WHEN ON WEDNESDAY
THERE WERE NO IFS, ands, or buts about it, Sunday lunch had to be served punctually at noon. When the church bell rang out, the boiling hot soup had to be on the table. Not that Grandad wanted it like that. I’m referring to my maternal grandfather, Grandad Tauber. I knew him; he wouldn’t have minded it at one and lukewarm, such things were of no concern to him. Besides, he hardly ate. He hardly spoke, and even then, he kept it brief. When he stood up from the table, he gave thanks for the lunch with a nod of the head, though there was no knowing who the thanks was meant for. It may have been meant for my grandmother, or Grandad may have been thinking of God, someone’s god, I honestly don’t know. I never saw him show the slightest interest in any of the worldly vanities. He was ethereal, all skin and bones. When he pulled me close, when he threw me up in the air, fly, Péter, fly, whoosh, there you go, and then as I came falling back down and he caught me after all, the little bird is falling down, I was very close to the bare skeleton that was my grandfather; even now I can feel his bony arms against my limbs. Except I can’t understand how in his inordinate joy that falling little bird could have escaped his lips, even once. A little bird comes falling down when the hunter shoots it or its legs get frozen in the extreme cold of winter.
Grandad was sparing of his emotions and I never saw him lose his temper. At most he gave more than usual emphasis to things through his humor. Still, underneath that stoic facade there lurked something ominous and threatening, and his daughters were right to fear him, and I feared him too, quite a bit, even though I honestly couldn’t imagine what would happen were he to lose control, just once. When he took offense his eyes shot off sparks, his cheeks turned crimson, but he never lost control; rather, he indulgently lowered his eyelids over his anger, like one who instantly thinks better of it and willingly turns a blind eye to what is taking place inside him.
My flight took longer than my fall, as if it would never end, that’s what it felt like, and I even caught my breath; the wish to suffocate, possibly that’s why I wanted him to make me fly; I came to only as I fell back down and he cradled me in his bony arms. Then again. Or else he rocked me on his knee, a game he must surely have enjoyed in his own way, though it must have bored him too, terribly. The rider had to sit securely in the saddle while the horse tossed him about, this was the rule of the game, the horse snorted, the horse bucked. Grandad simulated the chance occurrence, he mimicked randomness with his knee, and since I reacted to his efforts with good reflexes and good rhythm, because I knew what he was up to, I knew what he hoped to make me understand, he enjoyed the effect and roared with laughter.
He laughed silently, he roared with laughter silently, lips agape, in his delight raising his eyes up to the sky. Good. The boy’s got good reflexes. I’ve never seen the likes of it, laughing without a sound.
He must have needed as much self-restraint for our game as I, except our self-restraint had different objects. Now when I think back on the details of the scene, replaying it each morning, tasting it, trying to make sense of it, as a result of which yet more details unfold one from the other and hook up to other, even more remote details, I can’t help thinking that Grandad must have made a great point of keeping pleasure at bay. He didn’t give in easily. I had to beg him, wiggle my way in between his knees, and when he succumbed, when I found myself wrapped inside the live current of his body’s warmth, his resistance melted and he picked me up onto his knee, though even then he held off, he continued aloof and surrendered to our proximity only under strict control. Surely the monotony, the mimetic nature of the game, the ritual must have bored him, I can see that now. For my part, I had to endure the sharp edges of his knees and the protruding bones. It hurt. Enduring the pain in the interest of the pleasure hurt. Imitation bores me, too; pretense latches on to it with all its amorphous parts. Still, the pleasure of the game outweighed the humiliation felt over the mimesis.
And also, there was the pleasure of persevering. The pleasure of the breath stuck inside, an advance on suffocation, and Grandad’s silent laughter.
