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

deeply respected everyone's right to an opinion, he merely weighed the pros and cons and, almost as if searching for evidence to support other people's assertions, put things in the conditional mood and posed his unwieldy questions so awkwardly that acquaintances, aware always of his ungainly, larger-than-average build, thought him charming; "Pardon me, my dear Thoenissen," Privy Councillor Frick was wont to say, "but with such thighs and such a barrel chest, you cannot help being a democrat," or as Fräulein Wohlgast put it, "Our Thoenissen is playing the clumsy bear cub again"—counting on and enjoying this kind of reaction, Father kept on fussing until the whole edifice of the argument gently collapsed, without offending anyone, almost as if by itself; but at other times he wasn't so circumspect and would greet an assertion with such boisterous enthusiasm, such resounding astonishment (my ghost story was a case in point), and inundate it with such a fierce and exalted torrent of words which like all effusiveness had a certain childlike appeal, and go on to exaggerate, color, and embellish every little detail to such an extent that the statement completely lost its original dimensions, a riotous imagination inflated it into a monster of such absurd proportions that it lifted off, away from any notion of reality, no longer fitting into or connected to anything; Father showed no mercy in this game of his but kept embroidering and intensifying it until the original idea, the modest casing of reality, became so fatally distended that it burst from the pressure of its own emptiness; of course it wasn't these dubious if entertaining flights of fancy that so upset my mother—I think that words, insofar as they went beyond polite clichés and the vernacular of daily concerns, remained out of her grasp, so the subtleties of Father's verbal games were bound to elude her, by which I don't mean to imply that she was dull or limited, though alas the opposite wasn't true either, if only because her strict puritanical upbringing, or perhaps her inherently rigid and repressed nature, had made it impossible for her to realize her intellectual potential or to develop her other, emotional-physical sensibilities, so that everything about her was disturbingly unfinished, much like her life itself, and for that reason it probably would have been more appropriate if on her eternal resting place, instead of a winged angel tearing at her breast, Father had erected a statue of something more fitting, more dignified, for there was certainly nothing angelically feminine about Mother, and if we must dwell on this banal symbolism, picture a delicate pedestal supporting a densely fluted marble pillar that is brutally broken asunder, its ragged fissure exposing the stone's coarse inner texture, contrasting sharply with the finely polished exterior: this would have been a more apt representation, one that would have impressed me each time I visited her grave.
    On my long walks back home (if I may still refer to the city of my birth as home), having had my fill of the narrow, chaotically bustling streets, I enjoyed cutting across the old city and resting my gaze on the fields stretching into the distance beyond the city gate, where I'd turn precisely and purposefully in the direction where, over the hills, I could make out Ludwigsdorf, the village that Hilde and I used to visit every Saturday afternoon; even though spending time in the cemetery was never part of my plans, I could not escape its attraction, and it also happened to be on the way, though I could have avoided it by not taking Finstertorstrasse, but it was so tempting to walk through the crumbling brick fence with little shrubs sprouting in the cracks and, like a frequent visitor, feeling at ease and glad to have returned, to roam about the moldering, weed-ridden crypts and bright, flower-covered mounds in this ancient cemetery until, finally, coming to our winged angel that was destined,