Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  As much as she would have liked to, Gyöngyvér could not fall on him and fight him tooth and nail. She could not tackle him or run him down, because he was receding from her on his own orbit, moving ever more slowly; he could not have been slower or more absorbed in himself. The smile over the face dissolved unnoticed. He wasn’t anywhere. He was wiped away by pleasure, which commanded seriousness. He plowed the spine of his cock with his thumb, a very fast move in the general slowness, barely touching the surface of the strong, slightly slanting vein spreading toward the tip of the tightening foreskin. He was plucking the strings of a musical instrument. There was such an excess of skin there that despite the swelling and tension at the tip, the foreskin had not retracted as it would with other men. This might have happened partly because his long cylindrical penis curved downward and not upward, bending back into itself, as it were, and therefore, except for the brief tense moments prior to ejaculation, it could not rise high enough for the taut little frenum, huddling under the tip of the penis, to withdraw all the foreskin from the steep rim of the tumescent bulb. Gyöngyvér’s breathing, pulse, blood pressure, and imagination all worked against everything she was seeing, everything she knew about this cock, whatever she acknowledged or admitted. Her pulse was fast, as if she were running, and her blood pressure was rising, but she held back her breathing. She did this because she was kept from touching the other person at the very moment when that person began to talk about himself, without words, to tell a story that no reasonable mind could possibly follow.

  She did not comprehend it; she could not, though she suspected the man was expecting something similar from her. Holding her breath made everything look slightly red and hazy. Not only did she see what she was looking at, but whatever she looked at penetrated her unhindered. She couldn’t have understood it, because her sensual experience was dominated mainly by the rapid, vehement, violent, and exaggerated satisfaction that her purported sensuality exacted. A play whose every scene was more or less written in advance. Not like this coolly restrained and passionless show designed unalterably for this one performer, its sole, distant focus, vulnerable to surprise and improvisation. For a few weeks they had thought their temperaments were well matched, but now they both had to see that their temperaments could not even meet in their strangeness. They were moving farther and farther away from each other. Gyöngyvér’s life progressed between the steep banks of extreme ambition and petty existential danger, which was why she rarely risked anything with men with whom she was unfamiliar. With women it was even worse; she shrank from them. Indigence, want, necessity, and resignation were stronger than she, and her experiences predetermined what she could know, what she was allowed or forbidden to do, and what she must deny herself.

  A flat landscape extended as far as the eye could see; she was ambling toward the horizon, but behind that horizon was another one. The place at which she might arrive was no different from her starting point. All the while, some unapproachable, unfamiliar, and alluring high ground, which she had to reach at all costs, kept rising before her, vibrating vaporously, illusion and mirage.

  Maybe this time I’ll make it up there, she thought. She imagined there would be one magnificent moment when suddenly everything took a turn for the better. There was no such turning point, but at least she sensed that the man had started out from a different place and wanted to arrive at a place very unlike the one she longed for. He was in a different landscape. It was hard to understand how she could possibly follow him in anything so alien to natural requirements. What principles should she abandon, what habits should she break if she wanted to relent, make concessions, and demand nothing that the man obviously does not desire and until now, probably, had only pretended to desire. For a moment she even thought, wait, he might be gay. And what should she do in that case, with herself, without him. Not only does he not want to come in her—and she could find no acceptable explanation for that either—he doesn’t want to enter her at all, and she’s not even allowed to come close to him. Just keeps on doing his exercises. Impossible to endure, and yet that’s the way it is. She didn’t understand what else she could relinquish.

  Helplessness helps one cross borderline situations. From behind paralyzed desires, raw instincts, and persistent habits one’s other self appears and goes right into action. It knows what to do. This rarely happens, but when it does, one assesses the situation based not on experience and mainly not in conformity with socially accepted norms. Her loins wanted Ágost’s rough, strong hands. She was deliberating whether to surprise him from the back—snuggle up to him, hug him, take his cock out of his hand—or attack him from the front, kiss him, gobble him up with her groin, thrust her belly against his. She could do none of this and not only because he forbade it, but because she now saw something that was more than comprehensible.

  It was already her other self looking out of her head, with her eyes.

  This whole cock thing, this whole busying himself with it so much, is becoming something like a major and ominous natural phenomenon, and first of all she should acknowledge it. Until she does, she should say nothing, make no move and definitely not go close to him. Her body was throbbing with her breathing, or the violently stifled breathing was throbbing with her convulsing body. Red spots of excitement began to spread on her brown skin, on her neck, the strong cheekbones, her aggressive little forehead. She felt as if the hot wetness that flooded her vagina was pouring out on her labia. She wished in the depths of her body, in her womb and in her brain, in her shoulders, now covered in fine shiver-provoking silk, in her arms, and in her swollen nipples, she wished to be free so she could reach him and comprehend him; to touch the fine bones and taut muscles of his chest first with one nipple and then with the other; she wished for her belly to comprehend the tight wall of his belly, his hands to pry open her sopping vagina.

