by Peter Nadas
In vain he told them that when it comes to one’s own affairs one cannot shift responsibility to others, even if one’s circumstances are oppressive. They just stared at him, couldn’t give a decent answer to anything, always changed the subject and went on talking. But he would not wait to become a victim of their obtuseness, their constant grudging, lethargy, their pathological tendency to prevaricate, and their slowness hobbled by helplessness. He was not going to wait for this. He had had it with his friends. He could see on them how much he had changed. Here, one conforms to the mentality of either servants or gentry; there is no other choice where there are no free people. Their souls are imprisoned.
Along with his friends, he had been living the carefree life of the gentry for years, for which he deeply despised himself. At the same time, his appointment was so certain, he saw so many positive indications of it—and making him wait for it this long was so absurd—that it made no sense to move now. And where in hell would he move to. Not that he’d have the money for it, and anyway, in this country one couldn’t just go out and buy or rent an apartment. He was contemplating plans of revenge. For the time when he’ll be convinced that these people are truly as hopeless as they seem. He won’t do away with himself, no. He won’t any longer make it difficult to let the rival side know he was ready to work for them. Or for them too. He knew the ins and outs of such a move. He toyed with this adventurous thought but without sending out signals. Not yet. And not because he was afraid. Why not be a mole if he had to live his life underground anyway, une taupe ou un rat. He couldn’t have so much left of his life that it wouldn’t be more exciting spending it as a mole. Still, he preferred to count on his appointment because during the long years of waiting he had grown used to idleness. He counted on Paris, at least on Rome, but at a minimum on Brussels.
Then why rush. Out there, he’d be able to decide about his other affairs in much more favorable circumstances. And why should he have to listen to his mother’s superfluous laments.
He stood with his head bowed.
His thick, straight, dark hair fell onto his brow, he looked out from under his long lashes to see himself, however dimly. The sight of his own body always unsettled him. At any rate, more than other people’s bodies did. And he was aware how extravagantly and insanely Gyöngyvér worshipped every atom of it. Because of her astonishment, amazement, lethargy, and anger he disdained her immensely; that was, in fact, the reason he no longer desired her. After only a few days, he quietly ranked her with the servants, though for his comfort he continually needed her services. Ágost was one of those people who cling to the primal models of their earliest life experiences, from which no one can tear them away.
He was ten years old when, at seventeen hundred meters above sea level, his father left him on his own. At the treeline, where the pines end and only the snow-covered craggy peaks of bare mountains reach for the sky. He was not a short child, but suddenly everything became too large and too high. The mountains, the other people, the arched windows in the dormitory. In the thin air, he had no possession except his body. He shivered as if he were constantly cold, though his skin was hot, on fire. He’d wound up in a world in which he could no longer predict what would be good for him and what would be bad. And he didn’t even have the words to help him cope with his surroundings. They laughed at him, derided him because several times a day and in the most unexpected situations he would grow weak, become light, the heavy earth slipped out from under his feet, and he would collapse, unable to grasp at anything. Already on the first night they beat him. During the day he fell into quiet, white faints, as if hoping that through the whiteness they would take him back to that place. But he understood much more than he could theoretically understand; the words he heard for the first time as well as the novelty of the entire situation. He found himself among people who used their bodies and their language differently.
The moment they entered the shower room for the first time and had to get undressed, another process was also begun. A hitherto completely unknown current of life. It did not matter that within minutes they all disappeared in the steam, the tension and ardor of the body were simultaneously present in him and present in the others too, though none of them let on. He had the feeling that sheer vitality, radiating through the contours of his body and penetrating the steam, had an effect. It broke through the steam and the noise of the water spurting from the showerheads. And at night they beat him until he discovered how others traded in this effect, turned it into a commodity. Until he himself started to deal in these existing but unseen currents. By then he spoke French better, though the other boys continued to correct him or to pretend they didn’t understand him. It was the other language, their bodies and his own, he had to learn. And in fact he wasn’t doing it for the first time, even if he hadn’t done it so frequently in front of others. And it didn’t occur to him there could be a person who might not understand or indulge him, who wouldn’t admire his perfection or would fail to see what a profound pleasure it was just to be near him.
