenly, openly, emerging for a moment from behind her cynical look, she flashed her teeth in a harsh, coarse smile and said I could have him! uglier boys now appealed to her more, which meant, she was sorry to say, that I was also out of the running.

If she hadn't said that, if she hadn't blurted out the words and made them public between the two of us, if with her laughter she hadn't exposed this most profound secret of mine, which I so longed to put out of my mind, if with this exposure she hadn't disgraced the bond that was our past, then she probably would have found it much more difficult to leave the country; today I think I understand this better.

But then, as we watched each other's defenseless eyes from the dreadful shelter of our stiffening faces, this new shame made the mutually understood yes of the earlier moment turn into a final, irrevocable no.

Any remaining sense of fellowship would have been too painful; a denied one did not hurt, and could be forgotten.

Later in life it often happened that in the faces of complete strangers I'd see Hédi's, distorted and ugly, as she was saying goodbye; it would happen in the most mundane circumstances when I'd see around me immobile yet vibrant faces that even in their hostility could arouse deeply intimate emotions, and while I felt that no matter how much I might try to listen, to give myself to them, to trust them, some inner aversion, a paralysis brought on by vestiges of true feelings despite all the denial, would hold me back, a painful numbness somehow familiar from the far past, and over the years my face changed accordingly, as if an additional face had grown to cover over my own — distrustful, incapable of giving, frightened, made aggressive by constant fear for itself, trying to appear too hard to hide what was too soft, saying yes and no at the same time and doing even that reluctantly, with neither affirmation nor denial wanting to get entangled in any kind of fellowship— and it was as if I saw my own distorted face in all those selfish, hesitant, hurt, sly, apparently attentive looks, in those craftily conciliatory faces with their feigned joviality, which could attack or snub you at any moment, eyes quickly avoiding a stranger's glance, trying to avoid the shame of being unable to make real contact; later, when I began to think about these matters, I had the impression that everyone, without exception (though variously influenced by this persuasion or that affiliation), carries in his face the events of the past they would like to forget and make others forget by hiding them behind artificially altered, deliberately cryptic features.

For this reason I did not think it an accident that after that all-too-quickly forgotten farewell, whose duly deserved pain was denied us, many many long years had to pass, nearly my entire youth, before I could break the mutually agreed-upon silence and for the first time — not counting this written confession, perhaps for the last time, too — begin talking about it, and talk with the same compulsiveness with which I had been keeping it to myself, and talk to a stranger, a foreigner, someone who could have only the vaguest notion about it, and do this in a foreign language, standing in a Berlin streetcar; and there, once I began, it all came up with raw force, like bloody vomit.

It was Sunday, evening, another autumn, when the warm air was already suffused with a mist you could feel — it had a taste, and a metallic smell — and the lit-up streetcar clattered along in its leisurely way in the dark city already deserted despite the early hour.

As was our custom, we were standing in the empty car, because there, under the pretext of holding on to the straps, we could hold hands without attracting attention; we were on our way to the theater, and — I no longer remember how we got on the subject — Melchior began to talk about the 1953 Berlin uprising, when on the morning of June 16, under overcast skies, two zealous Party workers were proceeding unsuspectingly to Block 40 of Stalin Allee, then still under construction and later renamed Karl Marx Allee, to tell a discontented and of course starving group of bricklayers, carpenters, and roofers why raising the work quota was an absolute economic necessity, but somehow that morning the workers did not seem to comprehend what was so clearly comprehensible — of course it was a nasty morning — and, what's more, demanded that the new quotas be immediately rescinded, and then they chased away the two indignant and angry agitprop men, in fact were close to beating them up, and then about eighty of them began marching in closed ranks toward Alexanderplatz, chanting newly made-up slogans; listen to this one, Melchior said: "We are workers, no more slaves, Berliners to the barricades!"

The emotions erupting in the crude rhyme of the jingle, which Melchior found prosodically flawless, and his evocation of the little group of workers growing into an unstoppable human tidal wave; the open platform of the autumn streetcar bathed in yellow light; Melchior's palm, having lost some of its loving sensitivity, resting more lightly on my hand — and no wonder: any love dipped into history lightens by an amount equal to the weight of the historical moments it displaces, the streetcar's clanging little jolts, the taste on my tongue of the warm yet sharp evening air, the sardonic curl of Melchior's lips smiling to keep his distance from himself and his story, the conspiratorial emotions tempered by sparks of humor in his eyes, the familiar old slogans that sounded even more ominously factual when spoken in a foreign language — phrases like "agitprop," and "production quota," and "economic interests of the people" — all these things stirred something in me, I don't quite know what.

I sensed this as I used to feel the excitement and tension of being constantly on the alert: in my feet and in my hands, and also in my face, as if it had freed itself from its old paralysis.

I was thrust back, moved off dead center, given an unsought, not even consciously desired release; in Melchior's narrative the ever-swelling Berlin crowd had not yet reached Alexanderplatz, but my own Hungarian streetcar was already stalled in the midst of a dark throng on Marx Square in Budapest, at the spot where the tracks, screeching softly under the wheels, curve in a gentle arc onto Szent István Boulevard.

Laborers abandoning their scaffolds, housewives on their shopping rounds, students, street urchins, office workers, shop assistants, ordinary onlookers, loafers, dogs too, probably, the procession caught and swept everybody along, Melchior continued with hushed excitement; having swollen to such an enormous size, the crowd seemed to lose direction and then shouts went up: "To Leipziger Strasse, to Leipziger Strasse!" which suddenly became the common will, the current shifted, and the marchers headed toward the government buildings; then two Party workers appeared in front of them, planted themselves in the middle of the still empty street, and tried pathetically, with their bodies, to hold back the angry human tide, which, by then twelve thousand strong, propelled by its own mass and volition, was spreading calmly: "Bloodshed must be avoided!" yelled one of the Party workers; "Don't go to the Western sector!" shouted the other; and the crowd, as if letting out a collective sigh, came to a momentary halt; "You're not going to shoot at us, are you?" — words heard from the first rows, and "If you cross over, we shall!"; later, people said that only two words, "bloodshed" and "shoot," registered with the crowd and rippled through the square within seconds, and then, with the force of helpless rage they surged forward, because their own words were "bread" and "decent wages" and therefore they had to sweep the Party workers out of the way.

We were holding on to the railing, hungrily taking in the spectacle from the slowly moving streetcar, and could see only the tops of people's heads, a not only unfamiliar but completely incomprehensible sight; it was warm in the big, poorly lit square, though it wasn't only the unseasonably balmy air that generated the heat but also masses of people jostling, swirling, trampling on bits of newspaper and torn leaflets, coming from all directions in pairs or in packed, endless columns, singly or in groups, shouting slogans, waving flags, walking every which way, giving the impression of being in complete chaos and at cross purposes, yet the various clustering and dispersing groups seemed to hinder no one, but on the contrary, as if unafraid of colliding with or being impeded by anyone, people proceeded confidently, even at a leisurely pace, to their goal, a whole city having poured out of its houses, factories, restaurants, schools, and offices; here and there you could see policemen standing at the edge of the sidewalk, quite far apart from one another, looking listless and indifferent but mostly helpless and superfluous, for they wouldn't have known what to do with the flood of people streaming through the freshly opened cracks and probably didn't intend to do anything, which created the strange impression that contradictory goals and intentions are permissive toward one another because in them (or above them) is a guiding principle more powerful than any single one of them, an invisible force unifying everything, just as all the shouting and singing, all the jubilantly chanted slogans and jingles ferociously belted out, all the tapping, pounding, shuffling of thousands of feet turned into one wild yet cheerful rumble, as light as the fine edge of the warm evening mist, though even in the impersonal, uniform hum of the huge mass, in its evenly rising and falling sounds, one could distinguish isolated participants who did not want to be part of anything, who simply stared from the sidelines, considering it their mission to be mere observers, or those who hadn't decided whether to join in or hurry on silently and unobtrusively with their strictly personal business, laden with packages and shopping bags, fumbling with curious, restless children who had to be dragged out of harm's way.

With a slight jolt the streetcar came to a stop, the conductor signaled the end of the run by turning off all the lights, and we jumped off; I was there with two of my classmates whom I had very little to do with before (or after) this evening: a tall, strong boy with a beautiful face, István Szentes, who for some reason was always angry and pouting, often hitting out before thinking, and Stark, who kept blinking his sad, deep, dark eyes, and who wanted to be in on everything but was always afraid of retaliation, who seemed to be driven by an unquenchable thirst for experience.

Listen, fellas, he kept repeating now, I think I'll go home, I guess I'll be going home, he said, and then he stayed with us.

But this is what made the situation so wonderful, so great, so extraordinary: the moment we jumped off the streetcar we were caught up by the irresistible force of the crowd and joined a group of young workers who were singing "Red Csepel Island, lead the struggle, Váci Road, jump in the fray!" and their "Váci Road" became a full-throated, tuneless roar, as if they were eager to let everyone know, not just the crowd but, via the dark autumn sky, the whole world, that that is where they were coming from: straight from dingy, industrial Váci Road, in fact straight from the showers, with their hair still wet; now that we were in the thick of things, no longer watching from above or outside, there was no question as to where we were going or why, and it wasn't as if we couldn't extricate ourselves from the crowd, for no familiar force kept us there; of all possible routes we chose the crowd's precisely because in those hours its exhilarating sense of liberation left open all possibilities, allowed for everything, and with all possibilities thus open, one is free to choose anything, even what occurs accidentally, at random, the only condition being to keep moving, and by satisfying this most elemental need, the body's natural impulse to move, I associate myself with everyone around me, I am coming with them just as they are coming with me.

And so it happened that my two classmates, with whom I yielded to the dictates of chance and found myself in this enormous crush, suddenly became very close to me, defined and helped express my own feelings as if discarding all my old inhibitions and resistance, making them useless and laughable, became my friends, lovers, and brothers, as if they, and only they, could make all these other faces familiar, faces that, even without my knowing them, were no longer strange to me.

It was this peculiar, curiously stirring feeling that Stark put into words: he was scared of something he liked, he wanted to run away from feeling good about being there, so Szentes, to let us know that he, too, was in tune with these feelings, and also to stifle Stark's inevitable second thoughts, grinned broadly and slapped Stark on the back, and though it was a hard slap, all three of us acknowledged it with a burst of laughter.

In those early evening hours the crowd had not yet swallowed me up, made me disappear within it, trampled me underfoot, or taken away my personality as it did so often afterward, but generously allowed me to experience — in the most elementary condition of my body's life, in the act of movement — my kinship with others, what is common to us all, let me feel that we were part of one another and that, all things considered, everyone is identical with everyone else, and rather than all this making the crowd faceless, as crowds are usually described, I received my own face from the crowd just as I gave it one myself.

I was neither stupid nor uninformed, knew well where I was and had a good notion of what was happening around me, was so involved that in the next few moments I experienced the movement and emotions of the crowd as something intimate and familial, and thus we were marching and laughing when from the direction of Bajcsy-Zsilinkszky Road the open-hatched turret of a tank appeared, accompanied by the deafening grind and screech of its tracks and the deep rumble of its engine; at first it seemed as if the steel barrel trained on us was being floated above us by the heads in the crowd, though quickly enough bodies pulled aside, cutting a wide path for it; steps slowed down or quickened, and silence prevailed, the ambiguous silence of wary anticipation; yet the tank's approach, like that of a huge wave that might engulf us all, was greeted by a triumphant roar from the crowd, because in the bluish-brown cloud of fumes we saw that unarmed soldiers were standing inside the open turret or sitting around its rim, waving to convey peaceful intentions, and in the overwhelming noise we could pick out individual words, fragments of sentences stumbling over one another: "brothers," "boys," "the army's with us," "Hungarians"; Szentes was also catching some of the words and roared them back so fiercely it was as if for the first time in his life he could tear out his anger by the roots, as if he had been finally liberated, cleansed; "Don't shoot!" he cried, and just a few steps away we saw the soldiers waving and grinning, I didn't shout and had good reason not to, but grinned back just the same, and around us young workers with wet hair responded with similar grins, blaring in unison at the soldiers: "If you're a Magyar, you're with us!" to which unseen heads replied from a distance: "Petőfi's and Kossuth's people, all together, hand in hand!"

In those days Marx Square was still laid out with sparkling dark cobblestones, and as the tank changed direction with a cumbersome yet graceful quarter turn, heading for a space between two stranded streetcars in the middle of the square, the stones threw off sparks under the grating tracks; there was an earsplitting crunch, and then silence, though this time it was the silence of excited anticipation, as when on a soccer field everyone's favorite center forward manages to pull out of a hopeless situation and let loose with a powerful kick, the crowd was holding its breath of collective excitement, for it was unclear whether the space between the two streetcars was big enough for the tank; eyes were involuntarily measuring the gap, both dreading and wishing for the possible clash of the two masses of metal, as if they sensed what was still to come that evening and would surely happen — the inevitable — but as the delicate operation was accomplished successfully, the silence turned into an even more jubilant victory cry, a release of primal joy, and now I found no reason to withhold my own shouts; the tank clattered off toward Váci Road.

We moved on, but after a few steps there was another halt, an unanticipated bottleneck, and we could only shuffle forward, almost in place, progress reduced to barely a crawl; in front of the Album of Smiles photo studio an immovable throng of people was jamming the broad curving sidewalk and the roadway itself was blocked by abandoned streetcars, but the crowd showed no signs of impatience.

In front of the lit-up window of the photo studio, a slight woman in a raincoat was standing on a crate; actually, all that could be seen was the slender silhouette of a female figure rather high up, because only her feet were blocked by the bobbing heads of her listeners, straining to hear; her immobile body seemed tense with anger, she was throwing her head back, shaking it, turning and thrusting it in all directions, piercing the air as with a dagger, as if she were yanking all her movements out of her chest and belly; her long hair streamed, collapsed, floated around her, and she didn't fly away only because her stubborn defiance kept her feet glued to the crate. Szentes jabbed my leg with his wooden drawing board, urging me to look: he was taller than I and noticed the woman first, but just then Stark began reading off a list of demands from a handbill he had fished out from under a forest of feet: "Five: away with obstructionists; six: down with Stalinist economics; seven: long live fraternal Poland; eight: workers councils in factories; nine: agricultural recovery, voluntary cooperatives; ten: a constructive plan of action for the nation" — we could barely hear the woman's voice, but Stark interrupted his reading and, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, joined the woman by mouthing the words along with her, "… as they sink into hell, with mast and sail broken, in tatters hang.." and it did not surprise me, on the contrary, it filled me with warm waves of satisfaction that the patriotic poem so well known to all of us was being recited by a relative of mine— the woman on the crate was my cousin Albert's ex-wife, from the town of Győr — to whom about a year and a half earlier I had wanted to run away, somewhat foolishly but with a confidence in her that had no real basis, just to escape from my own home and my parents.

However silly this may sound, I'll say it: the moment I heard her, I was reassured that I wasn't alone in this crowd with my special personal and family history, that everybody was here with his or her unique situation, and these peculiarities could not challenge or doubt one another, for then all the feelings that had become common to us would have had to be challenged, too, so it didn't even occur to me to go over to her or to tell the others that I knew her, it remained my own pleasurable little secret and ultimate proof that I was at the right place; little Verochka— as my mother waggishly called this budding actress — was up there declaiming her poem and I was down here, one of the marchers; she was as much entitled to her place as I to mine, even if I refrained from shouting with all those who now had every right to shout, like Szentes, for example, who, knowing full well who my father was, had lit into me during an argument just a few weeks earlier — purple with rage and ready to strike, he screamed into my face that "we lived in a chicken coop, d'you hear? in a chicken coop, like animals!" — or like Stark, who lived near here, in Visegrádi Street, but was now choosing not to go home, who also a few weeks earlier had offered to let me use his drawing pen when the item was unavailable in the stores, but because their apartment was locked, we had to go to the synagogue next door to find his mother, a cleaning woman there, who came with us and opened the door of the ground-floor apartment where the table was already set for two, with only a tiny pot on the stove; my embarrassed protestations notwithstanding, I had to eat my friend's mother's lunch, because she let me understand, with infinitely refined humility, that she knew who my father was; nevertheless, we all got along, each of us carrying his own burden, and I had the right to feel what the others felt, especially since no one had challenged it; in any case, I earned this right, even if my own particular situation seemed to contradict it, because I most carefully distinguished between the concepts of revolution and counter-revolution and did so from the moment I recognized Verochka in that woman on the crate, and because I was neither uninformed, insensitive, nor stupid; I was sure, I knew, that this was a revolution, that I was in the middle of it, in the middle of a revolution which Father, if he were here, would surely recognize; and I also knew he couldn't possibly be here, I had no idea where he could be, he probably had to be hiding somewhere, much to his shame, but if he were here he would tell me that this was exactly the opposite of what I thought it was, he'd call it a counter-revolution.

The words "revolution" and "counter-revolution" occurred to me in their precise, clearly understood forms, guiding me through the thicket of emotional distinctions and identifications that until then had seemed terrifying, stifling, and hopeless, two words whose meaning, weight, and political significance I had learned so early, so precociously, from the conversations and debates among my father and his contemporaries, yet I want to stress that at that moment — and for me this was the revolution — I thought of these words not in their terms, not as a pair of antithetical political concepts borrowed from their vocabulary, but as something intensely personal, as if one of them was his body and the other my own, as if, each of us with his own word, we were standing at opposite ends of a single emotion generated by a common body; This is revolution, I kept repeating, as though I were saying it to him, uttering the word with dark vengeance, gratified to get even with him for everything, not quite knowing what, to which he could respond only with his own word, the very opposite of mine, and therefore I did not feel any distance between us, did not feel that he was removed from me but just the opposite: his body, caved in on itself, stooped, looking pitiful ever since my mother's death, that body the mere sight of which had evoked my fear of dreadful futility, his broken body in which — even after the previous June, after the public disgrace of being suspended for his role in some political trials— he had managed to find enough defiant energy to conspire with some suspicious characters he now called friends, that body was, strange to say, as close to me as it had been when as a small child I had climbed on his beautiful naked body, completely naked and pretending I was part of his dream, and, driven by a secret desire to discover our sameness, reached between his thighs; now I was more cool-headed, knowing well that, physical identity notwithstanding, differences were differences; and here I was, marching with these people I hardly knew yet felt to be brothers, for somehow they meant the same to me as Krisztián had, whose father was killed in the war, and Hédi, whose father was taken to a concentration camp, and Livia, who had to live on scraps from the school kitchen, and Prém, whose father was a drunken fascist, and Kálmán, who was branded a class alien on account of his father, and Maja, with whom I had searched for evidence of treason in Father's papers so that she and I, deceived by our innocence and gullibility, could immerse ourselves in the filth of the age, an abomination that could not be forgotten, something we must still try to put behind us; while marching with these people I presumed their fear, call it worry or concern because I knew what they might be up against, having read the faces of my father's friends gathering at our house; at the same time I also had to fear for Father's racked and tense body, which had grown wild with fever, had to protect it from the flood I was becoming a part of, but knew that I no longer could, knew that I didn't want to resist my own erupting emotions.

We pressed ahead, jostled our way out onto the boulevard.

Defining myself in terms of concepts — my grandparents' strict moral concepts that regulated emotions and passions to fit their middle-class way of life, my parents' more elusive ideological and political concepts — was a not unfamiliar exercise expressing well the kind of upbringing I had, and so it was natural that the self-definition with which I tried in this crowd to separate, indeed sever myself once and for all from my father, quickly changed me back into a small child, for my concern about him, the child's need to identify with him, sympathize with and understand him, proved to be the stronger bond, since ultimately it was with his concepts of myself that I had to justify being here, in this crowd, now, in this situation — or was it our shared grief over Mother's death? as we were finally thrust through the bottleneck and began to run to catch up with the people in front of us — the most elemental need in a crowd is to close ranks — my stuffed schoolbag kept knocking against my legs, my drawing board and long T-square flapping awkwardly from side to side, subtracting something from the revolution, reminding me of my helplessness and confusion, trying to make me admit that this was not for me; each tug and knock seemed to be tapping out this message as rhythmically as they had tapped out revolution just minutes earlier; I felt I had to get home, if only to be rid of these bothersome objects; no problem, I kept telling myself, we were moving in the right direction, I was running among people who did not appear to be bothered by thoughts like mine; I'll get across Margit Bridge somehow, I told myself, and then get on a streetcar, though I was sure I wouldn't find Father at home.

What also seemed reassuring in this plan was that my home was far away, well outside this area that was becoming dangerous even emotionally, up on the hill, far above the city.

And I guessed right: he turned up only a week later, and until then we had no news of him, not even a telephone call, nothing.

It happened on a late afternoon while I was standing with Krisztián in front of our garden gate; it was on the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth of October, and we were discussing the makeup of the new government— no, it was the twenty-eighth, now I remember, because I had a loaf of bread under my arm, it was the day the bakeries reopened, a Sunday, the first time Kálmán's father's bakery had fresh bread again; Krisztián was telling me how he had managed to get back from Kalocsa, giggling nervously as he told the story, and I knew that the giggles were meant to cover up our efforts not to talk about Kálmán; the year before, after a long struggle, Krisztián had gotten into a military academy; his greatest wish had always been to become an officer, like his father; they happened to be in Kalocsa, on fall maneuvers, when the revolution broke out, and the cadets were simply let go, right in the middle of the field; of course, they had to get rid of their uniforms, because people kept mistaking them for members of the National Security Service, and it was right about then that suddenly Krisztián said, Look, there's your father! and sure enough, down by the hedges, where our garden adjoined the restricted area, Father was hurling himself over the fence.

Embarrassed and blushing over his embarrassment, Krisztián said goodbye; I'd better be going, he said with a last giggle, and I understood well that he didn't want to witness this clandestine homecoming, so he left quickly in the descending dusk, and that was the last time I ever saw him; in the meantime, Father was hurrying up the hill, but instead of cutting across the lawn he followed the curving path of bushes along the edge of our garden and came up under the trees; from a slight jerk of his head I could tell he had seen me; he looked not at all the way I had imagined him during those anxious days of his absence, and I knew, as somebody once told me, that nothing ever is the way we imagine it; he was wearing somebody else's clothes: under a thin raincoat he had on a light summer suit, crumpled and ragged-looking and spattered with mud though it hadn't rained for a week; his face was covered with heavy stubble, and I would say it was almost calm except that his body seemed soft, turned light and pliant by some curious inner excitement that was neither fear nor bewilderment, there was something of a wild animal's resilience and sprightliness in him, and I also noticed he had gotten even thinner over those past few days.

The white summer suit was the first thing I touched, even before he had a chance to kiss me, an involuntary move, and I don't know how one's eyes can distinguish one white summer suit from all other white summer suits, but I was quite certain that he had come back wearing János Hamar's suit, the same suit János Hamar had worn when he came to see us straight from jail the previous spring, the suit he'd had on when years earlier two strangers had asked him to step into a black limousine in front of the Office of Restitution, the same suit in which he knelt by Mother's bed five years later, only hours after his release; this meant that he and Father had been together, again, and he must have lent Father his suit, must have helped Father, maybe helped him hide out, perhaps they even fought together in that armed group Father and his friends had organized a few months ago; when I abruptly extricated myself from the embrace of this summer suit, I happened to say something that prompted him to slap me twice in the face; he hit me unerringly, the movements of his arm and hand loose, coldly, with a force that nearly knocked me over — but more about this later, I told Melchior, it wouldn't make sense just yet.

I was talking to Melchior's eyes.

One of his hands was grasping mine on a leather strap, and with his other hand he was holding another strap, so that his raised arms opened wide the wings of his coat, shielding our faces, our hands, the secret gestures of our forbidden love from the other passengers; our faces were very close, close enough to feel each other's breath, but I was talking not to his face and certainly not to his mind but to his eyes.

And not even to a pair of eyes; what remains with me is the image of a single enormous eye hovering in the breath of my own words, a single beautiful eye, obliging yet twinkling with an inner urgency, and also concealing its light of comprehension each time it blinked, resting, waiting behind the beautiful fluttering membrane of its lid, seeming uncertain, groping, and suspicious; and each time it reopened, it would spur me on, impelling me to forget all the small details because he wanted to see the larger perspective; as it was, there were too many things to take in at once: not only did he have to imagine unfamiliar characters, orient himself in unknown locales, reconcile uncertain time frames, follow a very personal, therefore disjointed account of events which up to then he knew only from rather generalized historical descriptions, but he also had to contend with the unpleasant addition of my linguistic lapses, to deduce from my excited, often incorrectly used phrases just what it was I really wanted to say.

It had happened the previous summer, I told Melchior, about three weeks after Father had been suspended from his position as state prosecutor: one Sunday morning about thirty guests arrived at our house, filling the street outside with their parked cars, all men except for one young woman who came with her father, a glum, sickly-looking, elderly man who, rocking in a chair, said not a word during the entire meeting, waving his hand once to silence his daughter when she was about to say something.

I made use of a little family byplay to sneak into Father's study, where the assembled men were smoking, standing about in small groups, arguing or simply chatting; they seemed to be old friends having one of their get-togethers; alter a short while Father stepped into the kitchen to ask Grandmother to make coffee, but as luck would have it, Grandfather was there, too, and before Grandmother could respond with a reluctant but obliging yes, Grandfather broke their years-long mutual silence and, turning red and gasping for air in sudden irritation, told Father that unfortunately Grandmother had no time to make coffee, as she was on her way to Sunday services, and if Father insisted on offering coffee to his unexpected guests he should serve them himself.

Father had indeed made his request as a boss would do to his secretary, so the response caught him by surprise, all the more so since it was perfectly obvious that Grandfather wasn't refusing an innocuous request on Grandmother's behalf but simply found it distasteful to have any close contact with that group of men; It's all right, Father stammered, he appreciated the concern, and as he hurried out of the kitchen, pale with anger, he did not notice me tagging along, or maybe the unpleasant interlude made it difficult for him to object to my presence.

In any case, I positioned myself near the door leading to my room, where the young woman in her attractive dark silk dress was leaning somewhat uncomfortably against the doorpost.

I could tell from Father's vigorous yet controlled stride, from the sharp thrust of his stooped shoulders, from his hair falling over his forehead, or perhaps from the determined air with which he pushed his way through the smoke-filled room, that he was getting ready for something extraordinary, something he'd had his mind set on for a long time; he shoved his armchair out of the way, took his desk keys out of his pocket, opened a drawer, but then, as if suddenly uncertain, did not pull it out but slowly lowered himself into the chair and turned toward the company.

The sight of this change in his movement and the look in his eyes spread like a tremor throughout the room; some of the men fell silent, others lowered their voices, still others looked over their shoulders and purposely finished their sentences or even began new ones, while Father sat motionless, staring vacantly into the air.

And then, with a motion that started slowly but suddenly turned quick as lightning, he yanked out the drawer, grabbed something inside, and, with his fist, from which the grip of the pistol was sticking out, shoved the drawer home, pulled his hand back, and slammed the pistol down on the empty desktop.

One loud bang, followed by silence, an offended, pitiful, dazed, indignant silence.

Outside, the trees stood still in front of the open windows, and one could hear the intermittent hiss of the sprinklers, the water hitting the lawn.

Someone laughed nervously into the silence, a few uncertain laughs followed, there was a very young army officer there, maybe a colonel, a round-faced, smiling man with a blond crewcut who in the stunned silence stood up, leisurely took off his gold-braided uniform jacket, and, smiling amiably, laid it over the back of his chair; a general shouting began, but the officer, as if hearing nothing, quietly sat back down on his chair and in the general uproar calmly began to roll up a sleeve of his white shirt.

Now they were shouting at Father, pleading with him to stop this nonsense, addressing him by his Party code name. Millet, letting him know how well they realized what he was doing, how they sympathized with his outburst, however hysterical and irrational, but he ought to stop it and come to his senses.

No, no, the events of the last few months had finally restored his senses, Father said without raising his voice or looking at anyone, and this was followed by another silence, hollow yet grating; as a matter of fact, he added, the reason he had asked them to come was that he was still hoping to find a few men in this country who, like him, had managed not to lose their good sense.

Fully aware of his dignity, returned to him by the men's silence, his professional confidence marked by his smoothly flowing sentences, he remained seated comfortably in his chair, his hands on the armrest; he did not wish to create a scene or to give a lecture, he went on very quietly, it was a simple, sentimental human impulse that made him remind those present of their obligations which all of them had taken on themselves, not here and not now but for a lifetime, and, he smiled before continuing, in the present political situation he couldn't see how anyone could possibly ignore these obligations; he wasn't looking into anyone's eyes, his smile seemed to be meandering among the faces with that inexplicably sharp glance which always terrified me, which I took to be the sign of madness or deliberate cruelty or maniacal paranoia; he had a very simple proposal to make, he said, speaking without a pause now, the words rolling out as if from a recording, after due consideration he had concluded that to prevent a possible counterrevolutionary takeover, they should establish an armed group totally independent of the army, the police, and the security forces that would be accountable only to the highest echelon of the government.

The last words hovered in the air, then froze between the two potentialities of unqualified endorsement of a self-evident idea and vehement rejection, and only then did pandemonium break out — everything from deliberate and accidental knocking over of chairs, pounding on tables, slapping of knees, bellowing, hissing, yelling, shrieking, hostile whistling, guffaws and laughter of all kinds, although some of the guests remained quiet, and the young woman thrust herself away from the doorpost, seeming to want to say something, her face flushed with indignation, while in the middle of the room the colonel was slowly turning his round, smiling face this way and that; the sad-faced elderly man stopped rocking his chair long enough to silence his daughter with a wave of his hand, and then resumed.

I must confess, I told Melchior sixteen years later in that Berlin streetcar, that I hadn't found the scene at all painful, on the contrary, rather enjoyed it, it made me happy, and not only because — rational consideration notwithstanding, which I'm sure I wasn't capable of at the time — I was impressed by Father's regained prestige, determination, and reckless resolve, qualities that to an adolescent boy are always attractive and admirable regardless of their motivation (even Prém, whose fascist father beat him with sticks and straps, was proud of how strong that drunken beast was); no, my satisfaction had a quite different source: I knew something about Father those men could not have known; they weighed what was happening in political terms, and I weighed it emotionally, I knew that for all his insistence on not wanting to, he was creating a scene, mad performance being the only possible way to escape his own madness, to externalize his innermost insanity, for he was insane, so why shouldn't I have been happy to see this unexpected, purging release; ever since Mother's death, more precisely since János Hamar's return, he had been struggling with this madness; only a few days earlier we had been sitting in the kitchen having dinner when he suddenly looked at me, and I could tell he was seeing not me but someone or something else, something tormenting him, the compulsion to overcome which grew so powerful that his mouth, though full of food, dropped open and he began screaming at the top of his voice, half-chewed bits of food squirting out of his mouth and spattering all over the table, all over my face, and tears streaming from his petrified eyes: "Why, why, why?" he howled at me as I sat leaning against the white-tiled kitchen wall, "why, why?" — he could not stop himself, and as I struggled along with him in that howl, he fell silent just as abruptly as he had started screaming, and it wasn't my touch or hug that calmed him, not my hand or the proximity of my body, I don't know what made him stop, maybe he just resigned himself to being defeated by that someone or something within him, because my hands and body told me he was feeling nothing, he was hard as stone, was no longer there; his head sank into his plate, into the soggy vegetables, as if part of the humiliation he had to endure was soggy vegetables on his plate.

Melchior let go of the strap and motioned with his head that it was time to get off.

We were standing on a square, at the end of the line; the streetcar moved on, making the tracks shriek as it slowly turned, taking its lights with it from behind us; we should have started toward the Festungsgraben, where, among drab little houses, the festively illuminated theater stood, one of the few buildings to have survived the war unscathed, though the lovely little park around it had been completely destroyed.

Others were headed in the same direction, too — black, spit-shined men's shoes, the hems of cheap evening gowns sweeping the pavement and getting caught on gilded high heels — but we stayed there for a while, as if waiting for everyone to leave so for a few moments we could have the dark square all to ourselves.

The feeling that we must be alone now was palpably mutual.

It was also strange, I continued after we started walking down the dark street toward the theater, that Father always made the mistake of calling Marx Square by its old name, Berlin Square — meet me at Berlin Square at such and such time, though as soon as he said it he'd correct himself, I mean Marx Square, under the clock; the only reason I thought of this now, I explained, was because that Sunday they couldn't agree on anything, they kept on shouting and arguing for hours without making any sense, until the young woman in the silk dress began to speak despite her father's warning signal; they seemed unable to decide what they really thought of Father's proposal: on the one hand, they accused him of factionalism, sowing discord, some even yelling conspiracy and calling him a provocateur, demanding to know whose agent he really was, telling him they had no choice but to report him; and on the other hand, they admitted the situation had indeed gotten out of hand. State Security had been forced into a corner, the police were unreliable to begin with, the army officer corps was visibly disintegrating under constant, intolerable political pressure, something had to be done before it was too late, before even ordinary criminals were let out of the jails; if yesterday everybody had been an enemy, today everybody was everybody's brother; the most trustworthy Communists were being vilified, people were looking for scapegoats and finding them, directives went unheeded or never reached their destination, everyone was raking up the past, fishing in troubled waters, even the glorious Communist past, even the Spanish Civil War, was open to scrutiny, the whole Party apparatus was full of opportunists and obstructionists, miserable hacks and pen pushers were demanding freedom of the press, nobody worked anymore, public order had virtually collapsed, people were wrapped up in their private affairs, cynically serving two masters, and on top of all that were the enemy's subversive activities; in a word, the country was becoming ungovernable, and for this very reason every firm measure seemed a provocation, unity should not be destroyed by new factional strife, yet who had the right to talk of unity if they themselves could not agree on a proper course of action, it would be irresponsible to incite the various organs of the state against each other, not dissent but confidence had to be strengthened, which all depended on the right kind of propaganda, radical measures only added oil to the fire, the press had to be curbed, anyone with plans like Father's was playing into the hands of the enemy, after all, you can't piss against the wind, when a house is on fire you don't put it out by pouring oil on it; throughout all this, Father sat motionless, saying not a word; but now he was not looking at his friends as from afar, his glance wandering among the faces, but with a vaguely satisfied, friendly smile he gazed at them like one who has finally reached his goal, come home, behavior which made the situation much more complicated: those who were hostile neither to him nor to his proposal might wonder whether he wasn't a provocateur, after all, sitting there so calmly, having used the pistol trick to make people come clean; and his most vociferous accusers might ask themselves how he could stay so calm, so impervious, unless he was indeed backed by people in the highest places, and what did he know that they didn't, while they had unthinkingly revealed their most guarded cards?

And he spoke again, very quietly, but only after rising suspicion had overtaken the group and the shouting had died down, the angry gestures became hesitant; no, the reason he had asked them here, he said, his voice measured and self-assured, was not to debate whether his proposal was necessary or not but to discuss how to execute it.

The unheard-of audacity of this statement immediately dispelled their suspicion, for only someone speaking with the force of his own convictions could be so outrageously imperious; his words again required silence.

Thinking only in political and ideological terms, busy looking for tactics and strategies they believed to be consistent, these people failed to realize that Father had silenced their suspicion not with brilliant reasoning, convinced them not with bold strokes of logic but with the insanity of his argument; an insane man was seizing the reins.

He was about to say something else when the young woman next to me suddenly spoke up, throwing out her arms in a warning and imploring gesture, her fingers trembling in the air as she begged the men's pardon— I was surprised at the strong, resonant voice that came out of her fragile, emotion-filled body; listening to the arguments, she said, she had the impression that she had dropped in not from another country but from another planet; frankly, she didn't know or much care where the members of this esteemed company lived, but in the country where she lived the restoration of a free and democratic government, elected by secret ballot, would be a more appropriate response to the crisis than the deployment of a provocative armed force, and they should not forget that she was not the only person in the country who held this view.

While she was speaking, trembling with emotion, her father stopped rocking in his chair, planted his feet firmly on the floor, and stared ahead with impassive approval as if he knew exactly what his daughter was going to say, even when the period would come at the end of her last sentence.

Unheard-of, this was simply unheard-of, as if an outrageous impropriety had taken place, one that must not be answered or acknowledged, seen or heard, it was beyond anything debatable, it had to be dismissed immediately, except the proper action to do so was lacking; they all sat there stunned.

The woman's father let his chair rock back now, and it swung down with what sounded like a deliberate thud, a reply of sorts, as if to say enough is enough! then he rose ceremoniously, suggesting that he might be able to defuse the situation, walked over to Father, placed his hand on his arm, and addressed him, not too loudly or too quietly, making sure everyone heard him: he thought Father's idea was well worth considering, he said, certainly worth detailed discussion, but perhaps later, as part of a larger debate, or better yet, in a smaller, more intimate setting; so many arguments and counter-arguments had been heard just now, he believed it would be premature, indeed impossible, to form a definite opinion; when he got to this point, many of the others started talking again, too, involuntarily assuming his reasonable, delaying, wait-and-see tone, and speaking as if nothing untoward had happened, everyone anxious to move on to other subjects or, if they had to stay with the one at hand, ready to switch to different, less confrontational attitudes.

Some of them got up, cleared their throats, began to gather their things, lit up last cigarettes, went out onto the balcony, exchanged furtive little glances in allusion to what had been said, here and there giggled, acted precisely as people of varied opinions would act at a not very exciting official reception.

Although it may appear that all this did not amount to much, I told Melchior while we were still walking, very soon afterward I had a definite indication that the debate that Sunday was not a total fiasco and, what's more, that the young woman's words might have helped the debaters clarify their own views; a few days later Father and I made a date to meet at Marx Square, to buy a pair of shoes, I think; I waited in vain for an hour and a half; when he finally got home late that night, his clothes and hair reeking of cigarette smoke, he told me he had had to attend a meeting of historic importance and could not leave it; he sounded anxious but also hopeful as he begged my pardon; this unusual, talkative politeness led me to believe that while he might not have prevailed at the meeting, at least he had not suffered another defeat — we got an additional respite from his madness.

I stopped talking, abruptly, as if I had something more to say but had no idea what I could add or how I had got entangled in the story, which suddenly seemed false, alien, and far removed from me; we kept walking, listening to the even sound of our footsteps, Melchior asked no questions and I was glad I didn't have to say another word.

And in this silence punctuated by our footsteps which was not really silence but the absence of appropriate words, I felt that everything I'd said until then was nothing but idle talk, just words, an impenetrable and superfluous heap of empty words, foreign to me, not bending to my tongue; it was senseless to talk without the proper words, and there were none, not even in my native vocabulary, that would lead somewhere in this story, nowhere to go in the story, for there is no story when compulsive memory continually bogs down in insignificant details or details imagined to be meaningless; at that moment, for example, in my mind I was wandering about the old Marx Square in Budapest waiting for Father, and of course he didn't show up, and still I couldn't tear myself away from there — but why would I tell Melchior about that?

One can only tell the story of something, and I wanted to tell him everything, the whole of the story all at once, to transfer it, place it in his body, vomit it into this great love of mine, but where did that elusive whole begin and end? how could it be created in a language that had nothing to do with my body and weighed so heavily on my tongue?

I had never talked about these events before, not ever, not to anyone, because I had not wanted them to turn into an adventure story, what was not a story should not be turned into one, it would be better to bury it alive in the crypt of memory, the only fitting and undisturbed resting place for it.

In that dark Berlin street I felt I was desecrating the dead.

And isn't silence the only perfect whole?

We were walking side by side, shoulder to shoulder, head alongside head, and in my distracted state I failed to realize that talking to him had become difficult because I had been talking to his eyes, and now the eyes were no longer there.

And at the same time I also felt that our echoing footsteps, our well-matched leg movements, taking us closer and closer to the theater, were also curbing my storytelling urge; no problem, then, the story would end, remain unfinished anyway, and just as well: we'd go to the theater, enjoy the performance, and whatever was still left of the story I would simply swallow, and at least the shame of talking about these events would also remain incomplete.

Thick shafts of floodlights, misty around the huge reflectors, ripped the building out of the autumn evening, and the theater stood before us in the cold blinding blaze like an ungraceful cardboard box; when we stepped into the naked light where people, slightly blinded, hastened to partake of an evening fare that promised release and oblivion, I still wanted to tell Melchior something, something interesting, something funny, anything that would bring a closure to this frustrating walk.

You know, I said without thinking too much, for I was still wandering about that old square, this Marx Square, which Father always called Berlin Square, which was memorable for another reason, because while I was waiting for Father, a group of drunks staggered out of Ilkovits, a notorious dive known all over the city, and among them was a sorry-looking old whore who came reeling over to me, I thought she wanted to ask me something so I turned toward her; she took my arm, bit my ear, and panted seductively that I should go with her, she'd love to blow me, free of charge, and she was sure I had a sweet little cock.

She was right about that, I added, laughing, trying to be funny.

Melchior stopped, turned to me, and he not only did not smile but gave me his gravest, most motionless look.

In embarrassment I continued: she was no fancy lady, only a two-bit whore, she said, but I had nothing to fear, she knew better than anybody what adorable little gentlemen like me liked to have done to them.

With his impassive face Melchior indicated displeasure, but then took both my arms by the elbows, and as his face drew close to mine a tiny smile appeared, not around his mouth but in his eyes, but this had to do not with my evasive little joke but with his determination that right there, in the middle of this floodlit square, in plain sight of people hurrying to the theater, he was going to kiss me, quite passionately, on the mouth.

This soft, warm kiss gave birth to many more tiny kisses, enough of them to cover my closed eyelids, my forehead, and my neck; his lips, with their rapid slides and thrusts, seemed to be groping for something; I don't think anybody noticed, or, having noticed, paid any attention, though I must say they missed a great moment; but then our arms, protectively thrusting us apart, fell to our sides and we stood there looking at each other.

Then I got back that one, single eye.

He laughed, or rather his strong, wild, white teeth flashed from his soft mouth, he motioned to the entrance and said, We don't really have to go in.

No, we don't.

The show could go on without us.

It sure could.

But that single eye, at that moment, in the midst of the crowd, was telling me something very different.

Well, that's the end of the story, I said.

He smiled back at me, mysteriously, calmly, beautifully; I did not fully understand that smile then, for it was not his usual, steady, inescapable smile, the one I at once loved and hated; but I had to obey it, I had no choice; perhaps for the first time in our relationship he fully possessed me.

He must have acquired a part of my personality — a cherished or despised part, it was all the same — that until then he had not encountered or could not account for.

I had the feeling I'd better go on concealing my face with words.

He did not move, making us look as if we were quarreling.

In his smartly tailored dark suit, his clasped hands holding the wings of his open raincoat behind his back, his upper body slightly bent forward, Melchior was standing before me in the harsh bright lights, and as if compelled to entertain serious doubts about something, he narrowed his eyes to mere slits, almost making them disappear.

Several people were looking at us now, but whatever they may have been thinking they were wrong.

Let's go home, I said.

He shrugged his shoulders slightly, seemed ready to go, but that made it impossible for me to move.

I'm sure I have to tell him all this, I said, with an uncertainty caused by feeling powerless, so that he'll understand why I couldn't leave that crowd back then, in Budapest, and go home; the whole thing wasn't so interesting, and it hardly mattered, but I was sure that now he'd understand.

And then I didn't want to say anything else.

He understood, of course he did, he replied impatiently, though he wasn't at all sure that he had understood what I wanted him to understand.

It would have been easy to say something, anything, to break the painful silence that followed, painful because in truth I did want to continue but couldn't, though I did not wish to retrieve that part of my personality he had got hold of and now so eagerly possessed — and this in turn warned me that I couldn't just tell him anything I wanted to; and the reason I couldn't continue was not that I had to utter some terribly important and profound truth but that, on the contrary, an unfamiliar bashfulness was keeping me from recounting perfectly ordinary events, a kind of modesty, more dangerous than that of the naked body, checked the flow of words, for any of my personal experiences would seem hopelessly contingent so many years after the fact, petty, silly, laughable when compared to the events that silent historical memory had endowed with the grandeur of true tragedy.

I certainly didn't feel I should judge the final results of those events, yet it seemed just as wrong to talk only of the drawing board knocking against my legs or the T-square slipping out of my overstuffed briefcase as I kept running.

Still, those objects had been part of my personal revolution, for their weight, bulk, and clumsiness forced me to clarify for myself a question which, from a mundane superficial standpoint, seems silly and insignificant, since in the overall evolution of those events it was then and now unimportant whether one blond high-school student could extricate himself from a crowd of about half a million people or stay where he was; but bluntly speaking, the question for me then was whether I was capable of, or felt the necessity of, patricide; and that was no longer just an insignificant question but, rather, one that, one way or another, must have occurred to everyone in that crowd on that fateful Tuesday evening.

More precisely, if the question had really occurred to people in so crude and oversimplified a form, then none of us could probably have been there, marching side by side, with the commonality created by the heat of our bodies, heading in a direction dictated by an unfamiliar force; instead, horrified by our complicity and denying the power that molded us into a mass, each of us would have fled in panic back to our well-tended, miserable, or plush abodes; we wouldn't have been a crowd, then, but an enraged horde, a reckless mob, rabble bent on senseless destruction; in the final analysis, humans, not unlike animals in the wild, yearn for peace, sunshine, a soft nest, a chance to multiply; man turns warlike only when he cannot ensure the safety of his mate, his home, his food, his offspring, and even then his first thought is not to kill!

That is how it was at that hour, too, in the balmy evening air; we showed our combativeness only in that we were marching together, so many of us; of course our marching was directed against something or some people, but it wasn't yet clear what or who these were, everyone could still think what he wished, bring along his own private grudges, ask his own personal questions without having to come up with definite answers, and if anyone did come up with one, he couldn't know how the others would respond, which is why he spoke in slogans, yelled, or remained silent.

There wasn't a single thing seen or heard that evening that was not in some way significant: every taunt, every slogan, every line of poetry, and even silence itself turned into a mass-scale testing of, and search for, my personal feelings, points of contact, similarity to and possible identification with others.

An object — a T-square, a poem, the national flag — gives us a surface for our thoughts; on such surfaces we conceive of things that otherwise could not be put into words, and in this sense objects are but the tangible symbols, the birthplaces of inarticulate instincts and dark, unformed emotions; they are never the thing or event itself, only the pretext for it.

I couldn't stand the glare of the floodlights any longer.

If I could have talked to him, or at least to myself, about this, I should have said that after we managed to press through the human bottleneck on Marx Square and ran to catch up with the others, something in me changed irreversibly; I simply forgot that moments earlier I'd wanted to go home, and it was the city that made me forget it, turning stones into houses, houses into streets, and streets into well-defined new directions.

And from that point on things followed the course dictated by the law of nature: a spring wells up from the ground, branches into streams, flows into rivers rushing toward the sea; it was this poetic and this simple! obeying the attraction of the larger mass, human bodies propelled themselves out of the noisy, gaily seething side streets toward the boulevard and pressed themselves into the larger crowd there; Verochka must have ended her improvised recitation with the resounding line "Those who never knew, there's no more excuse / Learn now what it's like when the poor cut loose," because with the force of a cork popping free, to the rumble of running feet, people were rushing at us from behind, thrusting us forward, all of us sweeping along in the direction of Margit Bridge; yet even this did not mean that these countless individual wills — all at different temperatures, igniting one another with sheer friction but in the absence of real fuel causing only sparks that flared and quickly died— could heat up to a single common will, yet a change did occur, and everyone must have sensed it, because the shouting ceased, there was no more laughing, recitations, speeches, or flag waving, as if crowding into this one and only possible direction, everyone had retreated into the smallest common denominator of the moment: the sound of their own footsteps.

The massive fullness of this sound, the relentlessly even, rhythmic echoing that now filled the deep canyon of Szent István Boulevard, was strong enough not to lessen but to increase the feeling of fellowship, a feeling further intensified by the sight of people clustered in wide-open windows all around; separated from us, they were waving to us, were with us, and we, down on the street, were also with them up there; the crowd began to feel its own weight and strength, and developed with each step a slower, heavier solemnity.

Broad Szent István Boulevard begins to climb near Pannonia Street— today's Lászlo Rajk Street — and at Pozsonyi Road gently slopes as it runs onto Margit Bridge; on ordinary days this slight rise and downward slope can hardly be detected, and if I hadn't been in that huge crowd that evening I wouldn't have noticed it either; one simply uses one's city, unaware of the peculiarities of its streets and squares.

At the foot of the bridge, at this little incline, two streams of people met, coming from opposite directions and with very different dispositions, which immediately made clear why our steps had to slow, our ranks become more solid, solemn, silent: we were going up the gentle incline while opposite us people were coming down from the bridge, a crowd that was stronger not only because of its potential energy but also because it seemed more organized, cheerful, homogeneous and youthful, the people looking as if they had already achieved a significant victory; they came arm in arm, singing, belting out rhymed slogans to the beat of their feet, and without breaking ranks swept around the foot of the bridge, cutting a wide path across the intersection, turned onto Bálint Balassa Street, marching in orderly rows; our groups, ascending, tighter but more disorderly, cohering with so many mismatched personal impulses, had to merge into the opening and closing wings of this unending huge fan of people, we had to push our way into the available spaces, increasing our disarray as we went for any crack, any opening.

There are moments when the sense of brotherhood makes you forget all bodily discomfort and needs: you are not tired, love no one, are neither hungry nor thirsty, neither hot nor cold, don't have to relieve yourself; these were such moments.

While we were running, Szentes told us that these were university students coming from Bern Square; the ranks closed around us, we were in them and although we momentarily upset their orderly ranks and unity, we caught their upbeat mood; everyone began to talk, people coming from different places, in different moods, eagerly exchanged views, compared notes, addressed strangers as friends; we learned who had spoken at that other assembly, what demands had been made and how they'd been received; and we told them about the tanks, the soldiers, the workers from Váci Road and the army being with us now; this heated exchange of information and mixing of the two groups made for a certain diffusion, but the somewhat lax procession found cheerful new strength and vigor.

This is how we marched toward the Parliament.

Assuming that I must have a different view of what was going on but not wanting to expose me publicly, Szentes leaned close, making sure that Stark wouldn't hear — in our excitement our faces almost touched — and whispered, There you are, now you can see for yourself, this system has had it.

Of course I see it, I said, and jerked my head away, but I don't know how all this is going to end.

The dark dome of the Parliament was now straight ahead of us; the illuminated massive red star on top had been installed only a few months earlier.

I must have looked pretty funny with my drawing board, my bulging schoolbag, and my self-consciously solemn expression, trying to reconcile the extraordinary events of the evening with my peculiar family experiences, because my apprehension regarding the future so surprised Szentes that he had to laugh; in that very instant, as I tried to figure out what his laugh meant, somebody threw his arms around me from behind and a hand, firm and soft and warm, covered my eyes.

He's at it again, drawing conclusions, he's at it again! it was Kálmán, shouting and jumping for joy, waving his arms, in the middle of a bunch of uniformed baker's apprentices with three flustered high-school students facing him; but we couldn't stand around, we all had to move on.

