The booming seemed to gush out with my sobs; I didn't know why I was crying, I didn't want to cry, I didn't want him to feel, or for the two of them to see, what was happening, because it was my impurity that was flowing out of me in those tears; and while I was still struggling with myself, entrusting my body to him, the turbulence in his body came to an end.
Tenderness seemed to be carried along by capillary-like tributaries, by swift underground rivulets, and driven out of the honeycombed darkness of the body, it surfaced as inert strength, strength of the arms, the loins, as a trembling of the thighs; nothing more was happening, nothing was changing anymore; he was holding me in his embrace with the gentle strength of his tenderness, and at the same time his sources had dried up, nothing more was flowing from him into me, he became like silence itself.
I don't know how long Father had been standing in the open door.
I had my back to the door and was the last to notice him — when the vanishing tenderness made me realize that something had happened behind my back.
Above my head he was looking at Father.
Mother was standing in front of her bed, about to reach for her robe flung over the back of the armchair.
Father had his coat on, his soft gray hat was in his hand; his straight blond hair fell over his forehead but he did not push it back as he usually did with his long, nervous fingers; he was pale, looking at us with clouded eyes; he didn't seem to be really looking at us but at something incomprehensible located where our hugging bodies were standing, at an apparition, or at nothing at all, as if he could not possibly understand how this apparition had gotten here; maybe that's why I thought that his always clear, stern gaze was dimmed — his expression made almost idiotic — by his own astonishment; his lips kept trembling and he may have wanted to say something but then changed his mind because the words wouldn't come.
The cooled-off tear smudges on my face were now superfluous; the silence of the men was so deep and immovable that I could feel my own superfluity in my limbs, or perhaps what an animal feels when escape is made impossible by not only a perfectly constructed trap but its own paralyzed instincts.
Slowly he let me go, languidly; one lets go of an object with such indifference; Mother did not move.
A great deal of time must have passed like this; all those five long years must have passed by during that silence.
What I had learned about Father while rummaging through his papers seemed trivial compared to what was now becoming visible on his face; perhaps once again it was something I should not have seen: his body shrank somehow, his figure — I always thought of him as tall and slender — sagged under the weight of his coat; his comportment, the strength of his proud bearing, seemed to be illusory now; all these changes produced a curved back and stooped shoulders, and he had difficulty holding his head up, it was wobbling, hovering helplessly above his coat, because not only what he would have wanted to say but couldn't made his lips tremble — the trembling radiating to his nostrils, eyelids, and eyebrows, knitting his forehead in deep furrows — but also another force was stiffening his head in a twisted position, and what his mouth wanted to say was stuck in his windpipe, in his shoulders; always an impeccable dresser, Father now looked disheveled, his tie twisted to the side, the tips of his shirt collar standing straight up, his coat and the jacket under it both unbuttoned, part of his shirt slipping out of his pants over his belly, so many signs of frantic, undignified haste, embarrassment, and agitation, but of course he couldn't have been aware of them; I still don't know how he got the news — to all indications János's arrival at our place was completely unexpected — but I imagined that the moment Father heard the news he jumped into his car, he must have been both overjoyed and devastated, his soul, if there is such a thing, silently split in two, while at the command of his instincts he tried to maintain the impression that he was still a whole person; two irreconcilable emotions must have been raging in him with equal force, that's what made his face twitch, his head float and wobble.
But so far I've spoken only of the strength and rhythm, the dynamics, of emotions, that ebb and flow in which their colors and directions manifest themselves, their pulse and breathing, but by no means the emotions themselves, only one of their many characteristics; what really must have happened in him I can only approximate with a metaphor: he became a child and an old man, as if these two ages had yanked his features in two different directions; he turned into a very offended child whom up to now the world had pampered with false appearances, whose good mind had been nursed into idiotic complacency, and now that this same world had revealed its cruel face to him and he didn't like what was happening, wasn't used to it, the child withdrew from reality into sulking, into hurt-fulness, into hate-filled, sniveling regression, unwilling to see what he saw, hurting to the point where he should have been whining and whimpering with pain, which is why he tried so desperately to force himself back into the world of comforting appearances, wanting to be coddled and nursed again, to be dumb and complacent, to stick his thumb back into his mouth, to have his mother's nipples; consequently everything I had once seen as clear, bright, and pure, the sternness of moral behavior reflected in his face, now seemed to be exposing their sources: inane, childish trust, and the fact that he was holding on to somebody's hand; his mouth and nostrils quivered, his eyelids fluttered, his brows twitched like a child's, and all this superimposed on adult features made his face look malformed and freakish; I glimpsed within the ravaged face of this man the child who had never managed to grow up; at the same time, the child seemed older than his years, his pale face was full of shadows; he had turned into a very old man so utterly shattered, crushed, pulverized by real, cruel, bloody, criminal phenomena hiding behind the world of appearances that nothing in him was still innocent, his life force was barely flickering; now he knew, saw, and understood everything, nothing could catch him unprepared, and anything that did was but the recurrence of something that had happened before, and thus behind the fine veil of his intelligence and insight there was a weary boredom rather than affection or love; he seemed to be thrashing between the extremes of his childhood and old age, between his past and his possible future, and being unable to find the noble expression appropriate to coping with the situation, his face simply fell apart.
And János Hamar kept looking on, calmly, almost moved, seemed to be peering out at Father from a strength reduced and clinging to his bones, looked at Father as if at the erstwhile object of his love, as if smiling at his lost past, with the soft expression we use when we're trying to help someone, to identify with him, urging him sympathetically to go ahead and say what's on his mind, we'll understand his feelings, or at least we'll try to.
I was certain, or rather my feelings were certain, that Janos was my real father and not this ridiculous figure in the clumsy, oversized winter coat; that's when I suddenly remembered that János's hair used to be dark and thick, and the only reason I didn't immediately recognize this real and profound inner closeness which I had always carried with me was that the color of his skin had changed, too, having lost its lively brown hue, and was now clinging, white and wrinkled, to the powerful bones of his face.