From below his half-closed eyelids he saw his smooth chest muscles, the slightly convex and taut, hairless abdominal wall, his sex organ, somewhat filled out and hardened because of the delicate touches but still resting between the hills of his testicles, with a prominent vein running across its spine. He saw his knees, his delicate long-boned feet; Gyöngyvér was mad about taking his toes into her mouth to chew and suck them. He stood there as someone engrossed in something, contemplating something, brooding over it, though in reality he is not here, does not want to be disturbed, he has floated over into another dimension, using his rising and hardening cock to lift himself over, he can’t see and couldn’t care less what is happening around him. He was repeating a single series of movements. He touched his spread fingers to his chin, which at this late hour was stubbly, enjoying the scraping sound of the contact, and then puckering his lips toward his nose he kept sniffing and turning his five fingertips as if smelling some special fragrance. No one could tell or understand what he was doing with this sniffing and why he puckered his lips as if for sucking. He did not question why he was doing it, but from the time he had started it, he kept at it. With his smile, he was hovering in the dense tale of his pleasures; more precisely, the pure patterns of an unexplored past took possession of his features, which appeared, but only to the uninitiated, as a smile. He experienced it as that wild and unpredictable current he should not fear, because it would continue to flow, always and in everyone. It was opened by the scent and now he could step through the entrance to his secret life. Although he perceived what he saw, knew what he could know, and various things still occurred to him, still, with the scent of his body he was able to set himself free from the world of reality. With his scent he floated over to the other shore and from there glanced back at everyone else and at himself, whom he had left behind; the current carried him along. Loyalty no longer had any meaning; betrayal was waiting with new delights.
On this far shore, nothing had a name, naming was not obligatory, the entire story had not a single date; thus, events had no weight. He could not go over at just any time he wanted to, but when he fulfilled the only and very simple requirement, nothing stood in his way. On his fingers, he had to preserve the secretions and exudations of his body. Not wash his hands after urinating. If they didn’t check up on him, he’d skip washing his hands at least once or twice a day, deceiving even himself. As if he were in a hurry or had forgotten what they had pounded into him. The omission was not unconscious, though he couldn’t have told when it was or wasn’t. Neither did he know whether others were doing things like that, though he discovered that some boys picked their noses. Secretly, they eat their dry snot or, when back from the sports fields and taking off their socks, they dig in between their toes and keep smelling the stench of the darkest excretions of their feet. The stronger he felt the morass of hopelessness under his feet and the deeper he became entangled in some lie or wound up in some trouble, the more frequent
ly he turned to a oui, voilà, yes, d’accord. Who else could he turn to if not to himself. Though sometimes his desperation was so deep that he could not utter this yes, and then it turned into a non, no. Then, clinging to denial, he sank even deeper; from there at least he could not see out at anything at all.
To this day, he urinated like a little boy. He did not pull back his wrinkly, unusually long, funnel-shaped and pointy foreskin from his bulb, and when he finished he barely shook his member, letting some of the fluid be smeared on his fingers. He’d dig in with his fingers between his thighs under the testicles, where he always found for himself some worthy odor. Only rarely did he risk invading the cheeks of his buttocks to touch the crimped edge of his contracted anus. Perhaps to rub it just a little bit, to reach into it, as an experiment. But it did happen on occasion. The various odors nicely mingled on his fingers where he preserved them for the rest of the day. He saved them for the night, when he would have unhindered access to his body, though he had to be on his guard in the bluish light of the dormitory, listen for and follow with open eyes every little stirring. He taught his body, led it to the point of dark defiance; he was the one who exposed it to danger and self-denial. He was delaying, playing for time, dragging the odor across his lips. This slowed him down, his breath was caught, and he returned to the cunning, careful little boy playing with the deadly danger of defenselessness, the little boy he had once been and whom he had never left.
When he couldn’t tuck his weenie between his thighs, or couldn’t touch it, not even through his pants, because in the boarding school everybody was watching everybody else all the time, he consoled himself with these odors. And this remained the same later too, with his cock, though its odor had become more penetrating. He was in need of consolation almost all the time, and until now the clandestine way he went about acquiring it seemed not have attracted anyone’s attention. He passed the test of various dangers; he never proved to be punishable. Success justified his behavior retroactively. Putrefying urine, the translucent drops of semen that bubbled forth at the most innocent sensual excitement, the dried remains of the previous night’s ejaculation and the excretions of his penis, now swelling, now shrinking under the uncircumcised foreskin, were the ingredients that produced this lasting, penetrating odor. He kept sniffing it, drew it across his lips.
Then he spread the fingers of both hands again and set out with them, slowly, ceremoniously. This was not done absentmindedly, far from it, indeed on the contrary. He did it as someone with a cultic respect for every fraction of every second of time. Although his attention is personal, he is not the one who is acting; he is merely performing certain movements prescribed in ancient times. As one person initiating another, who now happens to be an ignorant woman, into the cult of his body, the way others had initiated him. He never forgot this. What Gyöngyvér comprehended of the whole thing was that she should not interfere, and she wouldn’t know how either. Just as one should not chatter during the celebration of sacraments. Morally, she felt she had no right to say anything. What she was seeing reminded her of all sorts of other men who had done similar things in front of her.
Besides, she wasn’t that interested. As far as she was concerned, Ágost could do with himself whatever he wanted to, he could even beat his meat. She would have liked to get to bed quickly, so early next morning, before her singing lesson, she could go swimming. Still, she couldn’t keep her mouth shut.
