After a time I felt my heart beating regularly again. I could feel the whole mechanism working, the way I saw in the panopticum at Nyíregyháza when I was a girl. They had an image of a dying pope there, made of wax. A machine was working his heart. That was the way I felt when my heart started beating again.
I looked up at him, and I wanted him to say something, not having the strength to speak myself. But he already knew the danger was past.
“Have you ever had a sexually transmitted disease?” he asked in a friendly manner.
The question didn’t scare me, didn’t even offend me. It sounded perfectly natural, like everything he said. I made a gesture to say that I hadn’t, knowing it was pointless telling him a lie as he would immediately see through it. Then he asked me how many cigarettes I smoked in a day. But, you know, I wasn’t smoking back then, or at least not continually, the way I do nowadays in Rome. It’s only here I started smoking recklessly, puffing away at that acrid American tobacco. Back then I only lit up after a meal now and then. I told him that too.
“What caused this?” I asked, putting my hand on my breast in the region of my heart. I felt very weak. “What was it? I have never felt anything like it before.”
He gave me a careful look. “It is the shock of the body remembering,” he said.
But he didn’t say what it was the body was remembering. He carried on looking at me for a while, then stood up and, with slow faltering steps, as if limping, went into the other room and closed the door behind him. I was left alone.
. . .
There were times later when he would leave me alone like that, morning or evening, at any time, because after a while, without any formal arrangement, I moved in. He gave me a key without thinking twice about it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. There was a woman who came to clean for him, sometimes even cook. But she didn’t have to tidy after him. Everything was perfectly accommodating … even the apartment, those handsome, well-proportioned rooms with their old Viennese furniture. There was nothing particularly grand about the place: it was just three rooms on the fifth floor of a relatively new block. One of the rooms was filled with books.
When I first arrived he treated me as a guest. He would produce delicious tidbits out of some invisible pantry, such as tinned sea crab. While everyone else was living off beans he treated me to tinned pineapples. He even offered me vintage brandy. He never drank any himself, but he did store wine. He had a personal collection of the great wines of France, of Germany, of Burgundy, of the Rhine, and all the best Hungarian regions, the bottles covered in cobwebs. He collected rare wines the way other people did postage stamps or fine porcelain. And when he opened one of these bottles, he would examine it with rapt attention, tasting the wine like a pagan priest preparing for sacrifice. He would offer me a glass now and then — a little resentfully, I thought, as if he didn’t think me quite worthy of the wine. He preferred to pour me brandy. Wine was not a woman’s drink, he said.
He could surprise me with his opinions. He was generally a little fixed in his views, like an old person who no longer wants to argue about things.
I was also surprised at how tidy his personal things were. I mean his cupboards, his drawers, and the shelves where he kept his manuscripts and books. It wasn’t the cleaning woman who was responsible for that, but he himself. He positively radiated order: he was quite obsessive about it. He wouldn’t let ashes or cigarette butts pile up in the ashtray. Every half hour he would empty it into a bronze bucket that he himself would tip into the general waste in the evening. His writing desk was as neat as a draftsman’s in an engineer’s office. I never once saw him move furniture about, but whenever I got there it looked as if the cleaning woman had just left. The order was within him, in his person and in his life. But that was something I understood only later, and even now I don’t know whether I really understood it. It was an artificial, not a living, order, if you know what I mean. It was precisely because the world outside was falling to pieces that he was so determined to maintain his own internal sense of order. It was a last line of defense against external chaos, a little personal revolt. As I said, I don’t really understand it even now. I’m just telling you.
I slept that night with a proper, regular heart. He was right: the body was remembering something. But what? I didn’t know then, but I can explain it now … He reminded me of my husband. I hadn’t thought of him in a very long time, not having seen him for years, never having wanted to see him. I imagined I had forgotten him. But my skin, my organs, and indeed my heart had not forgotten. And when I entered the life of this bald man who had been my husband’s close friend, my body instantly started remembering. Everything about him reminded me of my husband. There was something about the way this bald, silent figure had appeared out of nothing. He was like an ill-tempered, indifferent magician who is no longer interested in magic or tricks. It took me some time to understand why I was drawn to him, and what it was I remembered.
It was like a dream then, everything strangely dreamlike. People were being rounded up like dogs. Rounded up and murdered. Houses were collapsing. The churches were as crowded as the beaches had been.
Very few people remained in their homes, so there was nothing particularly odd about me going in and out of another person’s apartment, but I knew I had to be careful and not make any mistakes or else he’d throw me out. Or he would disappear at the very worst moment of the war and leave me there alone. I knew that if I tried to seduce him or made myself too agreeable, he would simply open the door, and who knows where I’d finish up. I also knew there was nothing I could do to help him, simply because he didn’t need anything. He was one of those unfortunates who can tolerate anything, any kind of deprivation or humiliation, who can put up with anything except the idea of being helped.
What’s that? Was he a snob? Of course he was, among other things, a snob. He couldn’t stand being helped because he was solitary and a snob. Later I understood that there was something under this snobbish manner of his. He was protecting something — not himself, no; he was trying to preserve a culture. It’s not funny. I expect you’re thinking of those olives. That’s why you’re laughing? We proles, we don’t really get the idea of “culture,” sweetheart. We think it’s a matter of being able to quote things, of being fussy, of not spitting on the floor or belching when we’re eating, that kind of thing. But that’s not culture; it’s not a matter of reading up and learning facts. It’s not even a matter of learning how to behave. It’s something else. It was this other idea of culture he was wanting to protect. He didn’t want me to help him, because he no longer believed in people.
For a while I thought it was his work he wanted to protect. It’s a lousy enough world to protect your work against. But when I got to know him, I was astonished to discover that he had completely stopped working.
So what did he do? you ask. He just read and walked. It might be hard for you to understand this, you being a born artist, a proper professional drummer. You can’t imagine life without drumming. But he was a writer, a writer who no longer wanted to write because he no longer believed that writing could change human nature. It’s not that he was a revolutionary: he didn’t want to change the world in that way, because he didn’t believe human nature could be changed by revolutions. One time he happened to mention that it wasn’t worth changing society because people would be exactly the same after as before. It was something else he wanted. It was himself he wanted to change.