  She knew she wasn’t going to touch him, no. He doesn’t want me. Her imagination tugged her back and forth between the possibilities and impossibilities that common sense dictated. He doesn’t want me anymore. And all her wishes were in vain, she could see, because the man was busy with his ominously rising, elongated, tumescent, and recurving cock, and with nothing else. Nothing left except this hollow piece of meat, enjoying its own tension and expansion, and all the relevant temptations and prohibitions in the indifferent brains of both of them.

  She couldn’t say why things would go better barefoot, but she kicked off her slippers; they flew and landed with proper thuds, one here, the other farther away.

  The next morning she couldn’t find them.

  With a single tug, she freed herself from her dressing gown, slipped, slithered out of it without giving her actions a thought.

  The next day, when in the corner of the taxi’s backseat she absentmindedly looked out the rain-swept window, she saw nothing but the half-risen, recurving cock she was not supposed to touch. As if seeing it for the first time, but at the same time seeing all the other cocks she had ever seen without the men the cocks belonged to. This image seized her attention as strongly as if she were backing away with it into a dusty courtyard of her girlhood. And the odor rising from the wet rubber mat on the taxi floor reminded her of some variation of the man’s scent. She kept the pills she had just retrieved in her half-closed fist. Saw Ágost’s hand on his cock, his mother’s cautious, thin fingers, and not the darkened facades of the buildings gliding by along the sharply curved Margit Boulevard.

  The wind could not lash more strongly this section of the road, shaded by large buildings. Lady Erna was conversing with the cabbie, but these voices reached Gyöngyvér as if from afar, from an imaginary, elusive, and hostile world. She should have called over to this world to ask what to do with the pills. Instead, she seemed to be aware, even hear, how in the nocturnal light the sparkling silk dressing gown softly slid off her body and gathered on the floor around her ankles. And it was as if someone were opening before her a secret door whose existence was new to her. She had no idea that now
a large dark hall would follow and behind it another, lighter one, and then a third, even darker than this one, and there is no end to the halls.

  God, I’ve nothing to fear.

  She’d have to traipse through it barefoot.

  She still had on a short, sleeveless nightshirt, matching the color of the dressing gown, a huge V cut low between her breasts; static caused by repeated friction made the nightshirt cling to her body like a mucous membrane. She didn’t think about taking it off or leaving it on. Perhaps she was trying to hold on to the last vestiges of her self-respect; she can’t surrender completely. To someone who doesn’t want her, who doesn’t even look at her. To someone who is interested only in himself, and not even in himself, only in his cock. From this safe point she sent out volleys of rebuke. This, at least, I now understand. What she wanted to do was rip the mucous membrane off her feverish body. It can’t be that every man is like this. If for no other reason than the man, who had no particular inhibitions about himself and whose sense of duty was the only force restraining his extreme egoism, had already crossed a magic border. Holding his erect cock in his fingers, he pulled the taut foreskin backward and forward, protruding like a funnel, slowly, as if surprised by every little movement, while with his other hand he gently raised his low-hanging, heavy testicles and, as if entrapping himself, squeezed them tightly once, twice, and then grabbed at them to cause himself pain; they slid smoothly over each other. From behind the foreskin’s beak now began to appear the dull, purple-colored tip of the penis’s bulb, with the solitary, deep-seated, large eye of the urethra, but not completely, only partially, and then it disappeared again among the skin folds, in the funnel of his cautious fingers.

  With her glances, Gyöngyvér would have liked to bring things to a halt or to full gratification.

  But now, everything located between her mind and clitoris, the former stimulated by will, memories, wishes, and needs, and therefore compelled to run on parallel tracks, and the latter swelling with blood and pulsing to the rhythm of convulsing vaginal muscles, was concentrated on the single question of whether the tip of his cock would appear again and whether she would see it in its entirety. The means at her disposal, between mind and clitoris, included intense attention, involuntary dissolution of the nuclei of some cells, breathing, blood pressure, acid production, intestinal contractions, and extra heartbeats. In this scene, her person was left without a role except, to her shame, to look and to wait for the response of the person slumbering behind the strange body.

  No way, it’s not going to happen, the bulb was distinctly outlined inside the skin, but he would not expose it.