Next time, at least close the rotten shutters if this is what you want to do, she hissed in her unappeasable anger, folding in the white-lacquered sections of the shutters from the window frame and slamming them into place, an action that vented some of her fury.
The long sections of the shutters were decorated with archaized profiles familiar from the building’s facade and the walls of the lobby and stairwell.
She felt she’d become ludicrous, even to herself, but still, with his obscene behavior Ágost was depriving her of something. What was she here for anyway. And in this, unwritten morality seemed to be on her side; after all, he was doing something in clear contradiction to accepted conventions. Even though she could see, as indeed she did, that he was giving more than he was taking. And she spoke as a kindergarten teacher, for she instinctively felt the presence of an inconsolable little boy in need of support.
The shutters’ lock clicked shut. Ilona forgets every night to close it in their room. This particular night, Kristóf was again awakened by the loud click. When they locked themselves in at night, the silence always grew ominous in the rooms facing the courtyard, which were so quiet anyway. In her silver-gray, shiny silk nightgown that gently clung to the flesh of her long thighs, and in her slippers trimmed with swansdown that barely peeked out from under the nightgown, Gyöngyvér remained in front of the suddenly blinded windows. Offended, she threw her head back; she would have liked to turn away, but kept watching him attentively. She coldly surveyed the terrain. The dark socks by the bed indicated that the man had begun undressing there. A little farther away, his white underpants were lying on the rug. His shirt was shining white on the back of an easy chair. She saw herself picking up these items one by one and burying her face in them. Scents and odors were among the incomprehensible things that would not let her leave Ágost’s side. If she had to describe his smell to someone, she would have likened it to a burnt electric wire. It didn’t satisfy her desire; she didn’t understand it, because she wanted nothing else but to see. Just to see. And not more humiliation. Just as she did not understand how a scent like that proved so irresistible to her. To see everything he would deliberately or involuntarily be ready to show her, what she could never have seen before. Anyway, her experiences with men cautioned her to keep her head, her calm, and her humility. When men are doing something like this, they are unpredictable and might beat her. But everything was changing constantly; her views and opinions were not binding either, and she could not stick to her decisions. She knew that what she was about to do this minute was not right because only her voraciousness, her wounded pride, and mainly her jealousy propelled her forward; go ahead, go, grab hold of it.
While Ágost, with his palms barely touching the surface of his skin, slowly slid his hands over his own body, alternately turning his palms in and out, Gyöngyvér started for him. And as the back of his hand touched the arch of his neck and then, following the round chest muscles, made light contact with the abdominal wall, his dark-haired loins convulsed as if excitement was trying to lock the body back into itself. He pressed his eyes tight shut. Again the cock was filling up, growing hard, and was already separated from the testicles, though not far, and rose a little along its entire length. Which made the man’s lips part hesitantly. His slowness did not surprise Gyöngyvér; on other occasions too he treated his pleasure with great economy, even frugality. He wanted to stretch each second into infinity. As if he were watching separately every sparkling atom, every single cooling grain of pleasure emanating from the nerve cells, doggedly following them, until sadly he would part with them when they lost their strength and unfeelingly died away. But now she saw that with the slowness he not only delayed the possible gratification but wanted to avoid it altogether or, as if it were something coarse and common, outright despised it. He isn’t looking for others in his desire. At most, there are viewers, observers, but these are not allowed to become embodied in any one person. This was indeed something new for Gyöngyvér.
Who had seen, not once and not twice, how men, bending over her, grabbed their cocks, only half-hardened or shrunken by fear, and quickly, bashfully, with nervous movements, tried to stimulate them, spur them on. As if ready to tear them, tug at them, eager to rip them from their roots. While with their lips they would glue themselves to her mouth, jab at a nipple with their tongues, suck it in, bite it, or hook their tongues into her vagina, searching for her clitoris. She could not shake off the images of these men, struggling with their helplessness, becoming engaged in diversionary tactics. After all, they weren’t doing it to
enjoy themselves, but to revive, resuscitate the diminishing excitement, paralyzed by too great excitement; they helped, urged, encouraged the blood to fill the cavities of their pricks, let them be hard so they could make the longed-for penetration. Into me. That was the goal, after all: into me. And she did not have to do much, only moan a little, make sounds in the air of polite expectations, whimper and groan provocatively and patiently, close her eyes or considerately look to the side so they would not see that she could see what they were doing, not to disturb them, not to expose their foolish, somewhat laughable little exertions. She loved these hotheaded or inhibited men because she had power over them and they, at least at times like this, allowed her to love them. She could give them an advance on the joy waiting for them with her voice, pant a little, whimper carefully, anything to help them get an erection. They were grateful for this and therefore more attentive. But not to interfere.
That could make all hell break loose.