By the way, I lost my drawing board at the foot of Kossuth's statue; Kálmán climbed up and I climbed after him, we wanted to see the people filling up the square, as earth-shattering shouts went up: Turn off the star! turn off that star! and then, in the blink of an eye all the lights in the square went out, only the star shone on top of the dome, a rumble of discontent raced though the crowd, followed by whistles and boos, and then silence, and in this silence people raised newspapers over their heads and lit them into torches; like a whirlwind sweeping across a huge field, the flames flashed and leaped, flooding the square in light, dying quickly, but flaring up again and again, spreading, glaring in spots, a white conflagration turning into yellow waves, blinking, flickering into red, and falling in glittering crystals at people's feet; a few hours later I left my schoolbag at the corner of Pushkin and Sándor Brody Streets, where it stayed on the empty pavement where Kálmán, just as he was about to bite into a piece of bread spread with jelly, dropped to the ground to avoid a burst of rifle fire coming from the rooftops; I even thought how quick and clever he was to duck, I thought his face was smeared with jelly.

If later, when Hédi was saying goodbye and looking at me pleadingly, expecting me, an eyewitness, to confirm what still seemed unbelievable, if I could have talked about this, or if she herself hadn't been convinced that talk was futile, then I should have talked about that strong, soft, and warm hand, the palm of a friend's hand, and not about the ultimately useless fact that he died, that it was the end of him, he was dead, and we dragged him across the street into the lobby of a house, and then into an apartment, though it was of no use, he died on the way, or maybe before that, on the spot, but the man who helped me and I both pretended that by dragging him like that we could make him live a little longer or that we could revive him; his whole body was full of holes, but one had to do something, so we carried him, his dead body, and as we did, his blood was dripping, dripping, trailing us, it wet our hands and made them slippery, his blood lived longer than he did, he was no more, he was dead, his eyes were open, and so was his mouth in his mangled bloody-jellied face, he was dead, and all there was left for me to do that evening was to tell his mother, who worked in Szent János Hospital; and then, a few days later, two months before his suicide — with János Hamar's light summer suit in my hand — I had to call my stealthily returning father a murderer; and that, too, I did as I was supposed to.

It wasn't about my friend's death, or about any of the other deaths and funerals, or the cemeteries glowing with candlelight and all the candles of that autumn and winter that I wanted to talk about, but about the last touch of his living body, that I was the last one he touched, and how he was holding that lousy slice of bread with plum jelly he'd gotten from a woman, a woman in the window of her ground-floor apartment at the corner of Pushkin Street who was slicing bread, spreading the slices with jelly out of a jug, and handing them to everybody passing by; I should have talked about the unmistakable smell and feel of Kálmán's hand, about the uniqueness of muscles and skin, of proportions and temperatures, that enables us to recognize a person, about the soft, warm darkness that suddenly makes us forget every historical event and with a single touch leads us back from the unfamiliar into the familiar world, a world full of familiar touches, smells, emotions, where it's easy to pick out that one unique hand.

And to make him understand me, at least some of all the things I'd been telling him, I should have told Melchior about the very last, happy little coda of my story: on that cold, harshly lit Berlin square in front of the theater I should have told him about the soft darkness settling on my eyes in which I recognized Kálmán's hand! — or was it Krisztián's? no, it was Kálmán, Kálmán! — should have talked about this last little remnant of childish pleasure, and since I had no free hand, what with the drawing board in one hand and my schoolbag in the other — which later I lost— I had to use my head to break free of his clasp, I was so overjoyed that he should be there, about as unexpected and unbelievable as when you look for a needle in a haystack and actually find it.

Silently Melchior watched my silence; there was something to see in that, I suppose.

And on that December afternoon, too, it wasn't I who moved first but Hédi; she lowered her head.

She wanted nothing more to do with our mutual silence over recent events, or with the agreed-upon no with which we denied them; she asked me to see her out.

Even at the front entrance of the house we did not look at each other; I looked at the darkening street while she poked around in her pocket.

I thought she wanted to shake hands, which would have been odd, but no, she pulled out a small, shabby brown teddy bear; I immediately recognized it as her and Livia's mascot; Hédi squeezed it a couple of times, then told me to give it to Livia.

And when I took it and her hand accidentally touched my fingers, I had the feeling that everything that might stay here of herself she wanted to entrust to Livia and me.

She left and I went back into the house.

My grandmother was just coming out, probably escaping to me from the annoying, consoling chatter of Aunt Klara.

She asked me who that was.

Hédi, I said.

The blond Jewish girl? she asked.

Dressed in black from head to toe, she stood motionless and expressionless in the dimly lit foyer in front of the closed white door.

She asked if anybody had died in the girl's family.

No, they're going away.

Where to? she asked.

I said I didn't know.

I waited for her to start for the kitchen, letting her pretend she had something to do there, then I went into Grandfather's room.

It had been a month since anyone had entered it; without Grandfather it had become dry and musty, nothing stirring the layers of dust.

I closed the door behind me and just stood there for a while, then put down the little teddy bear on his table, where books, notes, and writing implements, the excited traces of his last days, lay scattered about.

On the third of November he began working on an election reform plan, but could not finish it by the twenty-second of November.

I recalled his story about the three frogs that fell in a bucket of milk: I couldn't possibly drown in such an awful, sticky mess, said the optimistic frog, and while talking, his mouth stuck together and he drowned; if the optimist went down, why wouldn't I, said the pessimistic frog, and promptly drowned; but the third frog, the realist, did the only thing frogs can do: he kept treading milk until he felt something hard under his feet, something hard, dense, and slightly bluish, from which he could push off; of course he didn't know he had churned butter, how could he, he was only a frog, but he could jump out of the bucket.

I had to take the teddy bear back from the table, I felt that leaving it there would be a mistake.

The only thing I knew about Livia was that she went to study glass grinding; once, about two years later, walking on Prater Street, I happened to look through a basement window propped up with a stick; a group of women were sitting behind shrieking, grinding wheels; Livia was among them, a white smock casually unbuttoned at her chest; deftly she was working a stemmed glass on her wheel; she was pregnant.

The same summer I got a letter from János Hamar, a very friendly letter mailed from Montevideo; he wrote that if ever I needed anything I should let him know, I should write to him, he'd like to see me as his guest, but I could stay with him permanently if I liked; he was posted there as a diplomat and had a pleasant, easy life; he was staying for another two years and would gladly go on a long trip with me; I should answer him at once for he, too, was all alone and didn't really want anyone anymore; but the letter arrived much too late.

I continued to believe that everyone who was still alive would eventually return, slip back quietly, cautiously, but I never saw any of them again.

When years later I came across the little teddy bear, I looked at it; it hurt too much; I threw it away.

In Which He Tells Thea All about Melchior's Confession

On our evening or nighttime walks, on whichever of our usual routes we chose, our matching footsteps always resounded like a strange hostile beat in the darkness of the deserted streets, and our conversations or silences were never so all-absorbing that we could free ourselves of the constant, rhythmic beat even for an instant.

It was as if the city's houses, these sore sights, these war-ravaged façades, had kept close track of our harmless footsteps, but when they echoed them they echoed only what was hollow and soulless in us, and if up there, in that box of an apartment under the eaves, we'd chat freely, then down here on the street, where we had to bridge the gap between the bleak surroundings and the intimacy of our emotions, our conversations tended to become heavy, took on a tone of responsibility that is usually referred to as cool frankness.

Up there we hardly ever talked about Thea; down here we did so often.

Prompted by my emotional duplicity, I manipulated these conversations so that I'd never be the first to mention her name, always approaching the subject carefully, circling cautiously around it; when her name had already been mentioned and Melchior was talking about her but got stuck because he became frightened by his own unexpected association of ideas, or recoiled from his too passionate statements about her, then with sly and calculating questions, interjections, and comments, I'd helped us stay on the trail that led back to his murky past, to continue our progress in that foggy landscape from which he tried so adroitly, with all his intellectual resourcefulness, to isolate himself, even at the cost of causing serious emotional harm to himself.

But on my afternoon or early evening walks with Thea, I had to resort to tactics that were exactly the opposite of those I used with Melchior, because roaming the flat, windswept countryside around the city or sitting on the shore of a good-sized lake or on the banks of a canal running off into the horizon, watching the surface of the water or just staring into space, the very spaciousness of the landscape ensured a free intimacy of expression, a clear separation as well as mutual interdependence of sentiment and passion, for nature is not a stage set, is slightly surreal for eyes used to struggling with unreal surroundings, and does not tolerate petty little human comedies with exclusively urban settings; as I continually diverted and sidetracked Thea, my covert intention was to maintain her feelings for Melchior in a state of tension and at the same time prevent her from being honest with me — that is, talking to me about him openly.

I found this arrangement just right for achieving my secret goal.

But we talked about him even when we didn't, and I experienced the suppressed excitement a criminal must feel when getting ready for action, just listening, watching, stalking the scene of his intended crime, convinced he need not do anything, need not interfere in the order of nature, it's enough to have discovered how the system works that has created the prevailing situation; his prey will fall into his lap as a gift from the situation itself; and with both of them I did nothing but continually and consistently maintain this kind of situation with my suggestions and insinuations.

Drop by drop I infused in Thea the seemingly improbable hope that despite all appearances Melchior was within her reach; in Melchior, with the subtlest of means, I tried to eliminate the blocks that stood in the way of his dormant yet sometimes powerful and aggressive sensual impulses; oddly enough, though understandably, Thea never became truly jealous of me, for in her eyes, indeed in her entire emotional system, she saw me as the only physical, bodily proof of her hope for Melchior, which, however vague, was impossible to abandon; and Melchior was intellectually dazed by the possibility that through me he could get to know something he hadn't known before; what's more, he knew I couldn't be completely his until he possessed this other thing as well.

Lovers walk around wearing each other's body, and they wear and radiate into the world their common physicality, which is in no way the mathematical sum of their two bodies but something more, something different, something barely definable, both a quantity and a quality, for the two bodies contract into one but cannot be reduced to one; this quantitative surplus and qualitative uniqueness cannot be defined in terms of, say, the bodies' mingled scents, which is only the most easily noticeable and superficial manifestation of the separate bodies' commonality that extends to all life functions; true, the common scent eats itself into their clothes, hair, and skin, and whoever comes into contact with the lovers will enter the sphere of this new physicality, and if the outsider has a sensitive and impartial enough nose not only will he come under the magic spell of the lovers — put more simply, under their influence — not only will he receive a part of their love, but it's also possible that once inside the lovers' private bubble and led by his own olfactory sensations he will become aware of meaningful borrowings, transferences, and displacements in the gestures, facial expressions, and intonations that are the peculiar physical manifestation of the lovers' emotional union.

The place between Thea and Melchior that I was unable to occupy on our first night together at the opera did in fact become mine later on; all I had to do was let Thea enter a little way into this private bubble of ours and from then on the two of them could communicate with each other with my body as conductor, because without being aware of it I took Melchior with me on my afternoon walks with Thea, and if she took part of me for herself, as she had to if she wanted to maintain her emotional balance, then she took a part of Melchior as well, and this was the same in the other direction, too: if Thea gave me something of herself, then Melchior had to sense the lack or surplus thus created, and he did: when I returned to him from my walks with Thea, he would sniff around me like a dog, making scenes of jealousy that I couldn't lighten with horseplay and joking; we had to restore the upset balance and put things back into their right proportions between us, which of course again meant touching Thea somehow.

I never found out what happened between them at the opera, the answers they gave later to my questions were evasive, letting me understand that they both thought their encounter a shameful defeat, but I realized that every defeat was a prelude to a new offensive, so if I wanted to help along the disintegration of their relationship — and I did, believing it was the only chance to ensure decent conditions for Melchior and me to survive — then I had to make sure I understood the situation precisely.

I cannot explain my motives for an honorable retreat in any other way except to say that I was utterly lost in this relationship, both terrified and exhilarated by the knowledge that I, a man, an individual with a specific psychic and sexual makeup, was now intimate with another not of the opposite but of the same sex; and inasmuch as this was so, as it was possible to be so, if in spite of all prohibitions we were allowed to have this relationship, then it must make sense, it must! the idea of love's indivisibility filled me with such excitement that I felt I was reinventing the laws of nature or discovering a deep secret; for if this really was so, then I was really me, I thought triumphantly, a man, a complete being, an indivisible whole, my sex being only one aspect of this whole, and did it follow, then, that this whole could remain whole only in love? and could the ultimate meaning of love be one indivisible whole clinging to another indivisible whole? and should my connection to another be the choice only of my irreducible self, whether I chose someone of my own or of the opposite sex? but however comfortingly my questions were leading me on, I still had to contend with the painful realization that though I might have chosen one who was like me, he was not me but someone else, though the same sex as I, still not me; thus the pleasure and revenge of direct contact with sameness hit home forcefully, making clear that even in one of my own sex I could not make my own the otherness of another man, a bitter realization that so intensified the hopelessness and futility of my whole life, my past, and all my strivings that, yielding to the part of myself that yearned for stability rather than confrontation, I decided I'd better run away from the place, go home, and in this case home meant something old, dull, familiar, and safe, everything that home means when one is abroad.

I wanted to go home, and he knew it; I didn't explain or give reasons, and he didn't ask for any; with the immeasurable superiority of his pain, he let me go, but as if to beat me to my departure, he also wanted to leave, to return to his barely abandoned despair, to escape; I wanted to get back to the safety of my homeland, he to the uncertainties of his desires; and this was as if with a parallel change of locales — which, being parallel, would not allow us to tear ourselves away from one another— we had wanted to take revenge on each other for our own personal stories, and to besmirch each other with the considerable amount of grimy history that met and clashed in us, except that this was no longer a game, a harmless lovers' quarrel; escaping from this place could have dangerous, life-threatening consequences, a prison term at the very least, in those years only a very small percentage of escape attempts ended in success; we didn't talk about this either, Melchior being very mysterious about it, also tense and irritable; he must have been waiting for a sign or message from the other side, and certain indications led me to believe that it was Melchior's French friend, that self-proclaimed Communist, who was making the arrangements for his escape.

Trusting in Melchior and Thea's mutual attraction, especially in Thea's subtle forcefulness, I figured that if I wanted to hasten the disintegration of their relationship that would enable Melchior to forget his senseless escape plan, which for me was rather unpleasant, since I could not morally support it, then I ought to stay as neutral as a catalyst involved in a chemical process that, having no valence of its own, can never be part of the new compound and falls away.

Needless to say, my scheme violated their privacy, in a sense was a sort of emotional crime, but since it seemed workable — its feasibility was clear to all of us at our very first meeting — I went on with my schemes and plots, assuaging my guilty conscience by telling myself that it was they who wanted it, I was only helping them; success would prove that I wanted only what was good for them; this was my way of saying to myself that I wanted not only to remain honest but to win.

Of course I couldn't be sure the plan would work, and I had to keep going back, all too frequently, to our first meeting, and review every moment, every tiny detail of that evening; and the more often I replayed it in my mind, the more it seemed that in the cold, distant space of the stage, in the bodies of singers moved by the music streaming from the orchestra pit, a wild, emotional chaos arose that was closely analogous to the one overwhelming us as we sat in the plush box.

Without formulating a single thought, then, the events sensed with my shoulders, seen with my eyes, and heard with my ears, occurred in duplicate, becoming their own metaphors, and they affected me in a way I can describe as nothing less than an emotional earthquake; later I could not escape the memory of this profound effect, even if I hadn't intended to exploit it for my own purposes; today I'd say that the smooth, hard ground of my emotions, packed firm in the thirty years of my life, moved under my feet, the magma of instincts was jolted, edifices erected with the stones of mastery and knowledge and self-protecting morality began to crumble during the heartbreaking overture; entire streets of allegedly omnipotent experience suddenly shifted, and almost as if to prove that emotions also had material substance, in the throes of struggling with contradictory emotions arising from a familiar unfamiliarity, I began to sweat so profusely I might as well have been chopping wood, yet I was sitting motionless; as often happens, I pretended I was being carried away by the music, but that did not help either, for like any obvious lie, it made my body, used to self-discipline and self-denial, swim in sweat.

It would seem that by the age of thirty one achieves a certain deceptive security; it was this security that began to fall apart that evening; but the moment before the collapse, all my edifices held their original forms, although not at their usual places; nothing remained at its original location, and therefore these forms, symbolizing their own emptiness, were unaware of the tectonic forces they were now exposed to; my feelings and thoughts were in their old, cracked forms, squeezed between old borders, wandering on worn paths, and simultaneously were the empty symbols of these very forms; in this landslide I was given a moment of grace: in a single bright flash before the moment of collapse I caught a glimpse of life's, or my own life's, most elementary principles.

No, I did not take leave of my senses, not then and not now as I grope for a string of metaphors to help me approach my feelings at that moment; I sensed quite clearly that what for me was a real prison, the prison of my senses and ideas, for the Frenchman on my left was merely a stage set smelling of greasepaint; after all, the only thing that was going on was that in that stage prison uncouth Jacquino was pursuing charming Marcellina, who had no use for his bumbling masculine charms because she pined for Fidelio, and this apparently kind and gentle young man — who was really a woman in disguise, working hard to free her beloved husband, Florestan, languishing in an underground dungeon — without too much thought, though with rueful sadness, Fidelio put up with Marcellina's misplaced affection so as to attain her politically and personally commendable goal, thus perpetrating the most outrageous or hilarious fraud of all: pretending to be a boy while she was a girl, which of course proves nothing except that the end justifies the means, since everybody loved or would love to love somebody else, but somehow managed to find their true loves, so we could suspend our moral considerations; in the meantime, my shoulder could not and did not want to break free of feeling the shoulder of the man on my right, whose indecent proximity surprised, humiliated, and frightened me no less than his turning away did, offending my vanity; and though I knew that this turning away was temporary, a transparent love ploy, and that he was using Thea as shamelessly as Fidelio in her male disguise was using charming Marcellina's not altogether pristine sentiments, for she should have noticed that that was no man in those clothes! Melchior, with his convenient bisexual approach, exploited and turned to his own advantage what in all this ambiguity was quite real, Thea's real feelings; by withdrawing attention from me, he was actually calling attention to our closeness, which he could do convincingly only by really turning away, by displaying real or potentially real feelings for Thea, giving her what he took from me; and this was just what was happening onstage, where Fidelio had to become a real man, a perfect prison guard, and pretend to seduce Marcellina, in order to be able to free her true love from captivity.

I felt, then, that Melchior was showing Thea something surprising and genuine in himself that had been hidden even from himself, and because I sensed his emotional turmoil, his boyish helplessness, I felt what Thea must have felt, and as she responded to his advances the only way one could in such circumstances, with sighs, altered breathing, glances, I felt that what was going on between them was something of complete mutuality.

In my intricate jealousy I didn't want Melchior, feared him, found his closeness intrusive, or, I should say, I didn't want only him, for I felt that my own desire, mediated by his body, was taking me toward Thea; it would be fair to say that I yielded to Melchior's approach to the extent that it allowed me to approach Thea.

This went on for the entire length of the performance: the closer Thea got to Melchior, the closer I got to her and the more and more palpably I felt his physical presence; I kept feeling I should put my hand on his knee, which surprised me, since as far as I knew it had never in my adult life occurred to me that I could put my hand on a man's knee and have the gesture suggest anything other than harmless friendship, yet I had this almost uncontrollable urge to touch him, and thought of this not only as a seductive gesture, a single gesture with a double purpose, to let him know that his advances were being returned, but also, at the moment more important, as a move with which to draw him away from Thea so that I could regain her for myself.

If then and there I'd thought of anything at all, I'd have thought of my adolescence; of course a great many thoughts crossed my mind, but not that; even if I hadn't thought of my own younger years, I might have reflected in general on the experiences accumulated during adolescence, which one hastens to forget, after one's harrowing initiation into adulthood with its fierce pains and hard-won pleasures.

I should have recalled that in the dreadful needs of adolescence the only way to escape the paralyzing and frustrating sensual urges; gropings, ignorance, is to choose the communally prepared, sanctioned, and delimiting forms of sexual behavior that, though not coinciding with our own preferences — by definition, predefined practices limit our personal freedom and at that age we find them excessive, burdensome, and morally unacceptable — help us within limits to find an optimal middle ground, ways of loving that enable us, by keeping to accepted sexual roles, to fulfill ourselves in another individual who also is undergoing similar crises in self-control; in return for the loss of our real needs and wants, we offer each other the almost personal, almost physical intensity of a passable sex life, and not even the gulf that opens up moments after physical fulfillment, not even the terrible void of impersonality seems unbridgeable, for the most impersonal union may produce something very personal and organic — a child, and there's nothing more real, organic, or complete than that; a child for us, we say to ourselves, out of the two of us, like and unlike us, to compensate us for all our barrenness until now, a child is duty and care, a source of sadness and joy and concern, all of it real, tangible, instead of motiveless anxiety it brings us purpose and meaning.

A shipwrecked person whose feet desperately seek something solid to keep him afloat will grab at anything, anyone, the first available object, and if it buoys him up he won't let go, he'll swim with it, and after a time he'll see he has nothing else! just this? and the object will grimly concur, yes, just this, nothing else! and the implacable impulse of self-preservation, joined of course by rationalization and mystification, will have him believe that the object that drifted his way by chance was really his, it chose him and he chose it, and by the time the sheer force of unrelenting waves casts him onto the shore of mature adulthood, his faith and gratitude will have made him worship what was accidental and adore fortuity, but can his rescue from destruction be really accidental?

Built on shaky emotional ground, the edifices of my sexuality, assiduously maintained for ten years and thought to be sound, were about to crumble; it seemed as if in all my previous love affairs I had merely yielded to the all-powerful instinct of survival, falling back repeatedly and ungratifyingly on pleasures I could always coax out of my body in lieu of one real gesture that might not even be a gesture; I could not grasp the meaning of my exertions, which was why I always had to grab something with my hands and hover over the depths with it, but once the ground had slipped out from under me, I could not regain my footing; that's why I could never really be consoled by physical pleasure, hence the constant, agonizing search for and pursuit of other, restlessly searching human bodies! and I wasn't shocked that through the body of the man sitting next to me I desired Thea, or that in Thea he sought me out, and that in her I found my way back to him, so that both of us were bound to hover over her; we were all trying to establish a relationship for two, but any way we looked at it, there were three of us; and if there were three, there could have been four or five; no, this sort of entanglement was no more surprising than a familiar image ready to become memory except we cannot locate its time and place of origin within ourselves; what did surprise me was that behind our entanglement I seemed to discover, in pure form, the sensual, physical embodiment of the elemental desire squirming around within me, and instead of paying attention to the action onstage, I was concentrating on this! small, sheathed in a bluish membrane, throbbing moistly with a life of its own, quite apart from them and even from me; it was as if I were seeing the bodily home of the pure life force which, regardless of modern theories, is neither male nor female: it has no sex, for its sole function is to allow free communication between human beings.

That evening I was given back some of the old freedom I thought I had lost, freedom of the heart, freedom of feeling, though today I'd say, and not without bitterness, that it was in vain to have regained that freedom, in vain to have all that sensitive perception and observation, because it was in understanding and assessing them that I proved myself a complaisantly foolish child of my times: I had a vague, elusive, but appropriate notion of the state of affairs, but I believed it to be a true discovery and wanted immediately to make it actual, to establish an intellectual position with emotional means, and further, I wanted practical results, success, to influence, run, control things, as though I were a high official of some ministry of love, making decisions based on information provided by available data; the conditioning of ten years spent in sexual manipulation came back to haunt me: I'd trust only what was palpably real, disregard everything that could not be reified and therefore physically enjoyed; in the name of reason I'd shut out of the sphere of reality anything that could not be fully comprehended, distancing myself from everything that could be perceived and validated only by the senses, which made up my personal, subjective reality; yet the opposite was also true: for the sake of my personal reality, I had to deny the existence of a larger, impersonal reality; and though my guilty conscience and a sense of my own unreality tried to tell me I was making a fatal mistake, I did not believe them.

I felt it necessary to relate all this before resuming my narrative and returning to our afternoon walk so I'd have a chance to set the intellectual and mental context in which to see two people interact, two people each of whom was not above using the other as a means to achieve specific ends, though their walk bound them together: to be metaphorical about it, they were walking along the same path that others had taken before them.

What was the point of honorable intentions, of the pursuit of neutrality, if continually, with every step we took, we sank into each other's emotional mire, and if that could not be separated from the living substance of our bodies; we may have confined ourselves to speaking in allusions, with intimations — never touching, at most falling into long silences — but even our words developed meanings that referred only to the two of us, leading us where we wanted to go, drawing out of us precisely what we honestly and not unreasonably wanted to achieve.

That's more or less how things were then; such were the emotional conditions in which we were moving out there in nature, as she began walking in front of me on the well-worn path toward the distant woods, and I, still surprised and pleased, was mulling over her quiet, bitter, terse confession, believing that her real aim was not to remind me of the true purpose and nature of our friendship — just at the point where our relationship turned too intimate and threatened to be impossible for both of us — but to draw me closer to her, take me into the deepest, most secret sphere of her life.

I could barely contain myself; I would have liked to toss all complications aside and reach after her and, moved by gratitude and the need to reciprocate, to pull her slender, fragile body to mine; I sensed her yielding even as she was moving away, although a moment earlier she had said that her whole life was a stupid waste, but for all the stupid things she might do, there were two people in her life, her girl friend and her husband, that she could always go back to; this, in our mutually developed language, meant that we could do anything we wanted to! I shouldn't be afraid of her, she felt safe, she could even abandon them and still they'd be there for her.

Too honest confessions, those that touch what we believe to be the most meaningful centers of our emotional life, are also betrayals.

If, for example, someone tells us why he dislikes his homeland, his confession will inevitably be an expression of his love for it and his desire to act on this love, while earnest, passionate affirmation of loyalty to one's country usually betrays loathing, suggesting that this country has caused one much pain, worry, despair, deep doubts, and paralyzing helplessness, and the crippled desire for action must retreat into enthusiastic expressions of loyalty.

Her restraint, laconic responses, and ambiguous yet well-formulated words made me realize that I wasn't wrong, Frau Kühnert was: Thea had changed during the past few weeks, and she was standing on a borderline; her confession to me was possible only because the bond that was the one certainty of her life had become burdensome and intolerable for her, and she shared this with me because she wanted me to thrust her across that border, so that she would break that bond — she did want to break it.

The most obvious means to do this, using my hands, perhaps my body, to give her that push, was out of the question, it would have been too much and inappropriate.

Just as on that memorable Sunday afternoon, when Melchior's heartrending, animal-like sobs had taught me that the body alone would not suffice as consolation, he at the time wanted more, he was asking for my body's future, something I'd have control over only if I were to yield to him completely, unconditionally, and perhaps it was cowardice, but I did not have that kind of control and so I did not give him my body.

And I felt that my body was both insufficient and inappropriate for the task, though with the darkest, most instinctive knowledge that can be extracted from this same body, I sensed the possibilities in Melchior's and Thea's bodies, possibilities where my body could serve only as mediator; all I wanted was to serve them.

In the cause of achieving a distant goal, I offered myself as a neutral means of mediation, and they, obeying the rules of selfishness, accepted and used me as such; what we did not take into account was that no moral interest or romantic self-denial can neutralize the sex of any human body; all I had left was my own self-control, but this gave me the pleasurably turbulent excitement of a criminal before his act, so that the desire to help was no longer motivated by love but by the urge to murder love and banish the lovers from my heart.

But in that case it wasn't I who was walking along that trail but two legs, themselves strangers, carrying the hollow form of a servile intention, which is what it had turned into, without the joy of the moment of fulfillment: a leaden weight to be dragged along for the sake of a distant future that might restore one's life, or at least one's honor.

The dark green of the pine needles, like a single massive wave of the sea, tossed and tumbled above the reddish tree trunks.

The trail disappeared under a soft carpet of fallen pine needles once it reached the woods; under the trees it was almost completely dark.

Thea must have sensed that I wasn't too keen on following her there, because she stopped at the first trees and, without pulling her hands from the deep pockets of her red coat, leaned against a tree trunk, looked back as if to size up the distance already covered, and, sliding slowly down the trunk, lowered herself to a crouch, without sitting down.

We did not look at each other.

She was looking out at the soft undulations of a peaceful landscape growing dark under huge, swirling, rippling clouds now obscuring now revealing the light still playing in the sky, and I was looking into dimming woods filled with the pungent smell of decaying leaves, with ephemeral flashes of stray lights still cutting through the dimness, keeping it in constant motion.

After a while Thea rummaged in a pocket, pulled out a long cigarette, matches, and struggling with the wind lit up.

While still busy with the cigarette she said she was doing something she shouldn't.

Yes, I said solemnly, I've often wanted to do more of those things myself.

She blinked up at me, as if to understand the hidden meaning of my transparent witticism, but I did not return her look; I went on standing among the trees without any support.

I was always making these faces, she told me somewhat louder, as if I were smelling something rotten; then, more quietly and cautiously, she asked me if she had offended me in any way.

I looked past her shoulder, but still saw her face, the coy and provocative tilt of her head; what would happen, I suddenly thought, amused by the idea, if I took this soft red furball, knocked her over, and trampled her into the ground right here under this tree? in my jaw and teeth I felt my feet trampling the ground.

The sensation of violence made me nauseous; in the silence I imagined myself after the murder returning to the flat on Steffelbauerstrasse, throwing my things into a suitcase, getting on a plane, and from the air still seeing this place, shrunken to a dot, the telltale red of her coat still visible under the green carpet of treetops.

Just a woman struggling with her impending old age, I thought, but why was their youth so important to them? my annoyance and disgust was directed not at aging but at that special attraction I felt for declining forms, for I found her eroding features beautiful, like her struggle against her decline, which made her open up to me so shamelessly, giving away more of herself than she would have if she was still young and her features still smooth.

Actually, she said, she was sorry she wasn't in love with me.

But she is, I thought to myself.

For example, she imagined to herself, she continued after a pause— either misinterpreting the excited flutter of my eyes made her bold or the excitement triggered by her insincere candor had not yet abated — how I must look naked.

Judging by my face and hands and everything else that's visible, she'd guess I was a little soft and flabby, and if I wasn't careful I'd soon look as disgusting as Langerhans.

Everything about me was so ingratiating and obliging, so damn kind and decent and low-keyed, so self-consciously attentive, one might think I had no muscles in my body, and not many bones either, only aesthetic, smooth, hairless surfaces, yes, that must be me, and she wouldn't be surprised if I had absolutely no smell either.

I stepped closer and crouched down facing her; in that case, I said, taking the cigarette from her hand, would she mind telling me just what position she imagined seeing me in, I'd be most curious to know.

She followed the cigarette with her eyes, as if afraid I'd take too long a drag, but also thrilled that in this indirect way at least her lips would touch mine, then quickly took it back; though we were both careful, our hands touched, our fingers exchanging our anxious reserve as if fearing a catastrophe might befall us any moment.

Yes, she said in a deep and husky voice, appearances are deceptive sometimes; it was just possible, she said, that I was all skin and bones, as dry and cruel as I seemed.

Why don't you answer my question? I asked.

She didn't want to hurt me, she said before taking another puff.

You can't hurt me.

Though life is full of contradictions, she said, because when I opened my mouth she had the impression she was sticking her finger into dough, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing either.

Let's not kid each other, I said, it wasn't me she imagined, for her I was more like some necessary supplement, a little extra workout to keep her bones from getting rusty.

Brazenly she laughed in my face; in our crouching position our faces were only inches apart; then she pushed herself away from the trunk and, still crouching, began to sway, letting her face get even closer, then pulling farther apart, she kept playing with the space between us.

No, no, I was wrong, she said, offering the cigarette again; she did imagine me also for herself.

Also, I said.

We are greedy, aren't we, she said.

We were splashing about in the joy of boldness, crude openness, in the way we traded imagined nakedness for shamelessness; the wrinkles around her eyes disappeared; and yet there was something very uncomfortable in all this, as if we were exchanging our cheapest, most superficial aspects.

She even imagined, she said, or at least tried to imagine, what on earth we two could possibly do with each other.

Her face was beaming.

By now the cigarette, having gone back and forth, had only one good puff left; I carefully handed it back to her, and she took it from me just as carefully; as she took the last drag, a long one, as if in the time it took before the cigarette burned her finger, everything had to be decided, she blinked and buried her embarrassment in that blink.

And whatever it was we did together, why wasn't it happening to her, my mean and cynical self thought to itself.

However, the question struck me as a possible answer to a far larger question: why did we consider direct bodily contact, the pleasure deriving from one body penetrating another, more complete and more intense than any kind of mental pleasure, why was that the ultimate in human contact? and even farther afield, almost at the very edge of thought, loomed the question of whether war itself wasn't just such a necessary and deceptive pleasure in the contact between different peoples, for we know all too well that in most cases physical union is nothing more than the manipulation of biological drives, more like a quick, always conjurable, easy, and false consolation for unfulfillable spiritual needs than a true fulfillment.

In principle she had no objection, Thea said, and did not lean back against the tree.

The earlier brightness had gone from her face; pensively she stubbed out the cigarette and pressed it carefully into the ground, under the thick layer of pine needles.

Well, maybe a tiny one, she continued after a brief pause, and that's something every woman must feel when something is taken away from her, something that should be hers to give, but because in this case she was that woman, she involuntarily, almost instinctively, approved.

Oddly enough, she wasn't jealous of us, she said; yes, that first time, at the opera, when she finally figured out what was going on, she might have been, but only because it caught her by surprise, and did it ever occur to me that she was the one who had brought us together?

The next day when the two of us showed up at her house, and she saw what an effort it took for us not to let on that something had happened between us in the meantime, and how charmingly solemn and serious we became from all that effort, by then she wasn't jealous, but rather glad, well, maybe not glad, that would be going a little too far.

And did I ever notice, she asked, that women were much more tolerant of male homosexuals than men were?

All right, women would say, it's terrible, unnatural, disgusting, but still, I could be his mother.

She stopped talking, didn't look at me, kept patting and smoothing the ground over the buried cigarette, absently contemplating her fingers' fire-prevention activities.

I had a feeling she was going to say it — it was hard for her, but she would say it — and perhaps that's why I didn't want to interrupt, for this was about her and me, the two of us.

But in the present situation, which was very demeaning for her, she went on, she might have been very difficult and she might torment me and say ugly and stupid things to me, but she was really grateful to me, because just by being there I kept her from doing something that could turn into a tragedy — or a farce.

She fell silent again, still unable to say it.

Then she looked at me.

I'm an old woman, she said.

Her statement, her look, the slight quiver of her voice had not the slightest trace of self-pity and self-indulgence, not even as much as might seem natural and understandable; she looked at me so openly with her beautiful brown eyes that the physical image of her face blotted out the meaning of her sentence.

The inner strength she mustered to utter that sentence, the strength she hurled into my eyes, now did something to her: she was no longer a woman, or old, or beautiful, or anything, but a single human being struggling with the heroic task of self-definition in a universe still enthralling in its infinite possibilities — and that was beautiful.

She certainly could not have done it inside a room; there all this would have turned into sentimental soul-searching or lovemaking; between four walls I would have found her statement comical, too true or too false, either way it was the same, and would have protested vehemently or made light of it; but here, with nothing to echo these meaningful sounds, they left her mouth, came up against my face, I took some into myself, and the rest dissipated, vanished into the landscape, found their proper, final place.

And in that moment I realized that the source of her beauty was always her raw anguish; I had met a human being who did not want to eliminate her own suffering or exploit it either, but simply wanted to retain her capacity for pain, and that was the quality that might explain my attraction to her: she wasn't interested in enlisting sympathy, which was why she objected so strenuously to living-the-part or getting-lost-in-the-part method acting; she had nothing to conceal, since what she showed of herself was something she extracted from me — something I always tried to keep hidden.

And in exchange I was giving her my own pain, so similar to hers and forever obscured by clouds of self-pity and self-deception.

It wasn't her age that made her old, she added quickly, as if wanting to destroy any illusion that her self-pity was meant to elicit my sympathy, or her own; no, counting only her years she could still consider herself young, it was her soul that was old, but that was silly, too, she didn't have a soul, she said, she didn't know what it was, then, something in her or about her.

It was strange that lately she had to play all these lovesick women, vamps and all sorts of seductive females, and she was always good at it, but when she had to fall into the arms of strange men and kiss strange mouths, she found she wasn't there anymore, it was as if someone else were doing it for her, someone else was playing at being in love.

Love and desire in her — and she begged my pardon if she was about to say something stupid — became something no longer directed at another living human being but at everyone, anyone, yes, silly as it may sound, aimed at anything and everything that was humanly impossible to reach, and she was no longer interested in reaching, but feeling this way made her very pitiful in her own eyes.

If she really didn't want to reach it, she wouldn't be able to act, I said quietly, and since she did want to act, she had to reach what she no longer wanted.

Her eyelashes quivered hesitantly; she either didn't understand what I said or didn't want to; she chose to ignore it.

She said she'd be lying if she claimed this was the first fiasco of her life, it wasn't, not by a long shot, she was never beautiful enough or ingratiating enough to rise above a constant state of failure, she got used to it.

But she wouldn't talk about this anymore, she said, interrupting herself abruptly; she found it ridiculous and in bad taste to be discussing this with me, of all people, but then who should she discuss it with?

I didn't want to distract her with questions or friendly, consoling words; anything coming from me would have stifled her; I knew she wanted to talk, but would have understood if she hadn't said another word.

In the fragrant puffs of her voice bouncing off my face I felt she wasn't talking to me, she was sending words to the surface of my body, whose mediating reverberation turned them into the purest form of address directed at her self.

She had to stand up, but she did it as though her body had been filled with a single thought of anger that wouldn't let her straighten out her knees, making her look stooped and ugly.

The skin on her chin grew taut.

No, she said, this wasn't true either.

She said this and then bit off the rest of her words, also squelching the meaning of the unsaid words.

And this may have hurt me more than it hurt her; at least she had the courage to say what she wanted to.

But she wasn't interested in any kind of truth, in anybody's truth.

Sometimes she could make herself believe there was no such thing as humiliation.

There was a time, soon after they got to know each other, when she thought she could throw everything to the winds for him, but fortunately, she was more sensible now.

And for him she could have killed her husband, Arno, who snored away all their nights.

And yes, she admitted, it was she who kept calling Melchior at night.

And she came up with this stupidity about being old because her body was going to pieces in this humiliation which had been going on for months, and her mind could concentrate on nothing else, no matter how much she told herself she was over it; she was becoming like an addle-brained teenager who can only think about how ugly she is.

These stupid feelings would never leave her, and then, on top of it all, she had to look at our disgustingly happy faces.

And then I would have liked to tell her that the happiness she saw was indeed real but that I had never felt a more persistent suffering than this happiness; but of course I couldn't tell her any of this.

She wasn't jealous of me, she said; it was disgust she felt, rather than jealousy, the kind of disgust that makes men scrawl on toilet walls things like Castrate the fags, she said more softly, placatingly; of course she knew it wasn't the same thing, she said, as a matter of fact she felt a certain approval regarding our relationship, and despite all her swearing and rage, she couldn't be jealous of me as she would be of another woman, she took it almost as if I were her substitute, but that was humiliating, because she didn't want to come between us, yet she just had to keep calling him on the phone, she couldn't help it.

Now that she said it, maybe she wouldn't be calling anymore.

And if in the midst of this constant state of turmoil she could retain a modicum of sanity, then she could feel that maybe she had chosen this impossible predicament because she didn't really want him anymore, she wanted something else, equally impossible; and that really put her at a loss, for that couldn't possibly be happening to her, she really was too old for that kind of perfect impossibility.

She didn't want anything anymore.

Not even to die.

Why did her life fall apart and why couldn't she put it back together, or rather, why did all the pieces she still had left add up to nothing.

Even as she was talking she felt her talking was nothing, her words were nothing, it was only habit that made her say these nothings out loud.

And now she was going to stop altogether, we should really get going.

And I should get up, too.

She wasn't talking loudly, and I can't even say there was passion or excitement caused by suppressed tension in her voice, yet she wiped away invisible drops of perspiration above her lips.

And in that gesture there was something an old person would do, which younger people wouldn't be caught doing, for they wouldn't find it aesthetic.

I stood up, our faces were again very close, she smiled.

Well, I had never seen her in an open-air performance before, she said, and tilted her head to the side.

This last, awkward attempt at ending things and distancing herself sobered me up, perhaps because it was so awkward and self-conscious, because she seemed to have bitten into herself and, though painful, that prevented her from revealing a far greater pain; once again I was aware of the coolness of the air, the pungent autumn fragrance of the pine trees, the reassuring smallness of our bodies that only moments earlier seemed magnified in the vastness of the flat landscape.

And I felt an increasingly impatient urge to leave the place, get back to her car, lock ourselves in its safe, confining space; at the same time, from so close, her gestures and words suggested unmistakably that I was treading on very dangerous ground if I gave her the impression I was trying to hold her back, since, in reality, with my sheer presence I was hoping to thrust her toward something; the wish to murder her that had flashed through my mind moments earlier was more than an innocent play of my imagination; consciously repressed sexual desires produce such violent impulses; but even if I did reach my goal and manage to get the two of them together, what would I have done with such an impulse— save using it to kill myself.

Or maybe it was the other way around, I thought, inverting cause and effect with a casual shrug of my shoulders: the reason I wanted them to get together, wanted to get away from them and get closer to a woman, any woman, felt a man's body to be insufficient, too little or too much, was that I wanted to kill my love for Melchior; and the reason I couldn't make anything last was that deep in my soul I feared the punishment which others, in their great anxiety about their own sexuality, scrawled as warnings on bathroom walls.

But I couldn't run away, or escape, not yet; there were still words hanging on her lips that she would dare formulate only after turning from the intimate proximity she had created between us to the petty world of practicality full of cold calculations, only after this alluring and circumspect introduction.

I waited, and she could see in my eyes how this waiting was wearing me down; she had the upper hand, she could ask anything, say anything; she was vulnerable only while talking, but what she told me made me the more vulnerable of the two of us.

This mutual vulnerability began to affect us: the emotions emerging from a consciously controlled desire, my defenselessness, and my secret wish to reach her through the very man she loved drove me to the edge of helplessness and ridiculousness, to the verge of tears — yes, my futile exertion sent tears to my eyes, and she, pressing her advantage, stroked my face, kindly and with restrained excitement, as if making herself believe that it was her story that had moved me so, and didn't or wouldn't see that the tears had just as much to do with helpless, frustrated desire; still, her fingers trembled on my skin, I felt it and so did she, and we both knew that we were entering the time of catastrophe we had dreaded only moments earlier; this meant a renewed fear, or rather a cause for recoiling.

But she managed to grab my arm, as if holding on to her own advantage.

If the ethics of love were not stronger than love's desire, I wouldn't have left time for this move, I would have reciprocated the trembling of her fingers with a kiss on her lips; and if that had happened, she would not have demurred, I'm sure, but would have dissolved her own helplessness on my mouth, but since this didn't happen, her lips quivered for the lack of contact, for the shame of this lack.

Again we had to retreat, because the ethics of love do not tolerate the presence of the slightest foreign element, everything must be directed exclusively at one's partner, and only through one's partner can a third person have any relevance; this retreat again turned me into a means: she held on to me only insofar as she needed to get closer to Melchior, and we once again found ourselves in a rather dark territory where I also had to stick to my objective of reaching her through Melchior.

So, this meant, I stammered, that she didn't love me; in her language this could be expressed by using a more mundane, less emotionally charged word, as if I were to say in Hungarian that she didn't care for me all that much.

But she did love me, she did.

The last syllable was uttered on my neck, blown onto my skin from a kiss of parting and quickly closing lips.

Of course all the feelings we had had until then ceased in the wake of that kiss.

However, we were holding each other, filling up with many little details of ever-intensifying sensations, standing there, our arms entwined, a little lost, stunned by the newness of the other's body, not sure our minds could or even cared to name or analyze this new situation so deprived of logic; and it all turned out as if two coats were embracing, a little too theatrical, a little too rigid; what should have dissolved did not, for no matter how tightly we clung to each other, there was not enough passion in our bodies meant just for the other, or not enough details in the passion each of us had hoped would be exclusively ours, as if no power could dispel or neutralize the sensation that we were just two coats.

In such or similar situations our love experience can rush to our aid; with tiny, slow, cautious, and barely touching kisses I could have opened her lips resting bashfully on my neck; four little kisses like that could have opened her lips, and if at the same time I eased her body away from mine, broke the closeness, then she would again kiss my neck so that the rapid little kisses buried in our necks would rouse our desire for closeness, which could be quenched only by the closeness of lips, and so on, until we reached the state of no-closeness-is-close-enough.

It wouldn't have taken much to find the way to our bodies' biological urges, and without resorting to anything false or vulgar, for we did love each other, after all, and neither the coats nor our own clumsiness hindered us; but if that had happened, we would have transgressed against the ethics of love.

She had to stand on tiptoe to reach me, which I found especially endearing; her lips rested on my neck for a little while longer, waiting, as if wondering whether I would do what experience dictated now; and my mouth was on her neck, waiting for the possibility of a mutual response that would make a third partner vanish; at the same time I felt the wind's gentle little thrusts on my body.

Yet she couldn't have wished my mouth to make any of the experienced moves; she was the first to yield to Melchior's intrusive presence, and this was natural, since she wasn't as close to him as I was, and only if you're sure of possessing someone can you afford to stray; she pushed me away a little, but we did not break our embrace; she looked into my face with all of hers, she was so close that my eyes, trying to focus, ached a little, but the dull pain felt good, because at this close range the other's face can be superimposed on your own and the blurry sight is absorbed into your own uncertain vision.

Her senses had never deceived her, she said in a choked, agitated voice, her saliva's scent, mixed with nicotine but still sweet, pleasantly surprising my nose so unaccustomed to a woman's scent, what she said referred to both of us, as well as to the one who stood between us.

But the attraction of her scent was not strong enough to overcome a sudden revulsion, an urge to get away from this voice, from this face! for the face was not only distorted, like mine, it wasn't merely responding to my bewilderment with her own; hers seemed maniacal and possessed, and it occurred to me, not for the first time, that she might be insane.

Everything she said and did, every ounce of her strength, every wish, every aspect of her curiosity sprang from a tiny, sensitive, painful, and balm-seeking point of her being, and everything penetrating her from the outside world in the form of strength, desire, and curiosity was channeled back to the same point; if by some miracle I could have freed us of our clothes, and my body could have begged hers for mercy, and kissing and clinging to her I could have sunk into her wetness, I still wouldn't have reached her.

At the moment I saw her as someone willing to oblige but not to reciprocate.

In a way it was ludicrous to discover this about her in that situation, but she frightened me; I was alarmed that she might indeed be crazy, and then I must be crazy, too.

And against my better judgment I had to admit that Frau Kühnert, though she may have been driven by jealousy, was probably right: for Thea, people and feelings were only tools, means to some end; but since at that moment I myself was this tool, exposed and at the mercy of her sensitive touch, the fragrance rising from her neck and lips, I found this state of affairs tragic rather than amusing.

How did I ever get myself into this?

Whoever she picked out, she whispered hoarsely into my mouth, had to be one who had also picked her, she could be wrong about anything else, and also crazy and ugly and old.

No, no, she must be deranged or crazy, I thought, for thinking it made it less scary.

She might be vulgar and a fool, but she was never wrong about these things, and I must tell her — she was speaking right into my mouth and only a very abrupt, rough movement could have freed me from this position — because sometimes she felt, actually she felt for the first time, that she might have been deceiving herself in this case, so I must tell her whether Melchior had ever loved a woman.

Only madness could make somebody expend such an inordinate amount of physical and mental energy on so witless a question.

I pushed her away gently, but not so gently as to make it not seem cruel, for I had no intention of sparing her this cruelty.

Our arms fell helplessly to our sides, our bodies tilted back to their respective, balanced postures; as she looked at me, her face was so naked, as mine must have been looking at her, that it was as if we were seeing not each other's skin but the flesh, the bones, the rushing blood, the dividing cells, everything in the body that is selfish and self-serving and has nothing to do with another person; and at this point I should have said, It's over, let's quit, we're playing an impossible game, she's playing with me, at the expense of a third one, though we pretended to be playing for his sake.

I wanted to say all this but didn't.

It even seemed that the rudeness of my movement was useful in hiding a more calculating, more far-reaching act of kindness with which I could budge the moment of impasse into the next moment, delay and put off things and still leave her with a ray of hope.

Her hopelessness hurt me more than it hurt her, for she at least, by expressing it, could relieve herself of its pressure, and indeed, a faint glow of forced satisfaction did appear on her face, an almost audacious, sad smile that harked back not only to the question of Melchior's relation to women but also to the more provocative one about what Melchior and I could possibly do with each other that was so different from what she could be doing with me or with him, or could these things be completely identical? but this very common, pedestrian question only reinforced in me the feeling of hopelessness from which I wanted to save Melchior.

I was wrong, I thought, almost out loud, one could want another person only through that person's sex, except this was not to be, since everyone was more than his or her own sex, or maybe one never really wanted that other person; I was either wrong or crazy.

Of course, there was nothing to stop me from answering her, from explaining in simple terms what she wanted to know; but then I would have had to describe this relationship, unique and involving my whole being, in purely sexual terms, and that would have been a lie, an act of self-deception, a betrayal.

Let's go, I said out loud.

She said it was still early; she wanted to walk some more.

I could think of nothing except that I was wrong, and in the end things were very simple and she was the one who was right, because she felt the simplicity of things with her body, which I apparently couldn't feel; if she wanted to make soup she'd buy vegetables, meat, and seasonings, she'd put water in a pot which she'd set on the stove, light the stove, yes, that's how obvious it all must have been to everyone else but me; but then I must be wrong or insane.

And because I couldn't tell her any of this, I simply turned around, ready to walk back.

I would have started back, but like one just waking up and not knowing where he is, I found no path under my feet, because I had reached the end of a notion, or delusion; it was as though I had no idea what all this was, how and why we had ended up here, who this woman was, or perhaps we weren't at the place I thought we were, because the space around me had shifted and I found myself in an unfamiliar corner of an unfamiliar world, or more precisely, I did not find myself, I was nowhere, I did not exist; and then I must not have been waking from but sinking into an even deeper region of unreality.

Drained of color, the landscape was exhaling a gentle gray mist; only the edges of the massing clouds were still reflecting the windy red of dusk; down here there were no more curves, edges, or borders, and time itself had run out, though its infinitely divisible content remained inside me, but now it was formless, and what my eyes saw was also a similar formlessness.

I was making my way through chaos, moving neither forward nor backward, and certainly not along the trail, for a trail is only a concept we invent to help relieve us of our own bothersome physical mass; all right, no trail then, only the ground beaten flat by others before me, and no mist either, only water, and matter, everywhere and in everything only immovable matter.