Grandad laughed into the air, but his laughter lacked air; his stubborn asthma may have been the cause. The slightest exertion made him gasp for air, his lungs wheezed; the doctors call it labored breathing. Doctors say that asthma is the disease of renunciation, of denial, of self-denial. Marcel Proust also suffered from asthma, though at the time his doctors did not yet recognize the psychological character of his illness. And if Proust and my grandfather suffered from the same disease, there’s no knowing what an anti-mimetic person must be like, one who does not deny himself to himself and is free of all pretense. Surely, a man like that mimes only his most intrinsic traits, those most characteristic of him. On the other hand, what would be the use. This is what Grandad must have thought during the last ten years of his life. Besides, after a while you’re bored with the thing that gives you pleasure, but you feel you’ve run out of options. The skin that stretched across the area just above his temples glistened, the thick veins curled and coiled on the backs of his hands. These veins fascinated me. Even when I was a child, their outlines and function thrilled me. To be perfectly frank, they repelled me. I dared hardly consider all the things that might be happening in the body under the epidermis, in the arteries, the heart, the groin, the lungs, the intestines, and the awe I felt at the regularity of their function made me shudder. I shuddered at the miracle of such consistency of function, and this shudder excited me. I had to be on guard lest this spiraling admiration of nature sweep me along. In my family, the path to romantic self-adulation came with a stop sign.
Grandad said I should press the veins with my finger and attend to the beating of his heart. Grandad and I attended to his pulse with equal amazement, and with this trick, the beating of his heart, or else by following his pulse with the help of his pocket watch, with the precision of the ticking in my ear and the rhythmic palpitation, he succeeded in diverting my attention. We followed the hand showing the seconds, we counted the beating of his heart until I had regained my composure. This is how I first learned to count to ten, I think; this is how I learned to relinquish the frenzy, to calm down, let the steam out of the valve. He didn’t always let me, but from time to time I could coax the knotty veins on his temples from their place, after which they’d slide back only very, very slowly.
Grandad must have felt trapped, freed from one burdensome duty, the game, only to be followed by this other game.
He did not play cards, he did not play chess. When we stayed at the house in Göd, which the old man bought with the help of the members of the Workers’ Physical Training Association on whose vacation grounds it was located and which everyone jokingly called the Tauber Villa; in short, even there, every afternoon, when the young people were off playing volleyball, Grandad would sit wearing his antiquated, formfitting swimming costume and his unruffled smile, and watch them from the timber terrace shaded by the leaves of the woodbine.
Also, he rarely joined us for a swim.
The small house stood on poles in order to keep the floodwaters at bay. On the other hand, this turned it into a sound box. You couldn’t budge without it reverberating and booming, rumbling and thundering, and since many similar houses lined the riverbank, the riverbank rumbled and thundered too, from early morning till late at night.
They did not say that they were off for a swim; they said they were off for a dip.
We took a dip.
They hiked up a well-trodden footpath that ran along the riverbank and cut through the grassy thicket as it led up to Vác, then they swam at their leisure, entrusting themselves to the indolent current to bring them back down. Meanwhile they chatted leisurely on the surface of the sun-drenched water, as the water carried their voices afar, just as it carried the strains of the rumbling afar, too.
The riverbank on the other side brought their voices back.
We trickled back down, that’s the expression they used.
Also, it was Grandad who taught me to play Mikado one wintry afternoon. It may have been the only game that interested him. Letting the sticks, their value determined by the different colored stripes painted on them, the Mandarin, the Bonzen, the Samurai, the Kuli, fall from your hand, then retrieving them from the pile one by one with the help of two other sticks, rolling them with great care, standing them up with your finger pressed down on the pointed end, or retrieving them with the two pointed ends pressed between your fingers, but so the other sticks shouldn’t respond, they shouldn’t stir, they shouldn’t so much as quiver from the change. Not just see but, for all intents and purposes, intuit beforehand the position of the stick you’ve chosen to pull from the pack. Also, to control your breathing so the operation shouldn’t fail because of some slight inadvertent movement.
Grandad was also the first to teach me that you should let out the air beforehand, only then can you hold your breath securely. If you hold it with your lungs full, the effort will make your hand shake. A decade and a half later, when I studied photography with a handheld camera and had to increase the exposure time without recourse to a tripod or support of any kind, I had to familiarize myself with this experience all over again.
When I was already familiar with it.
Grandad also taught me to play dominoes. Which made for two silent games.
Copyright © 2017 by Péter Nádas
English translation copyright © 2023 by Judith Sollosy
