By the time I grew up mine became just like that of the murdered man, even though I was blond like my mother and blue-eyed like a pure-blooded German. I wore a perfectly strange cock on my body; the skin had a different consistency and color, but the only real difference between our cocks was that for this brief transition called life I was not circumcised, so that I could reveal our sameness in the mirror only if I pulled back the dark foreskin from the bulb and in that state laid the hanging cock on the testicles, which appeared almost black under the blond pubic hair. All right, so I have a Jewish cock, though I always tried to console myself with the thought that my body at least was like my mother’s and completely Christian. The wrinkled beak of the foreskin remained very narrow because I did things like this only very rarely, preferring to stroke it through pajama pants or underwear, so that when I did pull it back, the pain was greater than the pleasure.
From this I learned that I too was condemned to a terrible death.
I wanted to follow him faithfully, so that it would happen as soon as possible.
I heard in advance the grating noise my footsteps would make. It wouldn’t make sense to waste more time on sentimental thoughts. I felt like a person who in his sleep has lost all his clothes and is now made to appear stark naked in public. I had no choice. My impending death did not upset me, it was like a fait accompli; what bothered me were stupid trivialities such as the question why I couldn’t stay with them now that I had turned around and noticed them trying to get my attention with the glowing embers of their cigarettes. In this place every movement and gesture, or their absence, had an agreed-upon order and meaning, and just as I could haltingly read and find my way among their signals after a few days, they could already read me fluently. It was impossible to avoid being an open book that the eyes of these men could read. It was exactly the opposite of what happened in my other life, where nothing was uncovered, where behind the appropriate concealment of customs and rules, within the flexible frameworks of appearances, a person was sustained by his or her intentions.
I shuddered when I realized that since I was unaware of my own intentions, I must be even less aware of other people’s.
In our other life, something must happen to us that slips through the cracks between obstinacy and dissembling. In fact, darkness must have lurked behind everything all along. In which case, however, reality made visible must also have something behind it, and I can’t get to the end of either one, I can’t see their boundaries. I can’t decide which of my two real lives, so trickily covering each other, is the more robust one. Everyone has another life that must be kept hidden, I knew that, but in the concealed background of a life hiding behind appearances or brutality there is yet another life, and that one I didn’t know. Because while what men did to and with one another was rough, common, and brutal, the language of their communication was exceedingly refined, more complex, civilized, and flexible than spoken language and at the same time very clear and practical.
I enjoyed their knowing more about me than, for lack of experience, I did myself. Whatever I did or didn’t do instantly became a decipherable signal for them, whether it was my silence or motionlessness; and therefore no matter how hard I might try, I stood before them more naked than I could have ever seen myself in my other life. If I understood anything of their language, I understood something of myself that I had once chastely concealed or covered with lies. Appearances could not cover my real being. Not only was I observing them, but I was beginning to see myself with the experienced eyes of those who listened constantly from their place in the darkness and, in accordance with their undisguised intentions, were keenly evaluating and grading my behavior.
To carry out my plan and gain the bridge, I had to walk along the creaky stretch of the promenade in front of the rowers’ clubhouse, or cut across the dense thicket with a few short steps and take the trail to return to the island’s lit-up interior, which at this hour was completely deserted.
Nothing moved.
Sometimes from the Pest shore, sometimes from the Buda shore, I could hear creaks turning into shrieks. Streetcar wheels make the metal rails shriek like that when they round a bend. And then there’d be nothing again, only the wind fingering the trees or a human step crackling in the thicket. One could tell by the sounds where a night streetcar on either side of the city happened to be. There were more places on the Buda shore where streetcars would shriek — in the great bend of Margit Boulevard or, farther on, at different points on Moszkva Square. On the Pest side, the number 2 streetcar might shriek before the Parliament or the number 6 on Marx Square, or it could be another night line, the number 3, making a wide two-part turn at Visegrád Street where it opens into Grand Boulevard to return to Váci Road.
Beyond the Árpád Bridge, where the industrial quarter of Angyalföld illuminated the vaporous nocturnal sky with its reflectors fastened above barbed-wire fences and brick walls, a steam hammer rumbled occasionally, would strike and pound; for a short while its battering would resound through the city, making eardrums, walls, and ground quiver, and then it would fall silent again.
I had been thirsty for hours, I felt completely dehydrated and slightly nauseated; I chose the latter route.
Under the giant plane trees was a quietly bubbling drinking fountain. If it hadn’t been for an occasional light breeze, I might have fainted; my knees had grown weak with exhaustion and excitement.
It bubbled among the stones.
If you leaned over and pushed a button, the water, flavored by rust, would shoot up to the roof of your mouth.
I couldn’t wait much longer with my urge to urinate.
I wanted to die, yet I had no place to run to from the eyes around me that hoped to discover my intentions. Unnoticed, they weaved through the night darkness and tore it to shreds; I had no tactics to outwit them with. Which made my decision laughable; it made me seem frivolous even to myself.
The place itself was tragic, yet many things here that were meant to appear very personal or tragic became comical in the eyes of an observer. If, for example, I chose the shorter route and with my suicidal intentions went along that irritatingly creaky section of the promenade between the trees and the echoing wall of the smooth white building, where ominous darkness seemed literally to be trapped and anything might happen, that would be construed as my reply to any of the men standing by, ready for anything, and would be interpreted as saying, come on, follow me, I want to be yours. That stretch of the promenade was an attention-grabbing area, where the tribal warriors did their business with their wide-open buttocks in the air and where the boys for sale sold themselves. Anyone going there had to count on the possibility of his own death. But if I went past them without signaling to anyone in particular, all four would follow me, each telling himself, let’s just go and see what happens, because they did not generally insist on doing it in pairs. That also made my jaw drop. In my other life I imagined that this was something impossible to do except in pairs. I’d have to shake them off, one after the other, before I could kill myself in peace. Or first I could drink to my heart’s content from the rusty water, then drown myself in the Danube.
And it would be embarrassing, too, if I simply swam out of the water.
And that is why about ten minutes before my planned death, when all of this occurred to me, I could barely restrain my jubilant good mood.
And indeed I failed to restrain it; the sheer idea of how the mind herds together so many opposing, disparate thoughts made me laugh out loud in the darkness, how far a decision is taken from one’s guiding instincts, how far the intent of an action from its pure effects. Out loud I laughed into the darkness, like a lunatic. Wildly, involuntarily, too loud, even though the reason I laughed was that I couldn’t have been more somber and sober.