Maybe the color of red light around the edges of vaporous clouds, but that, too, was only dust, sand, and smoke, the residue of the earth's matter; or perhaps it was light itself, which I can never see clearly.

I was quiet, because there was no landscape, only matter, weight and mass; I felt like screaming that I was deprived of beauty, there was no beauty and no form, for that, too, was but a notion with which I hoped to tear myself away from my own formlessness, but my mental exertion was laughable because, if there was still formless matter, if I could feel at least its weight, its chaotic state, then who was depriving me of anything?

When she opened the car door for me and I got in, I could see that she had calmed down, everything in her had gone silent, and from behind the silence she was listening to me, exclusively, attentively, rather as if she were tending someone very sick or a mental patient; before turning her attention to the always troublesome ignition she looked at me as if she understood something of what had just happened between us.

Where to, she asked.

She had never asked that before, I said, why now?

She released the handbrake and let the car roll down the hill.

All right, she'd take me home, then, she said.

No, I said, I was going to Melchior's place.

The engine coughed, shuddered, the whole contraption jerked violently, but the car started and we turned back onto the highway; the headlights cut a bright piece of the road out of the dusk which the accelerating wheels kept tucking away under them.

That's what we all do, we tuck the future under us in the front and let the past out in the rear, and we call that progress, but the division is arbitrary; the continuity of recurring elements in time can be checked only with the notion we call speed; and that is what history is, nothing more; that is my own story; I made a mistake, and I kept repeating my mistakes.

And yet with her silence, her tactful silence, she was now giving me a bit of hope; I felt that, too.

Later, I asked her if she knew that Melchior at one time had studied to be a violinist.

Yes, she knew, but let's not talk about him anymore.

What should we talk about, then? I asked.

Nothing, she said.

And did she know why he stopped playing the violin?

No, she didn't, but right now she didn't care to find out.

Imagine a seventeen-year-old boy, I said; the fact that I had to raise my voice over the tinny clatter of an ancient two-stroke engine, speaking so loudly, practically shouting into her ears things that would have real meaning only in the tranquillity of the soul, actually enhanced this last of my little performances; I decided to have one more try, really the last one, and by having to raise my voice I'd have my revenge, too, as if to say to her, You wanted to hear it, well, here it is, now you can hear it! and that helped me broach and sully a forbidden subject, and also overcome the shame of my betrayal.

So imagine a seventeen-year-old boy who, in a quaint old town, recently bombed to smithereens in the war, was admired as a prodigy — I was shouting in a strange voice to drown out the engine, and asked her if she had ever been in that town, because suddenly it seemed very important to me that she know the houses, the street, the air, the fragrant winter apples on top of the cupboard, the wide moat around the old castle now overgrown with shrubs, and the spot on the ceiling over his bed.

And as I thought of this, I realized that my tone was wrong, wrong as all the others I had used; without the right tone and feelings the story itself could not be told.

No, unfortunately, she had never been there, but now she would really like me to talk about something else or, better yet, just keep quiet.

I should have told her about that evening, about the sticky, breezeless evening air as we stepped out of the house on Wörther Platz and just stood there on the street, because deciding on a route for our walk was always important, it had to match our emotional state and our plans for the future.

Could she imagine the condition, I shouted at her, in which an adolescent boy cannot yet distinguish between the beauty of the body and the power of its abilities?

Raising her head high to steady her awful glasses, she listened reluctantly, pretending to be interested only in the road ahead; I could just go on, my voice would mean nothing more than the clatter and drone of the engine.

That evening, or night rather, when Melchior told me the story, we must have been looking for open spaces, because we chose a shorter route, but then ended up taking the longer one to Weissensee, or White Lake.

On the terrace of the beer hall we took two iron chairs out of the stacked pile; they creaked uninvitingly in the dark; we settled down only long enough to have a smoke before moving on; it was cold.

It must have been around midnight, only an occasional call of wild ducks could be heard from the lake, otherwise everything was dark and still.

I was telling him about my little sister, about her death, about the institution my father had taken her to, where I had visited her only once, I hadn't the courage to go back again; I was telling him about that single visit during which, remembering our old game, she wedged herself between my knees, which was a call for me to squeeze her.

And I did squeeze her, and she laughed, and kept on laughing for an hour and a half, did nothing but laugh, which in her language meant she was anxious to please me, was telling me that if I took her away she'd reward me with her unending happiness, but it was also possible, I told Melchior, that it was the pain of my indifference that made me see it that way.

He put his elbow on the table, leaned his head on his hand, and looked down at me — I had pulled over two chairs and stretched out on them with my head in his lap.

Two years later, I told him, because I could never go back to that place again, I found a note on my desk: Your sister died, funeral at such and such time.

There was no light near us, we saw each other's face only in the glow of our cigarettes.

He listened patiently to the end, but not without a certain aversion.

Melchior shied away from everything that had to do with my past; whenever I talked about it he would listen, but in spite of his polite or seemingly polite interest, his muscles would grow tense as if to prevent my past from penetrating him; the present, the moment, my presence was more than enough for him.

I could also say that he was looking down at me with the reservation of a mature man energetically active in his present; he was slightly shocked but indulged this weakness in me, for he did love me; he clearly disapproved of my obsession with certain aspects of my past which normal adult men, done with their past once and for all, find improper to bring up.

But as he listened to me, a radically different process was also taking place in him: as usual, he kept correcting my grammatically faulty sentences, he did this almost unawares, it had become an unconscious habit between us; in fact, he was the one who shaped my sentences, gave them the proper structure, incorporated them into the neat order of his native language, I had to rely on his expropriated sentences to work my way through my linguistic rubble, had to use his sentences to tell my story, and didn't even notice that some of these jointly produced sentences were repeated two or three times, their place and value reshuffled, before reaching intelligible form.

It was as if I had to use my own past to coax the story of his past out of him. I didn't think of it then, but now I believe we needed these evening walks not just for the exercise but to relate to the world around us — which we both felt, though for different reasons, to be cheerless and alien — and to do it in a way that this same world would not be aware of what we were doing.

I also liked the way he smoked his cigarettes.

There was something solemn and ceremonious about the way he tapped the pack and pulled out a cigarette with his long fingers; the act of lighting it was special, too, as was each puff he took, inhaling voluptuously, long and deep, holding it down for a long time; and then he'd blow out slowly, curling the smoke with his lips; he truly enjoyed the sight of the smoke, reaching after it with his tongue, forming rings and sticking his finger carefully into them; and between puffs he held his cigarette in his hand as if to say, Look, everyone, here is a cigarette, and we now have the rare privilege of being able to smoke in peace; lighting up, for us, was not simply the act of common puffing on a common cigarette but the very essence of smoking pleasure.

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.

In his struggle with matter, the artist touched secret layers of his own being he didn't know existed; the revelation might be shameful, he'd much rather hide it from curious eyes; but if art was not an act of initiation into the most searing secrets, it wasn't worth a damn; he often yelled, almost going out of his mind, that he and his pupil were marking time in the antechamber of art, implying there was a certain place, like a great hall, they should eventually enter.

He couldn't say he liked this man, though he was attracted to him, yet for all his attraction he remained suspicious, at the same time reproaching himself for being suspicious; nevertheless he felt he saw something, knew something about him no one else did: he saw that the man was corrupt to the core, a liar, a cynic, an infinitely bitter man; yet he believed the man wished him well, and he not only did not dare reject this kindness but tried very hard to measure up to it, be worthy of it, while all along his ears kept telling him that all that talk about the antechamber and the halls of art was false, it had to be, if only because the man himself never gained admission, never got anywhere; he was full of longing, yes, and in this pathetic longing there was enough bitterness, and the credibility of sadness and despair, to make the things he said not complete nonsense, although Melchior also felt that this longing was not for music, not even for a career, the man had given up on that long ago, he didn't really know what he longed for, maybe just wanted to sound profound, mysterious, satanic, disturbing, and at the same time benevolent, decent, wise, and understanding, and in the end Melchior became the object of this longing, of this painful and pitiful struggle.

After each lesson he fled his teacher's house in complete defeat; during the four years he was his student, the demon of art, metaphorically speaking, inhabited his soul; he grew gaunt, he looked wasted, which didn't seem unusual, because in those years everybody was hungry and looked harried and worn-out.

He became humble and stubborn, he practiced compulsively and learned many things on his own for which he was grateful to his teacher, everything that was good had to originate with him; he was developing nicely, realizing his artistic potential, as people like to say, and his teacher acknowledged this, sometimes grudgingly, sometimes with furious emotional outbursts, which Melchior dreaded more than the annihilating criticism; now and then the teacher allowed him to perform in public, indeed organized some of the appearances himself, introduced Melchior to musical notables, had him perform before select audiences, and the result each time was overwhelming success; they simply loved him, they ate him up, he brought tears to their eyes, even though in those postwar years people were very reluctant to give way to tears.

But even at such moments, in the midst of the warmest ovation, his teacher let him know that while all this was well and good, we shall put it behind us, not dwell on it or let ourselves be carried away; and when they were left alone he proceeded to dissect the performance so mercilessly that Melchior was forced to concede that he couldn't make it, didn't know what heights he was supposed to reach but was sure he couldn't reach them, and his teacher was almost always right, about almost everything, and the only reason he was suspicious and ungrateful, the reason he could never be worthy of all that goodness, was that deep down he felt he didn't have the least bit of talent.

When alone with these feelings he was racked by anxiety attacks; for days he would huddle in a corner, stay home from school, and keep thinking that one day his complete lack of talent would be discovered; he thought he couldn't hide it anymore, everyone would see that he had no talent at all, and then his teacher would mercilessly give him the boot.

Sometimes he found himself hoping to see that day, though his mother would be very disappointed.

Maybe the reason he wasn't completely destroyed by all this, why he kept hoping his teacher might still be wrong, was that in the final analysis one is incapable of total self-annihilation, either mental or physical, not even after having taken cyanide, for even then it's the poison, or the rope, or the water, or the bullet that does the job; oh, how he would have loved to jump into the river, how he longed for the current swirling around the exposed pillars of that collapsed bridge! but then, even doing away with oneself came down to making an everyday decision: to pick the means to do the job for you; and mental suicide always left a little back door open: the sky is still blue, life can go on, and what is that if not hope?

The reason he thought of cyanide was that a few years later — he was already at the university — this poor man got hold of a dose large enough to kill a horse; it was summertime, no performances at the theater, no one looked for him in the evenings, a very hot summer it was, and then the neighbors were alarmed by this frightful, sickening smell coming from his apartment.

In any case, it was in such circumstances that he began to notice the girl in the window across the street; they were preparing for a very important competition; it was spring, he recalled, all the windows in the teacher's apartment were open; the stakes were high, the top three finalists would be automatically admitted to the conservatory; in his teacher's judgment the competition would be stiff, and he mentioned some of his colleagues and their capable students; but the difference between a talented and an untalented person, he went on, was that the talented one is inspired by his rivals, and since Melchior's rivals were very strong, his chances were very good.

He placed the music stand in front of the window so that each time he looked up, which he would make seem accidental, he could see the girl.

His teacher sat in a commodious armchair in the dark depths of the room, whence he issued his occasional instructions.

Interestingly enough, the tension thus created did not distract him from his work; it meant added pressure, of course, but the odd feeling that he was doing a balancing act with his violin on the borderline of two glances issuing from two very different, contrasting, and possibly even antagonistic individuals, that he was moving between a delicious secret and a dark betrayal, increased his concentration to an intensity he had never experienced before.

He wasn't trying to impress the girl or his teacher or himself; he was there, at once inside all three of them and outside the entire event; in a word, he was playing the violin.

Whenever it was raining or cold and the window had to be closed, the girl resorted to crazy stunts; with outstretched arms she'd lean so far out the window it really looked as if she might fall, or she would close the window and act very annoyed, pressing her nose, her mouth, and her tongue to the glass, making idiotic faces and mimicking him sawing away on his violin, or she would breathe on the glass and write letters in the mist, spelling out "I love you," would thumb her nose at him, tear at her blouse over her breast, implying that if she couldn't listen to that sweet music she'd go mad, stick out her tongue and blow tiny kisses from her palm; but if they ran into each other at school, they both pretended that none of that had meant anything, that none of that had ever even happened.

His teacher responded to the sudden qualitative improvement with pleasant self-satisfaction; he didn't praise him, but from the dim depths of the room he was radiating love, guiding his playing with angry, enthusiastic, and emotional interjections; and Melchior was overjoyed that after four years of hopeless suffering he had finally managed to deceive this seemingly wise and all-knowing man.

The game went on for about two weeks before the teacher got wise to them, though true to his cruel self he did not let on even then, slyly letting their story unfold and expand so that at the right moment he could pounce on them and wipe them away like so much snot; Melchior sensed this cruel anticipation, knew a catastrophe was imminent; but there was also the girl, who had no inkling of the impending disaster, who went on with her antics, swinging out the window, and he couldn't help watching and even laughing out loud at times, while keeping up his guard; he wanted both to protect himself and to annoy his teacher, and that — looking back now he was quite sure — made him even more seductive in the teacher's eye.

And in the meantime, he had to listen to long parables, colorfully told, spiced with exciting illustrations, all of them dripping with kindness, about the virtues of an ascetic way of life, about the psychological engine of aesthetics, the drawbacks of hedonism, the brakes, gears, and pistons of the human soul, and about those practical safety valves through which excess steam may and should be released from the body's power plant; the tales were filled with metaphors, figures, and verbal flourishes, yet when it became clear that these hints and allusions had no effect, Melchior had to pick himself up and with his music stand move deep into the room while his teacher took his place by the window.

The story might have ended there, because Melchior raised no objections: on the contrary, deep down he approved, he understood his teacher or thought he did, and considered the simple, physical regulation of human weaknesses to be the best, most helpful solution to the problem; he was innocent to the point of idiocy, an imbecile couldn't have been more innocent; not only did he have not the slightest notion of how babies were born, but he was also ignorant of the difference between the sexes, or more correctly, everything he was preoccupied with then moved in such a different dimension that even the things he did know he didn't truly grasp.

But the girl wouldn't give up so easily; she'd wait for him downstairs, and at that point all the clowning and mimicking came to an end, and a terrific struggle began among the three of them, a struggle in which Melchior could take part only with his senses — no, not even that, with his instincts — not realizing that it was a struggle, and that he was struggling for life.

And he could scarcely have had any idea of the agonies this man had to endure, the terrible struggle he had to wage with himself, yet he did know, for he was blackmailing the man all along.

He knew because on several occasions he overheard vague and embarrassed whispers about his teacher being a returnee from one of the concentration camps, Sachsenhausen perhaps, he didn't remember exactly, and about how in the camp his teacher wore not a yellow, not even a red, but a pink triangle, which meant he had to be queer; but as often happens, another story was also making the rounds, according to which he had to wear the pink triangle because of his liberal views — that charge was serious enough to have the accuser land in jail after the war — but what seemed to contradict this theory was the rumor that the teacher was in fact an outspoken member of the Nazi Party and had been active in the de-Judaization of German music; whatever the real story was, for Melchior it was all a bunch of empty words, they stuck in his mind, but he didn't connect them to anything, at most he concluded that for the grownups the war apparently hadn't been enough, they kept on squabbling even now, or that society had always viewed the artist as the carrier of some contagion, but sensible people paid no heed.

Nevertheless, his mother should have known better.

Melchior talked uninterruptedly until dawn, and this was the only moment when the cool, steady stream of his narrative was stemmed by an impassable emotional barrier.

His chest rose, and his gaze, still holding my eyes, turned inward and seemed to say, No, no more, the rest he couldn't let go.

His eyes filled with tears, he choked up, he seemed about to break into sobs or into loud accusations.

But laughing through his tears he yelled that I shouldn't take this seriously, nothing should be taken seriously.

Then, more quietly, almost finding his way back to his earlier tones, he said that every whore and every faggot had a mother and a soul-stirring story.

It was all sentimental junk, he said.

And several days later it was this story I continued telling Thea as we drove on that dark highway toward the city.

It's true, I did make a few unavoidable alterations: the mental state of a child prodigy was meant as a kind of introduction, a framework, and also, I tried to speak in impersonal tones, as if talking about a person neither of us knew.

But the impersonal tone and the attempted objective approach conjured up an abstract element in the story, one that allows us to weave the strands of personal causal relations into a larger and more general chronology which we tend to label — because of its impersonality and immutability — a historical process or the force of destiny, or even divine predestination; by insisting on this unalterable and impersonal viewpoint, which of course is an emotional rather than intellectual device, I tried to cover up my shameless betrayal of Melchior; I was retelling his story as if it were but a trivial episode in a larger history that, with its relentless flow of repetitions, kept extinguishing and giving birth to itself.

It was as if I had a bird's-eye view of a city; in it I could see an attractive young woman and a violin; I could see the cracks and empty spaces that history had cut out for itself and, using its own materials, would ultimately have to patch up and fill in; I could see a pretty little theater and inside the theater an orchestra pit and musicians in the pit, but at the same time I could also see a far-off pit, a trench somewhere near Stalingrad; in one pit I could see the vacant seat of the first violinist, and in the other pit a soldier wrapped in rags just about to freeze to death.

And looking down like this, from the bird's-eye view of impassive history, I would consider it a matter of little consequence that a few musicians disappeared from the orchestra pit and others vanished from the family bed and some people were hauled off to concentration camps and others to the front; details were beside the point, for history or fate or Providence ordered all this with one curt command: fill the empty space, music must be made in the orchestra pit, and in the trenches there must be shooting, and other pits and trenches were there for burials; someone has to fill in for the first violinist, no seat must remain empty, and the replacement must play the same music, wear the same historical disguise of white tie and tails, to make the changeable look permanent; and it must be made to appear negligible, barely worth mentioning, that French POWs from the neighboring camp have been ordered to occupy the chairs left vacant in the orchestra pit, and if, as a reward for ensuring unbreakable continuity, the guards should take these prisoners over to the Golden Horn Inn, this should not happen as if by accident, as if out of compassionate human concern dictated by fate or Providence or history, but for the sole reason that for a brief hour the new first violinist could slip into the innkeeper's second-floor apartment — the innkeeper himself was breathing his last on the snowy steppes of Stalingrad — and believe that it was for his sake that history skipped a beat.

But history or fate or Divine Providence never skips anything and filled the space the innkeeper left behind in his conjugal bed, and in this sense it again matters very little that in that bed an attractive young woman and an attractive young man experience something they rightfully call fateful love; they keep saying they would rather die than live without each other, and describe their feelings in such extreme terms because they are describing fate's own design.

Seen in this light, it's quite irrelevant to ask whether or not the quietly drinking guards noticed this impermissible breach of regulations, it's no problem for history temporarily to intoxicate a couple of slow-witted soldiers, or bribe them, or make them overlook a sudden burst of passion, so that it can use them later, once sobering light was shed on the terrible deed, to beat to death the French miscegenist, which would again create a vacancy in the historically important orchestra, but it's all right, history would fill that gap, too, later, when it would return somebody to the city, someone who had been banished on charges of sexual perversion.

So I don't think, I said to Thea, that the mother's blindness, viewed from this loftier perspective, could be faulted in any way, because whatever she had lost with her husband's disappearance she more than regained from her lover, and whatever she seemed to have lost when he was gone, too, she was compensated for, thank God, by the fruit of her womb, even though the gift thus received she would have to return one day.

Thea said quietly that she'd understand me just as well even if I didn't make a point of blaspheming in such a complicated, roundabout way.

And she continued to pretend that she wasn't really paying attention to what I was saying.

The day his teacher ordered him away from the window, Melchior went on with his story, the girl waited for him downstairs; for a while they just looked at each other, but then he didn't know what to do, for although he was glad to see that they had managed to deceive his teacher, he was also terribly embarrassed, he still doesn't know why, maybe because he was wearing short pants, anyway, he couldn't think of anything to say, so he started walking away, swinging his violin case, but then the girl yelled "Idiot!" and he turned around.

They were standing facing each other again, and then the girl asked him to come to her place because she'd like him to play once just for her.

He thought that was a terribly dumb thing to say; these things couldn't be mixed up in such a crude way, so all he said was "Idiot yourself."

The girl shrugged her shoulders and said, All right, then, in that case he could kiss her right there.

And from then on she waited for him every day, even though they decided each day that she wouldn't do it again; with arguments and intonations borrowed from his teacher he tried to explain that this competition was an awfully important thing in his life and they shouldn't be doing this now.

Actually, no; it happened just the other way around.

He recalled that on the first day, when they were both so excited they didn't know what to do with one another and talked instead to hide their excitement, they were standing in the old, dry moat, in the midst of garbage, bushes, debris of all kinds, it was all very smelly, and the girl was telling him how much she loved him and was willing to wait for him for the rest of her life, and since this competition was now more important than anything else, they should just break up and she would wait for him, and they both felt that this was a terribly beautiful sentiment, yet she was there every day, waiting for him.

And there was one more thing he had to confess.

Though at the moment he had no idea how to talk about it sensibly.

We were sitting motionless, but his gaze was running headlong inside me, and I was backing away and stumbling with my own blinking glances, trying to get away, jump out of the way of his words, as if we were blindfolded and chasing around an elusive object that slipped away just as one of us touched it.

The capacity of our modesty was at issue now, and the laws of spiritual modesty are far stricter than those of physical bashfulness, which is as it should be, since the body is perishable matter, but once it starts revealing itself as not matter, then suddenly its limited, finite nature becomes frighteningly infinite; in panic I fled from this boundless thing, not wanting to see the thing I myself had forced into existence.

His words remained sharp and deliberate, so many thrusts and parries, but no coherent sentence emerged, nothing more than so many powerful unfinished allusions, statements, exclamations, as well as their negations; questions and doubts that only I could understand, inasmuch as one can understand modestly fluttering scraps of words stirred by the repressed mental energies of another human being.

These confused, clipped, suppressed, and still meaningful words referred to the relationship between a long-buried memory now springing to life and another, prudently unspecified recent experience — that of meeting Thea, whose name he couldn't bring himself to say; there was, after all, a huge gap of ten years between the two experiences.

I was lucky enough to have heard two versions of how they got to know each other.

No more of that, he said.

Not even with me, he said.

He said that comparisons never made any sense.

And still, he said.

With her… the guilty silence now had to do with Thea; this whole unfortunate mess started with that.

He didn't want to be tactless or ridiculous, yet he couldn't be anything else.

He didn't want to hurt her, but that's exactly what he was doing.

He just didn't want those kinds of feelings anymore, it seemed.

This state of affairs lasted about a week, he said pensively, and I could tell by looking at him that he was referring to two different times at once, one ten years and the other only a few months earlier, more correctly, the events of ten years ago coming aglow in those of a few months ago.

There is no memory without the recurrence of emotions, or conversely, every moment of lived experience is also an allusion to a former experience — that is what memory is.

The two recollections converged on his face and settled down, one superimposed on the other, each fueling the other, and that made me feel such relief and satisfaction, as if at long last we had hit upon the true topic of our conversation, the one we had been blindly groping for until then.

Needless to say, this little digression I did not mention to Thea in the car.

But he did want to tell me the end of the story, because one day his teacher opened the door, and though he tried to look very solemn, his expression was so desperate that Melchior knew right away that the end he'd always feared was at hand.

He indicated that he should put the violin down, they wouldn't be needing it, and led him into another room.

The teacher sat down but let Melchior stand.

He then asked how Melchior had been spending his evenings.

For once he stood firm and wouldn't say anything, but then his teacher calmly enumerated the days of the week and told him precisely, to the minute, when he had come home each night.

He made no mention of the girl, not even a hint, simply ran down the list: Monday, 9:42; Tuesday, 10:28; and so on, like that, very slowly, without comment. Melchior, wearing his short pants, was standing in the middle of a rug, and when he heard the list he just passed out, right there, in the middle of the rug.

What made him faint was the sudden thought that this respectable, horrible, worshipped, old, handsome, gray-haired, unfortunate man had been following him — a mere child, an untalented nobody — sneaking after him, tailing him day after day, and he must have seen everything, everything.

It was probably just a dizzy spell, a blackout lasting no more than a few seconds.

He came to, smelling his teacher's familiar scent from very close up; he was kneeling over him, and his face remained an unforgettable image: a spider at the moment the longed-for green fly is caught in its web.

The teacher was hugging and kissing him, so distraught with fear that he almost cried, whispering, begging him, imploring him to trust him, for if he didn't he would surely die, he was already dead, they had killed him, and amid these frantic whispers he also blurted out that no one really knew who Melchior's real father was, so why not consider him his father and trust him like a father.

Melchior cried, protested, trembled; after he managed to calm down somewhat and his teacher thought it safe to let him go out on the street, he saw the girl waiting for him, but he ran off without a word.

Luckily, his mother came home very late that night.

By then he had managed to pull himself together; he told her that they should move somewhere else, anywhere, and look for another teacher, any teacher, because this one was no good; he didn't say anything else; he couldn't think of anything else except that his teacher was an evil man, but this he didn't dare say out loud, so in response to his mother's every question he kept repeating that he was a rotten teacher, as if they were talking about his musical education and not about his life.

His mother's lack of suspicion was the last straw, the final proof that no one was there to help him, not even his mother, and everything that really mattered in his life had to be kept secret.

He let himself be comforted, tucked in, and put to sleep; in spite of his misgivings, he let her go through the motions with which an uncomprehending mother can show her love in such a situation.

Having listened to all these minor details, Melchior said, I could no doubt guess what happened next.

Occasionally the girl appeared in the window, cautiously, timidly, because she meant to show him that she understood and was willing to wait for him, but the waiting caused so much pain it was best to block it out.

The day before the competition he and his teacher took the train to Dresden; he wasn't going to reveal what happened that night in the double bed of the hotel room, he'd say only this, that not before or since had he seen a man struggle so mightily with himself, and that his strength held out as long as it could.

It wasn't really a hotel but a quiet, old-fashioned boardinghouse somewhere outside the city, in a secluded valley, with somber little turrets and latticed balconies, like a quaint, forgotten, haunted castle.

They got there by streetcar from the railroad station; their room was large and pleasantly cool, and everything in it was white: the washbowl, the oval mirror, the marble washstand, the pitcher filled with water, the bedspread and the curtains, too; outside their window dense foliage rustled all night long.

He was speaking rather haltingly now, as it ready to break off at any moment, but he couldn't find his way back to silence, because after each word he thought would be the last, there was still another.

He asked me for a cigarette.

I found the pack, gave him a cigarette, and put the ashtray in his lap; I also looked for a position to support myself and something to cover up my bothersome nakedness and to warm my feet, numb with cold, so I moved to the other end of the sofa, leaned against the wall, pulled over the blanket, and slid my ice-cold feet under his thighs; he went on, still speaking haltingly, but compelled to carry on with the story.

Now I probably understood, he said, why he had asked his mother who his father was; his teacher's odd remark must have preyed on his mind.

It was also odd, he said, pausing long enough to take a puff, that three years later, when he was home from the university during a break, his mother still didn't seem to understand anything, and with stupefying innocence told him how his teacher had killed himself, talking about it as if it were a trivial piece of news.

He made no response; instead, he quite casually announced that in a few days they'd have a guest, he'd invited a classmate of his, and to avoid any misunderstanding, he pronounced the guest's name, Mario, very distinctly, in case she thought he said Marion.

And then, as if she finally understood, and this, too, happened while she was standing by the sink, the dish she was drying stopped in her hands.

It doesn't matter, darling, she said; this way you'll always be mine.

Once, long after that day, she repeated the same sentence to me.

Melchior's pauses grew longer, but he couldn't stop.

Some crazy delusion would have you believe that the events of the world happen just for you, he said, everything, including things that happen to other people; his experience, your experience are also mine, all mine.

The reason for this, he went on, may have to do with the fact that the first thing every living thing takes into its mouth is its mother's milk-filled breast; and that's why we want our father's red-veined cock in our mouth, too; everything alive, everything that can be stuffed or poured into it, whether it's sweet or salty, everything that assures life and is essential to it must be ours, we must possess it, make it our own.

I understood well why he couldn't stop; the more forgiving and understanding toward his mother and his teacher, the more he was tempted by a secret, unacknowledged desire to shift the moral burden of his experiences partly onto history, something conveniently intangible, and partly onto the two all-too-tangible people closest to him; but because his moral standards would not allow him simply to hate these two people — one absolved by death, the other his mother, after all — and also because he had no penchant for self-hatred, he had no choice but to see himself as a victim of history.

But a victim that talks is always a little embarrassing, his accusations comical, just because he is talking, whereas real victims of history, as we know, are always silent.

And that is why he could no longer abide this place, I understood that now; that's why he had to risk everything and try to get away, reject and sever all ties with his own history, or die for the hope of a new beginning, even letting himself be shot like a dog while crossing the border.

As we reached the city we both stopped talking, withdrawing into our own silences; side by side, there were two interconnected yet separate silences.

I felt a slight excitement in my stomach, in my bowels, as if my conscience had shifted its activities to those places; I was anxious to calm these rumblings and growlings, to ease the urge to pass wind, which was all the more difficult since Thea remained mysteriously and unpredictably closed and aloof — I couldn't tell what effect my response had had on her.

Her curious comment that she would understand even if I hadn't blasphemed in such an elaborate and roundabout way — if I related the story without making a moral judgment, that is — still stung a little.

Nevertheless, it made me realize that neither Melchior's story nor any other could be traced directly to historical circumstances or biological determinants; the moral onus cannot be shifted onto anybody or anything; to think so would imply a certain narrow-mindedness, a poverty of reason; in every story one ought to accept the power of an indivisible whole that pervades its every detail; this is by no means easy if one is used to focusing on details and one is not even a believer.

I had to look at her, almost as if to check the physical state of the person who put such a question to me.

But she seemed not to have heard the rumbling of my stomach, and appeared untouched by my searching look.

Her comment also struck me as curious because never before or after that day had I ever heard her utter God's name, either in prayer or as a curse.

I could interpret her silent features as impassive and indifferent, or as signs of being sympathetic and deeply touched by Melchior's story.

And the closer we got to Wörther Platz, the more impossible it seemed that this day was drawing to a close and something else was about to begin, something inconceivably different, and that she and I had to part until tomorrow, so terribly far away.

The feeling was not totally unfamiliar, though; when I was with either one of them, I was very much present, and the more I managed to be present in the in-between place, the better I could answer their needs, exactly as they wanted me to, and the harder it became to give up my place.

On such nights, for example, after getting out of Thea's car, I'd walk up to the fifth floor to see Melchior, annoyed by my lateness, open the door, and open it wide, and then not only his controlled, almost impersonal smile would seem strange to me but everything about him: his attractiveness, his smell, his skin, the stubble on his chin, his cool blue eyes peering out of his smile, and — I'd almost be ashamed to admit it — his sex, his maleness, though not his essential self.

It seemed I was always closest to the things and people I had just left and had to leave them to stay close; perhaps that was the source of all my errors, I thought, although it couldn't really be called an error, because it wasn't I but my experiences that went this way: in my stead, my own story was doing my thinking for me; I was alive yet continually kept saying goodbye to life, for at the end of every experience a death loomed; as a result, saying goodbye became more important than life itself.

Some such thoughts were going through my mind when we stopped in front of Melchior's building; with her head thrown back, Thea managed somehow to be looking down at me, then she took off her glasses and smiled.

This fast-spreading, expansive smile must have been lying dormant in the muscles of her mobile face, but she hadn't let it out before, held it back, out of tact perhaps, or guile, so as not to distract me, to be able to absorb the story as an undisturbed whole, the way I'd wanted to present it.

And I asked myself again, delving into the mystery of my cultural conditioning, why I was constantly inching away from the life of my most private self, why this readiness to conform to other people's image of me? was it because death lay in wait at the end of every memory? and wouldn't that be the most primitive historical experience rather than divinely inspired destiny?

Softly she put her hand on my knee, her fingers spread and wrapped around my kneecap, but she did not squeeze; in the darkness of the car I looked at her eyes.

Maybe she wasn't holding my knee at all; with that gesture she was holding together our bodies, our silences, and I could tell from her eyes that she wanted to say something, or rather, that she couldn't say anything because she was feeling precisely what she had to understand.

And to give voice to this feeling would be an exaggeration; certain things should not even be hinted at, life must not be interfered with, but still, if it hadn't been so dark in the car with only the light of streetlamps filtering in through the foliage, if we had been able to see each other's face clearly, if what we felt had not remained on the border of anticipation and consciousness, if it had turned into words, then, chances are, everything would have turned out differently among the three of us.

Later she did start talking, but by then that charged moment had passed.

Yes, she said, everyone had their life story to tell, and had I ever noticed they were all sad stories? and why was that? she wondered; yet it seemed to her that what I was telling her was the story of my own life, which she really knew nothing about, or perhaps the story of my personal hurts.

My hurts? I asked, because the word surprised me.

Without responding to the surprise in my voice, the smile on her face broke into a laugh, and out of that she shot a question at me: Did I know she was Jewish?

And then she began to laugh in earnest, probably because of the surprise and puzzled incredulity that must have been written all over my face.

All right, she said, still laughing, I should go now, she squeezed my knee and immediately withdrew her hand; that story she'd tell me some other time.

I said I didn't understand.

No matter, I was a smart boy, I should think about it; besides, one didn't have to understand everything, it was enough to feel it.

But what was there to feel here?

Never mind, I should just feel it.

She wouldn't get away with this, I said, this was a dirty trick.

I won't, eh? she said, laughing, and leaning across me, she pushed open the door on my side: time to get out.

But I didn't have the foggiest; what was she talking about?

She was no longer interested in what I was saying, what I did or did not understand; pressing her hands against my shoulders and chest, she was bent on squeezing or pushing me out of the car; hesitating slightly, I grabbed hold of her wrist; I hesitated because I felt I shouldn't respond violently to her violence since she was Jewish, she had just said it, hadn't she, she was a Jew; still, twisting it slightly I pried her hand off; we were both laughing at our awkwardness, and at the same time we both wanted to end it.

Don't, don't, she whined in a dull, artfully painful voice, at once the mature woman's crumbling defense and the erstwhile young girl's endearingly inept playacting: Let go, let go now, that's enough.

But perhaps it wasn't enough, not yet, because she jabbed me in the chest with her head; she wanted more, so I squeezed her hand harder, she winced, and for a moment her head rested on my chest, nice and cozy, as if she'd been looking for just that spot, and this tense meeting of our bodies meant that I was the broad-chested he-man and she the weak woman; she wasn't giving in, not yet, she'd push a little more and then she would yield.

I won't let go, I said out loud, expressing a feeling that was flattering because it conformed to the generally accepted sexual role-playing; and I gave voice to this feeling of male superiority eagerly, as if declaring that I had no intention of passing up the chance this feeling gave me.

I may have gone too far, however; insulted, she yanked her head back, accidentally knocking it against my chin, hurting us both a little.

Her offended withdrawal meant she was unwilling to concede the obvious difference between us, or at least was not about to make use of it, even if the pain thus caused was undeniably mutual.

What's wrong? I asked.

Wrong? she said brazenly, nothing, nothing.

But at the same time she was looking into my eyes so tenderly, imploringly, retreating into the role of the weak woman with girlishly sly and coy humility, illuminating the role with the mastery of a real professional; and this mockery, making our involuntarily assumed roles look ridiculous, was so much to my liking that slowly, gradually, I eased my hold on her wrist, though I didn't let go of it completely.

What was she trying to tell me? I asked, and the sound of my voice told me how reluctantly I was making my way from promising silent touches toward false and loud words.

But in fact I started to speak because I didn't want my mind to let go of my instincts; at the very least the mind should follow closely and understand what these instincts are after and why, and instincts and feelings should operate neither against nor instead of the mind; if there was something between us, if such a thing was possible, it shouldn't be some sort of supplement, a working off of other emotions, or a round of common sexual gymnastics; and she must have felt the same way.

Everything that had happened between us so far could still be seen as friendly banter, though it was hard to tell where good-natured rough-housing ended and the pleasure of amorous touching began; the borderline was carefully guarded by sober intelligence, even if the situation itself, precisely because of its delicious inherent possibilities, seemed irreversible; we'd either crossed the line already or simply didn't know where we were.

She'll tell me another time, she said dryly, now I should let her go.

No, I won't, I said, not until she explained what she meant, I don't like this kind of nonsense.

But reason could no longer help our feelings, because the words themselves were trying to decide about something startling and final, yet we no longer had any idea of what we were talking about — again an unmistakable characteristic of a lovers' quarrel.

Angry and impatient, she jerked her head sideways, hoping perhaps that a change of position would also change the situation.

Come on, let go, she said, almost spitefully, Arno had no idea where she might be, he was waiting for her, he'd get all crabby from so much waiting, it was very late.

As she jerked her head away, a ray of light fell on her face, the harsh light of a streetlamp; it was perhaps this light that defeated me.

Pretty funny that she should think of Arno right now, I said with a laugh.

Because in the harsh light from the street — and there is no other way I can put it — his face appeared on hers.

For a moment her face did seem to resemble Arno's long, dry, mournful face, yet it wasn't so much his features that showed through as a feeling, or the shadow of a feeling, just a trace of sadness belonging to that strange man to whom she felt she belonged, and whom, simply by pronouncing his name, and therefore not unwittingly, she now placed between us; he wasn't just the old husband she had to think about even at the moment she was unfaithful and whom she treated like a father or a son; no, it was this man's sadness to which she had to remain faithful, so she could remain faithful to the abiding, all-encompassing sadness that was the basis of their life together — could this be the reason she mentioned being Jewish? — a sadness that was not only his but hers as well, it would appear; was there something between them that was truly unbreakable? could their common bond be the fact that she was a Jew and he a German?

I should have overcome, wiped away, or at least banished temporarily this hitherto unfamiliar, never-before-seen sadness, except that Arno's sadness confounded me; it was the sadness of a man I didn't feel close to, a man I couldn't touch, and I couldn't pretend I didn't see that they shared this sadness — hence her victory, or theirs, over me.

And now I knew even less just where my place was in this somber situation, but the stark sadness that broke through all her possible masks and faces, now illuminated by the harsh streetlight, was like a sudden violent discharge, a clash of the most opposite forces.

All right, I'll let her go, I said, but first I will kiss her.

It seemed that by simply saying it, the act had become impossible, and then we could consider it done.

And then that famous whole that should pervade all details of a relationship must also include what in the ordinary sense does not take place yet is a reality.

She turned her face back toward me slowly and with a surprised look on it, as if she were amazed on behalf of that other person as well, I was faced with the astonished gaze of two people.

As she turned, the light vanished from her face, but I knew that the strange face would not leave her, and the half-open mouth said or rather moaned from behind that face, No, not now.

I let go of her; some time passed.

This moan issuing from their shared sadness did not mean what it seemed to mean, it had to be translated: in the language the two of us had in common it meant just the opposite, it meant that she felt as I did, and if not now, she did mean maybe later.

If it had meant next week or tomorrow perhaps, that would have meant not now and not later either; but that's not what she meant.

Our faces began to undulate between yes and no, between now, the next moment, and any time.

With my casual statement I seemed to have awakened our mouths, and now we had to look at them.

Yes, the features of our faces were undulating, wavering, the skin trembled as our faces relaxed and tensed again, and the next moment did arrive, but without turning into now or anytime, what remained was the uncertain later, yet what was vibrating on her lips was a definite yes— only its when was unknown.

But this began to be painful, because if it didn't happen now then the yes must have meant no, after all.

Like a pendulum, our faces swayed between the subtle pain of tentative rejection and the equally subtle joy of tentative consent; I might even say that our faces oscillated between self-defense and self-surrender; and because this was true oscillation — when pain flitted across one face, the other flickered with joy, and when one was suffused with joy, the other showed pain — even when the long-awaited decisive moment seemed at hand, yes and no could still not be separated.

So to avoid having to wait for the next moment, I cut through our shared time by making a move; and I did it simply because I was in pain, and while one escape route was closed to me, the car door behind me was open; the pain, unable to turn into joy, sought relief at any price.

But true to the movement of the pendulum, Thea was ready to swing forward as I was about to pull back; and she wouldn't allow her joy to turn into pain either — this was her yes moment — and with her hand she had to turn the anytime I created with my move into a now.

When we are awake and fully alert, our jaws are conditioned to keep the mouth closed, the upper teeth resting on the lower set, and the upper lip lying neatly on the lower one; at this point, however, the jaw relaxed and reverted to its original, preconditioned state, easing the alertness and discipline which, except in the hours of sleep, maintain tension in the facial muscles; regulating the extent and nature of this tension gives character to the face, which, in turn, causes the tongue inside, arching sensitively from the rim of the lower teeth, to hover, and the saliva collecting on the tip of the tongue and around the impeding row of teeth to trickle back into the hollow of the mouth.

Heads tilt sideways, if one to the left, the other definitely to the right, because when two human mouths seek each other out they must avoid the collision of noses protruding from the facial terrain.

Once the eyes measure the distance, from the features of the terrain estimate the angle of the tilt, and from the speed of the mutual approach can also determine the moment of contact, then the eyelids slowly and softly drop over the eyes — seeing at such close range becomes impossible and unnecessary, which of course should not lead to the conclusion that everything impossible is also unnecessary — but the eyes do not close completely, a narrow slit remains, so the long upper lashes need not descend and mix with the lower, shorter ones; in this way the eyes put themselves in a perfectly symmetrical position with the mouth; one is fully conscious now, but not quite aware; the amount of tension relinquished from consciousness equals the loss in awareness; whatever opens up here, but not completely, will shut down there, but not completely.

If one wished to say something specific about a kiss, the joining of two mouths, about the moment when the direct sensation of two sense organs turns into direct bodily sensation, it might be best to step into the open mouth, between the vertically grooved, tender skin of the barely touching lips.

If this were at all possible without the aid of a scalpel, the peculiarities of the living organism would force one to choose among several alternatives: should we follow the facial muscles rippling toward the interior of the mouth, or the intricate network of neurons, or the crisscrossing veins perhaps? in the first case we'd have to cut through the cluster of salivary glands in the lips and cheeks, traverse some connective tissue to reach the mucous membrane; in the second instance, it would be like being absorbed by the tiniest capillary roots of a tree and from there to reach the trunk and travel on to the nerve center of the crown; in the third case, depending on whether we took the red or the blue trail of blood vessels, we'd reach either the ventricle or the auricle of the heart.

Fortunately, it's only in fairy tales that out of three possible paths we have to choose the one that will lead us to safety; but since we don't need to be rescued and are merely yielding to simple, most likely superficial curiosity, we shall choose yet a fourth option and slip through the grooves of the barely touching lips; it won't be a smooth glide, though, because at this moment the surface is almost completely dry; the glands are producing saliva in abundance, but the insecurely hovering tongue is not wetting the surface; consequently, the longer it takes for the lips to meet, the more parched they become; sometimes they look like cracked soil in a protracted dry spell, even though in the hollow behind the lower teeth, under the tongue, a proper little lake of saliva has formed.

If we proceed along the craggy ridge of the lower teeth and, avoiding the little lake of saliva, clamber up the slippery back of the tongue to take a look at the distance covered, the sight greeting us there promises to be quite remarkable.

The undertaking is not without dangers: if we don't cling fast to the taste buds, we might easily slide down into the gullet, but it's all worth it, and where we are is actually a well-protected cave: over us stretches the palate's lovely arch, and looming before us, in the form of an obtuse-angled triangle, is the great orifice of the mouth itself; if we hadn't purposely invaded this spot to catch this breathtaking sight, we might cry out in astonishment, because from this vantage point the anatomical view of the orifice bears a striking resemblance to the conventional representation of the eye of God.

And while looking out through this opening, and seeing everything suddenly turn dark — for prompted by simultaneous pushing and pulling, yielding and receiving, another triangle clings not quite symmetrically but somewhat aslant to the triangular opening of our hiding place, in sum, a kiss is happening — we get the feeling that in the darkness of the two interlocking caverns, God's one eye is looking into the other eye of God.

We tend to dampen the joy of this discovery with pangs of doubt, asking even at this exalted moment whether the joining of two pairs of lips is really an event of such significance, during which God's single eye looks into God's other single eye?

When grappling with doubt, we try to dig up useful knowledge and experiences with which to deny or confirm our doubt, but to unearth evidence in this instance, we must first explore the body — anyway, we are in it already! — and take a look at those organs that play a role in one's love life.

A close inspection of these organs and their properties will lead us to the curious and for some people no doubt scandalous conclusion that sexual pleasure, though a prerequisite of our instinct for self-preservation, may be induced in any individual, male or female, through the manipulation of the sexual organs and, by means of self-stimulation, orgasm may be achieved without the presence of another individual.

Isolation and self-gratification, touching oneself while fantasizing about touching another, is something we all know from personal experience.

Neurotic, inhibited, or bashful individuals do not even have to touch their private parts to be aroused, it's enough if the palm of a hand grazes their naked thigh or belly or pelvic region; there the friction between the body and its own skin produces, accidentally as it were, the mutuality needed for sexual excitement; in the case of women we might include touching the breasts, the nipples, and the dark areolae, which may be followed, or accompanied, by stroke-like pressure applied to the mons veneris; without intending it, the stroking will grow more rhythmic, and that will increase the blood pressure, quicken the rate of breathing; this pressure corresponds, in the male, to the gentle groping men begin at the root of their thighs, and then transfer to the testicles and bulb of the penis; women can touch the tiny body of the clitoris, though not its supersensitive head, which at times can be painful; similarly, men can also take hold, with a slightly rougher grasp, of their hollowed member and, rhythmically pulling back the foreskin, free and then re-cover the bulb of the penis, the motion causing the excitement that releases the tiny valves through which arterial blood rushes in to fill the hollows of the shaft.

And since this is an individual activity to suit personal needs, and promises private satisfaction, the activity's form and the methods used may vary greatly.

The variety of ways used to induce physical pleasure cannot obscure the fact that, from a strictly somatological point of view, the same process takes place in every instance and in every individual; at most its intensity, efficacy, and, above all, results differ, for the process itself always creates a physically predetermined and closed organic unity, and it seems irrelevant whether the act takes place between two individuals of different sexes or the same sex, whether some external stimulus or mere fantasizing is at work, or if the same result is achieved by fantasy-induced self-stimulation.

Yet, however closed this unity created by the factors responsible for inducing, maintaining, and gratifying physical pleasure, certain effects appear even when the process seems entirely self-generated — in the case of masturbation or in nocturnal seminal emission — and these effects disrupt the apparently closed and from a physiological point of view perfectly self-sufficient system.

It is as if nature opposed a system that completely isolated the individual from others; during masturbation imagination steps in, and during nocturnal emission a dream is at work; imagination and dream connect the individual, and the ostensibly self-sufficient act, to another individual, or at the very least presuppose the presence of one.

This is the most, and also the least, that can be said of an individual's dependent relationships.

We might add, though, that an impulse is also at work in all of us that manages to create simultaneously feelings of isolation and self-absorption and of openness and dependence on others; isolation hampers while openness fosters the establishment of relationships, and the two feelings function in an inseparable tension that makes up the whole of the impulse.

If two individuals unite those of their organs which, though meant for another, can also function in isolation, if, in other words, two individuals wish to relieve or overcome their own isolation not by relying on imagination or dreams but in the possible openness of the other, then the resulting meeting is that of two closed units, each consisting of identical elements maintained in the tension of openness and closeness.

The tension, in this case, uses its openness to match itself to that peculiarity of the other's closeness, namely, that the closeness in the other is also open.

The meeting of two self-contained entities results, therefore, in a common openness that transcends their individual openness, creating a new, shared isolation; within this shared isolation they can step out of their individual isolation, and conversely, their individual openness is enclosed within the shared isolation they had opened up for one another.

If this is indeed what happens, it would mean that the meeting of two bodies signifies far more than the aggregate of two bodies; they are present in each other in a way that adds up to more than their individual selves.

We are all slaves to our own as well as to other people's bodies; we signify more than we actually are only to the extent that freedom signifies more than slavery, and the community of slaves signifies less than the community of free men opting for slavery.

And nothing proves this more strikingly than a kiss itself.

For the mouth is the same kind of physical window of the body as the imagination is the spiritual window of the mind, both connecting one to the universe.

Within the closed system of the body the mouth is a functionless, in and of itself neutral sexual organ, possessing no inherently usable properties; only by coming in direct contact with the body of another individual can it realize its potential for the most sensual stimulation, display its exceptional sensitivity and its very close and intimate relationship to all the other inherently excitable sexual organs; we might even say that it is the only sexually active organ that, within the closed system, is naturally open, physically and universally, since there is constant, if dormant, readiness in it to be open to others; in this sense the mouth is the physical counterpart of intangible imagination.

The mouth, then, is a bodily organ that, because of properties it lacks, differs from all other organs involved in the procreative act, whereas the imagination is that faculty which ensures the functioning of the sexual organs even in the absence of a sexual partner.

Because of its unique and in some way deficient character, the mouth differs so much from other sex organs that in a certain sense it cannot really be classified as one, if only because the meeting of two mouths is neither a prerequisite nor a precondition of two individuals' sexual union; mouths can even be excluded from the closed process of such union; yet it is no accident that two individuals, imagining the openness of the other's body, showing mutual readiness to unite the closed systems of their respective bodies, prove their readiness and wish by first uniting those organs that are not indispensable to the union but are open to begin with: their mouths.

Naturally, and luckily for me, I wasn't thinking about all this in the car when Thea put her arms around my neck to prevent me from getting out; I am thinking about it now, while filling this page which, considering how these reconstructions work, is a rather perverted form of thinking; but back then I couldn't have thought of anything like this, because around the age of thirty you have a pretty fair idea how these organs function, you know from experience that they work more or less the way you want them to work, though you are also past the stage when you still act blindly, without control, and you are past it even if you allow instinct and experience to take over; in reality you flounder among associations and comparisons floating about in your memory, which is also a kind of thinking — so I can't claim that I wasn't thinking at all.

Teetering on the border of sheer abandon and conscious control, I decided that this was what I wanted now.

Or rather, I yielded to the weight, to that curious heaviness, that at moments like this gets hold of one's head, pulling by the forehead and pushing at the back of the neck, toward the other person's head, as if you had voluntarily relinquished the mechanism that normally allows you to see, breathe, and think; you just want to fall into something, give yourself, entrust yourself to something, and above all not to ask why, though in most cases that would be the right thing to do.

There is a half-open mouth before you, which is the question the other's body is asking you, and your mouth is also open, that's where you'll get the other body's answer; and when the two mouths meet, on those other lips you will find your breathing again, yes, you can consider it an answer, and there you will also recover your lost sight as well; you draw your breath from the other mouth, from the breath you gauge the possibilities of the body that is now turning toward you, the inner landscape of that body is unfolding before you, and that is just what the other person offers you: a void, a hollow space that can and must be filled, and that puts an end to the falling sensation, because the lips, caught on the rim of the hollow space, touch fragrant, slick, warm, rough, cold, and soft live matter; touching so many different things at once and at once in so many different ways that our mind, conditioned as it is to act, is properly stimulated.