  She felt ashamed and was jealous of Ágost’s hands, which denied her; jealous of the cautious, loving movements with which he was following his own inner story and refusing to look at anything outside of it, jealous even of his mother, whom he resembled with his fine elongated fingers, and of his father, from whom he inherited his slightly protruding, tight abdominal wall, jealous of this whole rotten bunch of Jews. Someone inside her was raving. But the stubbornly down-facing head of the cock again refused to make an appearance. He wouldn’t show it. He was only playing, teasing. That’s him, all right, she recognized the man in him, yes, that’s him; someone who avoids repetitions, who does not go along with the steady acceleration, because he hates the monotony of life and therefore denies himself and others the expected peaks.

  For him, denial is the summit. To which no road leads. Which means there is no road to him either.

  But what attracted her to this man was precisely that he too was so alone and so untouchable. Yet their inner rhythms were different, incompatible. She finally understood this, though she did not formulate it for herself because she understood it with her hearing, she comprehended his syncopated rhythm with her sense of rhythm.

  She gave no thought to the possibility of stroking her own body either. To do to herself clumsily what the man was doing to himself. Her uncertain, nervous, and quick fingers glided over the silver-gray silk clinging to her body. Which, in fact, felt good. Not so much because of the contact, but because it revived their dormant relationship, alluded to a time when, sometime, in the past, their inner rhythms had conformed to each other.

  It conjured up the intoxicating days and hesitant nights of their first weeks. By duplicating the man’s movements on herself, she filled in the lack of their mutual physical contact.

  She did it by feeling herself, which strengthened her observation and returned some of her consciousness. She could at least shed the superfluous feeling of shame. That she was watching, yes, watching that cock. Of which she had seen enough, though she had never allowed herself to look at it, observe it so unashamedly, how it worked, how it reached the center of her awareness. Ultimately, everybody is raised with the warning that one should not touch oneself in front of others, and spying on others is forbidden. In her confusion, a fingernail caught in the lace of her nightshirt. Which barely covered her pudendum. Finally, she could look at the cock, and now she was seeing something that was very different from what she was thinking about. And it did not have much importance, because she could not use it to get in better touch with her own thinking, but she saw things at the center of the world that she did not and could not understand.

  At that moment Ágost roughly and unexpectedly yanked and then let go of the foreskin’s beak, and his other hand released his tormented testicles. It was impossible to guess what he would do next. The erect cock was trembling in the air. It would have reared farther, higher, but since it did not curve upward, it barely reached a horizontal position. Gyöngyvér seemed to sense, indeed identified with and lived the tension of the frenum hiding under the bulb as it held back the penis, not letting it rise further. She kept the memory of the frenum’s tension at the tip of her tongue and felt it in the arched muscles of her vagina. The impression was as if in preattack fury the cock were thrusting forward its lowered, large, dark head; done quite amusingly. She could identify with the stubborn fury, because the desire to rage made her tense too. In this fury she saw the physiology of her own bodily rapture. But she could not tell herself about this either, because her raving would not subside. She could see and feel how the down-curving head of this cock, as she continues to rave, reaches her swollen clitoris and how, when her labia finally roll back the foreskin, the folded-up collar of the bulb, now thrusting into her vagina, pushes the foreskin onto and then pull it back from the protruding head of her clitoris. She could see all the correlations. And although this had put an end to some of her unconsciousness, she did not know what to do with this new awareness.

  Along with the cool stale air, a different kind of unconsciousness was streaming toward her from behind the opening doors.

  When the shutters were closed in the rooms facing the courtyard and there was no draft at all, a mysterious heavy smell of old age seemed to pervade the air.

  The current of this different kind of consciousness was hardly familiar, but it carried her along. The only time she’d ever felt anything like this was when, while singing, she could convince herself with her own voice. When she was not rummaging about for the right method or technique of singing, but rather when the written-out notes sang with her and she with them, producing a real character in whom she was surprised to recognize herself, and while with her thinking she still, stubbornly, violated herself. The singer does not hear her own singing but can feel exactly what others hear as her voice. She would obstruct her breathing, hold it back, would not let go of it—and then she was anxious about it. As if there were a commandment according to which her breath was allowed to mix only with the other person’s breath. Carnal pleasure and joy cannot remain within her; that way they are not permitted. She stopped at the commandment regarding her breathing, insisted on it, but she could no longer stop what she saw, what she was looking at, and what she was doing. She could not be stopped because, for the simultaneous occurrences to reflect one another, it was not enough for her two spread-out fingers to
glide across her pubic hair and then open the gates of her mons veneris and slip inside. With her new awareness, she realized this was merely technique, and what her movement lacked was exactly what was so moving and convincing in the other person: selfishness, the refinement and unconscious elegance of selfishness.

  She’d like to be like the other person, and here she is, failing at her very first, clumsy attempt. Perhaps she should be headed not toward but away from him. She couldn’t find the wetness, either, which she had felt so abundantly in herself only a moment ago.