But history or fate or Divine Providence never skips anything and filled the space the innkeeper left behind in his conjugal bed, and in this sense it again matters very little that in that bed an attractive young woman and an attractive young man experience something they rightfully call fateful love; they keep saying they would rather die than live without each other, and describe their feelings in such extreme terms because they are describing fate's own design.
Seen in this light, it's quite irrelevant to ask whether or not the quietly drinking guards noticed this impermissible breach of regulations, it's no problem for history temporarily to intoxicate a couple of slow-witted soldiers, or bribe them, or make them overlook a sudden burst of passion, so that it can use them later, once sobering light was shed on the terrible deed, to beat to death the French miscegenist, which would again create a vacancy in the historically important orchestra, but it's all right, history would fill that gap, too, later, when it would return somebody to the city, someone who had been banished on charges of sexual perversion.
So I don't think, I said to Thea, that the mother's blindness, viewed from this loftier perspective, could be faulted in any way, because whatever she had lost with her husband's disappearance she more than regained from her lover, and whatever she seemed to have lost when he was gone, too, she was compensated for, thank God, by the fruit of her womb, even though the gift thus received she would have to return one day.
Thea said quietly that she'd understand me just as well even if I didn't make a point of blaspheming in such a complicated, roundabout way.
And she continued to pretend that she wasn't really paying attention to what I was saying.
The day his teacher ordered him away from the window, Melchior went on with his story, the girl waited for him downstairs; for a while they just looked at each other, but then he didn't know what to do, for although he was glad to see that they had managed to deceive his teacher, he was also terribly embarrassed, he still doesn't know why, maybe because he was wearing short pants, anyway, he couldn't think of anything to say, so he started walking away, swinging his violin case, but then the girl yelled "Idiot!" and he turned around.
They were standing facing each other again, and then the girl asked him to come to her place because she'd like him to play once just for her.
He thought that was a terribly dumb thing to say; these things couldn't be mixed up in such a crude way, so all he said was "Idiot yourself."
The girl shrugged her shoulders and said, All right, then, in that case he could kiss her right there.
And from then on she waited for him every day, even though they decided each day that she wouldn't do it again; with arguments and intonations borrowed from his teacher he tried to explain that this competition was an awfully important thing in his life and they shouldn't be doing this now.
Actually, no; it happened just the other way around.
He recalled that on the first day, when they were both so excited they didn't know what to do with one another and talked instead to hide their excitement, they were standing in the old, dry moat, in the midst of garbage, bushes, debris of all kinds, it was all very smelly, and the girl was telling him how much she loved him and was willing to wait for him for the rest of her life, and since this competition was now more important than anything else, they should just break up and she would wait for him, and they both felt that this was a terribly beautiful sentiment, yet she was there every day, waiting for him.
And there was one more thing he had to confess.
Though at the moment he had no idea how to talk about it sensibly.
We were sitting motionless, but his gaze was running headlong inside me, and I was backing away and stumbling with my own blinking glances, trying to get away, jump out of the way of his words, as if we were blindfolded and chasing around an elusive object that slipped away just as one of us touched it.
The capacity of our modesty was at issue now, and the laws of spiritual modesty are far stricter than those of physical bashfulness, which is as it should be, since the body is perishable matter, but once it starts revealing itself as not matter, then suddenly its limited, finite nature becomes frighteningly infinite; in panic I fled from this boundless thing, not wanting to see the thing I myself had forced into existence.
His words remained sharp and deliberate, so many thrusts and parries, but no coherent sentence emerged, nothing more than so many powerful unfinished allusions, statements, exclamations, as well as their negations; questions and doubts that only I could understand, inasmuch as one can understand modestly fluttering scraps of words stirred by the repressed mental energies of another human being.
These confused, clipped, suppressed, and still meaningful words referred to the relationship between a long-buried memory now springing to life and another, prudently unspecified recent experience — that of meeting Thea, whose name he couldn't bring himself to say; there was, after all, a huge gap of ten years between the two experiences.
I was lucky enough to have heard two versions of how they got to know each other.
No more of that, he said.
Not even with me, he said.
He said that comparisons never made any sense.
And still, he said.
With her… the guilty silence now had to do with Thea; this whole unfortunate mess started with that.
He didn't want to be tactless or ridiculous, yet he couldn't be anything else.
He didn't want to hurt her, but that's exactly what he was doing.
He just didn't want those kinds of feelings anymore, it seemed.
This state of affairs lasted about a week, he said pensively, and I could tell by looking at him that he was referring to two different times at once, one ten years and the other only a few months earlier, more correctly, the events of ten years ago coming aglow in those of a few months ago.
There is no memory without the recurrence of emotions, or conversely, every moment of lived experience is also an allusion to a former experience — that is what memory is.
The two recollections converged on his face and settled down, one superimposed on the other, each fueling the other, and that made me feel such relief and satisfaction, as if at long last we had hit upon the true topic of our conversation, the one we had been blindly groping for until then.
Needless to say, this little digression I did not mention to Thea in the car.