Rushing to act, with lips dry and rough, eager and wild, we fell on each other as if in that fraction of a moment we wanted to make up for all the meaningless wasted time that was now behind us, all the time we had not spent together; in great haste we had to get around all the blind alleys and detours of our mutual attraction and aversion, we had to prevent any separation again; at the same time it seemed that all our previous detours now gained meaning precisely from this dry and hasty eagerness, as if we had to keep avoiding each other so that now, with all the obligatory pretense and falseness behind us, passion could be real passion, and dryness could be the parched longing for each other, a desert in which the only drink would be the other's mouth; and when lips met lips the encounter should take a new turn, one of tenderness, of leisurely, melting softness; and though each tiny dry crack could still be felt, let the joy of discovery relieve the tension and allow the separate streams of the saliva of anticipation to flow into each other.

Our tongues delivered, and out of each other's mouth we drank the fluid our lips needed.

Our arms followed suit in a spontaneous move to squeeze and hold tight.

With both hands she gripped the back of my head as if she wanted to stuff it all into her mouth, swallow it whole — how she used to make fun of just such things! — while I slipped my arms under her open coat and drew her close; this move was still the trickery of self-conscious thinking; as if we were trying, with fitful groping and exaggerated squeezes and holds, to avoid experiencing how closed our bodies still were; as is often the case, the energy spent on avoidance made us sense all the stronger what it was that we ought to be avoiding.

The mouth itself, however, made no attempt to avoid the unpleasant feeling of the body's frustrating confinement; the lips' parched desire for one another was so intense as to preclude all but the mutual quenching of their thirst; for the mouths there was nothing to avoid with their craving, with their irresistible coming together when, in the joyful moment of finding each other, their saliva of anticipation mingled and lubricated the two surfaces, the better to slip into and slide over each other, thus foreshadowing the possibility of even greater pleasure ahead, and, ignoring the grips and holds of the hands, alluded to the climactic moment of mutual gratification that every tension-racked body strives for.

For a fraction of a second, even the tips of our tongues cleaved together, and the feeling beyond joy found in this firmness, like a foretaste of what was to come, flooded our bodies, obliterating all selfish designs and willfulness; yielding to the heat that can relax the muscles and fill the blood vessels under the skin, both of us shuddering and enervated, we stepped across the protective layer of outer surfaces.

In the interior landscape opened up by a kiss everything is sharply visible yet suspended in a mutable state; nothing resembles the external landscape our eyes are used to.

It is a feeling of being in an empty space; of course, one tries involuntarily to define one's place in it, and relative to one's position there is up and down, and background and foreground can also be distinguished; the background is generally dark or a blurred gray; there are no palpable landmarks, no forms familiar from dreams or reveries, only spots, flashes, and glimmers that, being in an empty space, appear to be flat rather than round, and they seem to follow a geometrical pattern as they separate from and then blend into the soft, probably infinite background of existence.

It's as though every sensation had its geometrical equivalent, and in these forms and shapes, in these visual codes, I could recognize another person's emotions and sensory capacities, needs and peculiarities, for in this interior landscape the boundary between me and the Other is blurred, the two merge, yet the feeling remains that the Other is the empty space and I a single spot or shape or streak in it.

She is the space and I am a restlessly but not impatiently moving configuration in it, ready to adapt myself to her space.

I am the space and she is a restlessly but not impatiently moving configuration in it, ready to adapt herself to my space.

Her promise is my promise.

And this promise, made to each other's body, we did honor, quite recklessly, a few days later.

The Nights of Our Secret Delight

I would have said no and no, and again no, if someone at that moment, in the words of the ancient philosopher, had called life a rushing river, insisting that nothing could ever be repeated, the water was always different, and you couldn't dip your hand in the same river twice; what was is already gone, and replacing the old was something new, itself becoming old instantly, and then new again.

If it were really so, if we could experience the irresistible rush of the new unaffected by anything else, if the old did not cast its shadow on the new, our life would be one ceaseless wonder; every moment between day and night, between birth and death, would be a thrilling miracle; we couldn't distinguish between pain and pleasure, hot and cold, sweet and sour; there would be no boundaries, no borderlines between our most extreme sensations, because there would be no in between, and thus we'd have no word for the moment, no division between day and night, and out of the wet warmth of our mother's womb we wouldn't come wailing into this cold, dry world; and in death we'd only crumble like stones scorched by the sun and lashed by icy rain, for there would be no slow decay, and no dread, and no language either, for words can name only recurring phenomena; in the absence of recurrence we wouldn't have what we like to call intelligent discourse, only the divine gift, the ineffable joy, of permanent impermanence.

And even if it were so, for as children we all felt the urge, in a darkening room, to catch time at its word, to really understand just when, at what precise point, day turned into night; in the invisible and vanishing dimness we did try to grasp and hold on to the apparently simple meaning of words, so even if we did make ourselves believe that there were no boundaries, no division between day and night, even then, after a time, yes, after a time, slipping off the hard wall of divinely permanent impermanence and running back to the softer realm of human thought, we'd have to concede that it is night, even though we couldn't tell just when it got dark; the eyes perceive the difference but never the dividing line, and maybe there is no such thing at all; yet it is night, because it is dark, it is night because it isn't day, just as it happened yesterday and the day before, and we fall asleep in the reassuring yet disappointing knowledge that soon it will be light again.

The sense of the permanent and the sense of the eternal may be part of our divine inheritance, yet I feel that it's just the other way around: our human senses and the emotions stemming from them are too crude not to feel the familiarly old in everything new, not to sense the future in the present, not to discover in every new physical experience a story already known to our body.

Although not in a divine manner, time does seem to stop at such moments; it's as if our foot did not step into a rushing river but trod desperately on some sinking, soft marsh, trying to stay on the surface of deadly boring repetitions, which nevertheless appear to be the single most acceptable proof of life, until our foot loses the battle and quite literally tramples itself to death.

But far be it from me to affect philosophical airs; the only reason I mention all this is to give some idea of an especially overwrought emotional state in which things appear startlingly new and at the same time stiflingly familiar; I found myself in just such a curious state at the end of my two-month stay in Heiligendamm, as I was standing by the handsome white desk in my room — no, it's no mistake, I had stood and sat in such a state before, in my robe, unshaven, unwashed, waiting for some fateful judgment; now, however, prompted by the coolly inquisitive and somewhat watery eyes of a police inspector, I began to read my fiancée's letter, and even if the situation were not so strikingly similar yet different, even if I hadn't felt those commanding eyes on me, eyes that could read a criminal's mind, her opening line would still have stunned me or, more precisely, would have deepened my astonishment in this wakeful state of bewilderment.

My darling, my dearest, my one and only, wrote my bride, using words she had never used before, the unusual address falling like fiery slaps on my face and, along with the sudden rush of awful memories, making me dizzy; it took all my self-control to keep my head straight on my neck; and as I scanned the rest of the letter, I felt hot perspiration inundating my whole body under the robe; with my hands trembling, I slipped the letter back into the envelope, and to steady myself I grasped the back of a tall armchair, though what I really wanted to do was to flee.

To escape, away from the chaos of my life! which was impossible, of course, if only because of the presence of my strange visitor, to say nothing of the fact that one can never satisfy the animal urge to escape, since from the chaos of one's soul there is no place to escape to.

The reason this worthy officer of the law was standing there by the terrace door, and the reason I so readily complied with his audacious request that I open the freshly arrived letter in his presence, was that that very morning the young manservant, Hans Baader, with a single stroke of a razor had slit the throat of the young Swedish gentleman to whom I had been introduced the day after my arrival, at the luncheon table, in highly unusual circumstances, almost at the very moment Count Stollberg's death was announced; with his throat slit, the young Swede was lying in his own blood on the floor of the neighboring suite; police officials who rode over from Bad Doberan located the murderer in the pitch-dark coal cellar, where, evidently unhinged by his own deed, he was huddling and screaming frantically; within half an hour these same officials shed light on the intimate relationship that had developed between Gyllenborg, myself, and Fräulein Stollberg, and on Gyllenborg's and my special attachment to the young manservant himself; with my courteous and obliging behavior, not completely devoid of a certain condescending haughtiness, I intended to dispel the suspicion that I could have had anything to do with this sordid affair that led to murder.

I thanked my good fortune and my stubbornness for not appearing in those ravishingly beautiful photographs, taken by poor Gyllenborg, that showed the young countess partially clad and the valet completely nude— photographs that might at any moment come into the hands of policemen who were just then rummaging through his belongings — even though my ill-fated friend had repeatedly asked me to pose, indeed beseeched me piteously, with tears in his eyes, saying that a triad was needed: next to the rough-hewn robustness of the valet's body, my own more delicate angularity, so that, as he put it, "these two extreme poles of health would flank what is so alluringly ill."

I was able to reject categorically all allegations, couched in polite, convoluted legal phrases, according to which my relationship with the valet and Fräulein Stollberg was reprehensibly intimate and my knowledge of the motives behind the crime a virtual certainty; but there was not a shred of evidence that could be used against me; in point of fact, during the two months of our friendship, as if all along anticipating a possible discovery, I always used the terrace door to reach Gyllenborg's room, converted of late into a studio, just as Father, twenty years earlier, in pursuit of his nocturnal secret delights, used to slip into Fräulein Wohlgast's room; consequently, no one could have witnessed my afternoon or nighttime visits there; without making much of a fuss, or even being especially cautious, I characterized the allegations as slander, pure and simple, and with a nonchalant shrug of my shoulders assured the inspector that I had absolutely no idea whether the murdered gentleman carried on any intimate liaisons with the persons in question.

It is true, I added, that I wasn't a close enough friend of the victim to have knowledge of the more intimate aspects of his private life, but I knew him to be a man of taste and breeding for whom it would have been unthinkable — howsoever he may have been inclined to behave — to enter into such a dubious relationship with a mere servant; I played the innocent, almost to the point of idiocy, but I had to be sure to avoid the dreadful snare, for, the valet not being of age, I could have been charged not only with indulging in perverse sexual acts but also with corrupting a minor; to give my professed naïveté some psychological support, I lowered my voice to a confidential whisper, shrugged my shoulders again, and asked the inspector whether he had had a chance to see Fräulein Stollberg's hands without gloves.

The inspector's unblinking eyes were staring at me steadfastly, and they were the strangest pair of eyes I have ever seen: light and transparent, cold and with almost no color, a curious transition between vaguely blue and hazily gray; the two eyeballs were large and, because of some weakness or chronic ailment perhaps, constantly swimming in a bowl of tears, and this made it appear as if all his ostensibly plainspoken, unassuming questions, as well as my supposedly innocent replies, had filled him with profound sadness, as if everything had pained him — the crime committed, the lies, even the hidden truths — and all the while his face, and the eyeballs themselves, remained totally impassive and cold.

Using only his eyes, the inspector now indicated that he did not understand my remark and would be grateful for an explanation.

Naturally enough, I assumed that Fräulein Stollberg would not betray me, would hold her peace, perhaps even deny everything, although she herself was somewhat implicated by the photographs Gyllenborg had left behind.

The inspector's silent request prompted me to remain silent myself, and I proceeded to show on my own hand how Fräulein Stollberg's fingers were fused together; that is why she had to wear gloves all the time; like hooves they were, I finally said.

The inspector was a large, jovial man with an air of quiet, commanding professionalism; his powerful build must have been an asset in his line of work; he stood in the terrace doorway with his arms folded; we were both standing as we talked, which meant that this was not yet an interrogation, but no idle chitchat either; he broke into a smile, which his tearing eyes made look almost painful; and then lightly, as if tossing back my argument, he remarked that from his experience he knew that certain people, usually emotionally troubled or weak, not only did not find physical malformations or deformities repulsive but, on the contrary, were often attracted by them.

I felt myself blushing all over and could tell from the teary glint in his eyes that the telltale change in my complexion did not escape his notice, though the sudden rush of emotion he unwittingly elicited in me affected him, too; the satisfaction he must have felt at having unmasked me for a moment caused such an abundant welling up of tears in his eyes that if he hadn't quickly pulled out a handkerchief from the pocket of his baggy trousers, with a movement that for him seemed almost too abrupt, the tears would have rolled down his plump, ruddy cheeks.

I must be one of those emotionally weak people, then, I thought to myself, suddenly recalling the moment in that compartment when in the silence punctuated only by the clatter of the train, under the light of the swaying ceiling lamp, she pulled off her gloves, slowly and mercilessly, and, looking deep into my eyes, revealed the secret of her hands to me.

Frozen, without breathing, I stared at the weirdly inhuman sight: on both her hands — nature's cruelty in her was symmetrical! — she had only four fingers; the middle and ring fingers on each hand were fused together in a single, thick digit ending in flat, hard nails; yet I must admit that the peculiar deformity did not really come as a surprise, and the inspector was right: I wasn't repulsed; if anything, the sight gave an attractive if cruel explanation of her delicate and vulnerable beauty, which during the long journey I had kept scrutinizing, entranced and mesmerized, and whose secret I had been unable to puzzle out.

By revealing her defect, she seemed to be telling me that we carry all our physical qualities, abilities, gifts, faults, blemishes, and passions in the features of our face; modesty had but one duty: to cast a gentle veil over what was self-evident; her face, after all, was perfectly formed, exquisite, each of its fine lines and charming curves complemented other, equally fine and charming features, yet even before I saw those awful hands I felt as if all this perfection hung suspended over the chasm of its own uncertainty, at any moment the finely cut features could unravel and become deformed; it seems incredible, but I felt that a law of nature was being embodied right before my eyes, I thought I could almost see how beauty could mature into itself only by going through the malformed and the ugly, that perfection was but the degeneration of the imperfect, and that is why beauty was engaged in a constant game of hide-and-seek with ugliness and degeneration; her lips were full, sensuous, yet quivering with gentle, soft currents, as if she had to stop some terrible violence or pain with them; and her eyes were wide-open and round, penetrating but also haughty, as if with each glance she were challenging, and at the same time trying to forestall, some imminent disaster; on her face I saw the dread of, as well as the longing for, annihilation; it was madness in the guise of beauty that excited me, so the gesture itself, the slowness and cruel dignity of the gesture with which she exposed the secret of her hands and that of her whole body racked with desire and the dread of desire, moved me to respond with a very rash, extreme gesture of my own: I seized the strange hand and, finding the root of my desires in this no doubt repugnant sight, kissed it.

Not only did she tolerate my humble kiss but I could feel that for that brief moment she yielded her hand totally to it and then slowly, savoring the warm touch of my lips, she began to pull it away, yet I felt she did not really want to, she wanted something else, something more cruel, more extreme; in our clumsiness we let the gloves drop to the floor, but then she shoved her unspeakable, hoof-like fingers between my lips, and while we both remained silent, like thieves — with eyes not quite closed, her mother was sleeping right next to her and being bounced around by the moving train — she deliberately bruised my lips and my tongue with the sharp tips of her broad, flat nails, turning my quiet humility into my humiliation.

The smile on her face then was unforgettable, and it was this smile that later Gyllenborg captured in his equally unforgettable photograph.

The picture itself was dominated not by the two intimately familiar bodies but by a heavy, undulant drapery whose folds swept down diagonally from the upper edge of the picture toward its center, where it twisted around, concealing some kind of studio hassock or stool, swung down farther, less ruffled, until its graceful sweep finally vanished from view, giving the viewer the impression that he was looking not at a complete picture but at a random detail of a larger composition, and thus the models assuming their position against the background of the luxurious drapery also looked rather tentative; the young servant's unruly hair was adorned with a laurel wreath; his legs spread apart, his chest puffed out, he sat in the middle of the picture with his work-hardened hands resting on his knees, and though he didn't face the viewer, his body did; as if following the folds of the drapery, he was looking out of the picture, over the head of Fräulein Stollberg, who, down on one knee, positioned herself in front of the young valet in such a way that her slightly bowed head concealed his groin; at the same time her head and her face with a gracefully cruel and voluptuous smile were framed by his two enormous thighs and powerful legs.

But with all this I haven't said anything about the photograph itself, which, naturally, revealed much more about its creator than about the people used as models; following some wise old rule of aesthetics, Gyllenborg uncovered the man's body, keeping the genitalia invisible, while the woman's body, with the exception of one breast, he draped with a sheet, slinging it over her shoulder in a classical manner; however, the sheet he used must have been soaked in water or oil first, because it clung to her, wet and shiny, accentuating even more, almost to the point of disgusting immodesty, what it so modestly covered up.

The picture could have turned out disgusting, ludicrously precious, frighteningly contrived and tasteless, a textbook illustration of a strained, dilettantish performance that, in its attempt to achieve well-balanced proportions, obliterates just those human traits, thought to be imperfect, flawed, and unseemly, that are a natural and inalienable part of any example of human perfection; except that the young lady in the picture— and for this the artist deserves praise — folded her healthy fingers into her palm, and held those awful, hoof-like fused digits before her face, those unnatural, deformed fingers! and as if not even conscious of the warm closeness of the valet's open thighs — heavens, what fragrant warmth must have streamed from those thighs! — she was busy looking at the repulsive, malformed fingers, contemplating them with that cruel smile of hers, yes, a cruel smile that turned everything in the carefully arranged picture, every self-consciously aesthetic and voluptuous detail, into its own diabolical parody; nevertheless, it wasn't the two subjects that were mocked and laughed at but we, the peeping viewers, you and I, and everyone else who looked at the picture, even the person who made it, for what the picture was saying was that with a smile one can accept one's deformities, with a smile one had to accept the objective cruelty of things, that is what real innocence is, the rest is mere decoration, detail, convention, affectation, the smiling acknowledgment of the perverse turned the wreath on the valet's head into a devilish parody, the tense indifference with which he looked out of the drapery folds also had the effect of a parody, as did the raw sensuality which, in spite of their affected aloofness and pensive inwardness, still bound them together; in the final analysis, the gauchely displayed beauty of their bodies also became disillusioningly pathetic.

I might have blushed more deeply and longer had the inspector not had the tact, or calculated cleverness, to wipe his eyes for a long time, dabbing them carefully with the corner of his handkerchief wrapped around the tip of his little finger, making sure he removed every bit of the yellow discharge which prolonged tearing always leaves in the corners; but his delicate little activity was nothing but pretense; rather than exploiting my momentary embarrassment, he wanted me to regain my composure; there was no hurry, he seemed to be saying, we had plenty of time, if not now, then later, and if not later, then I would tell him now what I had to tell, it was all the same to him; but in truth, his apparent tactfulness was his somewhat cruel way of making me nervous.

And not without results, for at the moment, though still overjoyed at being able to suppress the outward signs of my inner turmoil, I did become unsettled, I felt I had lost my bearings, the ability to control the situation, and that he had gotten me to the point where he wanted me to be, more or less; so be it, I suddenly thought to myself, I shall tell him everything, if only to be done with it.

It seemed so simple to tell everything, for it was really nothing: four people had been engaged in erotic games, and one of them wanted out, but another began to blackmail him with scandalous photographs he took of the two of them; if I could have found the first, simple little word needed to tell this nothing of a story, to formulate the first all-meaningful sentence, I could have told him the whole thing.

Fortunately for me, a quiet knock on the door came just then; I know I gave a start, not because of the three soft raps, but because they brought me back to my senses.

Thinking clearly again turned out to have a jolting effect; something inside me was trying to expand, shout out, and at the same time it fell back into itself; the battle of conflicting impulses, like an intermittent fever, made me turn so pale and faint that, while through the haze of my helplessness I watched the hotelier approaching us — his portly figure especially obsequious now because of the murder case — the inspector was ready to grasp my arm and help me into a chair; summoning the last remnant of my strength, I declined, and as if completing the same gesture, I took the letter from the tray offered to me, because I saw immediately whom it was from.

I must have looked a pitiful wreck of a man, trying with every move to convince those present that I was in control of my actions, yet in this situation, in this room, nothing surprising enough could happen anymore that would justify such desperate behavior.

Strangely, it wasn't the situation itself but certain details that stunned me: the sharp shadow the inspector's figure cast on me seemed more important than the words spoken or suppressed; how close and how loud the sea sounded to me, even though the windows were closed; the cold winter light flooding through the windows, witness to the frenzied floundering of my soul.

Although I knew perfectly well what had happened, I did not comprehend why the hotel manager himself and not the valet brought me my letter, yes, the valet, Hans, whom I had just moments earlier banished publicly from my heart, no, from someplace deeper than that, from all my senses; and I didn't understand where he was, where he could be, if his absence hurt me so much; it was my betrayal of him that hurt.

And I didn't understand why this stranger standing before me, folding his arms across his chest again, was telling me to read the letter, and saying it as if somebody else in the room also had to read a letter; I didn't understand why he was saying out loud what at that moment was going through my mind; the servile cowardice with which I obeyed his command, put to me in the guise of a polite request, hurt me so much that in my pain I had the feeling it was a stranger acting the coward in my place, a stranger who nevertheless had to be me.

Even now, as I write these lines, so many years after the event, I don't quite understand what happened to me then; the magnitude of the danger alone cannot explain my behavior; to be more precise, I do understand but am deeply ashamed of those little scenes of falling to pieces, of insanity, buffoonery, betrayal, and cringing, in which I hoped to find refuge; my shame is like a stuck blood clot, and no justifiable motivation or elaborate explanation can be the pill to dissolve it; the painful clot has remained proof positive of my fall from grace.

It was a short letter, barely a page, conceived no doubt in a sudden paroxysm of happiness: My darling, my dearest, my one and only, it began, and this salutation, brimming with joy, caught my eyes immediately; I went over it twice, thrice, and again; I wanted my eyes to comprehend what they were seeing, because with this salutation, suddenly it was a ghost speaking to me from this letter, the ghost of a woman whom I've already mentioned on an earlier page of these recollections, a woman who even as a ghost is more alive in me than anyone living but about whom I mustn't talk, for I cannot; and it was her image, no, not her image but her smell, the smell of her mouth, of her secret parts, of her armpits, that wafted toward me from that opening line, a fragrance I could never quite reach, only she could write to me like this, only she loved me and called me tender names in this way, only she — even though I knew very well that I was reading Helene's letter.

It was during that fraction of a second, while longing for that evanescent fragrance, that I made up my mind: I can't stay with her, I must run away from Helene.

It was ten long years of my life which I had rejected and wished to forget that stared back at me from the salutation; Helene may have expropriated them, but they couldn't have been hers, I couldn't let her have them; thinking of this just then could not have been an accident, for I knew that the police had detailed and creditable data about my ten-year association with secret anarchist societies; if, therefore, I did not act with animal cunning, I'd have to pay for those ten years, and my attempts at finding refuge from the subversive, even murderous activities of those years in Helene's arms would have been in vain.

Death spoke to me from that letter, death multiplying itself and still unique, death lurking at every turn, in every corner, death desired and death dreaded, the death of that one special sweet-smelling woman, rising from the bloody corpse of my now publicly rejected and abandoned friend; but every other murder and death also called out from that letter: my mother's unspeakably slow and painful wasting away at my father's side, and Father's own ignominious death under the wheels of a speeding train between Görlitz and Lebau, at Signal Station 7, and the mutilated body of the girl he had violated, that hideous lye-soaked sack oozing sweat, piss, shit, and snot; all deaths of the body, and yet Helene's letter was in fact sending blissful waves toward me, the prospects of a wonderful life: "That achingly beautiful morning," she wrote, "when we had to part, has become a morning of consummation whose fruit I now carry under my heart"; we had to move up the date of our wedding, she said, and therefore I should hurry back to her without fail, and that was her parents' wish as well; this was followed only by her initial, the first letter of her Christian name.

If fate chose to stage a scene such as this, having me read this letter while a detective investigating a murder keeps his moist eyes on me, then everything but everything is but an illusion and a bunch of lies — so thought one half of my split self, while the other half of course couldn't help being dizzy with joy, thrilled at the mere thought of life's relentless continuation, and the more it felt that this, too, was but an illusion, a deception, a false hope, the more it let itself go in absurd jubilation.

She wanted to give a son to this body oozing with corruption, the body that hoped to find its freedom in blissfully dreaded death.

What monstrous demons can crawl out of one's thoughts.

I began to laugh, a loud, harsh, boisterous laugh; I was laughing so hard I had to hold on to the back of the armchair to keep myself from falling over.

I don't know at what point I slipped the letter back into the envelope, but I can still see my trembling hand fumbling with the paper.

First there was a little tussle between my hand, the letter, and the envelope, and it was after that hard-won victory that I had to grab the back of the chair to stop myself from bolting out the door, and perhaps it was the uncontrollable trembling that made me explode in laughter.

I was laughing insanely, I could say, but the sound of my laughter betrayed the fact that by laughing I was trying to drive myself insane.

From then on I was carried along by the demon of my own sound.

Nearly a decade later, in a huge tome by Baron Jakob Johann Uexküll, I came across this illuminating and endearing statement: "When a dog runs, it is the animal that moves its legs, but when a hedgehog runs, it is the legs that move the animal."

This subtle distinction helped me understand that it was a primitive animal's instinct to escape that had appeared in my laughter; it wasn't I who sought refuge in that loud laugh but the laugh that saved me from my plight.

At the moment of its explosion the laughter revealed my utter desperation, but in the very next moment it tripped over itself and changed direction, route, and above all intended meaning, so that it could pretend that it wasn't even a hearty laugh but a titter, and not even that, only the inane display of overwhelming joy, though nothing like total abandon even then, for the incongruity of the situation inhibited this sort of tittering; my ears registered every shift, modulation, and distortion as if I were hearing it with the inspector's ears; and then it was the joy of life, cleansed of everything and bathed in bliss, that was laughing along with me, until I managed to be moved by my own performance to the point of tears, which in turn made the sound tremulous and faltering, and I felt moved even more, until I finally regained control and, haltingly, could say something.

"Do forgive me," I stammered while wiping my eyes, and my demon, so very sure of itself, still holding my voice captive, clinging to it, guiding it, graciously allowed me to sound sincere, as if to claim that lies and deceptions could very nicely turn into truths, there was nothing to be ashamed of! they became more convincingly real this way, more authentic than purportedly simple and immaculate truths; anyway, we can never gauge the moral worth of our actions so it's useless to fret and agonize over them, we might as well push ahead, especially since my demon used my fiancée's very intimate letter to refute, and refute triumphantly and unequivocally, any suspicion about my own involvement in this affair: "Do forgive me," I repeated, "this outburst was totally inappropriate, I am deeply embarrassed; yet if I say that I must nevertheless decline responsibility for it — for without being requested to do so, I would not have dreamed of perusing such a letter in front of a stranger — then I am in effect begging the forgiveness of my dead friend lying in the next room"; I said all this in my demon's cool, measured, dignified voice, though also affecting the nonchalance of a man of the world; "However," I continued, "I would be as loath to offend you as I would my poor unfortunate friend; I can assure you, therefore, that the content of the letter is strictly private, and with an eye to dispelling any lingering doubt that it might have something to do with today's tragic occurrence, I am willing to dispense with proprieties and reveal, ah, hell and damnation, what could possibly keep me from saying it — what I received was very happy news, the kind of news one should be only too glad to share with anyone."

I took a deep breath and even, I remember, lowered my head, and the voice inside me turned gloomy, or unpleasant somehow, perhaps too bashful, as soon as I uttered those words.

I remained silent for so long that after a while I knew I had to lift my head.

And it was as if a rainbow-colored, shiny soap bubble had burst in the air.

His eyes were shining at me from behind the distorting curve of a teardrop, but as we looked long into each other's eyes, I had the impression that for the first time his face was showing genuine astonishment, even shock.

"On the contrary," he replied very quietly, and I watched with enormous satisfaction as his apoplectic complexion turned several shades darker, though clearly anger and not shame made him blush; "On the contrary," he repeated almost too cordially, "it is I who must apologize, if only because your comment is well taken; my request was needlessly intrusive, I clearly overstepped my authority; and if I reiterate — your evident and quite understandable wariness compels me to reiterate — that we are assuming nothing and accusing no one, the case may not be closed, of course, but we do have the culprit in our hands, if I stress all this once again, I really mean to apologize, above all for creating a false impression, and at the same time I beg you to consider my intrusion as excessive caution, which in such circumstances is almost inevitable, or, if you like, as the blunt, unseemly curiosity of a seasoned professional, think of it what you will, but I beg of you, do not think ill of me, and since what is done is done, allow me to be the first to express my warmest good wishes, and please remember, the man offering his most sincere congratulations is one who is daily confronted with the seamy side of life and very rarely has a chance to share in the happy events of life, especially those connected to nature."

The deep flush vanished from his face, he smiled kindly, even ruefully; instead of bowing we merely inclined our heads, and all this time and even afterward he did not move from his place but remained standing by the terrace door, his arms folded over his chest and, in a shaft of slanting winter light, casting his shadow over me.

"May I ask you one more thing?" he said after a moment's hesitation.

"I am at your service."

"I am a rather heavy smoker, and unfortunately I left my cigars in the car. May I help myself to one of yours?"

This sort of behavior — apologizing for an inappropriate, unwarranted, and obtrusive act, and then committing just such an act, and to exploit a tense situation flaunting one's hold over another — reminded me of someone or something, though I couldn't at that moment tell who or what, but the familiar, almost physical disgust I felt led me to believe that this man was of very lowly origin.

"Please do, by all means," I answered graciously, and now I was the one who did not make a move; I did not wish to open the cigar box for him, and I did not offer him a seat either.

There was someone who could make me just as helpless, and whom I hated just as much.

However, the inspector did not let himself be bothered; he strolled in a leisurely way over to the table behind me and took a cigar out of the box Gyllenborg had given me a few days earlier; and now this hit me so hard I didn't have the strength to turn around; I knew what he was up to: in the deceased's room an identical lacquered box lay on the table; so this was the missing link he was looking for.

It got so quiet I could hear him slip off the cigar band; and then, just as slowly, he walked back and stood before me.

"Would you happen to have a knife?" he asked with a friendly smile, and I simply pointed at my desk.

Ceremoniously he lit the cigar, and I had the impression he'd never smoked one before; he praised its aroma and smacked his lips; then he blew out the smoke silently, and I had to stand there and look at him.

But I felt that try hard as I might, I couldn't watch him finish that cigar.

"Is there anything else I can help you with?"

"Oh no," he said, cocking his head amiably, "I've taken up too much of your time already, and in any case we shall meet again tomorrow, shan't we?"

"If you feel that another meeting is absolutely necessary, I'd be glad to give you my card," I said. "By tomorrow evening I should be in Berlin."

He took the cigar out of his mouth, nodded assentingly, and blew out the smoke along with the words: "I'd be much obliged."

He placed my card carefully in his billfold, and there was nothing left for us to do but bow politely to each other; without a word, puffing on the cigar, he walked out of my room.

Drained and exhausted, I was left to myself, and like an ice floe cracked in two on the dark waters of a turbulent river, like two light spots in the night, the two halves of my self were drifting farther and farther apart; while one was singing a selfish little victory march, the other hummed a dirge of utter defeat, while one searched through its memories, wondering why this disagreeable character, whom he may have resembled, looked so familiar, and fretted over not finding the key to the puzzle, the other pondered the chances of escape, imagining in every detail the arrival in Berlin's Anhalter Terminal, the attempt to melt into the crowd and, having eluded possible pursuers, immediately getting on the train to Italy; I also have to say here that all the time a third self was present, who in a way held the other two together, showing me an image that also sprang from the suddenly opened storehouse of my memories but seemed completely unrelated to anything, an image from a childhood garden on a hot late-summer afternoon when, wandering among the trees, I noticed a green lizard drowning in the stone bowl of a little fountain; it could keep only the tip of its tiny head and its open mouth out of the water, its hollow ears and open eyes were below the surface; it couldn't move up or down, forward or backward, though its outspread little legs were treading wildly; this was my first, perhaps my oldest memory of the world; it was a dry summer, and I knew the lizard must have climbed into the fountain bowl for a drink and then slipped into the water; stunned, rooted to the spot, I stared and stared at it, and I was no eyewitness but God Himself, for it was up to me whether this creature would live or die, and the mere possibility of having to make that decision so horrified me, I thought I might as well let it drown; but then, placing both hands under its body, I fished it out of the water, and shuddering with disgust at the touch or at the finality of my act, I flung it on the grass, where it stayed motionless, though it was breathing, its heart beating through its whole beautiful body; and this image, the shimmering emerald-green grass and the motionless lizard, didn't just cross my mind but was there before me, sharp and vivid, in all its color, light, and supple form, as if I were seeing it for the first time; I was standing in that garden of yore and not in this room.

I was that green lizard for whom this sudden gift of life, this reprieve, this near-death, the renewed beating of its heart, breathing the air again, was as much a mystery as was the drowning — perhaps an even greater, more profound mystery.

And I also wasn't aware that for some time I had been sitting, my head submerged in that image; I was sitting somewhere, no longer standing, and tears were trickling through my fingers, pressed against my face.

My sobs sounded like the crying of that little boy, it was as if he were looking, alarmed and with tearless eyes, at everything that happened to him later and had but a single, foolishly repeated question: Why, why, who wanted this, who made it happen this way, why?

As if already then he was repeating this eternally inane question to himself, and even today that was all he could do.

It wasn't the beloved friend I mourned, not Gyllenborg, not the handsome, cheerful young man whom even in his death I admired and envied, for however his life may have ended, he had managed to tell us more in a single, outrageously beautiful photograph than I ever could in my frantic, agonizing, pathetic struggle to string some words together, yes, I did envy him! for needless to say, in those two months spent in a riot of sensuality I had not been able to put down a single passable sentence of my planned narrative, while he, forever suffering from rashes of mysterious origin, always feverish on account of a diseased lung, could create, and with the nonchalance of a condemned man and the incredibly simple elegance granted him by death's proximity, could toy with all those weighty questions I could only brood on in my dilettantish artificially whipped-up zeal; yes, I admired and envied him, because with fatal constancy he achieved and completed what his body had prepared for him; he did not confuse his ideas with the objects of his curiosity and attraction but on the contrary fused them together so well that his ideas barely showed through, while I only indulged in reveries and thinking because I was hoping to escape and to save myself with ideas forced out of my own words — perhaps this is what separates art from dilettantism: the object of observation is not to be confused with the means of treating it as a subject! — Gyllenborg never made that mistake, so in him, and by him, something was brought to completion, there was no need for me to feel sorry for him, and I wasn't mourning Hans either, not his innocent youthful vigor, now in the hands of fate; yet what heavenly pleasure it was with all the tenderness of my frailty to love his fiery red hair, the soft smoothness of his milk-white skin, his freckles, which at places swelled into birthmarks I could feel with my fingers, the silky richness of his pubic hair, and the hot spurting milk of his warm groin; no, I wasn't mourning my betrayed, forfeited pleasures, not that body which I made my own and understood so well down to the depths of its pores — oh, it's not a mere body that will slowly waste away within the walls of a cold jail cell! — and I wasn't mourning my own base treachery, or my mother, whom I missed so terribly in these moments that I dared not think about her, and through my mother I wasn't mourning Helene, whom I was now sure to abandon, and in my child yet to be born, whom I'd never see, I wasn't mourning myself, or my lost fatherhood, or the ultimately guiltless father in myself, and I wasn't mourning my father, or the little girl he so viciously murdered, whose dead body I had to look at, along with our maid Hilde, as part of the elaborately cruel process of identification that also took place on a dreadful, sunlit morning such as this one, the same Hilde who a few months later, in an effort to get even with her cruel fate, made herself my first woman and who since has died, no, I wasn't mourning any of these people, and I wasn't mourning myself either.

While my eyes showed me the rescued lizard, my brain was working like a needlessly overheated engine driven by a steam of emotions, with its gears, belts, pistons, and levers dredging up from the depth of the soul everything that was similar to the image in the eyes, everything that could hurt as only a deep childhood hurt can; it wasn't exhaustion that made me cry, and not the impending danger, but the sense of helplessness I felt in the face of so much human filth.

And at that moment I already knew who it was that looked back at me so familiarly in the figure of the inspector, and I also knew that with my loud, racking sobs I was mourning my one and only dead, my only love, the only person untouched by this filth; it was she I was mourning, it was she I was coughing up, the one woman I cannot talk about.

I felt hot, was soaked with tears, shivered in the misery of my cold body, my limbs seemed to be melting away, and then, without knowing why, I had to look up.

Who possesses the divine ability to distinguish the separate times within a single second; yet in who, if not in us humans, do these divine distinctions of time, reduced to the thinness of a hair, weave their gossamer thread?

Yes, it was she, the face of my one and only, whom I saw standing there in the doorway, silent and reproachful, all in black, veiled, one hand still on the door handle ready to shut the door behind her; I wondered why she was dressed in black, she was dead, she couldn't be mourning herself! though in the fraction of the next second I realized it wasn't she but Fräulein Stollberg in the doorway.

And how strange it was that in this immeasurable space of time the terrible pain yielded to an even more intense throb, a pain caused by a loss that was final and eternal, and the Fräulein could see only the twitch of my face that was not meant for her.

She lifted her veil, slipped her gloved hand back into her muff, and waited, hesitantly, not quite sure how one conducted oneself in this situation; her face was pale, like marble, smooth and untouchable; I suppose it was some shock that made her look like that, quite alien and distasteful to me, yet I could see my own pain reflected in her face, perhaps in the timid, exceptionally fragile smile that hovered around her lips and that I also felt around my own mouth.

I had last seen her a few hours earlier in that tumultuous scene when we all rushed out into the corridor, alarmed by the raving screams of a chambermaid, and she, along with the others, ran toward the wide-open door of our friend Gyllenborg's suite, though at that point not knowing, not understanding yet what had happened, she seemed to be enjoying the noisy confusion.

Now her tiny smile served to alleviate her pain, to make it less humiliating; I could see on her face that her cruel little games were over and done with, and a far greater act of cruelty was to follow; the smile was meant to offset this next act but only made it more painful, the shame of it did, the same shame I felt at having to smile, at realizing that I could still smile, and that a smile was perhaps longer lasting than death itself, which of course was still not my own death.

Carrying in her smile the shadows of her offended, proud, humble, and beautiful cruelty, she hurried toward me, and I received her with much the same smile; but in me the weight of that smile was such that I was unable to rise, whereupon she suddenly yanked her hands out of her muff and, letting the fine fur piece drop to the floor, sank both her gloved hands into my hair and face.

"My dear friend!"

The whisper issued from her throat like a choked sob, and shameful though it may be to admit, the touch of her hand gave me painful pleasure.

A sharp pang that finds joy in pain — maybe that is what must have made me spring up from my chair, the terrifying joy of my shame; my face slid along her lacy dress, then up, face touching face, her hard, cool lips grazing my tear-soaked skin; she was searching for something, hesitantly but irresistibly, and she had to find it quickly, and I was also looking for something on the untouchable smoothness of her face, clumsily, greedily, and the moment her lips found mine, in that fraction of a second when I felt the cool outline of her lips, that gentle fold of flesh, that alluring, curved shape, and she, too, found something similar; then, without parting her lips, she let her head sink to my shoulder; though the withdrawal was deliberate, she threw her arms around me and held me tight, so that we wouldn't feel what we both felt: the taste of the dead man's mouth on our lips; without him it was impossible for us to make contact.

We stood like this for a long time, with our arms pressing our bodies against each other's chest, loins, thighs, or at least it seemed like a very long time; and if just a moment earlier pain sought release in tender touches and tiny kisses, in our quickly flaring and immediately fading sensual energy, then this furious but insensate pressing and squeezing was a way of sharing a pain that found its way into our grief and our guilt, a pain that would not let us eject the dead man, we let him squeeze in between us.

It seems we needed just enough time for my body, feverish from sobbing, to warm up her cold one, because then, with her head still on my shoulder, in a very different, sly, conspiratorial, and rather inappropriate tone of voice, she whispered:

"I was a very good little girl," she said, almost laughing, "I lied."

I knew what she was talking about: the very thing I wanted to know more about, for knowledge of these unnamed but important facts meant time and a chance to get away, but I couldn't ask her about them without giving myself away.

But she, too, was in flight, and betraying me would have meant betraying herself as well; still, she would have liked me to be grateful.

I, however, wanted to vanish from my present life without leaving a trace, not even a telltale, breathless, inquisitive question from which those who remained behind could afterward surmise my real intentions; I wanted to leave nothing behind but a traceless void.

She understood all this, though she couldn't really know what she understood, and though I wasn't going to deny her my gratitude, I had to pull away a little to see all this on her face.

Yes, it was all there, but I was wrong about her laughing, in fact she was crying.

With my tongue I lapped up her large teardrops, and was glad I could show my gratitude in such a simple way, and when I drew her to me once more, the strange feeling of a moment ago, that we were not alone, simply melted away.

But this feeling made me realize what deadly silence reigned in the room, indeed in the entire hotel, and that the soundless light streaming through the window came from an infinite silence.

It occurred to me that the valet had already been taken away.

Later she whispered something about having come only to say goodbye, they were leaving.

I'm going home, too, I lied, but it wouldn't look right if we traveled together, I added.

No need to worry about that, she said, breathing hotly down my neck as if we were exchanging words of love; they'll go to Kühlungsbronn first, and will probably spend a few days there before returning to their estate in Saxony.

After so many years, with a very different sort of life behind me, a respectable life free of dangerous passion and excesses, what shame prevents me still from describing our farewell?

It was as if we had to part not from each other — that we wanted to do most anxiously, to get away, and the quicker and farther the better — but from him, we had to take gentle leave of the one who was staying behind.

She didn't give me away, she lied for me, something I'm not at all sure I would have done in her place, and for this reason, even in this situation, in this impossible parting, she had to be the stronger.

She pushed me away and stepped back; I could say we were looking at each other, but what we both did was to look at him in each other.

By drawing apart we left him too big a space between us, it made him loom too large.

Flustered and stammering, not knowing how we could get around him, get around someone who was growing larger and larger between us, not to mention his corpse still lying on the other side of the wall, I said that maybe I ought to go and say goodbye to her mother; I thought that if we left the room together, we could somehow shake off his lingering presence, but in response, something so sharply painful flashed in her eyes that one could justifiably call it hatred, hatred and reproach, reproach for using such a poor alibi to get away from the dead, but hatred, too, because at the same time I'd also be pushing her away, who was still alive; I had to stay.

But staying meant the hopeless intermingling of the living and the dead.

And then she smiled, the way a mature woman smiles at the blundering of her child.

After a little while she took off her hat, slowly pulled off her gloves, threw hat and gloves on the table, stepped closer to me, and with those fingers touched my face.

"Silly, how very silly you are!"

I said nothing.

"It's only natural," she said, and while instinctively responding to her advance, I felt on my hands that the face I was touching was not the face of the woman I loved and to whom I was about to make love; I was holding the woman that he, the dead man, had loved, and would keep on loving; even now he loved her through me, by reaching into me, into my hands and my body, just as this woman wasn't touching me directly.

No more words passed between us; what's more, we had no more moves and gestures of our own, everything was his.

With measured and dignified slowness we consummated his time for him, and for this long hour, whose every minute was sober and serene, even the specter of Hans the murderer had vanished.

As if responding to some inner upheaval, our pupils widened and narrowed; we were staring at death through the alluring veils of each other's eyes.

After she got dressed, pulled on her gloves, arranged her hair in front of the mirror, and put on her hat, she turned around once more to look at me, as if to say that if I wished, I could now say goodbye to her mother.

But after what we had done in that long hour, a polite goodbye would have made no sense; it was best to leave everything just the way it was.

I may have shaken my head, or she may have guessed my thought and agreed.

She lowered her veil over her face and walked out.

The following night, standing at the window of my speeding train, I was looking out to see — for I did want to see — my departure forever from the part of the earth that others, more fortunate or less fortunate than myself, called their homeland.

It was a dark, foggy winter night, and of course I couldn't see anything.

No More

I am a rational man, perhaps too rational. I am not inclined to any form of humility. Still, I would like to copy my friend's last sentence onto this empty page. Let it help me finish the job no one's commissioned me to do, which should make it the most personal undertaking of my life, the one closest to my heart.

It was a dark, foggy winter night, and of course I couldn't see anything.

I don't think he meant this to be his last sentence. There is every indication that the next day, as usual, he would have continued his life with a new sentence, one that could not be predicted or inferred from the notes he left behind. Because the novel of a life, once begun, always offers an invitation: Come on, lose yourselves in me, trust me, in the end I may be able to lead you out of my wilderness.

My role is merely that of a reporter.

I begin, then, my voice choking, with the fact that it must have been around three o'clock in the afternoon. That's when he usually stopped working. It was a bright, cloudless, summerlike late September afternoon. He got up from his desk. Outside, the old garden that had thinned out in the August heat was now slumbering peacefully. Now and then, through the sparsely grown tree branches and bushes, he could catch a glimpse of the shining dark river. The unusually narrow, vaulted windows of the house were framed by creeping vines, their yellow and red berries ripened by the sun at this time of the year. Lizards and the various insects that made their home in the clinging vines were now basking in the sun or cooling themselves under the shady leaves. He described something like this in the first chapter of his memoir, and he must have seen something like this on that day, too. Later, he had a bite to eat, exchanged some pleasantries with my aunts in the kitchen, then tucking the morning paper and the day's mail under his arm and throwing a thick towel over his shoulder, he went down to the Danube.

Two mangled legs, a crushed-in chest, and a cracked skull. That's all that was left of him, that's what they brought back.

So, without attaching any symbolic significance to it, the sentence quoted above was the last of an eight-hundred-page manuscript. It was left to me, though I am not his legal heir.

And now I would like to state most emphatically that by prefacing this report about my ill-fated friend's death with a few words about myself and my own circumstances, I do not wish in any way to push my own person to the foreground.

One reason for my doing this is that if I were to speak only of him, I'd get stuck too often, my voice would choke and falter.

My name is Krisztián Somi Tot; if not the last name, my first name should be familiar to those who have gotten as far as that last sentence of this long yet still incomplete life story. Because my poor friend, now through the distorting effects of romantic idealization, now that of romantic disappointment, did record for posterity a boy named Krisztián, the boy I once was but with whom today I feel I have little in common.

I could almost say he wrote it for me. Which does make me just a little proud. Maybe not proud. Rather a little surprised, childishly, awkwardly surprised, as when somebody suddenly shoves under your nose a secretly taken and therefore completely revealing photograph. In another sense, I'm embarrassed by the whole thing.

Having read the manuscript, I think that the more desperate the will to live, the larger the gaps memory must leap over. When activities aimed at survival are driven by sheer, ruthless will, the shame evoked later by memory is that much deeper. Nobody likes to be embarrassed, so we'd rather not remember morally deficient times. Repression makes us both winners and losers. In this sense my friend was right: I've also turned out to be a man with a divided soul, and in that I'm not so different from other people.

To clarify what I have in mind, let me confess that the events of that freezing day in March which were so fateful in his life, my memory simply tossed away. I was there, and I've no doubt it happened as he described it. The overwhelming joy and terrible fear evoked by the tyrant's death, our own long-lasting but uneven attraction to each other, and the deadly fear of being discovered and betrayed — all these were within me, too; I felt them more or less the same way, and I said so. But I never thought about them again. I must have felt that that kiss settled something between us.

And I did say, while urinating, that the old train robber finally croaked. Or some such silly thing. It gave me such pleasure, like the body's pleasure, to be able to say a sentence like that out loud. Afterward I was terrified he might report me. In those years we lived under the constant threat of being evicted from the capital. Of all the houses of our neighborhood right next to that notorious restricted zone, we were the last original residents. Every official-looking envelope made my mother tremble with fear. Maybe our house was too small or too run-down; to this day I don't know why we were spared.

My mother I loved with the tenderly domineering, overly solicitous, forgiving yet controlling love that only a fatherless son can have for a mother struggling with loneliness and terrible financial problems, a widow mourning her husband unto death. For her sake I was ready to make any concession, be open to the most humiliating compromises. That's why I hoped we could avoid that reporting business. And if it had already happened, I wanted to know what to expect. I am not inclined to humility, as I've said, but when it comes to compromises I'm willing to go to extremes, even today.

What should be understood from all this is that no event in my later life could induce me to think that that kiss was really a kiss and not simply the solution to an existential problem I had at the time. I couldn't allow myself to be caught in dangerous psychological predicaments, I had all I could do to ward off tangible external dangers. I came to appreciate the advantages of psychological self-concealment, and with the years I continued to avoid ambiguous situations and judgments that didn't square exactly with my wishes or interests.

Now that I'm aware of how he perceived me, and what a lasting impression I had made on him — which I never could have sensed — I feel rather sad. As if I had missed out on something I couldn't possibly have wished for. And that, of course, is flattering to me. He could allow himself the luxury of being hypersensitive. And that, of course, is something for which he is to be envied. At the same time, my sadness is free of any kind of reproach, accusation, self-accusation, free of any kind of guilt. I must have been more interesting, more attractive, and also more slippery, rougher, meaner, and altogether more sinister as a child than I am as an adult. It had to turn out like that. I had to push and cajole and continually twist arms just to secure the bare necessities of life, and in this unrelenting struggle, in this ruthlessly pragmatic personal cold war, I must have appeared more resourceful, more pliable, and more versatile than I did later on when, wearying of the struggle for basics, I could finally carve out what seemed like a secure niche for myself.

By the age of thirty he turned into a dangerously open person and I into a dangerously closed one, though we both became vulnerable. He found a love he hoped would fill a painful gap in his life, and this hope compelled him to tread on unfamiliar ground. I, on the other hand, recovering from the weariness of constant struggle, had to realize that in my hopelessness I had chosen the most common route to escape my miseries, and having run as far as I could, I was just short of turning into an alcoholic. He told me once, not long after our reunion, that men stuck in their assigned sexual roles were prone to grow fetid, both physically and spiritually.

Looking at the course of my life and career, I don't feel out of place in this country. If my friend was the exception, then I am the norm; together we make up the rule. And I make this distinction not to flaunt my own ordinariness, my limited perception, my poorly functioning memory, and in this way, somehow, still to place myself above him whom I've called exceptional; no, with my description I don't mean to label either one of us, to shift the blame for my insensitivity and obtuseness; all I want to do, in my own way, is to take a good look at our common life experiences.

I am an economist, and for the last few years I have been working in a research institute. My work in the main consists of gathering data, analyzing recurring and, on occasion, atypical patterns in one particular sphere of the national economy. I try to isolate the unique features of a specific set of phenomena. I'd like to do the same regarding this manuscript. Creative writing is not my forte. I never tried my hand at poetry. I played soccer, I rowed, I lifted weights. Ever since I stopped spending my evenings drinking, I run considerable distances every morning. The only kind of writing I do is occasional articles for professional journals. I suspect that as a consequence of my social origins and upbringing, my life, from earliest childhood, has been guided by a desire to examine given peculiarities most painstakingly, with the greatest degree of detachment.

