A Book of Memories by Péter Nádas Read Free Book Online Page A

in advance, in the brief lulls between spells of fever, would ultimately, when I first got up and went to the window, make me feel light, cool, and clean, and also mildly disappointed, for though the swaying tree branches might seem to be lunging at me, their soft, leafy palms ready to snatch me away, I could see that nothing had changed on the street, nothing and no one had been disturbed by my illness, my room had not been transformed into a vast hall reverberating with the footfalls of giants; everything looked as it should—even friendlier and more familiar, actually, because the objects no longer evoked unpleasant memories associated with events thought to be long past—everything was safe and sound and exactly, almost indifferently, in place; it was some such release or cleansing I kept yearning for, though for those embarrassing and shameful reveries of mine I knew I'd have to find the remedy myself.
    That day, having completed our fresh-air treatment, we first began to walk toward the station, and in this not even I, conditioned though I was by the very uneventfulness of our lives to notice the subtlest of changes, saw anything out of the ordinary, though Father, slightly out of breath, did stop the exercise a little before the prescribed time and, as if he had just gone through a terrible ordeal, leaned his pleasantly ample body against the stone parapet and with ironic self-satisfaction looked back at Mother; he meant to turn toward the sea, but could not resist looking back, which wasn't something unusual, either; he always did that, for the sea, which Mother invariably referred to as "enchanting," like the sights of nature in general, bored Father no less than these ludicrous breathing exercises; what was there to look at, anyway; "As far as I'm concerned, my dear, this is nothing but a large body of empty water," he would opine, unless a ship happened to move across the horizon, for then he could play at guessing its stupefyingly slow progress by picking a "reasonably fixed" point onshore, establishing its angle to the ship's original position, and then gauging the changes in the angle: "It has moved twelve degrees to the west," he might cry out unexpectedly, and on occasion he would also offer rhetorical remarks about the relativities observable in the trajectory of human existence; but just as he never expected us to follow the trends of his thoughts —"Human thoughts are for the most part the by-products of basic life functions," he claimed, "because the brain, like the stomach, needs always to be fed with stuff it likes to digest, and the mouth, let's not condemn it for this, merely brings up bits of this ill-chewed stuff'—Father was gracious enough, when his own temper didn't get the best of him, not to spoil other people's pleasures, and, indeed, made it clear that it was the plain sight of human pleasures and exertions that he found most interesting and entertaining, that were the very objects of his delight; and perhaps it was his lack of interest in natural phenomena that might explain why he was attracted to everything that was coarse, common, and lowly, experiencing the broadly and universally elemental through the raw, cruder forces of human nature and thus for him everything refined and sophisticated served only the purpose of concealing its own true essence and was therefore worthy only of anger and biting scorn—"Theodor, you are simply insufferable," Mother would say to him at times, clearly annoyed, though she must have been pleased if pained to know that her ingrained habits, to which she clung tenaciously, were being continuously exposed; but there was something alarmingly two-faced in Father's behavior, because he was reluctant to formulate a clear-cut, straightforward opinion about anything, though he did have opinions, very definite ones, about everything, but pretending to be indecisive and impressionable, he agreed with everyone about everything—oh no, he wasn't going to argue, he