Already as a young child I had to think carefully about the ways of thinking, or rather to be careful and not necessarily really think the things I said out loud. The reason I don't describe this intellectually demanding self-manipulation in terms that would suggest any kind of emotional involvement is that I am quite aware that concealed behind my perceptiveness and discernment — developed in circumstances I mentioned above— lie a good deal of resignation and self-discipline, all dictated by necessity.

When young, all living things are passionate, and their passionate hope of mastering the world is what makes them attractive. How passionate that hope is, how and to what extent it is realized, is what determines the distinction they make between what is ugly and what is beautiful, and how they call the good beautiful and the bad ugly. By now, however, nothing in me would make my view of things an aesthetic one. Whatever I see or experience, however intimate, I do not judge as beautiful or ugly, for I simply do not see them as such. At most I feel a quiet gratitude, reminiscent of warmth, for things I find favorable, but even that feeling cools very quickly.

I may have been filled with passion at one time, and it may be gone now. It's possible that something is already missing, gone from me forever. And it's also possible that this missing trait, or its excess, for all I know, is what made me appear cold and aloof even as a child. I can't claim that too many people love me, but most consider me a fair-minded person. Yet in view of my friend's poignant analysis, I am compelled by fair-mindedness to ask whether I may not appear to be fair-minded because I always manage to keep my distance from my own endeavors as well as from the people who love me, so that I can avoid having to identify with them while still retaining my control over them.

I am not fortunate enough to be the ideal embodiment of any one life principle. I might have become a most vicious cynic if not for the continually recurring absence or surfeit of emotions from which I suffer terribly.

A few days before my high school final exams, I decided to demolish the tile stove in my room, and I did manage to take it halfway apart. I got home from my girlfriend's house very early in the morning. I always had to sneak out of her place to make sure her unsuspecting parents would know nothing about my being there all night. I was alone in our house; my mother had gone to visit relatives in Debrecen. That stove had been bothering me for a long time. I felt it was in the wrong place, and I didn't really need it. At night it poured all its heat on my head, and I couldn't open my door all the way because of it. So I took a big hammer, and could have also used a chisel, but all I could find was a cramp iron, which served the same purpose. I began to take the thing apart. The broken tiles I threw out the window into the garden. But dismantling the stove's inside ducts proved to be more complicated than I had thought. And since I had made no preparations at all for this messy job, my room began to fill up with dust, debris, and soot. Soon everything was covered: the carpet, the upholstery, the books, my notebooks, and my carefully worked-out answers to previous finals that were lying on my desk. When I stopped for a while, coming out of the hypnotic pull of my feverish activity, and looked about, I couldn't see the mess around me as an inevitable natural by-product of this kind of work; I saw it as sheer, repulsive, unbearable filth, the boring filth of infinite emptiness. This feeling assailed me as suddenly as had the idea of dismantling the stove. I was staring into the sooty, stinking, mangled body of a once useful man-made structure. I must have been halfway through when I stopped. I thought I was sleepy and tired. I closed the window, threw off my clothes, and climbed into bed. But I couldn't fall asleep. I tossed and turned for a while, tried to curl up, but I couldn't roll or fold myself up, couldn't make myself as small as I would have liked to. I don't remember thinking about anything else. And I don't know if I'd call my awful wish about shrinking a thought. I had to get up, because it was impossible to lie there awake without being able to fulfill this wish. And without giving myself time to weigh the situation properly, I began to swallow, almost indiscriminately, the pills I found in my mother's medicine cabinet.

I needed a lot of sleeping pills and tranquillizers. After a while I could no longer swallow without water.

Today it seems that I may be the one remembering the incident, but not the one it happened to. First I drank the water from a vase, then from the little trays under the houseplants. Why I didn't just go into the kitchen is still beyond me. I was overcome by nausea. And dry retching. As if I had no more saliva in my mouth. I would have been afraid to throw up on my mother's furniture. I fell on my knee, and with my hands clasped on the back of my neck I laid my head on the edge of the sofa. I tried with all my strength to calm my heaving stomach. I don't remember anything else. If my mother, prompted by an odd premonition, had not returned a day earlier than planned, I wouldn't be here to talk about this. My stomach was pumped, the tile stove reassembled.

I had never before attempted anything so crazy, and certainly don't intend to ever again. Yet whatever else my actions may have led to — joy, grief, happy resolution, or indecision — the group of emotions usually referred to as angst has become a permanent part of my psychic makeup.

And this in spite of the fact that until then I had never had feelings even remotely resembling angst. But I don't wish to dwell on them, not only because I am not clear on their origins, but because otherwise I appear to be a well-adjusted man with a cheerful disposition, and to me this genuine appearance is more important.

When one is asked to define family origins, one begins by making selections among one's ancestors. When I am asked that question, I usually say I come from a military family. As if all my forebears were professional soldiers, whether generals or privates. Which may be an impressive notion but does not reflect reality. It's a little like saying one comes from an old family. Every family is equally old. It's true, though, that the sons and daughters of different peoples climbed down from the trees at different times. For instance, the Incas and the Hebrews did it much earlier than the Germans, and in all probability the Magyars did it somewhat later than the English or the French. But from this it does not follow that a family of serfs of a certain nation is not as old as a prince's family in the same nation. And just as a nation distinguishes between racially identical families on the basis of social status, so does an individual when he begins to choose among the motley group of his ancestors, based on the personal evaluation of his own interests, desires, and ambitions. This peculiar mode of selecting one's ancestors — tailor-made for the person doing the selecting — is something I noticed in my friend's manuscript, too.

The only way he can maintain the equilibrium of his personality, splintered by extreme contradictions, is by observing himself, by continually scrutinizing the origins and causes of the unconscious forces raging within him. But for this all-important psychological self-analysis he needs the kind of balanced and sober perspective that, because of his unbalanced state, he does not have. He is trapped in a vicious circle. He can break out of it only if, for the duration of his self-analysis at least, he adopts the perspective of a person or group of persons in his surroundings who have the stability he needs. This is the reason for the decisive role his maternal grandfather plays in his life story, this liberal bourgeois who, even in very dangerous conditions, remained a model of moderation and self-discipline. And it is also the reason he views with mixed irony and affection that tenacious, stoic, and uncompromisingly respectable bourgeois woman, his grandmother. Through them he would like to identify with something to which his real-life situation no longer entitles him. Still, this is how he selects his origins. He chooses to trace this one line back to his past, though in principle he could have chosen a number of others. While I was reading the manuscript, it struck me that his leaving out his other set of grandparents couldn't have been completely unintentional. I'm not suggesting he did this because he was ashamed of them or because they weren't as important in his life as his maternal grandparents.

On weekends or summer mornings sometimes we would ride out on a streetcar to visit them in their home in Káposztásmegyer.

After completing my university studies I began working for a foreign trade company. For about ten years I traveled to many parts of the world. Yet when I think of travel, what comes to mind first is that rickety yellow streetcar and the two of us bumping along on its open platform. Sometimes, on long plane rides, I'd be wrapped up in some technical reading, and this old image would suddenly flash before me. And I'd feel as though I wasn't even flying but riding across the globe in that yellow streetcar. Rattling along old Váci Road, interminably.

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.

About matters such as these, and even more delicate ones, I should be talking only to myself. But man was not made to talk to himself. All such attempts are no more than foolish experiments that hark back to one's mental childhood.

Of course, I also loved my dead friend's maternal grandfather more than I did the other one. It wasn't really love, more like a flattering tribute to my ego. He treated me and communicated with me as if I were not, mentally and physically, still a gangly adolescent. What provided the opportunity for these conversations was his habit of taking long walks every afternoon in the neighborhood. He ambled along, thrusting his long, ivory-knobbed walking stick carefully before him, and if by chance we ran into each other, he would lean on his cane, tilt his gray head to one side, and listen to me with the attentiveness and empathy he believed was the due of every human being. His interjections, approving nods, pondering hums, and warning exclamations led me down a path I wanted to take only when complying with my innermost wishes. His empathy could be so disconcerting that sometimes I deliberately avoided him or, after a polite but hurried greeting, rushed past him.

In adolescence one tends to relate to intellectual urges in the same timidly willful way as one does to erotic ones. But he never forced the issue. There was nothing demanding or tempting about him. Yet the possibility of voluntary self-disclosure kept drawing me back to him.

Directly or in veiled, metaphoric terms, we discussed political issues, and he told me once that according to a very clear-minded philosopher, whom I would not be able to read since he wrote his works in English, what is important in human societies is not that the majority have as much right as the ruling minority. That's just how it is, and it's inevitable. But if this were the only social principle regulating societies, there would be only strife in the world. There would be no possibility of reaching any agreement between individuals or societies. But we know that this isn't so. And the reason for that is that there is also an infinite goodness in this world, and everyone without exception, rulers as well as subjects, would like to have an equal share. This goodness exists, he said, because our desire for equality, symmetry, and harmony is as strong as is our lust for power, our need for total victory over a foe. And we must understand that the lack of this symmetry and harmony in us is also evidence of the existence of this goodness.

I couldn't then have possibly remembered, let alone understood, this complex thought, but later, when I came upon the book of this very significant philosopher, I rediscovered it with a surprise that took my breath away.

And if now, after so many years, I take out these photographs and spread them before me, I am again reminded of this same, seemingly complex thought, and begin to suspect why I shied away from the symmetry that other people found so very attractive in my grandfather's features.

Grandfather's straight, almost rigid posture, which gave an unpleasant first impression, need not be taken as a peculiarity of his own. It has as much to do with the fashion of his day as with his profession, which made this kind of bearing almost compulsory. And there may have been another reason for the stiffness: in those days the long exposure time of cameras demanded that, with the help of all sorts of invisible supports, the subject be completely motionless. However, there are also two snapshots among the photos. One of them was taken at the Italian front in an improvised trench. They must have picked part of a ravine for the purpose, because you can see that two sides and the bottom of the trench are made of flat, layered blocks of limestone. Sandbags are piled on top of the stones, and you can tell the bags are loosely filled, they probably didn't have enough sand. Flanked by two fellow officers, my grandfather sits in the foreground of the picture. His long legs, elegant even in heavy boots, are crossed, his torso is bent forward, and his arms are supported on his elbows; with his mouth slightly open and his eyes wide, he is staring into the camera. The faces of the other two, lower-ranking officers are worn and haggard, their uniforms seem neglected, but the look in their eyes is fearlessly determined, if somewhat artificial. In this setting my grandfather looks like a self-indulgent playboy who can enjoy himself even in such circumstances because he has nothing to do with anything or anyone there. The other snapshot is one of the nicest pictures I have ever seen. It must have been taken at sunset, on top of a hill where only a single puny little tree stood. In between the sparse leaves, the sun shines right into our eyes, or rather into the lens of the long-gone amateur photographer. Grandfather is chasing two young girls in long dresses and straw hats; they are my aunts. One of the girls, my Aunt Ilma, has apparently gotten away; waving her ribboned hat, she is running, on her way out of the picture. Her triumphant grin is therefore very blurry. The other little girl, Aunt Ella, is in an odd pose, leaning out from behind the slender tree, and Grandfather catches her just as the photographer clicks his shutter. Grandfather is wearing a light summer suit, he either unbuttoned his jacket or it had opened by itself. He is coiling out from behind the tree while still clinging to it, like a well-groomed but momentarily disheveled satyr. In this picture, too, his mouth is half open and he is wide-eyed, but not only is there no sign of pleasure in his eyes, it almost appears as if he were carrying out some painful duty, although in the snatching, clutching movement of his hand there is something of the supple greed of a predator. In other photos, I can see only his harmoniously motionless face, photographed frontally, concealed by his rigid posture.

In old novels such faces are called ovoid. It's a full, well-proportioned, oval face, strongly, smoothly articulated, easing into a forehead framed by irrepressibly wavy locks of hair. His high-bridged nose has sensitive nostrils, his eyebrows are dense, his lashes long, his irises surprisingly light, almost luminous, against the generally dark tones of his features. His lips are almost vulgarly thick, and on his aggressively protruding chin there is the same hard-to-shave cleft I have on mine.

The face, like the brain or the whole body, has two hemispheres. The common peculiarity of these two hemispheres is that their symmetry is only approximate. The unevenness discernible in a person's body or face stems from the fact that impressions received by our more or less neutral sense organs are separated in two unevenly developed hemispheres of the brain, and which side of a person's body or face seems more striking to us depends on which side of the person's brain is more developed. The right hemisphere processes the emotional connotations of the impressions, while the left hemisphere deciphers the meaning of the same impressions, and only afterward, as a second step, does the brain establish a direct relationship between the intellectual and emotional aspects of the same impression. One perceives a phenomenon with one's eyes, ears, nose, and fingers as an unprocessed whole, then breaks it down to its components and, based on the relations between the different components, re-creates for oneself the whole that one first came to know through sensory perception. But, because of the uneven development of the brain's two hemispheres, the perceived whole can never be identical with the analyzed and assimilated whole, which in turn means that there is no such thing as a perfectly harmonious emotion or a perfectly harmonious way of thinking.

Anyone can observe this phenomenon in himself when talking to another person. People in conversation never stare directly into one another's eyes — only madmen do that — rather, they move their eyes from one hemisphere of the face to the other, back and forth. The glance oscillates between thought and feeling, and if it is fixed on any one point, it will inevitably be the left side of the face, the one expressing emotions, it is this side of the face that the neutral glance, taking in the whole of the impression, uses to check whether the words it comprehended mentally are identical with the emotions elicited by the interlocutor's words.

Language, in certain set phrases, also follows this functional peculiarity of the human body. If, for example, referring to a given phenomenon I say that I couldn't believe my eyes, what I'm admitting is that neither intellectually nor emotionally could I process the received impression as a whole, or more precisely, I tipped so far toward either a mental or an emotional evaluation that I could no longer establish a connection between the two poles. I saw something but could not reconcile it with my inner sense of order and balance; therefore, although I may have seen it as whole, I could not comprehend it whole, therefore could not assimilate it. The reverse phenomenon takes place when we say that we are trying to stare somebody down. In this case the searching glances of the speakers come to an absolute standstill. For two reasons. Either the glance finds harmony, perfect agreement between the emotional and intellectual spheres — and harmony always comes as an unexpected surprise, for it is a theoretical whole with, theoretically, no differentiated parts. Or, since the contradiction is irreconcilable between the emotional and intellectual aspects of the phenomenon, it intends to settle at the dead center of this unachievable harmony, fixed on the other person's neutral organ of perception, his eyes, trying to deprive itself of any further impressions and, with its impassivity, to force the other to decide in which direction it wishes to tip its own scale.

Of course, the state of I-couldn't-believe-my-eyes can last but a few seconds, just as you can't stare someone down for too long. The appearance of a harmony coming into being, or lacking totally, cannot be sustained for long, and not only because the relationship between emotion and intellect is disharmonious, even physiologically, but because the internal image we want to assimilate is not identical with the image our sense organs perceive in a neutral, unprocessed form. At the same time, the face as a whole reflects quite faithfully this complex triple relationship. We can confirm this phenomenon, too, by examining with the aid of a pocket mirror both our profiles, and then comparing them with the frontal view of our face.

The two profiles appear completely different. One of them expresses the emotional, the other the intellectual aspect of our character, and the greater the disparity, the smaller the likelihood that they will blend harmoniously in the frontal view. Yet blend they must, a natural necessity that excludes the possibility of the two being totally different from each other — just as they cannot be totally identical either.

Logically it should follow that we should consider a face in which emotion and intellect appear to be in radical imbalance just as beautiful as one in which the two are in perfect harmony. But this isn't so. Insofar as we can choose between two near-perfect forms, we always choose the near-perfectly-proportionate over the near-perfectly-disproportionate one.

If I were to take any of my grandfather's photographs showing him from the front, and with a pair of scissors cut it in two along the line between the cleft of his chin and the bridge of his nose, and then superimpose the pieces, one half of his face would cover the other near perfectly, like two geometric constructs. The reason for this unique trait must be that in individuals like him the two hemispheres of the brain developed evenly. Assessing the physical appearance of such people, one is tempted to conclude that neither emotion nor intellect predominates in them, pulling them in one direction or the other; and whoever looks at them cannot but be intrigued by the magical possibility of perfect symmetry.

If the brain's two hemispheres could indeed assimilate with a perfect blend of feeling and thought what the sense organs had already perceived as a neutral whole, if there were no differences between parts and the whole, if an individual's unique image were not formed in accordance with the brain's inevitable biases, if each individual could reproduce a perfect whole comprehensible to all, then it wouldn't even occur to us to differentiate between beautiful and ugly, good and bad, because there would be no difference between emotional and intellectual properties. This would be the ultimate symmetry we all strive for, which the man of ethics calls infinite goodness and the man of aesthetics calls beauty.

The only reason I've thought it necessary to explain all this is to demonstrate what an unbridgeable gap separates ethical thinking, which even in the absence of ultimate symmetries finds certainties, or aesthetic thinking, which cannot survive such an absence, from the kind of thinking I can also call my own. In my youth, because of my attractive physical appearance, people thought of me as exceptional and treated me accordingly. The advantages stemming from their admiration and devotion made up for the social disadvantages I had to endure on account of my family background. But in my thinking, perhaps for this very reason, I have remained the epitome of the average person. I did not become a believer like the ethical ones, or a doubter like many aesthetically sensitive people I know, because I never longed for the impossible but learned to make good use of the qualities I possess. Of course my own secret torments do enable me to empathize with the certainties of ethical believers and the uncertainties of skeptical aesthetes, with their happiness and tragedies, but my thinking is not directed at realizing hidden possibilities or at grasping metaphysical insights born of contemplating the impossible; my thinking deals only with real possibilities, things within reach of my two hands.

My activities don't touch on any systematic philosophy of life. I am guided by the conviction that whatever appears as debit on one side will show up as credit on the other. Despite my well-developed theoretical bent, I occupy myself only with the practical organization of my life. I draw on my credit, I make up my debit. And while doing so, I never forget that symmetries thus gained are valid only for the moment of their creation.

And if I said before that studying those photographs, whose allusion to ultimate symmetry filled me with such distaste, was one of my favorite pastimes as a child, then my statement is in need of further clarification.

As becomes evident from my friend's confessions, I wasn't a quiet, retiring child. As an adult, too, I am very active, although I'm tempted to consider my urge to keep busy, sometimes reaching the point of frenzy, to be one of my darker traits, even if others envy this seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy. What spurs me on is not a desire to win or to succeed but rather the indolence and inertia that thrust my immediate and not so immediate environment into a state of permanent defeat. And since there are so many more defeats than victories in one's life, I haven't had much opportunity to withdraw into a state of quiet contemplation. I don't like to use big words, but I'll say that our sorry national history, piling failure upon failure, defeat upon defeat, is partly to blame. For when confronted with seemingly impossible situations, tasks that are clearly beyond our resources, we don't even consider the possibility of regrouping our forces, but with a fool's defensive cautiousness we avoid the issues, put them off, pretend they don't exist, or with almost masochistic pleasure proceed to enumerate the reasons why rational solutions are simply not in the cards. This petty cunning irritates me no less than our fatalistic air of superiority. I believe that playing for time, lying low, waiting it out, is a justified tactic only in situations that hold out the prospect of solution; in the absence of such prospects the question of what can or cannot be done, and why, is futile, though it is as familiar to me as it is to the rest of my compatriots. When there is a solution, delay is superfluous, and when there isn't, talk is a sheer waste of time. But my annoyance and irritability seldom prove to be reliable counsel. In my feverish activity I myself pile error on error, stumble from defeat to defeat. And all the while, and not without a measure of arrogance, I keep telling myself that even a blind hen will find a seed if it keeps knocking around with its beak long enough.

But if between two erroneous decisions or two defeats I still manage to achieve some kind of breakthrough, then the feeling of surprise makes me retreat. At times like that I have to decide whether my success is the result of a correct decision or merely a stroke of luck. I observe, I weigh things, I distract myself and others, I become despondent and helpless and long for solitude. I look for something to read and, all of a sudden, softly lit corners in cozy, familiar rooms become very important.

In my childhood, during lulls in my fight for freedom, in my personal cold war, I studied photographs and military maps and browsed through dictionaries; as a young man I experienced in these periods, having grown timid with success, my casual conquests blossoming into tense love affairs, and I'd disappear for weeks and hole up in warm little nests with the unlikeliest girls; later, when I was a married man, the so-called periods of success got me started on quiet and carefully arranged but all the more persistent bouts of drinking.

My aversion to cowering and useless arguments, my propensity for acting recklessly, and my inability to handle success must all stem from my basic character makeup, which can balance feeling and thought so as to neutralize each other, but since I traveled a great deal and spent a lot of time in foreign countries, and therefore had a chance to realize that elsewhere I would probably have turned out differently, I feel that any attempt at discovering the character of a nation in something other than the particular traits of an individual is a very risky undertaking. We are all variants of the same thing. Variants determined by character, sex, family origin, religion, and upbringing. If someone, while still a child, wants to find his place in this community, he will select ancestors with the characteristics that seem most striking, but there is no personal characteristic that is not yet another version of the national character, and so, in reality, the child is selecting for himself only certain variants.

I chose two variants of the same dynamic character type: the hedonistic, social-climbing version in my grandfather and the ascetic-heroic variant in my father. They seemed as different as night and day. Their fates had one thing in common: they both died in wars that for their nation ended in defeat and had catastrophic consequences. My grandfather was thirty-seven, my father thirty-four when they lost their lives. They were united by their untimely passing, and this single connection between them made me decide that while death, most naturally, stands above all else, it doesn't have to mean the end of life. My mother grew up with one parent and was a widow when she raised me. Victory is probably a good thing, but one can also live with the misery of defeat. It was in line with this tradition that my own variant developed; and it is probably with this variant in mind that my son and daughter will choose their own.

I am thirty-seven years old. Exactly as old as my grandfather was when he lost his life in one of the bloodiest battles of the First World War. To lose one's life without losing life itself — a good trick, only how to do it? — that's what I'm thinking about now. My friend's been dead for three years. It's nighttime. I'm busy measuring different sorts and periods of time. It's drizzling outside, a fine spring rain. The pearly drops on the large windowpanes are illuminated by the friendly glow of my desk lamp, until they get too heavy and fall. I think of my children and wonder when I will have to let them go for good. As if I am somewhat surprised that I have had this much time with them and that I still have some left. Here I am, sitting in this book-lined, slightly disorderly — just the way I like it — quiet, nocturnal room. Moments ago some bad feeling or unpleasant dream must have startled my wife out of sleep, because she got up and came, or rather staggered, out of the bedroom. I followed her with my ear as she groped her way through the dark hallway, went into the kitchen, drank something, I heard the glass clink, and after taking a long look into the children's room, she went back to bed, her footsteps softer and steadier. When she opened the children's door, I followed her not with my ears but with my nose. I could smell the sweet fragrance of the children, and not even with my nose but with my flesh, my bones. No doubt my wife is even more powerfully aware of this sensation than I am. She doesn't look in on me. Although we haven't said a word about it, I know that ever since I started going over this manuscript she's been as restless again as she was when, sitting at the same table, I used to spend my time alone, drinking. She fears for our children.

We couldn't have been more than ten years old when my friend Prém and I decided we were going to be soldiers. My dead friend portrays Prém as subjectively as he does me, and sees some kind of erotic mystery in our relationship. True, he views Prém with petulant aversion rather than affection. I am not nearly as well versed in psychological analysis as he was, so I have no way of judging how accurate his conclusions are. But I certainly don't want to give the impression that I am biased in this regard and would therefore reject his particular interpretation of our relationship out of hand. If two human beings are of the same sex, their relationship will be defined by the fact that they are. And if they are of different sexes, then that will be the decisive factor. That's how I feel about it, and for all I know, I may be insensitive on this issue, too.

Prém and I have remained the best of friends to this day. He didn't become a soldier; he is an auto mechanic. And, like myself, a settled family man. If you're looking for faults, well, maybe his tax returns are not quite above reproach. A few years ago, exactly at the time my friend returned from Heiligendamm and I gave up my lucrative job as a commercial traveler, Prém opened his own shop. While the two of us went spiritually bankrupt, Prém got rich. When something is wrong with my car we fix it together, on Sunday afternoons. Prém is an absolute terror tracking down a malfunction. In the way we huddle in the greasy pit of his workshop, or rub against each other while sprawled under the car, making contact as we handle parts of a lifeless mechanism, in the way we curse and quarrel and fume or, in perfect agreement, we acknowledge the other's move to be perfect, just right — in short, in the way we enjoy each other's physical presence, there is undoubtedly something ritualistic that goes back to our childhood bonding, and it must reawaken in us the need for such bonding.

As children we made a pact and sealed it with our blood, though I no longer remember what prompted us to do it. With a dagger that belonged to my father we pricked our fingers, smeared the blood on each other's palm, and then licked it off. There was nothing solemn about this. Maybe because there was no real gushing of blood. We were embarrassed about our ineptness. Still, sealing our mutual aspirations with blood proved to be our deepest and strongest bond. What others used words for, we entrusted to the language of our bodies. And I am convinced the body has words that have nothing to do with eroticism. For the sake of an end to be achieved, we turned our body into a physical means. But our bodies had the goal in mind, not each other. And what reinforces this conviction is that it never occurred to us to consider each other a friend. To this day we call each other buddy, which to me — because I've been infected by intellectual self-consciousness — sounds a little phony, but which to him, precisely because of the differences in our background and social position, is a word that carries a most important distinction. He has other people for friends. But when it comes to straightening out his petty though by no means unprofitable financial indiscretions, he can always count on my professional guidance.

For us to become soldiers, we knew we had to outsmart the existing social order. Actually, neither of us could have picked a worse profession. I was the son of a captain on the general staff of the prewar Hungarian Army, and his father had been a fanatic fascist. My father fell on the Russian front. His father laid his hands on confiscated Jewish property, served a five-year sentence after the war, and then, six months after his release, was relocated to a camp for undesirables — much to his family's relief. The reigning spirit of the new age, in its shrewd cynicism, conveniently blurred the distinction between two lives that were predicated on ambitions and values that could not have been more different. We were both considered children of war criminals. Unless we wanted to appear stupid or insane, we had to keep our plan secret. And we didn't talk about it even to each other; after all, we didn't want to be soldiers of the Hungarian People's Army, just soldiers in general.

But all this needs some explanation.

Up until the mid-1950s, I could still hear members of my family voice the seemingly pragmatic and well-founded view that the English and the Americans would soon relieve our country of the Soviet Union's military presence. And the fact that in 1955 Soviet troops did withdraw from Austria kept these expectations alive, up until November 4, 1956. I considered my family's situation outrageously unjust, but with a child's unbiased sense of reality I also noticed that people around me did not really believe what they were telling each other. When my aunts and uncles discussed these matters, their fear and self-deception made their voices nervously thin and hushed. I had an aversion to these distraught and fretful tones. I must admit, therefore, that for lack of a real choice I would have wanted to become a soldier in the People's Army. Still, I had to realize my ambition without betraying my family. And in my morally dubious ambition, the example of my grandfather's life came to my aid.

As the fifth among a village schoolmaster's eight children, my grandfather had only two opportunities to utilize his exceptional mental abilities, already apparent in early childhood: a military career or the priesthood. As he was an irascible, unruly child, a priestly vocation was out of the question. His military ambitions were at first blocked by my greatgrandfather's unshakably nationalist, anti-Austrian sentiments. In his stubborn opposition he went so far as to prevent Grandfather from joining the Hungarian Territorial Army, even though the language of command in that force was Hungarian, and according to the historic Compromise of 1867 with Austria, the Territorial Army could not cross the Hungarian frontier without Parliament's approval. It's still a joint army, he grumbled, and no son of his would rub elbows with traitors. Then, in the heat of an argument, my grandfather said to his father, If you won't let me join up, I'll run away and become a professional dancer. For that he got two huge slaps on his face, but the next day he also got the necessary paternal consent. He graduated with distinction from the Military Academy of Sopron.

In short, we were preparing to be good soldiers in any Hungarian army, and to that end we put ourselves through the most difficult tests possible. With knapsacks filled with rocks, we went on long marches in the most sweltering summer heat. In winter we'd crawl in ditches filled with icy water. We had to learn to climb any tree and jump off the tallest one. With no clothes on, we'd cut through thorny bushes, and we wouldn't go home to change even if our clothes got sopping wet or stiff with ice in the freezing cold. I am neither hungry nor thirsty, neither cold nor hot, I am not afraid, I feel no fatigue, disgust, or pain. These were our basic principles. We frequently sneaked out late at night, and without first designating a meeting place, we had to find each other. In doing that, the functioning of our instincts was truly remarkable. We slept in haystacks or stayed up all night, especially in the snow, experimenting with ways of avoiding fatal frostbite. And on the days following such exercises we'd show up in school as if nothing had happened. We challenged each other to see who could hold his breath longer. We repeated the experiment under water. We took care of each other, not with the warm attention of lovers but as two people guided by mutual interests. We learned to creep silently over dry leaves, to imitate birds. We built a snow bunker, packing it so hard we could light a fire inside. We lifted weights, climbed rocks, ran on the toughest terrain, dug trenches. We designated no-food or no-water days, or ate and drank the most outrageous things. Lapping up water from puddles, eating grass or raw eggs snatched from nests were not unusual assignments. Once, I made him eat a slug and he had me swallow an earthworm fried on a spit; these, too, were only tests, not acts of cruelty. Naturally, our bodies were always bruised and covered with scabs, our clothes were in tatters; Prém was often beaten at home, and I had to resort to all sorts of artful lies to comfort my worried mother.

I remember only one instance when I couldn't come up with a credible explanation. But even this experience, jolting as it was, did not break my will. The incident did expose me, yet I was not about to give myself away. I've been a practicing liar ever since, a prevaricator and concealer in matters small and great. I can't help it, but it is with considerable indulgence that I observe the transparent duplicity of my fellow humans in their search for unequivocal truths. But now I'd like to relate the incident.

From my readings about the art of war I knew that logistics units were just as important to the success of an operation as were armaments, preparedness, and the morale of the front-line troops. It's important that every soldier be equipped with the best available weapon and that he be convinced of the necessity of having to fight, but it's just as important that supplies follow each phase of the operation like clockwork. We had to gain experience in this area, too.

We spent unforgettable summer days at the Ferencváros railroad station and the Rákos switchyard. The trainmen tried to chase us away more than once, and they were rough about it, too, but we sneaked back every time. The railroad tracks, winding through the stations and branching off to different destinations, the switches, turntables, and signals, all parts of a coherent system almost like a living organism, are still vivid in my memory. The knowledge I picked up there had a lot to do with the tense social relationship between the railwaymen and the track repairmen. If we managed to attach ourselves to a maintenance crew, we had it made for the rest of the day. We drank their watered-down wine, ate their bread, their bacon, and enjoyed the shy, fatherly affection and interest shown us by these lonely, silent, middle-aged men who worked and lived far from their families. If supervisors or a group of engineers came by, they'd just grumble: Come on, men, you know better than to bring your children to the workplace. Only vagrants and professional criminals knew better than we how easy it was to move around in a freightyard. From their towers, controllers see only busy, purposefully scurrying ants. They never bother to check the number, color, or size of these ants. And you can easily leave the colony. Just make sure you avoid the switchmen's booths, the kind of loose-limbed way of walking that might suggest loafing, and running accidentally into any supervisors.

We also took rides now and then. Of all our activities there, the most exciting, and riskiest, was climbing into one of the cars of a freight train about to be assembled. Then we really had to pay attention to what was happening between the control tower and the assemblers. We could board only from the side away from the tower, but once we were inside, the commands issuing from the tower would tell us what would happen next. After the instruction from the tower — nothing but the car number followed by the destination number — we heard noises of jostling and jiggling around the buffers and connecting cables, all accompanied by colorful cursing, and then silence. That was the time to find something to hang on to good and tight. It was hard to tell when, but the jolt would come. Not a big one — yet. The truly great pleasure always makes you wait for it.

Two hard bodies clink, giving the car its initial momentum on the open track. It starts rolling slowly, sluggishly, and maybe it is held up a little by a switch thrown at the last minute. If the car comes to a complete halt, there's real trouble. Frustrated yelling from the tower, cursing from down below, because the entire train has to be moved to give the errant car one big push. More grousing and screaming and yanking, but once the train gets rolling, the pleasure is so great you can't even comprehend what's happening to you. The uniform acceleration due to the weight and direction of an inert body, slowed only by surface resistance, hurls you irresistibly and at staggering speed toward the next moment.

We loved the tremendous, thunderous impact, which was followed by smaller, gentler bumps. If it was no longer safe to jump off, we'd go for a ride. Generally, they would just shunt the newly assembled train off to a sidetrack, but it happened sometimes that it was sent immediately on a regular run. That morning the train we were on started out for Cegléd; it was picking up speed fairly rapidly, it was too late to jump off. It slowed down once in a while but didn't stop. We weren't too concerned — it wasn't the first time this had happened — maybe just a little more jittery than usual. At one point when the train was again slowing down, Prém gave the alert sign. I jumped first, he was right behind me. As I landed, one of my legs sank knee-deep into a pile of rubble, while Prém neatly tumbled down the side of the embankment. But the momentum of the jump was still propelling my body forward. To this day the memory of that moment is crystal clear. The bright sunshine, the sight of his freely rolling body, and the bone cracking in my trapped leg — whose sound couldn't be heard in the noise of the passing train yet which I did hear. Then fast-approaching rocks. The way I smack into them, face first. We were done for. All our secrets exposed. Even in my pain, descending like a terrifying gray curtain, I had only one thought, that my clumsiness was unforgivable. Prém dug me out and wanted to carry me on his back. Whimpering, I begged him not to touch me anywhere. As it turned out later, my left arm and two of my left ribs were only cracked, but the pain on that side was more intense than in the open fracture of my right leg. Blood was pouring from my head and face. And to make matters worse, we were in the middle of nowhere. Not a soul, not a vehicle or a house anywhere. Just flat, scorched grazing land, a cloudless sky. He had to go for help. My only consolation was that he didn't lose his head.

By the time I was being rolled toward the operating room, a dozen figures in white were running alongside us. That's when I said goodbye to him. I heard one of the medics say: You wait here for the police, son.

When I came to, I could peep out with only one eye from the thick bandage on my head. I was in a cast, and my whole body was wrapped in white. A nurse was sitting on my bed. Her face was like a huge, beating white heart. She was humming and mumbling, trying to sing to me; she made me drink, she was stroking me and wiping me with a wet cloth. She was working hard, fussing over me. I must have looked pitiful, in need of comforting, for she kept singing that everything was all right, everything was just fine, and soon everything will heal, get better, be good as new. Only I mustn't move around too much. I should just tell her if I was becoming nauseous or had to pee. She'll stay with me until my mother comes, no need to worry.

Until then I hadn't thought of my mother. But from that word, just as from the ether-soaked mask they had put on my face in the operating room, everything grew distant and feather-light, though I felt myself very heavy, and then everything went dark.

As if kicking my way to the surface of some terrible dream, I woke up to realize that my body was cooling off and if that kept up I would definitely die. I was wrapped in wet sheets. I heard the nurse's soft voice: It's all right, it's all right. My temperature had shot up, she was bringing it down. But it seemed that changing the sheets over my naked limbs didn't help much, the fever kept slipping back from under the cast and the bandages. After a while, however, the temperature did subside, and I still remember that when she covered me with a dry sheet, quite pleased with herself, I was sorry I couldn't show off my naked body to her anymore.

Judging by the lights and by the noises in the ward, it must have been early afternoon. Luckily, my mother hadn't come yet. Later I had another attack of high fever, and by the time she got it under control, it was evening. The nurse told me she had to leave, her shift had ended, someone else was taking over for her. I don't know why she was so touched, she couldn't have seen much of my face. Maybe it was a gesture I made. Or maybe she could sense, even through the thick bandages, that I had never entrusted myself so unconditionally to another human being. Hardly any time went by and she was back. As soon as she appeared in the doorway, I ventured to say that she was right to come back. Why, she asked, was there anything wrong? No, nothing, I said. And I really felt that I was regaining my strength and was seeing clearly with that one eye. Then why did I say it? Because I needed her, I said. We reached for each other's hand at the same time, and she blushed. I was twelve years old and she perhaps ten years older.

We don't need to imagine how people close to us will behave. Certain situations always bring with them the appropriate form of behavior. Until the end of our lives we keep repeating identical gestures, and this is very reassuring for those around us. With this in mind, I was preparing myself for my mother's arrival.

The ward was full of white mummies like myself, lying strapped to their beds. I somehow wanted to dissociate myself from them. They wheezed, moaned, snored, groaned, and they stank. I had my back propped up with big pillows. I asked the nurse to turn on the overhead reading lamp, to take the bedpan out from under me, and to bring me a newspaper. I watched her slipping in and out of the room. But I was in too much pain and couldn't read with my one good eye long enough for my mother to arrive while I was still in this position. I dozed off. When I opened my eyes again, to my great surprise, it wasn't my mother I saw at the door but a she-devil dressed in my mother's clothes. Just as she was barging into the room and heading straight for me. This I didn't expect. With her arms outstretched she flew into me, her handbag hit me in the face, she seized my shoulders, and if the nurse hadn't hurled herself between us, she would have given me a thrashing then and there. And she had never raised a finger to me before. Never. Now the two of them were scuffling right on top of me. While in a voice choked with rage the she-devil was screaming, What did you do? What did you do again? the guardian angel, her voice a falsetto, kept shrieking, What are you doing? Don't touch him! You're crazy! Help! It suddenly turned light, blindingly light in the ward, and in an instant everyone was up and yelling, but very quickly it was all over. The she-devil vanished, evaporated, and my mother broke down, sobbing, on my bed. The nurse let go of her. She then checked my cast, felt my healthy as well as my bandaged parts, made everyone go back to bed, giggled nervously, told them everything was all right, turned off the light, and, grinning at me one last time, left the ward.

In a situation like this, the most sensible thing a child can do is to explain to his parent what he has done and why. He must confess all his sins, reveal at least a third of his secrets, and with a show of contrition gain her forgiveness. Still, it didn't even occur to me to give us away. I was convinced that Prém would tell the police only what was absolutely necessary. Perhaps the reason for my decision was that for the first time in my life I was caught between two women. This stormy scene had made me realize that Mother was not just my mother but also a woman. I had never thought of this before. One woman was sobbing on my bed, the other giggling as she circled my bed. As if she were gloating over my being in the clutches of a madwoman.

Still sobbing, my mother kept repeating her questions, hovering around the most critical problem of my life. I had to make a decision about my own independence. Using my good hand and the arm in the cast, I turned her crying face toward me. I was angry with her, I wanted to steer her away from this sensitive area, but in a way that wouldn't hurt her too much.

She could have come sooner, I said.

But she just got home. A policeman was there, waiting for her. A policeman.

I've been lying here all day with not a bite to eat.

She raised her tearful eyes to me.

I said I wanted some sour-cherry compote.

Sour-cherry compote? she asked incredulously. Where would I get you sour-cherry compote?

In the meantime, though, her tear-filled eyes regained their old familiar look: compliant and somewhat frightened, a widow's look. I managed to change her back into my mother.

Today I know that it was I who killed the woman in her.

I need not emphasize that this life, our life, was different in every way from my friend's life. Although there was a brief, and for my development decisive, period in our youth when, like him and his girlfriend Maja, we also caught the fever of counter-espionage. Prém and I called it reconnaissance. We had to penetrate enemy territory, then clear out unnoticed. We invariably chose apartments and houses whose occupants we didn't know. We thought it more honest this way. Friends whose houses we may have entered we wouldn't have been able to face afterward. We'd reconnoiter the garden, pick out the deserted room, find the window accidentally left ajar or the shutter that could be forced open, the door that just had to be pushed in, and then select the object to be removed. One of us did the job while the other covered him.

We never kept anything. The objects we took as evidence of our ability were later slipped back. At worst, we'd throw them back, or place them by the door or on the windowsill. Documents, clocks, paperweights, pens, pillboxes, seals, cigarette cases, the oddest knickknacks went through our hands this way. I remember a lacquered Chinese music box and a very pornographic statuette with movable joints. There isn't a jealously guarded secret of my love life that I can recall more vividly than I can these objects. We violated the defenseless lives of strangers — and exposed, unsuspecting, silent apartments. This was the point at which our community of two passed the boundaries of the permissible. At the very thought of an operation our stomachs would tighten, our eyes glaze over, our hands and feet shake, our insides rumble shamelessly, and in our nervous agitation, not once, we moved our bowels in plain sight of each other.

I believe that the moral value of an act can he physically measured in one's body. Such measurements are taken by everyone and in every moment. And the unit of measurement is nothing but the peculiar ratio between urges and inhibitions. For action results not only from urges attributable to instincts but from the relationship of inhibitions, attributable to upbringing, to these urges. Character makeup, social attitude, inherited aptitude, and family origins all look for their proportional share in any action we take. To repeated denial of such proportional sharing, the body reacts with fear, perspiration, anxiety, in more serious cases with fainting, vomiting, or diarrhea, in the most serious cases with actual organic dysfunction.

Theoretically, society should hold as ideal the person who feels the urge to do only what is not forbidden. And as most dangerous the one who feels the urge to do only what is not permitted. But this seemingly logical principle, like that referring to the asymmetry of beauty and ugliness, does not really follow the laws of logic. There is no person in the world in whose action there would be no tension between urges and inhibitions, just as there is no one who wants to do only what is forbidden. The ideals of social harmony and a well-adjusted life are predicated on the masses of people who manage to keep this tension in themselves to a minimum, yet it wouldn't occur to anyone to call them wise, good, or perfect. They are not the monks, nuns, revolutionaries, inventors among us, and not the madmen, prophets, or criminals either. At best, they are useful in maintaining social tranquillity. But the greatest usefulness can measure itself only in an environment of the greatest uselessness.

If before, in thinking about beauty and ugliness, I contended that when made to choose between two near-perfect forms we invariably pick the near-perfectly-proportionate form over the near-perfectly-disproportionate one, then now, reflecting on good and evil, I must conclude that in setting the moral standards for our actions, we never choose what is necessarily good or beneficial, never the boringly average, but the disturbing, provocative exceptions, life's necessary evils. Which also implies that for our senses the highest degree of perfection is the standard, while for our consciousness the standard is always the highest degree of imperfection.

On one page of his manuscript my dead friend claims that I sometimes asked Prém to take off his clothes. I remember no such thing. But I don't wish to cast doubt on his claim. Perhaps I did ask Prém to do that. But if I did, I must have done it for reasons other than those my friend had assumed.

There's no doubt that boys are greatly interested in the size of their own and others' sexual organs. One of our favorite games was to compare them in either words or deeds. Most men don't get over the effects of such games even in adulthood. Their unalterable physical endowments forever remind them of psychic injuries sustained in childhood. Depending on whether their organs are small or large in these games of comparison, the injury may take two different forms. If it's large, they must feel privileged, even though this privileged status later provides no advantage in their love life. And if it is small, then they must suffer the psychic consequences of feeling inferior, even if in their sexual life no disadvantage results from it. In this matter, everyday experience and scientific evidence are at odds with cultural tradition. I don't know how other cultures deal with the disparities between emotional and mental experiences, but our own barbaric civilization, in awe of the act of creation, does not respect creation at all. I'm sure of this. A childhood hurt does not develop into an emotional scar because of physiological factors but because of the contradiction between individual and cultural perception: an individual, geared to procreation, perceives his endowments as natural and unique, but his culture, disrespectful of creation, uses a different set of criteria — disregarding the limits given and defined by nature — to evaluate individual endowments. And so the individual wants to squeeze more out of what is already a lot, or suffers because what he has, which is not little, cannot be more.

It is clear to everyone that the quality of one's sex life depends on happiness, however fragile that happiness may be. Although it's true that sexual happiness cannot be separated from the sex organs, it would be foolish to relate it to the size of these organs, if only because the vagina by its very nature is capable of expanding to the size required by the penis. Its expansion is governed exclusively by emotion, as is the erection of the penis. But the cultural tradition of an achievement-oriented consumer society obsessed with the accumulation, use, and distribution of wealth cares not one whit about this mundane, albeit scientifically verifiable sense experience. It suggests to both men and women that something is good only if it's bigger and there's more of it. If you have less than the next person, something's wrong with you. And something is also wrong if you can't squeeze more pleasure out of what you have plenty of. And if there's something really wrong with you, you can either accept it or try to change your whole life. You sow envy and reap pity. That is how a culture bent on self-definition and self-propagation is forced to acknowledge the limits set by creation. All clever revolutionaries eager to change the existing conditions of life are as foolish in practice as the dull conformist is wise in accepting life as it is. When dealing with this delicate question, which touches on all aspects of our lives, we act exactly like those primitive tribes who make no connection between conception and the function of their organs causing sexual pleasure. Our own supposedly highly developed civilization posits a direct relationship between sexual organs and sexual contentment that nature cannot confirm. A precondition of procreation is the regular functioning of the sexual organs, which may result in conception, but sexual happiness is merely a potential gift of nature. Hence the fragility of this happiness.

After expounding on these ideas, it would be risky for me to claim that I'm neither scarred nor warped in this respect. From my earliest childhood, circumstances have forced me to satisfy not my cultural longings but my natural inclinations. And for this reason I can honestly say that I find the culturally inspired masochism of resignation and the sadism of forced change equally abhorrent. Unlike my poor friend, who ventured into the realm of human desires and turned his body into the object of his emotional experiments, I turned my body into an instrument, a means to an end, and thus my desires have become only the stern supervisors of my natural inclinations. Because my origins were so problematic, I viewed with great hostility anyone who tried to convince me there was something wrong with me, or anyone who considered me exceptional because of my physical attributes. I couldn't accept these judgments. Life for me was not something to accept as inevitable or something that had to be changed; what I wanted was to find, in the only life that was mine, the possibilities congenial to my character. And in pursuing these possibilities I have been, if not passionate, definitely obsessive.

I have been coaxing out of myself during these lonely nocturnal hours, though I am temperamentally ill suited for it, reflections and confessions. Having desires does point to some sort of suitability, however, and this compels me to become active in an area where I should prove to be inept. But two complementary principles necessarily put into motion a third one.

Not being filled with longing, I am moved to reflect and to remember. What I want from myself is to eliminate everything that might embarrass me or make me biased. It is true, of course, that bias affected the way my memory obliterated my own image as recorded by my friend. But I've no reason to complain, because my memory neatly preserved another image.

A seemingly innocuous one. I don't know how often I may have recalled it over the years. Once in a great while, I suppose. It's like a pinprick. The sun is blinding. The grass is green. Prém is squatting in this raging light. From between his closed thighs his prick is dangling. And in thicker, longer, and harder sausages, shit is coming out of his ass. I have more of such images but none of them quite so distinct.

In the middle of our reconnaissance operation we'd suddenly feel the urge to relieve ourselves. We were not embarrassed in front of each other. Either I would have to go, or he, and sometimes both of us at the same time. And in the most impossible situations, too. We didn't have time to clean up, either, for whether we had reason to be afraid of getting caught or not, we always had a deeper shame to flee from. I believe that this more serious injury protected us from the other, much milder one.

Our compulsive shamelessness created a peculiar order of importance. What to others was a titillating sight, reaching into their sensuality and satisfying their curiosity, for us was only a trivial circumstance, though it still reminded us of our shamelessly affected shame. So if I indeed asked Prém to take off his clothes and show his nakedness, I did it not because I was suddenly seized by an uncontrollable desire to see his emblematically significant organ but, on the contrary, because I knew that in the other boys there still lived that inescapable attraction which our shame had already killed in me. This was the feeling I wanted to free myself from, or recapture the feeling of community with the others. That I could never succeed in this is a different matter. Perhaps this is the reason I don't easily tolerate being kissed.

I was toilet-trained by means of the most frightful prohibitions. I learned that I must perform one of my most basic life functions, relieving myself, in complete secrecy, alone, never in the company of others. The taboo was so strong I knew it could never be violated with impunity. Rules of sexual conduct seemed far more lenient in comparison. How profound and unavoidable the urge must have been for me to violate that prohibition. For I did violate it, we both did. For others there had to be a war, a state of emergency to do the same. Yet our conscience didn't trouble us, because it was not the cultural norms concerning toilet-training that we wanted to breach, just as nations don't go to war to squander the treasures of their moral sanctuaries. We lived in days of illusory peace, and we simply wanted to prepare ourselves for the day when we'd have enough experience and resolve to carry out the greatest reconnaissance mission. The ultimate proof of our preparedness would be the execution of an actual plan. If, for instance, we could penetrate the area near our house guarded by killer dogs, barriers, barbed-wire fences, and heavily armed men. If we could do it unnoticed, effortlessly, without getting hurt, like master spies. Unlike my friend and Maja Prihoda, we weren't trying to expose spies, we wanted to become spies ourselves. To spy out that quintessential enemy territory whose very existence and unfathomable character brought into question the validity of our own existence. But for this cold-war operation we didn't, couldn't possibly, have the necessary courage — just as my friend and Maja ultimately shrank from denouncing their own parents. For that we would have had to break the seven seals of the darkest secret and do something that the country itself, sunk in a stupor of peace, could not do. And this was the greatest shame we all shared.

But I couldn't give up the idea of doing something like that.

It was autumn when I wrote this last sentence. There are sentences I have to put down so I can cross them out later. The truth is, I'm not happy with that sentence. Still, I can't cross it out, strike it from my heart. It's spring now. Months go by. I do very little else. I've been trying to figure out why I couldn't give it up. If I knew, I wouldn't have to write it down, or I could just cross it out. What I've been really thinking about is why I still can't give it up. Why I'm ready for the most humiliating compromises just so I won't have to give it up. Wouldn't it be more dignified to bow to irrevocable facts than to wallow disgracefully in the filth of obstinacy? Why am I so afraid of my own filth when I know that it's not just mine, and at the same time why do I shudder to look into a mirror that reflects only my own image, after all?

If memory serves, we broke into ten or twelve apartments. That's quite a lot. And we had to take a crap on eight or ten occasions — enough to fix the experience indelibly in my mind. But what was the point of devising the most impossible tasks for ourselves, and piling one senseless crime on top of another, when we both knew very well that we were after something else? And we didn't need to talk about it either. Helpless and dejected, we hung around the fence of the restricted area. Trying to make friends with the guards. Did small favors for them, which they repaid with spent cartridges. We kept wondering how we might render the watchdogs harmless. We even asked the guards. There's no way, they said. But no amount of clever maneuvering could make us equal to the task, because what we were demanding of ourselves, in fact, was that our courage, strength, resourcefulness, and determination match the brute force that this untouched and untouchable restricted area had come to symbolize.

I remember well our last clandestine operation. I was trying to climb out through a small pantry window when a shelf laden with preserve jars gave way. It happened on Diana Road, in a villa surrounded by a high brick wall. Luckily, I was able to avoid falling on the bottles, which rained down with a terrific racket. I held on to the windowsill and took a look under me. The indescribable sight still haunts me. Green pickles plopping on and mixing with sticky jam, marinated yellow peppers sliding and rolling all over the tile floor. And more jars and bottles falling onto this soft, squishy mess, shattering one after the other.

My life does not abound in memorable turning points. Still, this moment of long ago I ought to consider as one. I felt I had to seek other, different means of action, and without ever again derailing any of my desires.

I was always an excellent student. Moreover, I was blessed with the diligence and perseverance of a teacher's pet. But my adaptability and pleasing appearance kept me from becoming thoroughly dislikable. I am one of those few who actually mastered Russian in school. My mother and I had visited all my father's fellow officers and soldiers who were returning from Russian POW camps. It was while listening to their stories that I decided to make a serious effort to learn Russian. In this I took after my mother, emulating her grim, obsessive ways. If she could learn the true story of my father's disappearance and death, she would get him back. This is what she must have felt, and this feeling took root in me. And since I was preparing to become a soldier, I hoped I'd be able to investigate the circumstances of his death exactly where it had happened. German I had to learn twice. The first time, it was acquiring a language nobody spoke anymore. Among the books we inherited from my grandfather was a two-volume leather-bound set with a mysteriously simple gold-embossed title on its spine: On War. The margins were filled with my grandfather's notes, in Hungarian, written in his tiny, crabbed, but quite legible hand; the book itself was printed in Gothic letters. I had to acquaint myself with this book, because I thought that from it I could also learn everything there was to know about war.

In December 1954, on the last day before winter break, as I recall, a sizable delegation of grim-looking men showed up at our school. They arrived in huge black automobiles. They all wore dark hats. From our classroom window we saw the hats disappear in the doorway downstairs. All teaching ceased. We had to sit in silence. Footsteps echoed in the corridors, never just one but several pairs of footsteps, and then silence again. Some people were being led somewhere. Not a peep out of anybody, hissed our most hated instructor, Klement, when somebody would stir to change position. The door opened. The janitor called out someone, barely whispering the name. Footfalls. Then the waiting: will he come back? After a short while the student would come back, looking pale, and sidle into his seat, followed by our curious stares, and the door would close again. Trembling lips and ears rubbed red told us that something must have happened. Something was going on. But the most unlikely people were taken out; I saw no pattern, so I could draw no conclusion.

Nevertheless, after a while I had the feeling we were being surrounded.

Klement had a huge bald head with tiny watery blue eyes. A stomach the size of a barrel. He weighed at least three hundred pounds. He carried a small cardboard valise. Now he was sucking candy, clicking his tongue, and smacking his lips in the silence. With deep moans and long wheezing sounds he kept himself busy with himself. He'd pull up his socks, which had slid down to his swollen feet. Or he'd open his sorry little valise, check his bunch of keys, then close the valise, but you could tell he was still thinking about it. He kept scratching his nose. Pinched something from it with his nail, examined the extract intently, then smeared it on his pants. After cracking his knuckles for a while, he kept sliding his rings over his pudgy fingers. Or he'd clasp his fingers over his stomach and twiddle them, with the thumbs always touching a little as they circled each other. He was like a living, breathing machine. He'd raise his bottom slightly, pull a handkerchief from his back pocket, unfold it, bring up phlegm and spit it into the hanky, and then, as if to guard some rare treasure, carefully refold the handkerchief. It wasn't excitement that deliberate cruelty evoked in him but the most voluptuous sense of self-satisfaction. So from his behavior we could only surmise that we were in trouble, worse trouble than ever before.

My mind was whirling like a windmill grinding grain. To all the questions they might have asked, I answered with a definite no. Looking straight into their eyes, I'd deny everything, even things that by their standards would be helpful to me. I would even deny knowing Prém. And deny poisoning the dogs, though we never went through with that. He wasn't being called yet, and neither was I. The only reason such a deathly silence could be maintained for so long was that this wasn't the first time. Nobody dared ask to go to the toilet. About two years earlier they had found a little poem on the wall of the third-floor boys' bathroom, written in the style of one of our classics: "Don't ask who said it, Lenin or Stalin, it's all the same. If you're up to your neck in shit, hold on to the rising standard of living. It might've been Rákosi who said it. So make him your guiding star." I didn't quote it in metric feet because the authorities weren't interested in poetics either. They could always find something if they wanted to. So how could anyone think of going to the bathroom at a time like this? Two years before, the investigation had lasted two whole days. They interrogated everyone, lined us up, took writing samples, photographs, searched through schoolbags, pockets, pen cases — we couldn't easily forget that.

I couldn't control my anxiety. Prém and I caught each other's eye, but he didn't have much to grin about either. I could go on vehemently denying everything, but it wouldn't help. I felt as if I were perfectly transparent. As if anybody could read my thoughts. As if I couldn't hide myself, not even behind myself. I don't want to bore anyone with an in-depth analysis of this state, but I would like to say something about the useful experience I gained while in this situation.

If someone has to be afraid of his own thoughts, because he must fear other people's thoughts, then he'll try to substitute his own evidently dangerous thoughts for those of others. But no one is capable of thinking with somebody else's brain, for the thoughts thus produced are merely his own brain's assumptions about how others may think about the very same thing. So not only must he eliminate the telltale signs of his own thought process and pretend to be second-guessing somebody else's thoughts on the subject, and then substitute these for his own, but he must also eliminate the uncertainty that this substitution is based on a mere assumption. And if one is forced to make one's brain play this game long enough, one will no doubt learn a great deal about the mechanism of thinking, but the real danger is that one can no longer distinguish between one's assertions and assumptions.

At least an hour and a half went by. When my name was called, I felt utterly unprepared. Still, I was glad I could spring up and at last go somewhere. Just then, Klement threw another piece of candy into his mouth. The janitor was standing in the doorway. But Klement, while shifting the candy with his tongue and smacking his lips, said to me, "You, Somi Tot, you can really count yourself out." I was crushed by his comment. It implied that I couldn't possibly have had anything to do with the terrible crime, of which he of course had full knowledge. Yet the pitying tone of his comment couldn't have implied that I was therefore off the hook. It couldn't have, even if there was something vaguely encouraging and even kind about it, an acknowledgment of my high standing in the class. He smashed to smithereens the system of assumptions I had constructed during the past hour and a half. I felt the way I had in the hospital when the nurse, out of sheer kindness, mentioned my mother. In the ruins of my system of assumptions and defenses, there was no other assumption to cling to. Besides, there was no time to go over all my calculations in the light of the new data provided by Klement. All things considered, my feet were carrying me rather steadily. Like those of a fleeing animal, through the only possible opening, straight into the trap.

We passed through the empty teachers' room, and when the office attendant threw open the door to the principal's office, nothing could have topped my astonishment. The razor-sharp blade of the guillotine had already chopped off my head. I died. But my eyes were still peeking out of the sawdust-filled basket, I could see that what was waiting for me on the other side was not horrible but rather bright, festive, and friendly. An alfresco breakfast. Picnic on the hillside. A stag party with the smell of fine Havanas.

The moment I entered I was addressed in Russian.

The door behind me closed, but all the doors of the principal's apartment, adjacent to his office, were wide open. Through these huge, elaborately ornamented, brown double doors you could see all four connecting rooms of the spacious flat with its heavy furniture and thick carpets. It was much later that I got to know the works of Hans Makart, a Viennese court painter, but his crowded interiors, filled with draperies, statues, plants in deep reds and browns, always reminded me of this improbable moment. We knew from Livia, the janitor's daughter, that the former principal, who had been summarily dismissed and later deported from the capital, had to leave all his possessions behind. In the farthest room two young girls, our current principal's daughters, were playing on the carpet. The rooms were brilliantly lit by the morning sunshine and its rays reflected from the snow outside. For a second I even caught a glimpse of the principal's graceful wife flitting across the flood of light. Somewhere a radio was playing, I heard very fine, very soft music.

A bright-faced young man sitting behind a large carved desk in the shadow of oversize philodendrons and potted palms asked me how I was. From his appearance and accent I could tell he was addressing me in his native tongue. The other gentlemen were sprawled out comfortably, in jolly disarray, in easy chairs and straight chairs that had been kicked away from their regular spots. The principal, as if indicating that he wasn't really part of this group, was leaning against the warm tile stove with a forced little smile on his face. Enveloped in the undulating cloud of smoke, they had wineglasses in their hands, some were munching on canapés or enjoying coffee and cigarettes. None of this would have suggested an official visit if it hadn't been for a few ominously strange-looking sheets of paper lying on the table, on shelves, and even on the floor near the chairs.

In answer to the question, a single Russian word came to my lips. I even remembered that I had come across this expression in one of Tolstoy's fables. I didn't just say, I'm fine, thank you. I said, Thank you, I feel splendid. This made some of them laugh.

What a smart lad you are, said the man who had first addressed me. Come closer, let's have a little chat.

A straight-backed upholstered chair was waiting for me in front of the desk. I had to sit down, which meant that now all the others in the room were behind me.

I didn't know what might happen. I had no idea what sort of examination this was. But while he was asking his questions and in my blissful ignorance I kept answering them without difficulty, I felt I was on the right track. Yes, the track was right, but where was it leading me? Suddenly it got quiet, a tense silence. Their satisfaction made it very tense.

I was already sitting when the bright-faced Russian asked me if it was snowing today.

I answered that it wasn't snowing today, the sun was out, but yesterday quite a bit of snow fell.

Then he asked me about my grades and acknowledged my reply with a satisfied nod. Then he asked what I would like to be when I grew up.

A soldier, I said without hesitation.

Splendid, the Russian shouted, kicked his chair out from under him, rounded his desk, and stopped in front of me. He is our man, he said to the others, and then holding my face between his two hands, he told me to laugh. He wanted to see if I could laugh.

I tried. But probably didn't do a great job, because he let me go and asked if somebody in the family spoke Russian, from whom I could have learned it so well.

I said my father had learned to speak it, but then I got stuck, because I shouldn't have said that.

Your father? He looked down at me inquiringly.

Yes, I said, but I never knew him. I learned from books.

He thought he didn't hear me right. What was that, I didn't know him? he asked, amazed.

All my resolve, my dissemblance, and my hope got caught in my throat. I was still trying to smile, at least that. He died, I said, and managed not to burst out crying.

And then, in the silence behind me I heard a slight stir, the rustling of paper; somebody was evidently turning the pages of a book or notebook; of course I didn't dare turn around, though the Russian was also looking in that direction.

The principal came over, holding our open grades book in his hand, and with his finger pointed to something he apparently had already shown to the others. In little black boxes next to our names our class origins were noted in red letters.

The Russian cast a fleeting glance at the rubric, returned to the desk, sat down, and with the desperation of a disappointed lover buried his face in his hands. What was he to do with me? he asked.

I didn't answer.

In a louder voice, almost rudely, he repeated the question in Hungarian.

I don't know, I said quietly.

Do you think you could be worthy enough to speak the Russian language, he asked, again in his mother tongue.

This made me think not all was lost. I was very anxious to win back his goodwill.

Yes, I groaned in Russian.

He said I could go.

Less than a half hour after they had left, word got around that those who had passed the test would get to go to Sochi, in the Crimea, on a winter vacation. I had never before begun a school holiday in such a foul mood. I squeezed that yes out of myself in Russian, yet I remembered my voice sounding rather decisive and soldierly. I would have liked to hear myself with their ears, because if I could be sure I did all right, then I could forget about my betrayal. I had no desire to go on any winter vacation, and anyway, as the days passed, the likelihood of that grew more and more remote. But I avoided Prém. I didn't want to play with him anymore.

On December 31, I was summoned to school. They sent Livia's father to get me. There were six of us waiting outside the teachers' room, three very pale girls and three eager-looking boys. We didn't say a word to one another. The principal again received us in the company of a strange man and proceeded to deliver a little speech. He tried to make his voice sound appropriately solemn and emotional. An extraordinary honor had been bestowed on our school, he said. On the occasion of the new year, and on behalf of the Young Pioneers and the entire school-age youth of Hungary, we were going to deliver greetings to our nation's leader and wise teacher, Comrade Mátyás Rákosi, in his home. The stranger talked to us about the details. He told us exactly what was going to happen, how to behave, and how to answer any questions we might be asked. The ground rule was, he cautioned, that we mustn't say anything that might cause sadness. Surely we were familiar with the teachings of Zoltân Kodály. While singing, one should keep smiling. That was the next basic rule. After the greetings we would be served hot cocoa with whipped cream and cake. And if Comrade Rákosi's wife should graciously ask us whether we would like some more cake, we must answer no, thank you, because the visit mustn't last longer than twenty minutes. Maja Prihoda would deliver the greeting in Hungarian and I in Russian. He gave us the text, which, he said, we had to memorize and know perfectly by the next morning. No one must know about our mission until afterward, and he would strongly advise us not to show the text to anyone. The bouquets of flowers and further instructions would be handed to us at the gate on Lorant Street.

As soon as I left the others, the noiseless thunder of this last sentence propelled me to Prém. The gate would be raised, after all. He was playing cards with his older brother in their kitchen. Outside, we took only a few steps from the house and I told him right away that we could get in, after all. I made it sound as though we both would. He kept shifting his feet in the cold. The snow crunched under his shoes. And he kept blinking, looking confused, as if he thought I was making a bad joke. I was already pulling the piece of paper from my pocket. To show him the speech as proof. But he cut me off. He had a great hand, he said, he must finish the game, and anyway, I could kiss his ass.

I wasn't offended. In his place I would have said the same thing. Prém was a very poor student. Year after year he barely passed his finals. And his family was dirt-poor. Of course, we weren't rich either; we, too, ate mostly beans, peas, and rotten potatoes, but in a pinch my mother could sell a rug, an old piece of jewelry, or some silver. We were friends; the unbridgeable social gap between us was fully calculated into our friendship. In our war games I was always the officer and he the private. He wouldn't even be corporal or sergeant, for the in between rank would hurt his pride. So this unpleasant little interlude didn't stop us from restoring the old order a few days later. And his eagerness to hear more didn't seem to embarrass him. He had me recount the story of the visit several times a day. I obliged him, and even the first time I gave him a rather imaginative version of it, which I kept embellishing as time went on. It would have been unthinkable to admit that what we had treated as a profound mystery until now, a secret worthy of a reconnaissance mission, was in reality something infinitely boring, colorless, dreary, and mundane. I held the secret in my hand and did not believe my eyes. I couldn't have known then that no secret was drearier than the secret of despotism.

Everything did go just the way the strange man had told us it would. In this secret there is no room for contingency. At nine in the morning we had to show up, in our Pioneer uniforms, without hats, scarves, or coats, at the Lorant Street gate. They stuck two bouquets of carnations in our hands. Maja got one, I got the other. It was a bright, snowy morning, at least ten below freezing. We must have looked pitiful, though, because our parents, quite correctly, wouldn't let us leave the house in white Pioneer shirts, as the instructions prescribed, and made sure we put on lots of warm underthings. We all looked stuffed and bulky, and after we'd moved around awhile, all sorts of things were sticking out from under our holiday outfits. Of course, this detail I didn't mention to Prém. Instead, I told him that on the other side of the gate was this well-concealed structure where they searched us. And to make it sound even more alluring, I added that the girls were stripped to their birthday suits. And that's where they gave us the bouquets, I told him, to prevent us from hiding poison or explosives in them. Actually, one of the guards brought the flowers from his booth. All right, children, who is giving the speech? I couldn't reconcile the terrifying thoroughness of the preparations with the sloppiness of the execution. So I embroidered my tale to fit my harrowing expectations. Our little troupe marched down the road that cut across the forbidden territory, where the snow hadn't been cleared away, just as it hadn't been in the rest of the streets of the city. Against my will, my eyes made the incomprehensible observation that there was no appreciable difference between the two places. But according to my report, the road was heated by a secret underground radiator, so not only was there no snow but the pavement remained bone-dry. On the left, among the trees and quite far apart, were two shabby villas. There was nothing on the right. Snowy woods. And then an ugly house in the woods. In my story, it was a white mansion and we drove up to it in a black limousine. Two armed men guarded the entrance, and we were led into a red-marble hall.

During the last days of October 1956, members of the newly formed national guard removed the barriers to the place. And the following day newspapers reported that the compound was no longer a restricted area. Yet Prém did not reproach me. I did lie to him, but he wouldn't have known what to do with the real facts either. I told him what he wanted to hear. Or rather, I said what our mind's eye had to see in order to understand what otherwise defied understanding.

If in what follows I should discreetly amend or correct some of the statements made by my deceased friend, I do so not out of a burning desire to establish the truth. What I'd like to do is examine our common life experiences from my own particular perspective and for my own sake. Whatever we may have shared can be approached via not only similarities but dissimilarities. In fact, I take the position of the most extreme moral relativists, making no qualitative distinction between truth and lies. I maintain that our lies prove as much about us as do our truths. Yet, when I concede that my friend was perfectly justified to speak of his life as he saw fit, I ask for the same consideration: that I be allowed to lie in my own way, to fantasize, to distort, to hold back, and, if it suits my purposes, even to tell the truth.

I read on pages 492 and 493 of his manuscript that after much struggle I finally got into a military academy, and that we happened to be in Kalocsa on fall maneuvers when news of the October uprising reached us, which resulted in our abrupt dismissal. And after I had related to him the adventures of my journey home, I took my leave, walking off into the twilight, and we never saw each other again.

I'd be no doubt more respectful of his memory if I left his version unchallenged. I can't do it. I can't accept his story as the only one, the exclusive one, because right next to it there's my own. The substance of our story was identical, but in it we moved in totally opposite directions. Thus, from my perspective, of his three seemingly innocuous statements I must judge the first as too simplistic, the second as totally erroneous, and the third as an emotional distortion that simply does not square with the facts.

My friend's father, if he was his father, I met very rarely. As a rule he ignored me. He barely returned my greeting. This much I can remember, but very little else. His face, his build, I can hardly recall. I was afraid of him. I couldn't say why. My fear wasn't unfounded, after all he was among the most ruthless men of the era, although I had no specific knowledge of that until after his suicide. And that late October afternoon I did take my hasty leave, for when I saw this much respected and feared man climbing over the fence, I knew I mustn't witness such an odd homecoming. If I'd stayed, I would have humiliated my friend, and I didn't want to do that either. I did say goodbye to him, but exactly eleven years later we met again.

Eleven years later, in late October 1967, I had to travel to Moscow. It wasn't my first visit there. I had accompanied my immediate supervisor twice during the previous year and three times that same year.

Each time we were put up at the Hotel Leningrad, near the Kazan railroad station, in a palatially spacious suite with a foyer, a reception room, and a bedroom complete with silk-draped four-poster beds. No ordinary mortal could possibly fill the dimensions of these rooms. My boss spoke Russian rather poorly, while I reveled in my knowledge of it. I seized every opportunity to use it and to improve my vocabulary. In my free time I roamed the streets, rode the metro, made friends, even had an affair. The pervasive, sugary, choking smell of gasoline was no longer a novelty for me; it drifted up to the thirteenth floor of our hotel, blew through the parks, filled the metro tunnels, got into your skin, your hair, your clothes, and made you smell like a Muscovite. I found myself a fasttalking blonde; returning to her for the third time was a real joy. She lived on the Pervomayskaya with her mother and sister and a niece who had recently moved there from the country. The powerful voices of these large women and their unbridled sentimentality just about burst the walls of their tiny flat. It became my secret home. I admit timidly that neither before nor since have I seen such delectably firm and enormous female thighs. In the summer they rented a dacha somewhere near Tula, and we made plans for me to visit them the following year. We'd swim, gather mushrooms, and pick blackberries to flavor our tea with, come winter. At that time my resolve to make it to the Uriv region one day, to Alekseyevskaya, was still very much alive. We discussed this plan in great detail, too. In the end nothing came of it.

The series of negotiations in which I participated concerned the details of a long-term trade agreement involving the sale of chemical products. The contract itself that we, representatives of various trading companies, had drawn up had to be signed by the appropriate ministers in December. We were nearing the last round of talks, there wasn't much time left. Everyone was nervous, the prices hadn't been fixed, though this in itself was nothing unusual. Even after they'd been set, prices could still fluctuate.

In socialist business dealings, prices are arrived at in a manner that has precious little to do with pricing as we know it in conventional trade relations. It's as if someone was trying to catch a mouse and ended up trapping the cat instead. We usually refer to this as the double-trap principle. The process begins with a socialist commercial firm asking for a price quotation not from another socialist firm but from a capitalist one, for a product which it has no intention of buying but which in fact it wants to sell. The capitalist firm knows exactly what is going on, so it quotes not a realistic price but a blatantly unrealistic one that does not threaten its own real trading partners. However, the socialist firm takes this for the real world-market price of the product in question and makes its own offer to its socialist trading partner accordingly. The partner knows of course that the so-called real price is not real at all and, just as arbitrarily, makes a counter-offer, amounting to perhaps one-third of the quoted price. As a result, they wrangle over two totally unrealistic prices that, during the course of negotiations, acquire an air of reality. If two people who do not believe in ghosts begin to talk about ghosts in a dark room, sooner or later a ghost will appear, though they won't be able to touch it.

The process continues with the seller trying through further negotiations to narrow the gap between the two unrealistic prices, knowing well that the considerable difference can be made up only with the help of a state subsidy. But the buyer also knows that if the deal is important enough for commercial or industrial-policy reasons, he too can count on state funds, so he eases off, which in terms of the bargaining process is tantamount to driving up the price. If he misjudges the situation, and the seller is not swayed by insurmountable political considerations, then either there is no deal or some compromise is worked out. But regardless of whether or not a bargain is struck, neither party will ever be aware of the true relationship between the price finally arrived at and the real value of the commodity on the international market.

My superior, ingeniously combining the teaching techniques of the peripatetic Greek philosophers with the habits of French kings, used his morning toilet to lead me into the mysteries of these negotiations. He was of the opinion that the Russians were the world's most unpredictable business partners. They could be unexpectedly flexible on one occasion and equally stubborn and immovable on another. Whether you deal with Swedes, Italians, Armenian-Americans, or Chinese traders, what drives the negotiations is the logic of mutual interest. Differences arise from different assessments of a given situation. If you're dealing with Russians, however, you can give logic a rest.

Later, having gained a certain amount of experience myself, I came to regard my supervisor's conclusions as an enjoyable myth. It would take too long to expound my own view, which differs greatly from popularly held beliefs. To put it simply, I think Russians view the relationship between reality and unreality differently from the rest of us. Whatever we might consider an unreal phenomenon — because by violating realistic value relationships it brings our inner order to a halt — from their point of view is something incidental and negligible, for their inner order, independent of the outside world, remains functional.

On the first day of negotiations my boss fell ill during lunch. To make sure he didn't notice my forbidden nocturnal absences, and to make sure, too, that I could wake him up at six in the morning, as he requested, and while he splashed in his tepid bathwater I'd be ready to listen to his always instructive musings on economic concerns, I had to get up at the crack of dawn in that flat on Pervomayskaya, far from the center of town. Also, that morning, I was too sleepy to make much of his complaint that he wasn't feeling quite right. Anyway, he was a big, robust man.

We had trouble getting down to business that morning. It was hard to find the right tone. If I abandoned my sense of humor and accepted what they considered a realistic position, then I myself became unrealistic; and if I didn't accept it and made light of things, then my position in our relationship would become unrealistic. These are the times one really feels how much flexibility, imaginative insight, and infinite patience it takes to function as a son of a small nation. In my days as an apprentice negotiator I often felt it was best to get past the table-pounding stage quickly; I was frustrated because my boss, with the experience of four years in Russian captivity behind him, preferred holding back, delaying, putting things off, turning evasive — but even with these tactics we made no headway.

After the morning session we had lunch with two of our local commercial representatives in the hotel restaurant, a cavernous affair, more like a grand hall of columns than a restaurant. At one point my boss slowly put his knife and fork down on his plate and said it might be a good idea to open a window. Considering the size of the place, the suggestion didn't make much sense, so we more or less ignored it. There is no air, he said. I never saw anyone sit so still. A few moments later he spoke again: we should get his medicine from his pocket. At the same time he opened his mouth, letting his tongue hang out a little. Beads of perspiration were forming on his ashen face. He said nothing more, he didn't move, his eyes stared vacantly, but the way he was sticking out his tongue clearly indicated that he wanted the medication placed under his tongue. As soon as the tiny tablet dissolved, he felt much better, let go of his knife and fork, wiped his face, and color began to return to his cheeks. But again he complained that there was no air, and as if groping for air in the air, he got up restlessly and went in search of more air. We tried to support him, but he took such forceful steps he didn't seem to need us. We let go of him. When he got to the lobby he collapsed. He was taken to a hospital. In a deep coma, he lived for two more days.

The talks were broken off. I called the director of our company to tell him what had happened. Hopes for recovery were slim, and the patient could not be moved. I asked him to notify the family. Conversations with my boss had centered exclusively on professional matters, yet I imagined members of his family, whom I had never met, to be just like him: strong, agile, a little worn-out, but sturdy. My director's position was that the talks must resume without delay. He thought that all the wrangling had been mostly a show and therefore superfluous. The Russians' offer had to be accepted. He had given my boss — who always started fussing when there was no need — very specific instructions to that effect. He was authorizing me to lead the negotiations with these instructions in mind. He would telex his decision to the head of our trade office, who would then officially inform the Russians of the change in our delegation. If the whole thing weren't just a matter of formality he would send a replacement, but as things stood now, I could step right in. I should keep that well in mind, too. But it didn't happen that way at all. A senior member of our embassy's commercial section took over formally, but he let me handle the practical end of the negotiations, saying he hadn't been sufficiently briefed.

In the next two days I had a great many things to attend to. Feverish activity always generates more energy and the need for more activity, which is maybe why I couldn't stay put at night in my four-poster bed in the hotel, though I knew I should be there to receive a phone call. I went to sleep with a guilty conscience in the flat on the Pervomayskaya. In the embrace of a strong, calm female body I relived the death of my father, whom I now lost forever.

I had trouble falling asleep. Not even with making love could I get death out of myself. Hovering between sleep and wakefulness, I was drifting along a snow-covered highway. It was a scene deep inside me, often imagined, endlessly replayed.

More than two weeks after the enemy broke through the bridgehead at Uriv, on January 27, 1943, to be precise, my father set out by motorcar to make his report. That was the day their retreat began. They were not completely surrounded yet, but the Russians were closing in fast. There was a point in my drifting when I either fell asleep or had to start the scene over from the beginning. The only thing we knew for certain was that at 2030 hours the retreating battalion encountered the Russians and within half an hour suffered a defeat, losing 50 percent of its troops. But they did manage to break through the Russian lines. The car in which my father had left earlier that day was found about six hundred meters from the scene of the battle. It was riddled with bullets. Its doors were flung wide open. It was empty.

For years we waited for Father to come home; after all, the car was empty.

I've got a picture of him, sent from the front. An endless field of sunflowers under a perfectly clear sky. In the middle of the field a tiny figure waist-deep in flowers.

Quite early on the morning of the second day, when I took a taxi back to the hotel, I could hear the persistent ring of my telephone even before reaching my room. Such rings are unmistakable. There was really no need to pick up the receiver. But we are such fools. We pick it up to find out when exactly the thing we knew was going to happen did happen. An hour and a half later the talks were resumed. In a curious atmosphere. The Russians were emotional and quick to express their condolences, yet we all tried to sit down at the negotiating table as if nothing had happened. The slight hesitation over the agenda, the preoccupied air with which we shuffled and exchanged and leafed through our papers helped to preserve the semblance of normalcy. However, when it was my turn to speak, I couldn't keep myself from briefly eulogizing my colleague. And these men, all of them much older than I and for the most part hardened war veterans, listened in stunned silence as I spoke of our morning bathroom ritual.

For us Hungarians, death evokes stark terror. For Russians it is like the softening sign in their language: silent in itself, it cannot be voiced, but it softens the letter preceding it. My instincts perceived this difference during the two nights I spent on Pervomayskaya. My blond friend was the first and for a long time to come the only woman on whose lips my own mouth came alive. After the brief commemoration, I immediately got down to business. I don't think my motives were improper in any way, yet I didn't follow my director's instructions. There was nothing in me but this terror, and it made me stubborn. The session lasted all of ten minutes, and the Russians accepted every one of my proposals. We spent the rest of the day working out the details, even skipping the usual lunch break. The man from the embassy's commercial section did not dare reproach me, but he was fuming. Both parties were anxious to get the whole thing out of the way, if only because all this was taking place on November 6, the eve of their most important national holiday. Nobody felt like working anymore.

It was late afternoon when I got back to the hotel. I was tense, wound up from lack of sleep. In such an overtired state one always feels energetic somehow. I was dying to get rid of my necktie and that impossible black suit and head for Pervomayskaya. I couldn't really enjoy my little breakthrough at the talks, even though it was something of a coup. It came at too high a price. And it was really the dead man's coup, not mine, and the breakthrough was death's breakthrough, not mine. I was pretty sure my director wasn't going to give me a hard time. And even if he did, our commercial people had no choice but to back me up. One thing was certain, the way I handled the matter would evoke his fierce displeasure. I'd be considered some kind of liability for quite some time, which meant kissing promotion goodbye. That's the kind of mood I was in before stepping into the hotel elevator.

It was nearly full and the operator waited for me to get in. But I hesitated. Deliberately slowing my last two steps. I didn't feel like squeezing in. I also noticed that all the passengers were Hungarians. Which turned me off rather than attracting me. But standing among them in a long fur-collared coat was a dark-complexioned girl with curly hair who caught my eye. In response to a question they must have just asked, the disagreeable elevator operator was saying no, no, not allowed, room reserved for banquets. Hearing this, they began to laugh as if they had just heard a priceless joke. Banquet, banquet, they kept shouting. I had walked into an infantile cacophony, and I can't say I liked it. My compatriots tend to feel lost when they are abroad alone, but in groups they can act quite silly and rowdy. I had the feeling that they also sensed the compatriot in me and their reaction was the same as mine, so they finally quieted down. I positioned myself so that I could be close to the girl and watch her from the front. Her slightly old-fashioned coat, tapered at the waist, outlined a slender figure, and the face framed by the upturned silver-gray fur collar was ruddy from the cold. On her hair, eyebrows, and even her lashes half-melted snowflakes were glistening. The first snow of the year had fallen that day, and it hadn't let up since morning.

In my callous simplicity, I thought she was what I needed. And I could see in her eyes that she not only caught my glance but understood my meaning. She didn't think I was pushy, but she wasn't going to respond. She was noncommittal without turning me down, she was holding on to my offer without making one herself, she was impassive but not without a certain amount of curiosity. There was even a hint of impudence in her look, as if to say, Well, big boy, what else can you show me, real quick? We must have ridden about three floors like this, staring in each other's eyes.

We were caught up in each other, but she was playing to the others a little, too, not wanting them to notice just how caught up she was. What I also felt then was that someone standing next to me was staring into my face, with a persistent, unmoving look that suggested he knew full well what I was up to. I had to find out what that was all about, yet I hesitated, for if I turned my face it might appear that I couldn't take her stare, though in truth I couldn't take his.

It would be very hard to describe the feeling I experienced when, turning my head, I looked into the face of this obtrusive stranger. As adults, we always maintain a certain distance, which we determine, from the face of another adult, and the extent and nature of the closeness or distance is invariably regulated by our own interests and aims. But this adult face, suddenly cropping up from our long-gone childhood — no matter how much it may have changed — wound up intolerably close to mine. A melting tenderness came over me. As if I were seeing not a person but the passing of my own lifetime. Everything had changed, and yet nothing had changed. I sensed transience in myself and permanence in another man's features. At the same time I was so shocked to see the features of a child I'd known so intimately in the face of a man that a feeling of repugnance also began to stir in me. I didn't want this. Our glances scanned each other's features. He hadn't made up his mind either. And with that we irrevocably exposed ourselves in front of each other. There was no going back. Even though we both would have liked to avoid this meeting as much as we wished it to happen. There's nothing more humiliating than a chance encounter. But not giving in to it is even more humiliating.

I couldn't possibly benefit from this chance meeting. On the contrary, it could only work against me. I wanted to be already in my room, open the refrigerator, take a good long swig from the iced vodka bottle, and then leave this place as quickly as possible. Anyone seeking solace in alcohol knows what these moments are like. He reminded me of things I didn't want to deal with at all. And I was in such a state that my body would not tolerate delay. Still, I couldn't prevent what had to happen. I think our hands moved simultaneously, and in the gesture two very different weaknesses met. It couldn't turn into a real handshake, we were standing too close for that, it became more of a crude grasp. Hesitantly, eagerly, two hands seized and then immediately let go, almost thrust away, two hands. Just touching fingers was too little, but anything more would have been too much. And through it all, clumsy, stammering questions about what the other was doing here. Here of all places. As if "here" had some special meaning. I mumbled my own little story, and I blushed, which rarely happens to me, while he muttered something about a delegation of artists, and with a silly grin pointed to the others. We must have been on their checklist this year, he said. His tone was unfamiliar, alien.

But all this was surface; our tone, our blushes merely the appearance to provide some protection. Because what the moment was really all about was that our lives had turned out to be so very different, yet neither he nor I, neither before nor since, had ever loved another human being as we loved each other. Back then. Yes. This was our confession. And even now, when we are still so different, even now, although in a different way. And since then, too. This is an enduring part of our lives. It can't be helped. This love has no purpose, no meaning, or motive. Nothing can be done with it. I blushed because I wanted to forget it, and did. He was acting silly because he didn't forget, and probably couldn't.

His features seemed so indistinct and blurred that each line or curve or angle could mean three different things at once. And there was a danger that he might just ignore the glances of these strangers and mawkishly revert back to our lost time. In the end, however, it was his grim self-discipline that averted my always obliging though noncommittal bear hug. I saw brittle coldness in his face, dread in his eyes, though he was making lighthearted, cynical noises. Still, he, not I, was the one who stayed outside the situation. For if I cannot be guided by sober reason, if I cannot comprehend the meaning, direction, and purpose of a signal or a gesture, I freeze. I can yield to no person or situation. He, on the other hand, had it in him to act, to put his feelings on display. He burst into laughter. I wanted to shut my eyes. I showed up just in time, he said, as if we had last seen each other only yesterday. They had just come from a holiday reception. And now it was off to the Bolshoi for a gala performance. It promised to be quite an event. He sounded as if he were inviting me to his grandmother's for noodle pudding. Galina Vishnevskaya was singing. They had an extra ticket. Just for me. Box seats, too. Wouldn't I join them?

The maddening artificiality of his tone made it easier to decline the invitation. By then we were on the thirteenth floor, standing in the narrow hallway, in front of the dezhurnaya's table laden with keys. The others passed us in silence on their way to their rooms. I told him I had no time, unfortunately. And looking over my shoulder, I involuntarily followed the brown-haired girl with my eyes. I'd already made plans for the evening. The girl opened her door slowly and disappeared without looking back. In the meantime, we kept laughing at the discovery that evidently the Russians always reserve the thirteenth floor for Hungarians. We should meet for breakfast, though. But no later than eight. They'd have to attend the parade on Red Square. We'd open a bottle of champagne.

I'd have to say that as soon as I closed the door of my palatial suite, I forgot this accidental meeting, as one might forget a fleeting unpleasantness. I didn't want a champagne breakfast. I didn't turn on the light. The strange rooms were glimmering faintly in the reflected light of the snow. I heard the soft murmur of the city below. Compared to the events of the past few days, what could these fleeting moments mean to me? Nothing. An embarrassment, at most an annoyance. Anyway, while I struggled here in vain, they were having fun. Still in my overcoat, I sank into an armchair. I had never before felt such a heavy, all-pervasive fatigue. It wasn't my bones or my muscles but my heart that seemed to give way. As if my blood had stopped flowing. I felt drained, empty. I didn't even want that drink of vodka anymore. Or I should say I did, but didn't have the strength to get up. That's not precise enough either. What I felt was that I must gather strength. But you need some strength to gather your strength, and I didn't have any.

No, I won't go on like this, I won't. That's what I kept saying to myself. I didn't know what the denial was referring to, or what it was I didn't want to go on with. I simply kept repeating the words. And let my head drop, my arms dangle. My legs were thrust out in front of me. Still, I couldn't let go completely, couldn't yield to my own exhaustion. A stern pair of eyes judged me self-indulgent, a show-off. As if I were playing in some cheap melodrama, with my limbs dangling, puppet-like. And I wasn't playing my role well and would have liked to get out of it. A fever was coming on, I was sweltering and shivering in the coolness of the enormous room. I fell into a deep sleep.

I was awakened by the horrible thought that I'd been left behind. As if they had yelled "Fire!" and run away. It wasn't even a thought or a cry but an image that I recalled, sharp and detailed, of that girl opening her door slowly and, contrary to my expectation, not looking back. For a moment I didn't know where I was. I jumped up and tried to figure how long I'd been asleep. Not too long, I decided. I can't get this woman out of my mind, I must see her. I'll run after them if I have to. Or sit and wait for her in front of her room. I wasn't thinking of my childhood, revisited just now in the features of my friend. Yet the feeling was definitely a childhood feeling. As when everybody went off to play but didn't tell me because they wanted to exclude me. If this is my room number, I figured, and the numbers keep going up, then hers must be such and such. While dialing the discovered, or inferred, room number, I looked at my watch. It was six-thirty. I'd slept for twenty minutes.

Hello.

There was just a hint of hesitation in that hello. As if she didn't know what language to use. But this one word made my heart leap with fright. It began to function. It was made of pure joy, in the shadow of an unknown fear. I heard her voice for the first time. From the moment I had gotten onto the elevator she'd said not a word to the others. I had no way of knowing what her voice was like. She had one of those female voices that have a very strong effect on me. It seemed to come from deep inside her body, a voice with a very strong, solid center, whose surface was nevertheless smooth and soft. It wasn't gentle, for that it was too proud and assertive. When I think of it, I see a dark, hard marble. A marble can fit snugly into the palm of your hand, a marble is something you can lift easily. But a marble is nearly impossible to penetrate. And if you do, it's no longer a marble.

I introduced myself, apologized, was very courteous, and very elaborately explained that I'd changed my mind and would like to join them. I rattled on. She listened patiently. She remained a silent island I lapped around with my words. I said I didn't know my friend's room number, that's why I called her. Though that wasn't the only reason. If she'd be kind enough to give me the number. I should hurry up, then, she said by way of reply. Yes, do hurry up. I used the familiar form of address, she stuck to the formal one. When I tried again, she pretended not to hear the more intimate form. She meted out her silences as reservedly as she did her glances in the elevator. She let me go on, but she was brushing me off.

I wouldn't attach importance to this brief conversation if what followed had been merely another one of my moderately gratifying adventures. But what followed was a bitter four-year struggle. I could also call it an agony, a series of hopeless quarrels, the low point of our lives, certainly my own darkest period up to that time. It would have been all that if it hadn't also been filled with the hope of newfound happiness. Yet the joy we found in each other only reached us unexpectedly, catching us by surprise, sometimes for weeks, at other times only for days, hours, or brief moments. We strove for it but could never really achieve it. What remained was the agony. The agony of missed happiness, or perhaps the joy of agony.

Yet we had no greater desire than to preserve for a lifetime the profound feeling of having found each other. Compelled by painful need, we set conditions for each other and failed to notice that we were breaking, crushing each other with them. She demanded absolute faithfulness from me, while I would have liked her to accept my infidelities as proof of my faithfulness. In vain I explained to her that I had never loved anybody as much as I loved her, but to counter these feelings of unfamiliar quality I needed at least the semblance of freedom. I could no longer live without her, but with her I turned into something like a faulty communicating vessel: if, with the greatest effort, I gave up my freedom and, complying with her condition, didn't even look at other women, my alcohol intake promptly shot up; if, however, I reduced my alcohol consumption by getting entangled in meaningless affairs, then the tension between us became simply unbearable. Our mutual degradation was greatest when she should have felt most secure, for that's when she used the most underhanded methods to spy on me, to probe and snoop, for which I beat her up. I did this twice, and it took a great deal of self-control not to do it more often. But her suspicions even at these times were not completely baseless. What made her jealous were not my occasional lapses but my enforced fidelity. Similarly, I didn't raise my hand to her because she got her girl friends to spy on me but because I couldn't comprehend why she didn't understand me. She sensed and felt everything. I couldn't make a move without her sensing its subtlest meaning. And she knew that the fidelity she forced on me caused intolerable tension, that it turned my behavior false and unnatural, because I wasn't used to giving up anything. But whenever her jealousy managed to drive both of us to distraction and I couldn't help seeking relief in some silly affair with no strings attached, then she wanted to break with me for good. She was capable of uttering not a single word except a morning hello, for weeks on end. Of letting all my questions go unanswered, pleas, threats, pledges, and promises. As if punishing me just for being alive. As if playing only to lose triumphantly, so that I'd have to play to win, though she'd never let me. Her real victory would be to push me out of her life completely, though she knew I could never push her out of mine.

The distorted values of my youth came back to haunt me with a vengeance. Because my actions were determined not by aesthetic or ethical principles but by sheer necessity, for me the line between freedom and license became forever blurred. Then, after four years like that, in the lull of one of our cease-fires, we quickly got married. Since then another six hopelessly difficult years have gone by.

One thing I know: that November evening, in a most curious way, I entered a very dark period in my adult years. The meeting turned me into an insecure, anxious adolescent, which I had never been. And the reason had obviously to do with my character and natural inclinations, but also with an accident of fate. A complete life must include lost or stolen time, but what one doesn't actually live through cannot be made up afterward, and there's no point blaming yourself or anyone else for it. Until the age of sixteen I wasn't all that interested in girls. I found their admiration as self-evident and natural as I did the uncritical adoration emanating from my mother. If for some reason I lost one girl's admiration, another one would take her place. And if necessary I could easily have a third or fourth. I accepted the aggressive signs of my biological maturity with the understanding that I'd neither resist nor make too much of them. It still seems odd that my brand-new manhood called attention to itself not in dreams or even in relations with girls but while riding on public transportation, on bumpy streetcars, and buses taking sharp and sudden turns. I wasn't ashamed of it, didn't even try to curb it, at most I'd put my briefcase in front of me. But at times the excitation came on so suddenly and was so acute that to prevent a minor accident, I'd have to get off in a hurry. And this was enough, because the physical tension, the body's excitement, wasn't directed at anyone in particular; it seemed independent even of me and had to do only with the bumpy ride.

In 1957 summer came on us suddenly. In the city quite a few houses still lay in ruins. Charging out of spring, this summer's hot explosion seemed to release energies of life the devastated city badly needed. When the school year had resumed, Mother and I had several hysterical fights, but in the end she won. She didn't let me go back to the military academy and enrolled me instead in a local high school in Zuglo. One afternoon, after walking a new school friend home on Gyertyán Street, I got on a streetcar. When I think of this afternoon — it must have been the end of May — I see great big chestnut trees with their erect, candle-like white flowers reaching to the sky.

As always, I was riding on the open platform. The sliding doors were left open, the warm air rushed unhindered through the almost empty car. Across the platform stood a young man. His clenched fists were casually sunk in his pocket, his legs spread wide for support. On the other side of the open door was a young blond woman in a light, almost see-through summer dress. Bare, very shapely legs; on her feet white sandals. Holding on to the straps, she had nothing on her except the tram ticket. This, or perhaps something else, made it seem as if she had no clothes on or that her dress made little difference. First I watched the woman watching the man, but as soon as she noticed my curious glance and raised her bright, impudent blue eyes at me, I switched to the man or, more precisely, avoided her brazen look by turning in the man's direction, while he followed the woman's glance to register this developing interlude between the two of us. He was slender, ordinary-looking, of average height. The most conspicuous thing about him was the dark smoothness of his face and skin. A smooth, shiny forehead and, between his fists thrust into his pockets and his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, somewhat paler but still very smooth arms. The kind of smoothness that had to be, I felt, more than skin-deep. Having followed the woman's glance, he had to look at me. But then, prompted by an indescribable bashfulness, I had to look away. I returned to the woman, for I wanted to see what her eyes had to say about all this.

She was large, fair-skinned, on the verge of plumpness, but still at a point where her well-fed body was in harmony with a deeper vitality; however much food she might stuff into her pleasure-seeking body was sure to be worked off or burned up by other kinds of activity of the same body. Her firm, well-proportioned limbs did not simply fill out her dress but fairly burst out of it. The warm currents of air mussed up her hair and kept lifting her dress. We could see the strong, remarkably white insides of her knees. She'd sway now and then, springing up and down on her feet, relishing our eyes feasting on her. She couldn't have been more than twenty, but she was ripe, solid, everlasting, like a model poured into a heavy statue. By which all I mean to say is that she was at once available and unreachable.

After our glances met for the third time, she grinned into my face, showing her somewhat uneven teeth, and I, involuntarily accepting the grin, passed it on to the man. But I quickly realized I had first received a smoother, more discreet version of that grin from the young man. Now he took my grin and slipped it back to her. And then, simultaneously, we turned away, taking each other's grin with us.

Outside, the broad avenue, trees, and buildings were running after us. And then, again together, we turned back. It would be almost impossible to say where we trained our eyes. The grin we couldn't wipe off by turning away was now growing stronger, and it seemed as if something terribly important was lying on the greasy floor of the streetcar and our eyes had to find it. We were staring not at each other but at a point equidistant from all three of us, sending our grins to the geometric center of the imaginary triangle we formed. And somehow we had to stay together even when we threw back our heads to accommodate the laughter that burst out of us. But the laughter was not equally distributed among us. The woman giggled, tittered, let out little squeals and tiny bubbles of laughter, popping them and sucking them in again. The man was almost silent as he laughed, chuckling at short intervals, as if trying to form words. This stammering, almost talking laughter made me notice on his otherwise smooth face a deep, bitter crease around the mouth that wouldn't let the laugh fully erupt, even though he was shaking harder than the woman or me. Of course I could hear my own runaway horselaugh, too. With it I revealed all my innocence, but I didn't mind. The streetcar was crawling along, though to me it felt as though it was tearing up the tracks. Maybe the only time you feel free is when you don't bother about consequences, when you trust the moment and let yourself go.

The laughter was unstoppable, it terrified itself, its own brazenness made it falter; and we didn't just spur one another on with liberating little jabs; it seemed that we all had our own reserves of laughter, and their variety created such an enjoyable common sound that it would have been senseless to stifle it. Yes, let it come; no one has anything to be ashamed of. And it came, it grew, it hurt, it made us cry. This felt good, because all the while my sheepishness made me tremble; I felt my arms and legs shaking visibly. The streetcar was approaching the intersection of Thököly Road and György Dözsa Road, it slowed down. The young man thrust himself away from me, though he seemed to shove himself out of his laughter. He slipped his fist out of his pocket and raised a warning finger. A single finger held way above his head. We watched that single finger in the air, and in a flash all laughter stopped. The woman let go of the strap and just stood there with her ticket, her impudence gone from her blue eyes. Then slowly she stepped out onto the platform. It was perfectly clear what was happening, and I was trembling too hard to do anything about it. The young man bounced off the still-moving streetcar and looked back not at the woman stumbling after him but at me, taking in with one last sweeping glance my schoolbag, which I placed in front of me to cover my embarrassing state of arousal. There was still time to back out of the situation. For a moment we froze. A pair of huge liquid brown eyes in that smooth face. There was nothing to think over.

We probably needed that tiny delay. It made the mad race that followed that much more frantic. Our mouths were good only for catching our breath, but our feet could giggle and clatter away on the pavement. Dashing across streets and roads, weaving through crowds without bumping into anyone while your feet, your arms, your eyes became alert sensors, jumping on and off sidewalks. Feinting and dodging smoothly, the man was galloping ahead and sending us a message with his every move. Whatever he had been unable to tear from himself with laughter he was now pouring into his running. With his shoulders squeezing and thrusting, his neck craning, and his back straight, he not only controlled the situation but played it out for us. It looked as if at any moment he would cross the finish line; having pulled away from his rivals, he was already in the straightaway, unchallenged. That's how he kept playing with us. He'd change direction with lightning speed and careen into a side street. Somewhat confused, we'd follow, but just then, without curbing his leaps, he'd disappear into an open door. The woman had a funny way of running; she wasn't clumsy, yet she seemed heavy and sluggish as she filled the trail cut for her by the man. Not until the next day did I check the name of the street.

It was cool in there. Dark. Smell of cats. We crashed against the flaking plaster. Watching one another's eyes and body. I could still beat a retreat, but I seemed to have run the trembling out of my limbs, and a quiet but sober voice told me to stay. If not now and not like this, it would happen some other time, some other way, so why not get it over with? We were panting. We were looking at one another as if we were at the end, and not at the beginning, of our story. Everything was calm. There was nothing to be afraid of. The woman sneezed into this panting silence. Which would have been cause for renewed laughter, but the man raised a finger to his lips and, as if to continue this warning gesture, started up the stairs.

Through the slats of lowered blinds, the hot afternoon sun streamed into the completely empty apartment. A slight breeze was also blowing in through the open windows and doors. In the long hallway and three large interconnecting rooms there was not a single piece of furniture. Except for a couple of mattresses thrown on the floor of the largest room, with pink and not altogether clean bedding: a turned-up blanket, wrinkled sheets, just as he must have left it in the morning. On picture hooks left on the wall hung a pair of pants, a shirt, and in a corner there was a pile of shoes. I knew we were beyond all rules and conventions. I was ignorant of what was to follow, yet I made the first move. I flung myself on the mattress, lay on my back, and closed my eyes. Showing them just how inexperienced I was — not that they could have had any doubt about that — whereas they seemed to be familiar with the ritual. During the time I spent in that apartment not a single word was spoken. But no explanations were needed. I knew I was in one of those flats whose occupants had left the country the previous December, or early January at the latest. And the man had to be a squatter. He couldn't have been a friend or relative of the former tenants, because then they would have left him something: a chair, a bed, a cabinet. He must have broken into the abandoned apartment, for if he had bribed the caretaker and got the key to the apartment, then he would have let us laugh freely in the stairway.

I have no way of figuring how long I may have stayed in that apartment. Perhaps an hour, maybe two. The three of us were sprawled out in three different positions on the mattress, two of us on our back, the woman on her stomach, when at one point I sensed that I was in the way. The feeling just came over me, even though neither of them gave a signal or made a move. Perhaps they began radiating a different sort of calm, and the energies passing so evenly between the three of us until then simply changed course. As if with their special calmness they were detaching themselves from me. They both seemed to want it this way, and I knew that with my more restless repose I could no longer find my place between them. Very gingerly I slipped my finger into the inside curve of her drawn-up knee. I was hoping she might be asleep. If she was not, she'd squeeze my finger by closing her knee. She stirred. First she turned her head toward the young man, and then she drew her knee up even higher so as to escape my finger. The man slowly opened his eyes and with his look said what the woman had told him with hers. There was no mistaking their message. It would have made no sense to experiment further. I should have felt very hurt, but what made the rejection bearable was that in the young man's eyes there lurked an almost paternal encouragement. I lay on the mattress, quite defenseless, yet my fiercely persistent erection could not have been offensive, as it was alluding to our joint endeavor up to that point. Nevertheless, standing in that state would have been awkward. I waited a little; I closed my eyes. But this way I sensed even more strongly what they had hinted at just before, that they wanted to be alone. I gathered up my scattered clothes, and while I was pulling on my shirt, my shorts, my pants, and buckling my sandals, they both fell asleep — I didn't think they were feigning.

They did nothing to offend me. Still, for the next two days I felt as if I had been cast out of paradise for having committed a mortal sin. It wasn't the expulsion itself that was so hard to bear. After all, I left of my own free will, doing what I felt was best for me. Still, I would have liked to hold on to my newfound bliss. The following noon I went back to the house on Szinva Street. The blinds of the second-story windows were still drawn. I was hoping the woman would open the door. I imagined her being alone in the flat. The little brass disk moved in the peephole, and the man could see my face. Slowly, very considerately, he let the disk swing back into place.

I dragged myself down the stairs, trying not to make any noise. I didn't understand what he could have meant by the encouraging look he'd given me before. Feeling cheated, I roamed the neighborhood for two days, waited, hung around the house. Had I given myself completely over to my pain, I suspect many things in my life would have turned out differently. Pain would have given me a chance to think through what had really happened in there. And if I had thought it through, I might have reached the frightening conclusion that I had learned to make love from the body of a man — not exclusively, but from the body of a man also— and this despite the fact that I have never, not then or at any other time, touched another man's body. And except for a bashful curiosity I have no desire to do so. Nevertheless, through the woman's body we did communicate. In trying to possess the woman, the other male body instinctively sought a common channel in which all our bodies could flow in a common rhythm. And that was the experience they deprived me of, but they also deprived themselves and each other of it. Something did happen, but what they took from me they could make use of only between themselves. Just as later, when I was with others, I made good use of what I'd learned from the two of them. The paternal encouragement in the young man's look referred to future times — it wasn't an invitation for me to come back.

Of course I didn't think all this through, I couldn't have. I found diversions, I avoided my pain. My urge to return to that place I sublimated in much more conventional ways. I formulated a code of behavior for myself. I never again indulged in pawing, grabbing, kissing, or running after girls; no courtship, no pining, no writing of love letters for me. Be smart, I said, with the encouraging paternal glance I had acquired from that stranger. I may not have been fully conscious of the origin of this high-handed, knowing glance, but I used it all the time. In some ways, I still do. And the girls, at least the ones I've wanted something to do with, have always proved to be smart.

I became part of an open world in which the laws of exclusive possession and appropriation do not apply, in which I enter into a mutual relationship not with a single chosen individual but with everybody. Or nobody, if you like. At the same time, my mother, ever since I can remember, all but forbade me to return her affection, which was, now that I think of it, a clever and instinctively cautious move on her part. In me she loved the man she had lost, but only through a tragic deception could my emotions have compensated her for that loss. She spared me from the pangs of love, and that is why it took me a very long time to understand that suffering is as much a part of a human relationship as pleasure is. I resisted tooth and nail every form of suffering. And it didn't occur to me that anyone expected me to reciprocate intense feelings; after all, my good looks earned me special privileges. Not that my looks could in any way make up for the indignities I had to endure on account of my family origins. But the tension between my social situation and my physical looks was enough to make me want to take root in a world that, whether it adored me or rejected me, did not lay claim to the whole of my life.

The devotion and admiration were meant for my physical attractiveness, the rejection for my social position. Unlike my friend, whose greatest ambition was to get to know, conquer, comprehend, bond another human being to himself and make that person his own, my own need to know and possess was fueled not by an overwhelming, self-effacing desire to understand, to identify totally with another being, but by the ambition to create order in my own affairs. We each lacked half of ourselves. I had a home, but not a homeland. He had a homeland, but not a home.

When it came to practical, expedient self-control, I was no less irrational than my friend. This self-control became my freedom. I used the natural affection of others as a means to an end, and to the same extent I curbed my own inclinations if they didn't fit a given situation and might hamper me in realizing my goals. So much for my moral justification. I never expected more from another person than I was willing to give of myself. I preferred to get less. I trained myself to be so sensible, so hard-nosed, that the very possibility of love was out of the question. My first adventure in physical pleasure most likely determined my subsequent experiences, but it was only part of a process. If one is forced to use oneself as an instrument, one remains an instrument in relation to another person as well. The quality of my first sexual adventure I consider to be identical with the quality of my ambitions. But I am neither so stupid nor so insensitive as to have let the need for love die in me completely. Except I couldn't have any experience in love — it would catch me unprepared— because I acquired my experiences in affairs and relationships. And that's how things stand with me.

Actually, it was that visit to Rákosi's residence that gave me courage to apply for admission to the Ferenc Rákôczi II Military Academy. I didn't understand, and still don't, how they happened to pick me for that honor, but they did, and that meant that the impossible could happen. I didn't understand, because I knew that before summoning me to the principal's office they had to have clarified my family background. Or if for some reason they had neglected this, why did they disregard my principal's explicit warning? The reproachful gesture of his finger, the way he pointed to the little box next to my name in the class grades book and made sure everyone saw it, can never be forgotten. Cows are branded, not out of some conviction, but out of the practical necessity to distinguish one from the other.

Even as a child, with my still limited comprehension, I concluded that the system I lived under could not possibly regulate life by enforcing the inhumanly rigid and passionless rules it had devised. I sensed that only in the gaps and loopholes of this incomprehensible and absurdly rigid set of rules could I develop my own potential. True, I couldn't decide whether they fell into my trap or I into theirs, but I wasn't eager to know. I did know, however, that I wanted to get into that restricted zone. And the very people who created restricted zones were the ones to get me there. The condition of entry was my knowledge of Russian, yet it would never have occurred to me to study the language seriously if my father hadn't perished in a POW camp or maybe in that bullet-riddled automobile. The only way I could crawl through the tiny gap they offered me was by cunningly revealing something of my real intentions. If I could appear trustworthy enough to be able to go on being insincere. My knowledge of Russian and my pretty face got me in, and all they asked for was a trifle, that I pledge my faith. And why shouldn't I have considered myself worthy of speaking any foreign language? It's true of course that in the process I wound up rejecting my father and betraying my friend. But the system compensated me for my pledge of faith and for my services. It revealed its weakest side to me. Namely, that for all its professed ideals, it can make soup only from the vegetables that grow in its own garden.

If all this had happened a year earlier, or had the restricted zone really been significantly different from its surrounding area, if they had led us into a marble hall instead of a conventionally furnished living room, if the cocoa were not lukewarm and the disgusting skin on its surface hadn't reminded me of the milk we got in the school lunchroom, if the cream had been whipped properly and wasn't limp and slightly sour, or if I hadn't suddenly had the impression that the reason the much-feared and respected couple seemed in low spirits had nothing to do with lack of sleep but most likely with a simple domestic quarrel they had to suspend because of our arrival, if, in other words, the visit hadn't turned out the way it did, it would never even have occurred to me that the small gap I was offered could accommodate all of me. The system's forbidding sternness seemed to leave no room for the contingencies of human life. No wonder, then, that seeing so much ordinary action and mundane behavior in the restricted zone would make me all the bolder. In exchange for new and exciting opportunities, I was ready to give up my childish fantasy of someday becoming an officer in some army. I was in, inside the gap, I could feel its proportions and believed I could make decisions according to its rules. But all my calculations proved false. They rapped my knuckles very quickly.

The same day I submitted my application to the military academy, signed reluctantly by my mother, I was called into the principal's office. All the windows were open, though a fire was burning. When I walked in, the principal was rubbing his back against the tile stove. For a long time he didn't say anything, just kept shaking his head in disapproval.

Then he pushed himself away from the stove, walked across the room to his desk. He must have had some back problem; he bent over a little, favoring one side, sidling rather than walking, and it seemed that only by pressing his back to the warm stove could he straighten up properly. As he pulled out my application from a pile of papers and handed it to me, he quipped, Miracles don't happen twice. If you know what I mean.

Obligingly, I took the application from him. He was quite pleased with himself. Then he motioned for me to go. But I got stubborn and wouldn't budge. And that irritated him.

Anything else? he asked.

I stammered that I didn't understand.

That would disappoint him, he said, because I was not only the best pupil in his school but also a young man who was as clever as he was cunning. So why try to outsmart him? If he were to forward my application, he would get into trouble. His advice to me was to apply to a school where my background did not present a problem. Considering my scholastic record, he wasn't telling me to go to a vocational school, but a specialized technical high school was out of the question. And he wasn't recommending a parochial school either. The only thing he could do for me was to help me get into the science program of a regular public high school. I should just go home now. He was giving me permission to leave early. And I should fill out a new application.

My eyes filled with tears. I saw that he noticed. I knew this wouldn't move him, though it might have some effect. I felt he misunderstood: he thought these were tears of sadness and desperation, when in truth they were tears of anger. His long desk was between us. Nice and slow, I let the application drop on the desk. It wasn't real impudence, just a bit of cheek. As if to say: you can wipe your ass with it. No way was I going to take that application with me. Mumbling the usual parting words, I started backing out toward the door. Even in normal circumstances the required phrase was hard to utter with a straight face. According to the rules we were supposed to say, "Forward, Comrade Principal." The idea of calling a man who just wrecked my future a comrade! Saying forward while backing out of his office! Pointing to the form on the desk, he told me to pick it up and leave. But I left, pretending to be too confused to have heard his last words.

Getting out of school before noon, without your schoolbag, is in itself one of those semidelirious experiences. You are free. But your schoolbag, which you stuffed nervously in your desk drawer, still ties you to the scene of eternal bondage. You feel like a plaything of fickle fate. It seems to you that this early-afternoon life around you, proceeding at its own normal pace, could be yours as easily as anybody else's. The sense of liberation, so short-lived, was fading fast. I was in a daze, and also fuming. And then, at the Városkuti Road station of the old cable car, just as I was counting out change for the fare, I realized where I was heading. It would have made no sense to go home. I wasn't about to create new anxiety for my mother, who in those days worked as a typist for a foreign trade company. By the time my plan could have scared me, I was on the train.

I went to see my father's onetime friend and comrade Colonel Elemér Jámbor, at the Ministry of Defense. When I got downtown, I had no money left for a streetcar, so I rode without a ticket. We had been to his place only once, and he never visited us. Yet Mother was convinced that the allowance that arrived each month came from him. At Christmas, Easter, and on my birthday, he sent me presents, accompanied by a brief letter, which I had to acknowledge with an equally brief thank-you note. The navy-blue gold-buttoned overcoat my friend describes in such loving detail was also one of his gifts. Mother believed that it was his quiet intervention that had saved us from being deported from the capital. Owing to the awful turn of events, we were able later on to repay his family some of his concern and kindness for us. He was arrested in late November 1956 and executed the following spring. His widow lost her job, and she had to raise two daughters, both of them about my age, on her own.

The guard at the gate said that the comrade colonel could not be reached at the moment. For about an hour and a half I roamed the neighborhood. In Miksa Falk Street there was a pet shop with cages and a fish tank in the window. I stared at the fish as they kept returning to the glass wall of the tank and with their mouths agape nipped at something invisible. A little farther on in the same street, I saw a girl with close-cropped hair charge out of a house, crying. She ran like crazy, as if being chased, but then stopped in her tracks and spun around. Her eyes fell on my curious glance, and that much sympathy was enough for her to burst into tearful sobs. I half expected her to throw herself into my arms. But she ran back and disappeared into the doorway. I waited for a while, thinking she might reappear. Later, I walked to the Parliament. The huge square was deserted. From a proper distance I watched the comings and goings at the side entrance on the right. Now and then a barge-like black limousine pulled up, a gate opened, someone got into the car. The glossy blackness, the gleaming chrome receded majestically in the midday sun. People were leaving but no one was going in. I figured enough time had passed, I'd try again. The guard was annoyed but agreed to ring the office. Cupping his hand over the receiver, he not only gave my name but added with a chuckle, It's a kid, and pretty pushy, too. I could tell he was talking to a woman. And I was let into the lobby, where I could sit in a comfortable chair. While waiting, I was troubled by a single unpleasant thought: What's going to happen to my schoolbag if I don't make it back to school in time.

It must have been four in the afternoon when I finally got to see my father's friend. The guard took me up to the fifth floor, and in the bright, spotless corridor I saw the colonel coming toward me. He put his large, heavy hand on my shoulder, as if to make sure it wasn't some tragedy that brought me here. He led me into a room where a military operation might have been discussed before. Rolled-up maps seemed to imply this, as well as heavy cigarette smoke hanging in the air, empty coffee cups and glasses and ashtrays still filled with cigarette butts on the glass-topped conference table. He offered me a seat, walked around the table, and on the other side made himself comfortable, too. He lit a cigarette. So far he hadn't said a word and I'd offered no explanation. He was a husky man, bald, with blond hairs on his powerful hands. I could see it wasn't just the cigarette smoke that made him blink and smile. He was sizing me up and was responding favorably to my appearance. He addressed me in the pleasantly solicitous and jocular tone of voice many adults used with me. He asked what mischief I was up to this time.

After I told him, he rapped his signet ring on the glass tabletop. He said the school would definitely forward my application. That much he could promise. Of course, that didn't mean I'd be accepted. While he respected my decision to apply, there was nothing optimistic he could say about the possible outcome. But whether I'd get accepted or not, from now on I'd have to fend for myself.

He put out his cigarette and got up. He rounded the table and, while I was getting up myself, again put his hand on my shoulder, and this time there was indeed nothing encouraging in this gesture. I should heed his advice not only because his own influence was very limited but also because anyone unable to make the best of his own opportunities could no longer understand his own situation. My own father would not think otherwise. He spoke quietly. With his hand still on my shoulder, he was steering me toward the exit.

A month later I was notified that my application had been rejected. No reason was given for the decision.

In all probability I must have responded with stubbornly laconic answers to my friend's persistent questions, and he must have gathered from this that there was some struggle about my going to a military academy. I know he was afraid of losing me. He hoped that my hopes would be dashed and then we might still wind up in the same high school. But frankly, that possibility got as big a rise out of me as my soldierly aspirations did out of him. In any case, there was no struggle at home. If anything, my mother was happy. Prém conceded defeat and decided to become an auto mechanic. I remained alone with my obsession. The anger I felt for my father's friend would not abate. I couldn't understand why he wouldn't help. I felt like a child who craves chocolate and can't understand why adults don't eat chocolate day and night — after all, they have the money to buy it. I did the very opposite of what he in his paternal wisdom advised me to do. Or more precisely, in my anger, I did exactly what he advised me not to do.

I wrote or rather tapped out a letter on a typewriter and sent it to István Dobi, President of the Republic. I kept a copy of it for years and destroyed it only after I noticed that my wife had been rummaging through my papers. Shame keeps me from quoting the actual words used by that humbled, abject child. What I said more or less was that making the acquaintance of Comrade Rákosi — and of the new Soviet man, or rather woman, in the person of his wife — was a fundamental turning point in my life. I continued by mentioning that in our family the love of the Soviet people was a tradition; it was by following in my father's footsteps that I mastered the Russian language. That's how I got to somewhat safer ground. I acknowledged that my father was forced to fight in an unjust war against the Soviet people, but I asked that his steadfast anti-German attitude also be taken into consideration. Finally, I vowed that I'd dedicate my life to righting the wrongs committed by him. I wanted to lend credence to my words with documentary evidence. Nothing I have done in all my life fills me with greater shame. I appended four notebooks with checkerboard covers to the letter — they were my father's war diaries.

I know very little about opera and even less about ballet. I find people singing and dancing onstage both fascinating and repugnant. People comporting themselves in a way that normal, sober adults would never do in public. Still, I am amazed that these people are capable of such shamelessness. The voices, the bodies, the decor, the cloying splendor of opera architecture so repels me that it's a trying experience whenever I have to set foot in an opera house. It feels as if I were sitting inside a fancy powder box and somebody was stuffing cream puffs into my mouth. As soon as the curtain goes up I begin to feel queasy, I have to close my eyes, and before long, without noticing it, I doze off with all that music going on. And on that November evening we weren't sitting just anywhere but right next to the huge imperial box.

I've no idea how this particular opera is supposed to be staged, but behind the curtain that rose to the first strains of the overture, another curtain became visible. It was tacked together from shimmering silks, shreds of gold-spangled muslin, smoke-gray tulle, as well as pieces of coarse sackcloth and soiled rags. While the orchestra was busy playing, this multilayered patchwork, independent of the music, was slowly pulled, floated, flapped, and fluttered before our eyes. This went on until the set of Red Square appeared, where crowds of people with smoky torches, candles, and swaying lanterns were dancing. And at last you understood that the curtain was supposed to represent the slowly lifting morning fog.

Two huge black cars came to pick us up at the hotel. And although I managed to end up in the same car with the girl, I soon had second thoughts about joining them. Apart from the secret, largely unexpressed joy of seeing each other again, there was nothing much my friend and I could talk about. For one thing, I was tired, and also distracted by the girl. What's more, they were rather loud under the influence of something they'd had earlier, while I was still in need of a drink. And the strenuous effort to conceal from each other the joy of seeing each other created an unpleasant tension between us. As for the girl, I could only watch her, keep an eye on her, but could not really get any closer. She let me know that any advance on my part would be met by a refusal. One thoughtless move and she'd rebuff me so spectacularly, I'd have to give her up for good. Which also meant that she didn't want to give me up. She hadn't made up her mind yet. We kept avoiding each other's eyes, but we couldn't avoid the desire for each other's glances. The whole time we kept each other in a state of tension. The only thing I permitted myself to do was politely to take her fur-collared coat from her when she took it off. She thanked me with the same noncommittal politeness. The tension was mutual, because we both tried to hide from the others our mutual interest. We couldn't succeed completely, not only because the four people and the interpreter accompanying them had already had an afternoon of copious drinking behind them, but also because they shared the special intimacy that develops among people traveling together. I remained a stranger among them.

One member of the group, a bearded young man who appeared anxious to call attention to himself at every turn, was especially eager to show me up. It's possible the girl had sounded so cool on the telephone because she wasn't alone in the room. The bearded young man was watching me, and I was watching them. Later it turned out that my suspicions were not unfounded. My friend and the third man in the group were watching and waiting to see where all this was leading to. And the interpreter, an unfailingly kind and solicitous lady, kept a watchful, maternal eye on the entire group. Reminding them of my position as a guest, I politely let them go first, and took a rear seat deep inside the box, next to the lady interpreter. The girl sat in front of us, leaning forward on the railing. From time to time I had to look at her bare neck. Her unruly hair was gathered in a bun. And she sensed every time my glance lingered on her neck; she'd move imperceptibly. Or rather, she seemed to dictate to me when I should be looking at the stage and when at her bare neck.

When the last shreds of the fog's silks and rags had lifted, the ideological significance of the vanishing fog-curtain also became evident. The rags-and-riches motif was now repeated onstage: rich and poor folk were whirling about and mingling in apparent confusion, though in still identifiable clusters. Princesses like golden puppets, drunken boyars wrapped in furs, merchants and lascivious priests frolicking with courtesans in flimsy silks, half-naked beggars, contortionists in dirt-encrusted rags, wounded soldiers writhing in blood-soaked bandages, peddlers hawking their miserable wares, and here and there, among gaping loafers and street people, provincial grandees in gaudy folk costume, demure maidens and handsome lads. All this abundance made me sick to my stomach. I felt like leaving. I felt like going to Pervomayskaya. Where I was expected. Where I wouldn't feel so out of place. Where in the morning three women in large pink satin bras and even larger pink satin panties paraded around the house and I could scratch and mope to my heart's content. Searching for a deeper clue to my discomfort, it occurred to me that for a disciple to sit in a theater just one day after his master's demise was an unseemly thing to do.

The whirling and dancing were still in progress when the bearded man put his paw on the girl's hand resting on the railing. He leaned over and whispered something into her ear. I could see they were accustomed to such intimate whispering, though it immediately made their two companions curious. They craned their necks, wanted to be in on whatever was going on. The bearded man, without letting go of the girl's hand, began to explain something to them. And my friend, after catching only the first few words, quickly moved closer and over the bearded fellow's shoulder whispered something to the girl. They both laughed. But the girl tilted her head so that I could catch a glimpse of their merriment, and at the same time she pulled her hand out from under the bearded man's paw. And that gesture, too, was meant for me. She made up my mind for me: I couldn't leave now. But all this fidgeting and chuckling and carrying on made me extremely uncomfortable. I belonged to this group yet had nothing to do with it. I understood their game but wanted no part of it. Because from this point on, everything that happened onstage made them laugh. I couldn't completely ignore the solemn atmosphere in the theater, but from then on I was compelled to see the stage with their eyes.

No doubt it isn't a particularly brilliant artistic concept to use irreconcilable class struggle and the conflict of social classes as the basis for a ballet piece within an opera. It's also true that the opera's overture didn't quite work as ballet music. Yet the group's judgment of it rubbed me the wrong way. I was also afraid they might create a scene. And I was right. After a while the interpreter, startled out of her patriotic rapture, tried with alarmed and cautious touches of her fingers to make them come to their senses. But this only added fuel to the fire. The poor woman was like a kindhearted schoolmistress who is herself terrified that the principal might get wind of the rowdiness of her charges. They didn't dare look at one another, and probably didn't much look at the stage either. The interpreter didn't understand any of this, she kept hushing and admonishing them in her softly accented Hungarian. Their backs and shoulders were shaking with suppressed laughter. Now and then the laughter would pop, erupt, and be immediately stifled, but that only hastened and amplified the next explosion.

I don't know how many dancers were on the stage — a great many. It's rare to see so many dancers all at once. But when after the overture the victoriously entering soloists were followed by fresh throngs singing away jubilantly and carrying church banners and military insignias, creating an incredible mass of bodies, and when, to top it all off, to the accompaniment of booming church bells a red sun rose, pulled by. wire, over the crenellated walls of the Kremlin, all hell broke loose in our box. They began punching one another, their laughter turning to snorting and belching. Trying to calm them, the frightened interpreter was also punching them. In neighboring boxes a counter-movement was brewing; general consternation now found expression in indignant hissing, muttering, and muffled cussing. I lost my head, sprang up, and fled.

This row of boxes did not give directly onto a corridor but onto a brightly lit lounge with red silk wall hangings. I was incensed, indignant, but also relieved to know that whatever happened to them, I was out of there. I got my coat. But just as I was putting it on, the silk-covered door of the box was flung open and, with a resounding bass aria serving as background, the four Hungarians, clinging to one another in their uncontrollable fit, literally fell out of the box. For a second I could see the interpreter desperately gesturing behind them, but then one of them slammed the door on her. The four continued laughing and pushing and shoving and stumbling into one another, in turn shrieking and whimpering, with tears in their eyes. Four unruly children sent out of the classroom. As far as I was concerned, I wanted to put an end to this impossible scene, the sooner the better. The girl and her bearded friend fell holding on to each other, against the wall. After the impact, the man sank to the floor. I would have made my getaway then if my friend, on purpose or by accident, hadn't let go of his partner in a way that had him fall against me. I had no choice but to catch him. For long seconds we stared into each other's eyes. I couldn't hold back the contempt and hatred that loomed out of the shadows of our remote childhood, as the joy of our reunion had only an hour earlier. I felt my own hand — or rather, I realized I was — grabbing his shoulder. I shook him. Clowns! I was yelling at him, bunch of buffoons, that's what you are! Miserable buffoons! His face relaxed at once, and he glared back at me with the same implacable hatred. And you are a lousy opportunist gone sour, he said. A shitty little Julien Sorel, that's what you were and that's what you still are. A filthy playboy. And he said something else, too. The hatred was still in his eyes, but his voice had a phony cynical ring I hadn't known before. It came hissing out of him. In the sudden silence the others could hear it, too. I couldn't have picked a better time to tell you, he hissed in that odd voice, but I was madly in love with you, you chickenshit.

The girl regarded my defenselessness with indulgent contempt. Well, well, she said, and as she headed for the exit, she gave my arm a pitying touch. She meant it as a coup de grâce. She even pursed her lips. Only the muffled sound of music could be heard. Four of us were standing in the lounge, facing in four different directions. And then she took the pins out of her bun, letting her long hair fall down. She shook her head and walked out the door.

What followed strikes me now as something phantasmal, out of a fairy tale. With slow, measured steps, she was going down the red-carpeted stairs. Her shapely, stockinged legs were going down, down. Silently, a bit dejectedly, we followed her, leaving the last strains of music behind us. On the second floor, the glass doors of the onetime imperial reception hall were wide-open. Under glittering crystal chandeliers, breathtakingly opulent tables were waiting for the guests at the gala performance. The U-shaped table followed the curve of the room. Except for us, not a soul was in sight. Without betraying the slightest sign of surprise or embarrassment, she sauntered into this room. Timidly the others followed. She walked around the table laden with cold meat, fruit, drinks, and sweets, decorated with garlands and flower baskets and gleaming with silver cutlery, crystal, and china. Then she picked up a plate, took a fork and napkin to go with it, and served herself. The others chuckled and, somewhat flustered, followed suit. Within a few moments they were continuing where they had left off in the lounge. Except now it was all silent. They guzzled and stuffed themselves. I found a bottle of vodka, filled a glass, and gulped it down. Then I walked over to her and asked whether she'd like to come with me. Actually, she was the most vicious of them all, because she wasn't stuffing herself but, moving methodically from platter to platter, only sampling things, digging, poking into every dish, ruining everything. And all the while her face remained perfectly straight. When I spoke to her, she looked up. No, she said, staring at me steadily, she was having a good time right here.

The snow would not let up. The streets were full of lively, happy sounds, but the slackening traffic, muffled by the heavy snowfall, made it evident that the big holiday had already begun. There were staggering drunks on the streets, too. I walked back to my hotel, took the vodka out of the refrigerator, and put it next to the telephone. I drank and waited for her call. Later I called her, and kept calling her at ever shorter intervals. A few minutes after midnight she called me. By then she was alone.

And this is about as much as I am able, or prepared, to tell about myself.

After this accidental meeting in Moscow, I didn't see my friend for a long time. Now and then his name would crop up. Reading his pieces about alienated, anxious, and feckless young men was like eating sawdust. A little over five years had passed when a few days before Christmas I had to fly to Zurich. Since I'd be away for only two days, I left my car in the parking lot of Budapest's Ferihegy Airport. When I returned and walked out of the terminal, as usual I couldn't find my car keys. They weren't in my coat or in my pant pockets. I kept feeling for them all over. They must be in my bag, then. Or I had lost them; it wouldn't have been the first time. My possessions don't stick with me either. All I had was a small suitcase stuffed with shirts and papers, and a large shopping bag full of presents. Putting my things in a luggage cart, I began searching for the keys.

While rummaging in my suitcase, I noticed that somebody just an arm's length away from me was sitting on the concrete guardrail of the steps. I took a good look at him only after I'd found the keys in one of my socks. He sat so close I didn't even have to raise my voice.

Did you just arrive or are you leaving? I asked, as if this were the most natural thing to ask, even though I saw that something was wrong. Neither the season nor the place nor the hour was right for anybody to be sitting there. It was getting dark; in the fine, drizzling fog the streetlights had been turned on. It was unpleasantly cold and clammy. He looked up at me, but I wasn't sure he recognized me. Until he began to shake his head I had the feeling that I might have made a mistake.

Are you waiting for somebody? I asked.

He said no, he wasn't waiting for anybody.

Then what are you doing here? I asked, a little annoyed.

He again shook his head silently.

In the intervening five years he probably hadn't changed more than I. I was still surprised to see his face so narrow and dried out, his thinning and graying hair. He looked as though the last drop of moisture had been squeezed from him. He was dry and wrinkled.

I stepped closer, showed him my key, and told him I'd gladly take him into town.

He shook his head no.

What the hell did he want to do, then?

Nothing, he said.

He was sitting between two large, well-stuffed suitcases. On the handles I could make out the tags of Interflug, the East German airline. Which made it clear that he wasn't departing but had just arrived. I simply thrust my valise in his lap, grabbed his heavy suitcases, and without saying a word headed for the parking lot. By the time I found my car and put his luggage in the trunk, he was standing there with my bag. He was handing it to me while his face remained inert, frighteningly expressionless.

Yet, strangely enough, his face was more determined-looking than ever. For all its softness, almost forceful. Gone, too, was that odd ambivalence that had so surprised me at our previous meeting. A clean face, free of shadows. And yet it was as if he himself did not reside in his own face. As if he'd sent himself away on some vacation. He was dry. I can't find a better word to describe him.

My car is usually pretty messy. I had to make room, toss things on the back seat. I tried to be quick and decisive, because I had the impression that he might slip away any moment, leaving his luggage behind. Or I should say I had this impression because he remained totally impassive. He was standing there but wasn't really there.

We were already on the highway when I offered him a cigarette. He declined; I lit up.

I told him I'd take him home.

No, not there.

Where, then? I asked.

He didn't answer.

I couldn't say why, but I had to look at him. I wasn't waiting for an answer. I knew he couldn't answer because he had nothing to say. He had no place to go. And anyone without a place cannot talk about that. At regular intervals we passed under bright arc lights, and therefore after a while I had to turn again to make sure I saw what I thought I saw. He was crying. I'd never seen a crying man look like that. His face remained dry and impassive, as before. Still, drops of water were coming out of his eyes and trickling down along his nose.

I told him to come to our house. It's Christmas tomorrow. He'll spend it with us.

Oh no.

I wanted to say something simple and comforting. We might just have a white Christmas. Which sounded pretty inane, so after that I kept quiet for a long time.

I never before had the feeling, except with my children, that someone was so completely dependent on me. It was a feeling I probably wouldn't have experienced even if I had to save him from drowning or cut a noose off his neck. But he gave no indication that he intended to part with his life. The empty shell of his body was still alive. There was no need for heroic gestures. I couldn't have known what had happened to him and wasn't eager to find out. I didn't have to save him. Besides, one can sense when it's all right to ask questions and when it isn't. He was only entrusted to my care for now, and it didn't seem such an unpleasant burden. Many of his passions had burned out in him, and the void made it possible for my simple, pragmatic abilities to come to the fore.

We reached the city. I always have to cast a glance at the huge building of the Ludovika Military Academy, where my father had spent so much of his life. Then came the Polyclinic on Ullői Road, where, in a second-floor ward, my mother had died two years earlier. And right there, while driving between those two buildings, I felt an urgent need to decide just where we were going. I didn't look at him.

I said I had another idea. But for that I had to know whether he insisted on staying in the city.

No, he didn't insist on anything. But really, I shouldn't worry about it.

I should just drop him off somewhere. Anywhere. On the boulevard. He'll get on a streetcar there.

I said I wouldn't hear of it. That streetcar idea sounded rather fishy to me, anyway. But if he didn't mind staying with me for a little while longer, we could go for a ride.

He couldn't answer.

Later, however, I had the impression that something vaguely resembling a feeling drifted back into that empty shell. It got very warm in the car. Maybe it was this heat that deceived me; still, I felt my solution was wonderful, if only because it couldn't have been simpler.

My paternal grandfather was a very wealthy man. He was a mill owner, a grain merchant, and he also dabbled in real estate. The brief period of unparalleled growth and prosperity around the turn of the century seems to us almost too fabulous to be true. It was a time when great fortunes could be made almost overnight. It's all the more incredible since the economic history of Hungary, starting from the last days of the Middle Ages, has been the history of crises, depressions, and emergencies of one sort or another. Yet, we know that there was such a period because most of the schools where we study, the edifices where decisions affecting our lives are made, the hospitals we go to to be cured, and even the sewers where we empty our waste were all built around that time. Maybe not too many people like the ponderous style of these structures, but everybody appreciates their made-to-last sturdiness. During this period, not too long after the turn of the century, my grandfather had two houses built for himself: a fully winterized summer home on Swabian Hill, where Mother and I had lived until her death, and a spacious and romantic-looking two-story hunting lodge. He liked to hunt small game and chose a spot not too far from the city where he could indulge his passion. In a flat region along the Danube he could shoot ducks and coots in the tideland willows, and pheasants and rabbits in the open fields.

I can't divulge the name of the village itself. It will presently become clear why not. Actually, I should adopt the ingenious method used by authors of the great Russian novels and note places with asterisks. The human settlements they identified this way had unique, unmistakable characteristics and could therefore be found on the map, although they could also be anywhere in that vast land. It is the painful consequences of possible recognition that prevent me from naming the place. If I wanted to be coy about it, I could say that starting at the zero marking of the main highway and traveling at a good clip, one could reach the place where we were heading that late afternoon in about sixty minutes.

I should also add here that in January 1945 my mother's two sisters, Aunt Ella and Aunt Ilma, were bombed out of their apartment in Damjanich Street. The house remained in ruins for a long time. Even in the 1950s I remember seeing piles of the uncleared rubble on the street. As soon as the war was over, my two aunts moved into this country house. None too soon, as it turned out. The house had been broken into and vandalized, though strangely enough, few things were taken. Garden tools from the shed and two huge handwoven tapestries that used to hang in the trophy room. Years later, my aunts came upon some pieces of these wall hangings — many of their neighbors insulated their doghouses with them. Neither the Germans nor the Russians ever occupied this village; they only passed through it. The vandals were most likely local people, and the reason they had no time for a more thorough job was that about the time of my aunts' arrival the village was going through some terrible days.

A few days before they arrived, three Russian soldiers, separated from their unit, had rowed across the icy river. They helped themselves to some wine, brandy, a couple of ducks and chickens. They also discovered that in one of the houses there lived three marriageable daughters with their widowed mother. Neither the girls nor their mother minded throwing a wild party and enjoying the commandeered booty. They baked and cooked, they feasted and danced, had such a good time they even fired shots in the air. The house stood at the edge of the village in a waterlogged hollow at the foot of cemetery hill. To this day villagers talk about the incident with the utmost circumspection. The way they tell it, the party went on for two days and two nights, and the women didn't even bother to close the curtains over their windows. Through it all, the village played possum. No one ventured outside. Nevertheless, on the second night, bullets were fired through the windows. The bullets, fired from a pistol and a hunting rifle, came from the top of cemetery hill. The first rounds wounded one of the girls and hit one of the Russians in the stomach, who then bled to death. The other two returned the fire. Bullet marks can still be seen on some of the old gravestones. But the battle was uneven, because in their earlier merrymaking the soldiers had almost emptied their submachine guns. The few rounds they had left they used to cover each other as they retreated to the riverbank. The mother immediately hanged herself in the attic of her house. She got the message, it seemed. The next day, a large contingent of Russian military police arrived. The wounded girl was taken away. My two aunts walked into the village that afternoon. All the interrogations, lineups, and house searches, even the hauling away of some people, failed to produce any results. There were few clues to follow, and they found no weapon. In a small village like this everybody is somehow related. The Russians had to press a few men into service to bury the mother. To this day the village does not want to know who fired those shots. One thing is certain: if my grandfather's house had stayed vacant, nothing would have saved it from destruction. Not to mention the fact that only because of my aunts' foresight and cunning has the house remained in my family's possession.

Two old warhorses — that is how the more outspoken members of my family refer to my aunts. Not a very flattering description. But they are indeed exceptional creatures. Whenever I read some agonizing essay about our nation's slow demise, I immediately think of them. Because it's hard to decide what sustains them: their infinite adaptability or their uncompromising resourcefulness. They eat little, talk a lot, and their hands and feet never stop moving. In recent years, having aged visibly, they keep saying that constant activity wears you out, and if the body is worn out it's easier to die. The year and a half age difference between them doesn't show. They are so much alike they could be twins. Both of them are tall and large-framed; they cut each other's hair, which they keep very short. They may have been attractive in their youth, the way a plowhorse can be said to be attractive. They must wear size 12 shoes; when they walk, everything shakes and rattles around them. If they were not moved to tears so easily by compassion, or if they didn't show an almost exaggerated understanding of the most varied and peculiar ways of the world, one could say there was nothing feminine about them. But their gentleness is so refined, so discreet, so very caring, they surely meet all the spiritual requirements of the most traditional female ideal.

At the age of eighteen, my Aunt Ilma had a child out of wedlock. For the family this was no less an outrage than Grandfather's threat to become a dancer if he wasn't allowed to join the army. Ella very decisively defused the impending scandal by having her sister move away from home. The baby died when it was only a few days old. The two of them have been living together ever since. They must have made some final arrangement among themselves. No man has entered their lives since then. Or at least it appears that way. And that's when time must also have stopped for them. They do not subscribe to newspapers, do not listen to the radio; only a few weeks ago did they buy their first television set. They are believers, but do not attach much importance to either church attendance or prayer. They talk about God in the same tone of voice as about the expected yield of their plentiful vegetable garden. As far as they are concerned, battling evil requires no greater passion than does the struggle with, say, plant lice or potato bugs. They sprinkle wood ashes on the former and hunt for the latter, on all fours, in the flowering potato plants, squashing the bugs with their fingers.

They start the day in the garden. From late May to mid-September they go swimming in the Danube every day, come rain, come shine. They put on their ridiculous, tight-in-the-bust-stretched-out-in-the-buttocks bathing suits made of rubberized cotton whose onetime wildflower patterns have completely faded. They put on white bathing caps and white rubber shoes. That's how they go trekking up the shore, squelching in the silt or crunching on the gravel. Ella leads, Ilma follows. Then comes a charmingly girlish interlude. They wade in waist-deep and with skittish delight let their skin get used to the cold; before long they are squealing and splashing each other. Then suddenly they stretch out in the water, abandoning themselves to the current. On their buttocks, the bathing suits balloon up like rubber tires.

The two-acre property, a park in which every cultivated plant ever planted as well as weeds of all kinds bloom and perish at will, is separated from the village by a high brick wall, and on the shore another high red retaining wall protects it from flooding. This is how far they swim with the current, then march up the steep, moss-covered stone steps, put on their bathing robes, and go back to the house. It was along this stretch, right by the stone wall, where my friend was killed. It had been a dry summer, and by autumn the river receded to where it was normally the deepest; its water turned a dark brown.

In the evening, while one of them was busy sewing and mending or perhaps knitting a sweater for me, or crocheting one of her endless lace runners, the other would read out loud. Their friend Vince Fitos, the Protestant minister, lends them books of inspirational literature. They both assume an appropriately serious and solemn expression, but that wouldn't stop them from sniggering at a particularly inane passage.

I don't know what signals they use to make their judgments, but their ability to see through things is as unerring as if they were the most well-informed people in the world. They pump me regularly about exchange rates on the international financial markets, and from the boys in the village they find out the latest soccer results. Their personal needs are very modest. When I bring them a present, they look around, bewildered: where will they put it, they don't really need it. If, therefore, they want or do not want something, their action will be motivated not by personal interest but by family need or moral consideration. That is how they acted when we were notified of my father's death. We all expected him to return, of course, but they insisted that Mother sign the house over to them. We shouldn't own two houses. In other families such a questionable proposition might open old wounds and sow suspicion and discord. But Mother was cut from the same cloth as her two sisters. She welcomed their suggestion. As a first step, they rented their own house to the village council. Ella is a licensed kindergarten teacher, Ilma an experienced schoolmistress. And the village had neither a suitable building nor a properly trained staff to start a pre-school program, though the need was clearly there. And that's how the two of them opened a nursery school right in their own home. Along with the richly paneled trophy room, they lost the use of all the other rooms on the main floor, but now they had a regular income, received a nominal rent for the premises, the four upstairs rooms remained theirs, and maintenance of the building was also taken over by the village. In the early 1960s, when the threat of nationalization no longer hung over their heads, they began their quiet little scheming. Ostensibly, they were cutting off the branch they were standing on. But in the end the health authorities ruled that the old house was unfit to be used as a school, and when a few years later a new schoolhouse was completed, my aunts announced their retirement. The enemy surrendered unconditionally and left the battlefield with the pleasant feeling of victory.

After all this, I need not say too much about my two hardy aunts' feeling about me. To them I am perfection incarnate. In my student days I had to give them detailed reports of my progress, and now they are just as interested in my job and the advancement of my career. They are so delighted with my successes, they accept blindly all my decisions as correct. They never voice approval or criticism openly but follow me with glances that tell me that in a similar situation they would have acted exactly the same way. To be sure, I usually regale them with stories I know will please them. Ever since my mother passed away, their doting fondness has become almost too much to bear. I don't have to announce my visits in advance, because in my reckless youth, when I never knew where I would spend the night and therefore roamed the world with a toothbrush in my pocket, they got used to my showing up at the oddest hours, and not always alone. Later on, when I was married, they learned to accept that it wasn't always the wife and the children I brought along to their house. This was the only sensitive area in our otherwise cloudless relationship. They let it be known that they did have reservations about my love life — on moral grounds. For example, they'd always find old girlfriends more charming than the current one. Or they'd list the physical attributes and personality traits of my casual companions and, with an innocent air, present me with their devastating conclusions. It was their way of telling me that, though somewhat proud of my numerous conquests, they didn't think this was right, that more was not necessarily better.

They still occupy only the upstairs rooms. Except for the kitchen, the ground floor is unused and in the winter unheated. I can come almost unnoticed, I don't have to bother them. In fact, I can stay in the house without letting them know I'm there. We keep a key in the back porch, on a beam under the eaves. And in a small room downstairs the strike of a match can kindle a cozy fire in the tile stove.

For three years he lived with them in this house. In this room. And if in these reminiscences I've been referring to him as my friend, it is not because of our shared boyhood but because during these three years we became very close. Even if we spoke mostly in allusions. Whether we talked of our past or our present, we both cautiously avoided total candor. I learned nothing about his life I hadn't already known, or was forced to witness. And I didn't show him a new or different side of myself. But after twenty years we did return to that mutual attraction which had once transcended our dissimilarities and which we didn't know what to make of as children. This reversion may have had to do with the fact that slowly but surely my successes were turning into failures, and that he never again wanted to be united with anyone on any level. Not with me, either. He remained attentive, sensitive, but shut up in himself. Turned cold. If I wasn't familiar with the painful reverse side of this coldness, I'd be tempted to say that he became an accurate, intelligently responding, precisely calibrated machine.

My experiences in human relations have made me see everything in this world as temporary and ephemeral. What I perceive today as love or friendship can turn out tomorrow to be nothing but the need to gratify a physical urge, or a move prompted by crass or sly self-interest. I acknowledge this with the greatest of equanimity. I have never lied to myself, because I know all about the necessary fluctuations of purposeful action. In the foregoing pages I have already prepared my balance sheet. No loves, no friends. When down in the dumps, I feel the world is nothing but a pile of disappointments. If I could be disappointed, in myself, in something or somebody else, then I could yield to this feeling of disappointment. But in me the absence of this feeling has remained so vivid that it is all I can feel. Which simply means that I haven't yet sunk into total apathy. And that is probably the reason why during those three years it became a vital necessity to have the attentiveness and sensitivity of someone whom I didn't need to, wasn't allowed to, touch. And he himself no longer had such desires. Still, he was closer to me than anyone whose body I could possess.

My aunts did not communicate their astonishment with so much as a flash of their eyes. Maybe a stiffening in their backs hinted that they didn't quite understand. They were more talkative than usual. For long moments they kept moving and fussing about us as if my friend were not there at all. They completely ignored his two suitcases. They were upset. They both talked at once. Not cutting into each other's words, just rattling on, dwelling on different details of the same story. The day before, two boys from the village had hanged themselves. I knew them, too. To help my memory, they went into detailed physical descriptions. Luckily, they were discovered in time to be cut off the rope. They both survived, they were in the hospital. They did it with a single rope. Tied a sliding loop at both ends and threw the rope over a crossbeam of the barn. They stood on apple crates and kicked them away at the same time. Supposedly they were in love with the same girl, who told each of them she was in love with the other. Now if the neighbor's hens didn't lay their eggs all over the place. If she wasn't looking for eggs just then. If she didn't manage to shove the crates back under their feet. It wasn't easy to put a stop to all this. Quite abruptly I told them we were hungry. They quickly improvised a supper for us.

Ella holds the power, Ilma is more sentimental. I followed Ilma into the pantry, where she went to get some pickles. While she was poking around in a huge jar, I briefed her on the situation in a few whispered words. For a certain amount of time, I don't know how long, they must keep him here. This one's soft, she said, and threw back a pickle. They must nurse him as they would nurse me if I were sick. She nodded nervously. Why are these pickles so soft this year, she wondered aloud. The two sisters must have a secret system of communication. Because from that point they weren't alone for a second, couldn't exchange a single word in private, yet Ella went ahead and lit the fire in the tile stove. By the time we sat down to eat, they had both gotten over their nervousness, they were relaxed and back to their amiable, good-natured selves. They tried to draw my friend into conversation and did not once mention the two suicidal boys. In the end they had to see the situation for what it was, though my friend kept smiling throughout. The conversation and the continued smiling took so much out of him that when dinner was over I had to put him to bed, literally. Pull off his clothes and shake him into his pajamas. He protested feebly. He couldn't possibly stay here. Felt awful about it. Being a burden to strangers. I should take him back. I covered him up well, because the room was still freezing cold. I said I'd be back to shut the stove when the fire died down.

The details of his recovery I learned from my aunts. There is a sofa in that room, and in front of the unusually narrow, vaulted windows there's also a walnut table, worn marble-smooth with age, and some old armchairs. Opposite the entrance is a big chest of drawers with a simple mirror above it. The white walls are bare, the beams of the ceiling heavy and dark. He slept for two days. Then he got up, put on his clothes, but for another few days left his room only at mealtimes. On the second day of Christmas, and again shortly after New Year's, I drove out to see him. On both occasions I pretended to be visiting my aunts and exchanged only a few words with him. He lay on his bed. He sat at the empty table. He stared out the window. That's what he did all day. It was quiet. I sat on the bed while he was staring out the window. He was silent for so long that my mind began to wander and I was startled when he finally did speak. He would love to have the mirror covered. Nobody's died here, I said. It seemed we couldn't find the right words. There was a copper candlestick on the table and he kept pushing it back and forth, giving it all his attention. When there are many objects in a given space, he said, our attention is taken up by the relationships among them and we lose sight of the space itself. If there are only a few objects, we look for the relationships among the objects and the space. But it's very difficult to find a permanent, final place for a single object. I can put it here or there. Compared to the whole of the space every possible place seems contingent. It was something like that he said, obviously talking about himself. As if the thinking machine were talking. He was talking about his own situation like that, and it made me laugh, which I did. It wasn't very kind of me to laugh at him, but it was also ridiculous the way he wrapped his confession in transparent abstractions. And then we looked at each other, trying to see where this mutual antagonism would lead. Our eyes were smiling. I was smiling at my own urge to laugh at him, and he at his self-conscious cerebrations.

In the morning he'd sit at the table. The afternoons he'd spend lying on the bed. At the end of the day he'd be at the table again, staring out the window. His daily routine for the next three years grew out of the rhythm of these three compulsively assumed positions. The recovery itself didn't take very long. At the end of the second week he ventured into the trophy room, where my aunts had put back my grandfather's more or less intact thousand-volume library. It may be an exaggeration to call it a library, as it consisted of turn-of-the-century literary dross, collected with unerring bad taste. He began to work. Papers appeared on the table, finally determining the place of the candlestick.

Within a few weeks it became clear that my idea of bringing him here wasn't half bad. It proved to be such a good move, in fact, that my aunts were ready to take over for me. On my next visit Ella drew me aside and said she was sure I would have no objection to my friend staying with them for a longer time. It was so restful for him here. And good for them, too. Because, frankly, there were days when they were afraid. She couldn't really say why, but they were scared, and not just at night but during the day, too. They'd never brought it up before, because they didn't want to trouble anyone. They were familiar with every noise in the house; they checked the doors and made sure the gas was turned off. Still, it was as though danger was lurking about, a fire perhaps, or somebody eavesdropping or prowling, and not an animal, either. She laughed, because my friend wasn't exactly a strong lad who could protect them. If anything, he was a weakling; just the same, since his arrival their fears had vanished. But if I needed the house for my own entertainment or if I felt like a little vacation with the family, there were plenty of extra rooms, downstairs or upstairs. Everything here belonged to me, I must know that. That's why they'd like to have my consent.

She said something about certain financial advantages. That was laughable, because I knew that my friend's financial situation was worse than hopeless. The rent he offered to pay for the room should be considered symbolic. They didn't even mention food. Anyway, what they ate they grew in the garden. At worst, they'd give my family a little less of their surplus. In short, they grew fond of him and were trying hard to find a material framework and financial assurances for their affection. The unconditional admiration they had for me they now transferred to him. What is more, his conduct fit their ideals better than mine ever did. In three whole years he had no more than five entirely harmless visitors. While they kept busy around the house or in the vegetable garden, he worked silently in his room. Between eight in the morning and three in the afternoon not a sound was heard from that room. He ate little and went to bed early. But a new taste in the kitchen, a winter sunset, a late-blooming plant that defied the season — such little things could make him happy. He helped with the more difficult household chores. He chopped wood, carried manure, could work the chain saw, repaired broken objects. And what was most important, he listened to them, and not just patiently but with genuine interest in what they had to say.

His stay, assumed by all to be temporary, aroused a mixture of suspicion and curiosity in the village. My aunt reported that some of the villagers asked for permission to peek into his room, through the window, when he was out. What they really wanted to see was what anybody could be doing alone within the four walls of a room. He knew nothing of this specific request, but he felt his situation to be precarious. He was afraid, he once said to me, that my aunts might look at his manuscript one day. If they did, he'd surely lose their trust. He was also afraid, he said another time, that when he got up from the table at three in the afternoon everybody knew what he'd been up to, because he felt he was walking stark naked among them. He was afraid, he said with a laugh, that one day they'd club him to death like a mad dog. And it was true that the villagers didn't know what to make of his long, solitary walks. A few times a ranger followed him from a safe distance, but of course my friend noticed him. The Protestant minister was the first man in the village whom he befriended. The old women called the minister the man with a smile.

The police investigation concluded that three motorcyclists were the likely perpetrators. Because of good visibility that day and unmistakable track marks, the possibility that the death was accidental was all but ruled out. A body lay on the gravelly shore closer to the water than to the retaining wall. When the water recedes as far as it did that autumn, one can see the layout of the riverbed. There is a wide strip of sand, closest to the central channel, above that a narrower band of silt strewn with larger pebbles, and the area nearer the shoreline is covered with fine pebbles. He was lying on his back, on a towel. His head reached the strip of silt. He'd probably fallen asleep. Before that he may have gone for a swim, or at least a dip, because his swimming trunks were still wet. The three cyclists, riding side by side, were approaching at about forty kilometers an hour on the slightly sloping, pebbly, dried-out shore. In principle, it's not possible to ride any faster on such terrain. They were coming upriver. At the same time, from the opposite direction, a tugboat towing barges was heading to the nearby pier. Otherwise the riverfront was in all probability deserted. Vacationers are gone by this time of the year. And the villagers come to the river only to scrub down their horses or to fetch a wayward goose. There was no one at the boat station either. When they were about sixty meters from my friend, two of the cyclists accelerated, though the experts could not agree on the rate of acceleration. The third cyclist followed suit only when he was about forty meters away; perhaps he hesitated, or maybe he was the last one to spot the fallen figure. In any case, he rode over the legs. The middle one rode over the chest, then tipped over. After a long skid upward, he slid into the hardened strip of silt. The third hit a stone, leaped in the air, and then landed on the victim's head. The one who fell over got back on his bike, made a loop around the body, presumably to have a look, and only then did he follow his friends. About ten minutes later death completed the job they had started. While waiting for the third to catch up, the other two apparently kept looking back; for about a thirty-meter stretch the two sets of tire marks showed them circling, weaving in and out. Then the lines became straight again and in parallel formation led to the pier. Here they formed a single file and got on the paved road. And that's when the tugboat reached the pier. From the deck, one of the ship's engineers saw the three cyclists. Although he couldn't give anything approaching a detailed description, he thought they were young men, possibly teenagers. Later, he also saw a man lying on the shore, but thought nothing of it.

By the time I made it to the village, alerted by my aunt's telephone call, the police had already finished taking pictures and examining the evidence. It was almost dark. His body was brought up from the shore on a makeshift stretcher. I walked alongside him, accompanied him. Once, just once, I cast a glance at what remained. One of his hands hung down and flapped about. The outspread fingers now and then grazed the ground. I would have liked to catch that hand, hold it, put it back in its place. But I didn't dare.

When the water level was low, local boys often rode their motorcycles along the shore, emulating cross-country competitions. Now each and every motorcycle in the area was thoroughly examined. Nothing substantial turned up, no lead, nothing to build a case on. At the hour in question, the men in the village who owned motorcycles or knew how to ride them had not yet returned from work. One man, a baker, left for work two hours after the murder, but because of other circumstances he had to be considered above suspicion. This late in the season the campground at the edge of the village was no longer open, but some rowing enthusiasts always pitched their tents there. They hadn't seen any cyclists either. The investigation was never officially closed, but with three years gone, nothing is likely to turn up. From the very beginning the inspector in charge thought they should be looking for drunken rowdies who were also quite young. He seemed to be the right man for the job. I don't think anyone in the village knew more about the taverns and pubs of the area than this officer. He was looking for three young men who were clearly drunk when they left one of these taverns. He was looking for three motorbikes parked in front of a pub. Until the day of the funeral I, too, was inclined to believe his theory.

Vince Fitos, the pastor, eulogized my friend in the village cemetery. While he spoke, dried leaves kept falling from the trees, spinning slowly to the ground. It was a pleasantly mild, breezy autumn day with a faint smell of smoke in the air, and an unusually large number of people came to the funeral. The old peasant women sang psalms at the open grave. I kept looking at the faces around me. At the minister, crushed by the event, struggling hard with his tears. And at the infamous house at the foot of cemetery hill where, to meet the demands of the recent increase in tourist traffic, an inn had opened. The memory of its former inhabitants will live forever, because among themselves the local people insist on calling it the Three-Cunt Inn. We could hear the clatter of dishes and even got whiffs of the heavy kitchen smell.

And then I thought of something. It was no more than a hunch, but I seized on it eagerly. If it was done by some drunks, it had to have been an accident — a shameful, terrifying accident. And then there would be no explanation for it.

It couldn't even be called a suspicion. It was too vague a thought to jell into any sort of lead. Besides, I had no desire to play the sleuth. When staring death in the face, one looks for explanations.

On the other side of the grave, wearing a dark, ill-fitting suit, a young man was standing, his face deathly pale. I knew him well. My aunts had been buying their milk from his folks for years. Now and then his body would tremble, as if shuddering in his fight to hold back his tears. Each time this happened, he would sing a little louder. He was one of the boys who had tried to commit suicide. The other would-be suicide, who wasn't at the funeral, had to undergo a laryngectomy and as a result lost his speech forever. This boy I knew only by sight, as a kind of local celebrity. He was born out of wedlock, his mother was barely four feet tall, a midget. No one knew who his father was. Ever since I can remember, the woman has worked in the same tavern, washing glasses behind the bar, standing on a kitchen chair to reach the sink. Rumor had it that she'd kept experimenting with drunken men in the shed behind the tavern until she got herself pregnant. She had everything going against her, yet her condition, and the fact that she went through with the pregnancy, did not bring down the wrath of the village. To this day people like to tell appreciative anecdotes — well sprinkled with spicy details — about her deft manipulations in that shed. She gave birth to a healthy boy and has been a model mother ever since. And the boy grew into such a big, powerful, attractive young man that, the circumstances of his conception notwithstanding, people have admired him as living proof of the unpredictable forces and wonder of nature. Consequently, no one found it objectionable when he became friends with the son of one of the village's wealthier farmers. They were inseparable. Leaders and trendsetters among the village young. They remained close even when the midget's son began working as a butcher's apprentice while the other boy went on to high school. It was almost as though they decided on a suicide pact, too, just so they wouldn't have to fight each other for the love of the same woman. Two male animals in whom natural love proved weaker than the need for friendship.

In those years I could gauge the social changes taking place in the village by the changing behavior of my aunts. Until then they had been bent on scrimping and saving. They would rather do without than part with anything that constituted family property. But now, with almost girlish ease, they succumbed to the enticements of the new mercantile spirit. Perhaps they grew tired. Perhaps they feared old age and wanted to keep up with the times.

The village, isolated as it was from its environs, was fast losing its people. In direct ratio to this loss, the number of abandoned farms around the village began to increase. Part of the working population moved away, and others, as if preparing for the same step, began to commute to the city. Lovely vineyards and orchards, as well as much of the farmland, were sold to city dwellers in the market for vacation property. For them this was the only means of converting ill-gotten cash, dubious windfalls, or modest inherited capital — earning next to nothing in state banks — into sound real estate. With their unused capital, city folks bought up the unused land of country folks. Jumping on the bandwagon, my aunts began to sell, too. I tried to convince them that when there is too much money floating around and real estate is the only sensible investment, the thing to do is buy, not sell. First they unloaded a vineyard for a pittance, and later, when my friend was already staying with them, they sold a big slice of the park around the house, in the face of my strenuous objections, of course. They gave me the money and told me to buy a new car. That's how they tried to rationalize an irrational move, but in fact what they were saying was Let everything go, let's lose everything that can still be lost. The new owners weren't much different. They mercilessly uprooted everything. Shrubs, rose gardens, orchards, hundred-year-old lindens and chestnut trees. They wanted to wipe the slate clean; they wanted something of their own. They found great pleasure, after so many years, in doing as they pleased with whatever was their own — even if what they did went against all reason. The long-lasting repudiation of private ownership wreaked havoc not only on state property but on newly repossessed private property as well. Sorry-looking, shoddily built vacation homes sprang up. A large field was turned into a modern campground. The temporary boom prompted people to hold down three different jobs and to break with all forms of traditional activity. The incidence of heart attacks among middle-aged men increased dramatically. And the pastor had to contend with a flock that stayed away from church even on holidays.

After recovering from their shared suicide attempt, the two friends turned into deadly enemies. The young man in the dark suit who would fight back his tears while singing psalms at the gravesite began to pay visits to the minister. First he went there just to chat, but then stayed for Bible class, where he met my friend, and after a time was attending services every Sunday. A group of village youths followed his example. A small circle formed this way, relentlessly hostile to another group, led by the now mute former friend and partner in suicide. This latter group was made up only of motorcyclists, all of them boys. Not exactly a gentle bunch. They drank heavily and got into fights, chased after girls in the campground, blasted their radios, harassed vacationers, broke into vacant summer cottages for wild parties. My friend, for the first time in his life, received holy communion from the minister.

I know very little of the circumstances of his religious conversion. But it was around this time that he befriended the meeker suicidal boy, who, after graduating from high school, was studying to be a mechanic. The two met every afternoon. The young man accompanied my friend on his long walks. If the latter's solitary walks had seemed odd to the villagers, the two of them strolling together in rain or in winter snow was even more baffling. The following year the young man applied to divinity school.

After the funeral I stayed on for almost two weeks. My aunts asked me to. I wasn't conducting an investigation, but I did talk to a number of people. I had no difficulty getting them to open up. After all, they've known me since I was a child. I couldn't be privy to their innermost thoughts, yet my hunch can't be far off the mark. I say this because the young man, who was very modest and shy, and who weighed his words carefully, maintained that, regarding the two of them, my friend had done nothing that would render him impure before God. However, I also found out something the young man had not told me. On one of their winter walks, on the riverbank, the motorcycle gang surprised them from behind. They rode around the two, but as the mute leader roared by, he grabbed my friend by the sleeve and just as quickly let go of him. My friend fell on the stones and bruised his face. As I recall, it must have been shortly after this incident that he said he was afraid one day he might be clubbed to death like a mad dog.

After his death, it took me a year and a half to muster up enough strength to sit down at his table. I found the individual chapters of his life story in separate folders. Most of my time was taken up with the careful study of his notes. From the general outline covering the entire manuscript I could determine the sequence of the chapters, but even after a thorough review of his notes, I haven't been able to decide in what direction he intended to steer his plot. However, I did find one additional, sketchy chapter, a fragment really, that I could not place anywhere. It doesn't appear in any of the repeatedly revised tables of contents. Yet he may have meant it to be the keystone of the whole story.

My work is done. The only thing left for me to do is to append to the text this last fragment.

Escape

Opening night at last.

Snow begins to fall in the afternoon, a soft, thick, slow snow, with only an occasional gust of wind buffeting and stirring up the big moist flakes.

It stuck to the rooftops, covered the grass in the parks, on the roadways and sidewalks.

Hurrying feet and rushing tires soon soiled it with black trails and tracks.

This white snow came much too early; true, our poplar had lost the last dry leaves of its crown, but the foliage of the plane trees on Wörther Platz was still green.

While outside this early snow keeps nicely coming down, in the den one is lying on the narrow sofa, the other is systematically decimating his extensive record collection; squatting in front of the cabinet, he takes every record out of its jacket and, according to some unknown criteria, breaks over his knee the ones he doesn't like.

He didn't answer any of my questions, and I didn't answer any of his.

And even later there was no screaming, cursing, and crying from which to escape with a quick, dramatic, tearfully tender embrace; what there was was irritable bickering, fitful mutterings, quiet indignation, all those closely watched opportunities for bloodless scrapes and bruises, as if by causing each other some deceptively minor pain, they could avoid the greater ones.

So many excuses and pretexts, and not a single word about the things that truly irritated and troubled us both, and made us feel this was too much, more than enough, the very limit.

A few hours later, when they finally left for the theater, it was clear the snow had won: the city had turned all white; snow sat on the bare branches, slowly covered up all the dirty tracks and trails, and put a glistening white cap on the green domes of the plane trees now glowing in the light of streetlamps; all sounds were muffled in the white softness.

That's how blood, pulsing quietly through the eardrum, reports good news.

I thought I was lying to him; I still didn't know then that he was also lying to me.

It wasn't even deliberate lying but rather a way of mutually and systematically keeping quiet about certain things, which is something that can grow, spread, and stifle any intelligent exchange.

He was busy, he said, he was waiting for a telephone call, he'd see the play another time, but I should go, he said, he wanted to be alone at last.

The phone call was true, he was waiting for somebody to call, but I didn't understand what it was he had to be so secretive about.

Everyone is familiar with the kind of reconciliation that, instead of bringing peace, prolongs hostilities; that's how they are walking, sometime later, in the snow, side by side in their warm coats, with their collars turned up, their hands deep in their coat pockets, just walking, seemingly at ease, stepping softly in the wet snow sloshing under their feet.

This semblance of smiling calm is forced on them by their own self-esteem, but their strenuous, defensive self-control is making them very tense, and this tension is the only thing they have in common now, it's their only bond, and it cannot be broken, if only because neither of them is willing to name the real cause of his unease.

They are waiting for the underground at the Senefelderplatz station, and there something very strange happens.

About ten days were left before I was supposed to leave for home, and we never again mentioned my plans to come back here.

The station was empty, and one should also know that these echoing, drafty, bleak stations, built around the turn of the century and therefore having a role in the imagined story as well, were very economically lit, which is to say, they were almost completely dark.

A good distance from them, on the opposite side of the platform, one other passenger was waiting, a lean, shivering figure.

A grubby-looking, self-absorbed boy, attracting attention only because the way he held his shadow-thin yet sharply outlined body showed how cold he was; he hunched up his shoulders, pulled in his neck, pressed his arms to his trunk, and tried to warm his hands by holding them flat against his thighs; he seemed to be standing on tiptoe to keep his feet from touching the cold stone floor; a burning cigarette was dangling from his lips, its occasional red glow the only reassuring sign in all that dimness.

The unlighted, vanishing subway tunnel remained silent and empty for a long time; no train, not even a rumble to hint at its coming, and for me every minute counted; if I wanted to describe this performance, including the details of the entire production process, I couldn't very well miss those very moments in which all that preparation was to culminate.

And then the boy with the cigarette dangling from his mouth started walking toward us.

Or, I should say, heading straight for Melchior.

First I thought they must know each other, though considering the boy's appearance, that was not very likely.

I felt uneasy.

His feet made no sound; he moved with a soft bounce, thrusting his body up in the air with each step, as if in moving forward he also had to move upward as well, and the unpleasant impression he created may have had something to do with the way he wouldn't let the weight of his body drop all the way to his heels; he wore a pair of tattered, slipperlike shoes and no socks; the white of his ankles flashed with each bouncing step.

Socially conscious empathy is invariably bundled up in a nice warm coat.

His pants were tight, rather short, well-worn, and ripped around the knees; his synthetic red jacket was stiff, came barely down to his waist, and made rattling noises, as if frozen, with his every move.

Until now he had been standing with his back to the boy; he reacted to this cold rattling sound, amplified in the vast space of the station.

With a single, elegantly indifferent movement of his shoulders he turns toward the boy; but as he is turning, the boy stops and, with an inexplicably hostile and deranged look, seems ready to pounce on him.

This may be the place to say something about city parks at night; about the shadows under the trees where it's blacker than black, and where strangers signal their hunger for a lustful touch with the intermittent red glow of their cigarettes.

In becoming an animal you cannot sink deeper into yourself than that.

It was hard to decide what he was looking at, maybe at Melchior's neck.

He wasn't drunk.

It seemed as if a tiny goatee blackened his chin, but a closer look revealed that this black spot wasn't facial hair at all but the chin itself, and that some horrible skin disease or blemish covered that entire area; or perhaps it was a black-and-blue mark, the traces of a well-aimed punch or a sudden fall.

Melchior didn't turn pale.

His features, reflecting a total lack of interest in the world around him, merely quivered as he shifted into an entirely different state of mind, yet I did see this as a sudden paleness.

And this subtle shift in his expression told me he didn't know the boy, yet he seemed to discover something very important in him, something so important that realizing it, and the long-dormant joy that came with the realization, terrified him; it was like an irresistible inducement, an idea that could save him; but he didn't want to betray his excitement, and so he remained very controlled.

How can you get deep enough into your memories so that you won't need to remember anything anymore?

But then he did betray himself, because he gave me a quick, cold, withering look that said I was out of my depth, as if I had committed some grave offense, as if I had offended him personally; in a quiet and deep voice, hardly moving his lips, trying in fact to conceal with his mouth the meaning of his words from the boy's wide-eyed stare, he said, Get lost.

Which in his language sounds even harsher.

And I thought: This is how he's getting back at me.

What did you say? I asked sheepishly.

Get lost, get lost, he spat the words at me from behind his clenched teeth, from his throat, his face turning red; then he quickly pulled a cigarette from his pocket, stuck it into his mouth, and started toward the boy.

The boy is waiting for him, on tiptoe, motionless, ready to fight, bending forward.

I didn't understand anything; this new turn of events was already past any kind of surprise, but I was sure there would be a fight, and soon; we were still the only people on the platform, a wind smelling of dank cellars whipped through the empty station.

He walked up very close, almost bending over the boy's burning cigarette, and said something to him that made the boy not only lower himself back on his heels but also take a few awkward steps backward.

But Melchior goes after him, is all over him, and now I feel it's the boy and not Melchior who needs to be protected; but I couldn't see anything except Melchior's back.

Like two madmen facing each other, one more insane than the other; when Melchior says something to him again, the boy leans aside hesitantly, quickly and obligingly snatches the cigarette from his mouth, and with a trembling hand offers its burning end to Melchior.

But during the shaky contact of the cigarettes the burning tobacco must have been dislodged, it fell out and scattered on the concrete platform.

Disregarding this little accident, the boy starts talking, rapidly, feverishly, going on and on; I couldn't make out what he said, something about being cold, he repeated the word "cold" again and again in the echoing darkness.

From the tunnel we heard the rumble of the approaching train.

And if until then there was something uncontrollable and maniacal about Melchior, it now suddenly snapped, got deflated.

It was over, all over.

He fumbles in his pocket, drops a few coins into the boy's open palm, then turns around, disappointed and weary, and starts back toward me.

Now he is tossing his cigarette away, crushing it angrily with his next step.

In the few seconds this unexpected confrontation had taken, he did turn pale, was humiliated, grew angry and desperate — and he came back to me in that state.

And I kept staring at the boy, staring as if the sight itself would provide the explanation; with one hand holding the coins he'd just wheedled out of Melchior, with the other crumbling the cigarette that had gone out, the boy again raised himself on his toes and looked at me accusingly and insistently, disconsolately and reproachfully, as if this whole incident were my fault, yes, mine, and he was ready to rush me, knock me down, and kill me.

And for a fraction of the next second it looked as if he'd really do it.

That's right, look at me, go ahead, keep on looking at me, he screamed at the top of his lungs, managing to overcome the noise of the train roaring into the station.

You think you can buy me off, don't you, he screamed.

In public, like that, he screamed, buy me off in public.

There was no time to think.

Between two screams, in a flash, Melchior tore open the door of the nearest car, shoved me in, jumped after me, and we continued to move away from the raving boy, though still staring at him, mesmerized.

You think there's forgiveness.

We were moving farther inside as the razor-sharp voice of madness penetrated the car with its quietly huddling passengers.

You can't buy forgiveness for a few lousy pennies.

A face marred by huge red pussy pimples; damp, sticky, blond, fuzzy hair of a child, and sensitive blue eyes untouched by his own rage.

A strange god was screaming out of him, a god he had to carry with him wherever he went.

While we kept backing away, seeking protection among passengers who were now raising their heads, the conductress, slovenly and looking bored, emerged from the next car, her hands resting on the leather bag that hung from her neck; she walked in a leisurely way down the platform, past the cars, remaining perfectly calm and unresponsive to this awful screaming; All aboard, she intoned apathetically, though besides the boy there was nobody on the platform, all aboard; how is one to explain the infinite sobriety and shameful orderliness of things?

She shoved the screaming boy out of her way.

He lost his footing and reeled back; but to chalk up a tiny victory, not much, just a modicum of satisfaction, something that even in his profound humiliation could comfort him, for a brief moment at least he rushed to the train, and just before the doors closed he threw into our face — no, not the money — the crumbled, cold cigarette butt; but he missed, and now the refuse ol this little scene was lying at our feet.

When people in the speeding car finally calmed down and were no longer watching us with a reproachful curiosity that did not hide their eagerness for a scandal, when they stopped trying to figure out what we must have done to the unfortunate child, I asked him what that was all about.

He didn't answer.

He stood there motionless, upset, pale; with his hand on the strap he was hiding his eyes from me; he refused to look at me.

Nobody is so sane as not to be touched by the words of a madman.

Holding the strap next to him, I felt as if the senseless mechanical clatter of the train was also jostling me to the verge of madness.

Wheels, tracks.

I'd get off at the next station, without a word, and end it all, leaving everything but everything behind me on those tracks.

Fat chance; I couldn't even bring myself to swallow the pills.

This was not madness, not even close.

In those years the sense of any kind of perspective was missing from me; it was only inside or on the surface of other human bodies that all my words, movements, secret desires, goals, ambitions, and intentions sought fulfillment, gratification, and even redemption.

Yes, I lacked these perspectives, like the awesome, magnificent perspective of madness manifest in a strange deity, because everything I perceived as madness or sinfulness in myself spoke not of the great chaos of nature but only of the ridiculous snags of my upbringing, of the sensual chaos of my youth.

Or maybe it wasn't like that; maybe it was the perspective of the merciful, punishing, and redeeming deity, the one and only, that was missing in me, because what I saw as a touch of grace in me was not part of a grand, divine order but the work of my own petty machinations, spitefulness, and trickery.

I believed that the sense of uncertainty could be eliminated from my life; I was a coward, the sucker of my age, an opportunist feeding on my own life; I believed that anxiety, fear, and the feeling of being an outcast could be assuaged or, by certain acts of the body, even be evaded.

But how can one be familiar with the nearby affairs of men without a perspective on the remote affairs of the gods?

Shit never reaches to the sky; it merely collects and dries up.

Leaning close to his ears I kept repeating the question: What was that all about? was this what he'd been waiting for? was it? I wanted an answer, though I should have held my tongue and been patient.

He'd had enough of the whispering and answered rather loudly: I could see for myself, he asked for a light, a light, it was that simple, except he didn't realize that he'd picked a raving lunatic.

What I felt then inside me was my little sister, the one I'd never see again; I felt her heavy body in mine.

I am like a house with all its doors and windows wide-open; anyone can look in, walk in; anyone can pass through, from anywhere to anywhere else.

I can't take your lies anymore.

He didn't answer.

If he won't answer, I said, I'll get off at the next stop and he'll never see me again.

He swung the arm that was raised to hold the strap and with his elbow struck my face.

From the open window one could look out on a spring afternoon.

And then, opening night, at last; snow began to fall in the afternoon, a soft, thick, slow snow, with only an occasional gust of wind buffeting and stirring up the big moist flakes.

It stuck to the rooftops, covered the grass in the parks, on the roadways and sidewalks.

Hurrying feet and rushing tires soon soiled it with black trails and tracks.

We were on our way to the premiere.

This white snow came much too early; true, our poplar had lost the last dry leaves of its crown, but the foliage of the plane trees on Wörther Platz was still green; a few hours later it was clear the snow had won: the city had turned all white; snow sat on the bare branches, slowly covered up all the dirty tracks and trails, and put a glistening white cap on the green domes of the plane trees now glowing in the light of streetlamps.

She was the only survivor, so I went to see Maria Stein; I wanted to know which one of the two men I should remember as my father, though it didn't really make that much difference.

Last year's weeds grew waist-high; sitting on the embankment, men stripped to the waist were enjoying the breeze in the hot afternoon sun.

The river flowed lazily, forming tiny funnels under their feet; over on the shipyard's island the willows now showed yellow as the branches seemed to be drifting in their own reflections.

It couldn't have been a Sunday, because across the river everything was clattering, hissing, creaking, a giant crane was turning slowly.

First I took the well-trodden trail along the railroad tracks all the way to the Filatori Dam stationhouse; I knew that my father's body was brought here, and he was laid out on the waiting-room bench until the ambulance arrived.

Now the waiting room was cool and empty, they must have used sawdust dampened with oil to clean the floor; a cat scurried by my feet on its way out the door; the long bench stood against the wall.

The curtain moved behind the bars of the ticket window and a woman looked out.

No, thank you, I said, I'm not buying a ticket.

Then what was I doing here?

She must have seen the corpse, I was sure, or at least heard about it.

This is not a lounge but a waiting room reserved for passengers, and if I didn't intend to take a train, I'd better clear out.

In the end I didn't have the courage to ask Maria Stein which one of the two I should consider my father, and later I tried in vain to compare features, to scrutinize my body parts before a mirror.

In Heiligendamm, too, in the hotel room mirror, I was trying to establish my physical origin and intellectual identity; my own nakedness was like an ill-fitting suit; but the policemen weren't knocking on my door because they were interested in the circumstances of Melchior's disappearance; it was the hotel clerk who had found me suspicious, after seeing me come in at an unusual hour and with my face all banged up, and he decided to call the police.

By daybreak the wind had died down.

The only thing I kept thinking about was that I had to deny ever having known Melchior.

They asked to see my papers; I demanded to know the reason for their investigation; they in turn ordered me to pack my things and then took me to the police station in Bad Doberan.

I heard the raging of the sea, although outside there was hardly a breeze.

While huddling in my cold prison cell I decided to face all the consequences of my action, and afterward I'd have the valet kill my friend.

After they returned my passport, apologized for the inconvenience, and requested that I leave their country as soon as possible, I toyed rather wickedly with the idea that in parting I'd tell them all about Melchior's escape; and to make them even happier, I'd tell them that in the valet they'd put an innocent man to death, because I was the murderer.

In the meantime, the sea had calmed down and was gently lapping the shoreline; I was all set and waited for my train.

There was nothing much to see from that bench, so I left the cool waiting room for the warm spring sun outside.

I knew I'd find Maria Stein at home; she was still too scared to leave her apartment, her neighbors did her shopping for her.

She opened the door; the blue sweat suit she was wearing was stretched at the elbows and knees; she was holding a cigarette in her hand.

She didn't recognize me.

The last time she had seen me was at my mother's funeral.

Five years had passed, yes, and I saw her again at Mother's funeral; she'd been let out of prison earlier, but she didn't come to see us.

Or maybe she pretended not to recognize me so she wouldn't have to talk to me.

She led me into the room where they had tormented each other all night long; the bed was still unmade, and from the window you could see the train station.

My father, or the man whose name I carry, said to her. All right, Maria, I understand, I understand everything, and you are right; Maria, all I ask of you is to look out the window.

I'm not asking this for myself, it's for you; I want you to be sure that I'm really leaving.

Will you do it? the man asked.

The woman nodded, though she didn't quite understand.

The man got dressed, the woman put on her robe in the bathroom; without a word the man walked out of the apartment and the woman walked to the window.

But not before taking a look in the mirror; she touched her hair and face with her finger; her hair was gray and looked strange to her, but the skin on her face seemed smooth and tight, and she realized she'd better put on her glasses.

She found them under the bed; now she could see the man better.

As if an empty overcoat were making its way through the waist-high rubble-strewn weeds, on the trail still frozen hard; someone was leaving, was gone, in that cold dawn in the light of a streetlamp.

The first snow that year fell in January.

The woman was happy to see it, was grateful for it, for she kept telling herself all night long in her messed-up bed that it was no use, no use; with every little scream and sigh, with every choked breath, she tried to silence this dreadful inner protest: no, no, no, she couldn't be the wife of a murderer, she just couldn't do it, she didn't want to.

I'll still be your mistress, like before, that I can't deny myself, but nothing more.

I have to raise two children, and I am a madman, he said.

No, nothing more; we'll just make love like animals.

That we don't need, the man said at the very moment he penetrated her, and not for the first time that night.

The word was on her lips all night, but she couldn't say it; instead she said, I couldn't care less about your children.

You're the only one I can say this to, child, she said to me; I didn't tell him that I couldn't be the wife of a murderer.

And she turned her body so the man had no choice but to penetrate her even deeper.

Besides, it wasn't you, it was never you I was in love with, him, always him, and I'm still in love with him, him and nobody else.

János Hamar, with whom Maria Stein was so much in love, left a few months later to take up his post as chargé d'affaires in the Montevideo embassy; he left his light summer suit in our house.

In love, in love, the woman groaned with his every move inside her; all my life I've been in love, and still am, even in prison, that's why I survived, because I never stopped being in love, with him, only with him, I never even thought about you, it was always him, you I only used.

Well, use me.

I always have.

It's also possible that all this didn't happen quite this way.

But one thing is certain: early on the morning of Christmas Day, 1956, the man walked down that dark, rubble-strewn trail and reached the well-lit railroad tracks at the point where the commuter train makes a sharp turn just before entering the Filatori Dam station.

The woman waiting in the window was about to turn her eyes away, there was nothing more to see, when she saw him turn around, pull something from his pocket, and look up, probably trying to find her window.

This became his last wish, that she should see it.

He shot himself through the mouth.

She called me child, but talked to me as if I were not a child, and neither man's son.

From the hints she dropped I could more or less figure out what must have happened between them, though it was much later that I deciphered the meaning of her words; but my childhood experiences did give me some understanding of what is meant by hopeless love.

You're the only one I can say this to, child, she said to me; I didn't tell him that I couldn't be the wife of a murderer.

I couldn't become your stepmother.

If there is some sort of god somewhere, he'll forgive me; honor must be important to him, too.

He knew it two days in advance; he had plenty of time to warn me.

I wouldn't have run away; if they had asked me to, I probably would have turned myself in on my own, because I've always done everything for them; but not like that.

No, not at that price.

My mother earned her living with her body, you know; she was pretty and she was a whore, but she was also a miserable consumptive, a poor man's whore; if she had to, she sold herself for pennies, yet she taught me that you must have your honor.

And if no one ever taught you that, I'll teach it to you right now.

They broke down my door, dragged me out of bed, slashed all the upholstery with knives, though they knew better than anyone they wouldn't find anything, and if they did, it would be something they had planted there themselves, because I gave everything, my whole miserable life, to the cause.

And yet I didn't give them anything; they exist only if there is some sort of god, and there isn't.

If I gave anything, it was to myself; so whatever happened to me, I brought it on myself.

They handcuffed me, woke up the whole building on purpose, wanted everybody to see that even a member of State Security had something to be afraid of; they blindfolded me and got me downstairs from the fifth floor by kicking me all the way, making sure I hit the wall at every landing.

They took him away on Easter morning, in 1949.

The day before, I talked to your mother on the telephone; she told me the forsythia in your garden was in bloom, wasn't it wonderful? we were both ecstatic, spring was here, we chattered away on the phone, even though she also knew.

She knew what was waiting for me in the next three days; I knew it, too, yet it was more than I could imagine.

But I will tell you all about it, child, everything, step by step.

I've never told anyone, and I still can't, I'm still in their clutches; but now I will tell you, I don't care what happens.

I was never a big fish.

She was in charge of the day-to-day maintenance of secret locations used by State Security; she had to make sure that the furnishings and special equipment were in proper order, and that the houses were cleaned, well heated, and the staff well fed.

My rank was much higher than my actual position; the only reason they hauled me in was that they wanted at least one defendant who was involved with the practical end of the operation; I was needed to complete the picture.

She was still sorry she didn't just mow them all down, shoot all the bastards when they came for her.

I had time to reach for my pistol, but I still thought it was all a mistake, a misunderstanding that could easily be cleared up.

They couldn't trick me again, that's for sure.

They watch my every move, you know; I'm on all their lists.

They won't take me back, but I can't leave for good either.

Where would I go, anyway?

The only thing my neighbors know is that I did some time.

But they could start spreading the word anytime that I was still one of them.

She raised a finger to her mouth, stood up, and motioned me to follow her.

We went into the bathroom, which was filthy; she flushed the toilet and turned on all the faucets; there were piles of dirty laundry everywhere.

Giggling, she whispered into my ear that she wouldn't buy their poison from them.

Her lips tickled my ear, her glasses felt cold against my temple.

Luckily, her neighbor knows the score, goes to a different food store every day, she'd never bring milk from the same place twice.

Milk is the easiest to put the stuff in.

When they let her out, they gave her this apartment because it was bugged already.

She turned off the faucets and we went back to the living room.

All right, now listen, all of you, hear the things you all did to me.

I will tell this child everything.

I was like a fly caught by a huge warm hand.

For once you'll hear me out, hear what you've all done to me.

From that moment on she wasn't talking to me, and I also felt as if the two of us were not the only people in the room.

They took her away in a car, the ride was long.

Afterward, judging by the sound, they lifted the grating off a sewer or some other trapdoor and on steep iron stairs led her down what may have been a large water tank.

It couldn't have been any of the houses under her care; this was special treatment, then, to make sure she didn't know where she was.

They waded through knee-deep water, climbed a few stairs, and then they locked her up behind a steel door.

She could hear no sound; she tore off the blindfold with her handcuffed hands and hoped her eyes would get used to the dark.

A few hours must have passed; wherever she reached she touched wet cement; the space she was in felt enormous and every little move produced an echo.

She tried to determine at least the height of the ceiling, so she started yelling.

Later, the steel door opened, people came in, but it remained as dark as before; she tried to get out of their way, but they followed her; there were two of them, they were closing in, she heard the swish of truncheons; she managed to avoid the blows for quite a while.

She came to on a silk-covered sofa.

She thought she was dreaming and in her dream she was in a baroque mansion; she didn't know where she was.

Her instincts told her to pretend she was still asleep; gradually she remembered what had happened to her.

The handcuffs were gone, and this confused her; she sat up.

They must have been keeping an eye on her from somewhere, because the moment she did, the door opened and a woman came in carrying a cup.

It seemed to her that it was late afternoon.

The tea was lukewarm.

She was grateful to the woman for bringing the tea; but as she sipped it, she noticed an odd look on the woman's face, and the tea tasted strange.

The woman smiled, but her look remained cold; she seemed to be very intent, as if waiting for some reaction.

She knew they tried out all sorts of drugs on people here; this she still remembered, but as she tried with her tongue to locate the strange taste in the tea, her mind went blank.

The first thing she remembers after that was a feeling of being very ill; everything was huge and bloated; as soon as she looked at something it began to swell, and from this she concluded that she must be running a high fever.

And all sorts of loud sentences were screaming inside her head.

It seemed to her that she was talking but that she screamed her words, and every word hurt so much she had to open her eyes.

She saw three men standing before her.

One of them held a camera; the moment she budged he started clicking, and after that he wouldn't stop.

She screamed at them, she demanded to know who they were and what they wanted from her, and where was she, and why was she sick; she wanted to see a doctor, wanted to jump out of bed, which was some kind of low couch next to the wall in a large sunlit room full of mirrors; but the three men didn't say a word, they kept out of her way, and the one with the camera took pictures all the time she was having this fit of anger.

First she lost the feeling in her legs, she collapsed, but managed to hold on to a chair; she wanted to grab the camera, but the man photographed that, too.

Then the other two fell on her, punching and kicking, while the third one kept clicking away.

This happened on the second day.

On the third day they pulled her up from the water tank on a rope; she was blindfolded again, and she kept knocking against the iron stairs, but she was glad, because at least she knew where she was, she knew for sure, she heard them slam the steel door.

A long journey followed; they gave her no food or drink, they didn't let her go to urinate; she was so weak she made in her pants.

First she heard the crunch of gravel under the tires, then an iron gate creaked open and they pulled into a closed space, presumably a garage, where the car quickly filled up with the smell of gasoline and exhaust fumes; then with a huge bang they slammed the door shut.

She was overjoyed.

Because if they were going to take her down a winding staircase now, and then along a narrow corridor, where linoleum covered the stone floor to muffle footsteps, and if they were going to shove her into a cell that was like a woodshed, then she knew exactly where she was.

Then they must have brought her back.

Then she was in the house in Eötvös Street, the house she herself had picked out and where she'd supervised every alteration; and then everything was all right, and soon she'd be surrounded by familiar faces.

There was a winding staircase, but no linoleum; there was a woodshed, she could smell the freshly chopped wood and the sulphur smell of coke briquettes, but what her bound hands touched was a damp brick wall.

She was lying on something soft; she kept falling asleep and waking up.

Her lips got so puffy from thirst she couldn't close her mouth; she had no more saliva left, her tongue was sticking to raw, swollen sores.

She tried to relieve the hot throbbing pain by pressing her face against the damp bricks, but there wasn't enough moisture there for her dry tongue.

After a while she managed to work the blindfold loose.

No, it wasn't that house, after all — and then there was no hope.

Very high up she noticed a windowlike opening covered with a plain piece of cardboard; around its edges some light and air seeped through, which meant there was no glass.

In the wall she discovered the sharp edge of a rusty hook; on that she rubbed and scraped the rope used to tie her hands together until she managed to undo it.

Now she had a piece of rope, but it wasn't long enough for a loop and a knot; and besides, there was no place to fasten it.

In her sleep she heard soft music, soothing, lovely music; she was sorry to wake up, but the music continued; it wasn't as lovely as before, more like regular dance music.

She must be hallucinating; she knew that thirst could drive a person mad; she'd lost her mind, then, but not completely, if she was aware of it.

All right, then, she'd gone mad, she just couldn't figure out when it happened.

She even knew she was going to have another fit of anger, she felt it coming on; she was fully aware and felt that she was throwing herself against the wall, and although she had no strength left, she went on slamming herself against the wall.

The music was coming from outside; it got much cooler in the cellar, and no light at all filtered in from anywhere.

It had to be evening.

But she couldn't decide anymore when she was sleeping and when she was hallucinating and seeing images that weren't really there, because the music turned into a little stream in the wall, the trickle became a flow, a flood — a burst pipe, she thought — turning into a roaring, rumbling waterfall; she almost drowned.

The next moment, or a half hour, or two days later — she wasn't sure anymore — she woke up thinking that everything was all right; with her finger she was trying to scoop out wet plaster from the spaces between the bricks.

She even managed to clamber up all the way to the window, but just at that moment the music started playing again and that made her fall back.

But she didn't give up; she tried once more, and with the tip of her finger, with her nail, she reached the edge of the cardboard over the opening.

The cardboard was fastened to the wall, but she kept jabbing and prodding it until she moved it, and then it simply fell down.

She looked out on a terrace lit by colorful Chinese lanterns; people dressed for the evening were dancing to this same music, and on a staircase leading to a dark garden two men were talking in a foreign language with a beautiful young woman.

She wore a colorful print dress, her expression seemed serious.

If after a short while they hadn't come for her and walked her up the same staircase, and if the two men and the young woman hadn't let them pass as casually as they did, and if she hadn't been led across the dance floor on the way to another part of the same house, then she would still be convinced that this garden party with the Chinese lanterns was one of her hallucinations.

From the smells, the overheard foreign words, the look and shape of ordinary objects, she surmised that they had taken her across the border, and they were somewhere near Bratislava.

First they showed me your father's signature; I had to read his official testimony, and then a statement by János Hamar confirming the accuracy of that testimony.

Two men sat facing me in comfortable armchairs.

I told them this wasn't true.

They acted surprised; why wouldn't it be true, they said, and chuckled, and interrupting each other, they kept making pointed and vulgar references to my relationship with both men.

Either they are lying or you tortured them, too, or they've gone mad; there's no other possibility, and that is all I have to say about this.

There was a glass of water on the table in front of them.

One of them said, We've prepared a statement, if you sign it, you may drink the water.

I told them there was no interrogation, no statement, how could I sign anything?

The other man gave a signal and I was dragged out through a side door.

As soon as the door closed behind us, they started beating me; they shoved me into a bathtub, poured hot water on me, struck me with the shower head, called me a spy, a traitor, and said, Now you can drink all you want, you slut.

When I came to, I was in the cellar, but they soon dragged me upstairs again.

Not much time could have passed, because my clothes were still sopping wet and I could still hear the music.

This time they didn't lead me across the terrace but up the spiral staircase, through the garage, and into the garden; we probably used the main entrance this time.

They brought me to a very small room with only a large desk and a chair in it.

A blond young man was sitting behind the desk, by the cozy light of a lamp; even from here the music could be heard.

As soon as I walked in, he jumped up and seemed quite happy to see me, as if he had been waiting for me for a long time; but he greeted me in French, asked me to sit down in French, and expressed his indignation in French that contrary to his strict instructions I'd been treated this way.

From that moment on everything would be different, that he could promise me.

I asked him why we had to speak in French.

The odd thing was that he sounded pretty sincere, and I let myself be a bit hopeful, that maybe I was in good hands, after all.

He spread his arm apologetically and said that French was the only language we had in common and it was very important that we understood each other well.

I insisted on knowing how he knew I spoke French.

Come on, Comrade Stein, we know everything about you.

When your friend was released from jail, in May 1935, and he confessed to you that the secret police got him to work for them, you neglected to report this very significant fact, didn't you? the two of you left for Paris and returned only after the German occupation, with false passports, on Party instructions, if I'm not mistaken.

That's almost how it happened, except my friend was not recruited by any kind of secret police, and he didn't confess anything to me, consequently I had nothing to report, and we went to Paris because we were out of work, we had nothing to eat.

Let's not waste time on meaningless quibbles, he said, let's get to the point.

It was his solemn duty to convey a request, and it was only a request, nothing more, made by Comrade Stalin himself and addressed directly to Comrade Stein.

It consisted of only six words:

Do not be stubborn, Comrade Stein.

She had to think a long time, because on this third day nothing could happen that would still strike her as improbable; and as she kept looking at the face of this blond young man, she realized that this was the request she'd been waiting for all her life.

If this is truly how things stand, she said, then Maria Stein would like Comrade Stalin to know that in the given circumstances his request cannot be granted.

And the blond young man was not at all surprised by her reply.

He leaned all the way across the table, kept nodding and staring at her for a long time, and then, in a very quiet, very threatening voice, asked if Maria Stein really believed they could find anyone crazy enough to deliver such an impertinent message.

Stars shone brightly in the spring sky; it was getting chilly.

I knew I just had to get up sometime; she also, stood up but didn't stop talking; later, I walked across her room, and she came after me and continued talking.

I walked into the hallway; I already opened the door for you, she said; I looked back at her, and she was still talking and didn't even lower her voice.

I closed the door and began running toward the staircase, still hearing her voice; I ran down the stairs and out of the building, and on the trail continued to run toward the railroad tracks, where just then a well-lit but empty train was screeching terribly as it made its turn.

It was getting late.

The yellowish light of streetlamps cast a soft, festive shine on all that whiteness.

The snow's reflected light made the sky look lighter, yellower, and wider, the softness of the glow toning down every sound; on high, from behind the thinning edges of the dark slow-moving clouds every now and then the moon showed its cold face.

It must have been around midnight when I got back to the flat on Wörther Platz.

In the lobby I shook the snow off my shoes; I didn't turn on the light in the stairwell.

As though anyone, at any time, even at a late hour like this, could demand to know what I was doing here.

First feeling and moving aside the tongue-like lid over the opening, I carefully slipped my key into the lock.

Not to wake him, should he already be asleep.

The door lock snapped back in the dark, that was all the noise I made.

Careful not to make the floor creak, I reached the coatrack almost without a sound, when he called out from the bedroom that he wasn't asleep.

I sensed that he had left the bedroom door open because he wanted to see me.

Yet he didn't want to pretend to be asleep, either; he himself would have been offended by such a pretense.

I hung up my coat and walked in.

It was a pleasant feeling to be bringing in the chill of the snow and the smell of winter.

The bed creaked as he made a move; I could see nothing in the dark, but assumed he was making room for me. I sat down at the edge of his bed.

We were silent, but it was a bad silence, the kind one should never get into, even if the conversation replacing it is forced or trivial.

He finally broke the silence and in a hollow voice said he wanted to apologize for hitting me; he was truly ashamed, and he'd like to explain.

I didn't want his explanation, or, I should say, I didn't feel I was ready for it; I asked him instead what he had thought of the performance.

He couldn't say that he liked it or that he didn't; it just didn't do anything for him, he said.

And Thea?

She wasn't bad, he said vaguely; she was probably the best of the lot, but he couldn't feel sorry for her, or hate her, or admire her; nothing.

I asked him why he had run away.

He didn't run away, he just wanted to come home.

But why did he leave me there, why didn't he wait for me?

He could see we needed each other, she and I; he didn't want to disturb us with his presence.

I couldn't leave her there, I said; Arno had moved out, for good this time, and he didn't leave anything in the apartment, not a pencil, not a handkerchief; but it had nothing to do with me.

He lay silently on his bed, and I sat just as silently in the dark.

And then, as if he had heard nothing of what I told him, or found nothing new in the little that he did hear, an episode in a life that no longer concerned him, he continued where I had interrupted him before; he would like to tell me something, he said, a simple thing, really, but also difficult, he couldn't tell me here, could we go for a walk?

Now, I asked, go for a walk now? in the cold? for I really wanted to skip the explanations.

Yes, now, he said.

The night wasn't even that cold.

We took our time; with slow, leisurely steps we walked all the way to Senefelderplatz and crossed the silent Schönhauserallee, and where Fehrbellinerstrasse touches Zionskircheplatz, we turned and went along Anklammerstrasse and then followed Ackerstrasse, until the street came to an end.

On our nocturnal walks we never chose this route, because we'd find ourselves facing the Wall.

While we were walking, I looked at the streets, stores, and houses with the eyes of a professional, as if all this were only the locale of my invented story and not a place where my own life was unfolding.

I plundered my own time, and wasn't displeased with the looted treasures of an imagined past, for it stopped me from being overwhelmed by the present.

Along this stretch of the street the Wall was also the brick wall of an old cemetery, and beyond it, in a mined, floodlit no-man's-land, stood the burned-out skeleton of a church destroyed during the war, the Versöhnungskirche, the Church of Reconciliation.

It was beautiful how the moon shone through the bare ribs of the bell tower, penetrated the hollow nave, and made some broken pieces of stained glass glimmer in the rose window.

Yes, it was very beautiful.

The two friends were standing next to each other and watched both the church and the moon.

A little farther away, a border guard's footsteps sloshed softly in the wet snow.

They saw the guard; he took four steps in front of his booth, then four steps back; and he noticed them, too.

The whole scene was so strange, I almost forgot Melchior might have something bad to tell me.

Very gently he lowered his arm onto my shoulder; his face was lit by three different lights: the moon, the yellow streetlamp, and the floodlight, but they cast no shadows, for all three sources of light were also reflected by the snow; and still, it wasn't light around us, there was only the glimmering of a many-colored darkness.

So I'm leaving, he said quietly, it's all arranged; two-thirds of the cost, twelve thousand marks, has already been paid; for ten days he'd been waiting for the confirming message.

He was waiting for a phone call, after which he'd have to go for a walk; he'll be followed, will meet a man smoking a cigarette who will be heading straight for him; he'll have to ask the man for a light, and the man will say he doesn't have his lighter on him, but he'll gladly help.

It was a good thing he left the theater in such a hurry; as soon as he got home he received the phone call and he did what he was supposed to do.

That's why he'd asked that crazy boy for a light, he thought he had botched something along the way; there was no phone call yet, it was only the tension that made him do it, I must understand; what with all that waiting, he had a hard time controlling himself, that's how it happened, I shouldn't be angry with him, that's why he hit me.

I don't know when he lifted his arm off my shoulder.

But why do we have to do this here? I whispered; let's get away from here; why here?

The guard didn't come closer, but after every four steps he stopped and looked at us.

I'm still at home, he said in his familiar old voice.

Yes, at home, I repeated.

It wasn't that he was afraid to tell me any of it; he wouldn't want to do it as originally planned.

He wouldn't want to leave without a word of explanation.

He won't say goodbye to anyone else, won't remove anything from his apartment; he's written out a will, but they'll confiscate all his things, anyway, let them! so it was a kind of symbolic will, and he wants me to take it, but only after he's left.

Maybe he'd go to see his mother one more time, but he won't tell her either; it would be nice if I went with him — but not if it's too hard for me — because with me there it would be easier to keep quiet about all this.

He's supposed to get his last instructions three days from now, and by then he won't have time for anything.

That's why he was telling me these things now.

I don't quite know when we turned away from each other and looked only at the moon; I said he didn't need to be concerned about me.

In the next three days I would do whatever he wanted me to, whatever was for the best.

I shouldn't have said this, because it may have sounded like a quiet reproach.

We fell silent again.

Then I said, the quotation may not be exact, but according to Tacitus, Germanic people have this belief that fateful enterprises should be embarked upon under a full moon.

Those barbarians, he said, and we both laughed.

And then a tentative, quickly and mutually checked movement of ours made me understand why he had to tell me this here, at the Wall, in this light, within sight and earshot of the guard: we couldn't touch each other anymore.

I said I'd better go back to Schöneweide now.

He thought it was a good idea; he'd call me, he said.

By the following morning most of the snow had disappeared; dry, windy days followed, at night the mercury dropped below freezing.

I was sitting in the Kühnerts' apartment, on the second floor of the house on Steffelbauerstrasse; I left every door open and was mulling over all sorts of crazy plans.

The last hours of the third night we spent together; we sat up in his flat as in some waiting room.

We did not turn on the lamp or light a candle; now and again he said something from his armchair, now and then I did from mine.

At three-thirty in the morning the telephone rang three times; before the fourth ring he was to pick up the receiver but not say anything; according to the prearranged plan the person at the other end had to hang up first.

Exactly five minutes later there was a single ring and that meant that everything was all right.

We got up, put on our coats, he locked the flat.

In the lobby downstairs he picked up the trash-can lid and casually dropped in his keys.

He was still playing with the fear that gripped us both.

In the glass-enclosed Alexanderplatz station we took the city line that went out to Königswusterhausen.

When we got to Schöneweide I touched his elbow and got off; I didn't look back at the disappearing train.

He had to stay on till Eichenwalde.

They were waiting for him at the Liebermann Strasse cemetery, and from there he was taken, on Route E8, to the Helmstedt — Marienborn crossing, where, in a sealed casket, with documents certifying that the casket contained a disinterred body, he was shipped across the border.

It was raining.

In the evenings I'd walk to the theater; on the soppy carpet of fallen leaves the soles of my patent-leather shoes would soak through a little.

In the abandoned apartment the refrigerator kept humming quietly; when I opened its door, the bulb lit up helpfully as if nothing had happened.

The telegram contained only three words, which in my language is a single word.

Arrived.

The next day I left for Heiligendamm.

I did not take the police warning seriously; I waited until my visa expired, until the very last day.

Two years later, in a picture postcard filled with tiny letters, he informed me that he was married, his grandparents had died, unfortunately; their little girl was a month and a half old.

The postcard showed the Atlantic Ocean and nothing else, only angry waves reaching all the way to a blank horizon; but according to the printed inscription the picture was taken at Arcachon.

He hadn't written a poem in a long time and was less given to deep thoughts; he was a wine supplier, dealing exclusively in red wine; he was happy, though he didn't smile as much anymore.

And the other one was standing, still in a strange house, with this news in his hand, looking now at the written side of the card, now at the picture.

So it was that simple.

That's what he was thinking, that it was that simple.

That simple, yes, everything was that simple.