by Peter Nadas
I’m dry, completely dry.
Gyöngyvér did not have particularly nice hands, which made her attracted to and envious of women who did. Her fingers were quite long, and to increase their effect, she let her fingernails grow perhaps too long. She could do this because they were not brittle but strong, healthily and nicely arched, manicurists loved to work on them. But when an inspector visited the kindergarten and noticed those nails, Gyöngyvér did not get away without loud altercations and vengeful written reports.
She had them filed, polished, and treated carefully so they would not be dangerous weapons. The children liked them a lot, especially the little girls. And not only in the kindergarten did she have to mind her every move, which made her gestures seem slightly affected. With men it was enough for her fingers to slide unguardedly between their thighs and reach under their testicles, or to touch the sphincter muscles of the anus between the spread cheeks in the heat of vehement thrusts, or with the blades of her nails to plow across the blood-filled bulb’s rolled-up collar, to unerringly produce surprised moans, painful shouts, and a spontaneous ejaculation erupting in successive tectonic waves.
But she was as unable to surprise her own body as she failed to surprise Ágost’s. With the tip of two fingernails she reached the anteroom of her clitoris, the first fold of the skin. She was not careless, yet the sensation was more unpleasant than pleasant, even though the sensations penetrated each other.
The Quiet Reasons of the Mind
No, they didn’t just push me, he continued a little more loudly, it was something much rougher, or cruder. They dumped me into a ditch. The way they throw out dead animals.
What the hell are you talking about. Did you ever see a dry well full of carcasses.
I didn’t understand why they were doing it, how could I. Or they would put me in a cloakroom, I don’t know, like checking an umbrella or a coat. I’ll put it that way if you like.
Why would they do anything deliberately against you. She was whispering, with tiny breaths of words, into the man’s speaking lips while watching, cross-eyed, those lips—fleshy, with very taut skin. Why are you talking about them like this, not nice of you, I don’t understand. I don’t believe they wanted to do anything bad to you.
She wanted the man’s lips, she wanted to lap up his words from them; that’s why she was squabbling, acting contrary.
Why do you say they humiliated you. How could they have humiliated you anyway.
She didn’t kiss him, to see more of how the lips spoke.
I didn’t say they humiliated me.
You did.
Why would I have said that, in connection to what. It’s not a word I like to use.
But why do you say you didn’t say it when I heard you say it, with my own ears. Their lips touched, just barely.
She could not resist the touch.
You did say it.
All right, you’re officially protecting the terrible parents, he laughed, les parents terribles. He enjoyed seeing the uneducated woman’s recurring embarrassment. I know what you’re thinking. But I’m talking just about myself. If you’re interested. Not about them. And I’m not going to go into their moral qualifications.
She hasn’t the foggiest idea what I’m talking about, he thought.
He had managed to revive his hatred and contempt for his parents, but this robbed him of strength, since it divided his attention, yet it made him more attentive and his moves more cautious.
They wanted to give you a good education, whispered the woman, making a final effort to think this through. A good one, she said more loudly, a very, very good one, she said against her will, her voice gibbering, the foolish sounds knocking apart what had been a sensible dialogue. If I had such a sweet little child like you, oh, your mouth, please, please give me your mouth, she said, breathing hard, and had lots of money too, she tried to continue more sensibly, I’d throw my child in an institution too. She was kissing him. And whispering the words: you’re unjust to them, very unfair, believe me. I’m sure they love you more than anything in the world.
The man’s body fell silent again.
Come on, you’re talking nonsense. Something else entirely was going on. Bringing us up well isn’t even close.
He barely returned the kisses, but endured hers.
They wanted to be free of us for a while—it’s as simple as that. Not only because something terrible had happened between them but because something had really ended. Maybe they didn’t believe it themselves, but we felt it. My older sister kept whispering to me that they wanted to get divorced and that I should believe her. She wanted to torture me because she was suffering too. We eavesdropped on them. They were looking for a perfect reason to send us away, and they found the perfect place. Actually I was lucky, because if I hadn’t gone away they would have destroyed me as they destroyed my sister.
That’s not true either. They weren’t the ones who destroyed her, that’s another gross exaggeration. They loved you. They did what they did because they loved you more than anything.
My sister understood a lot of things then, but how could I, a ten-year-old boy, protest. She didn’t want to leave either. Much later, I understood that the poor thing was in love for the first time in her life—how could she leave that boy. And they seemed to guess—no, not guess, they knew what was coming. One day at the table, my father said, well, you bore two Jewish kids for me and now I have to suffer the consequences. Our mother put down her fork and knife and said, what, you can imagine. We just sat there. She got up, smiled as if she had just heard the best joke ever, kicked the chair out from under herself, and before she turned to leave threw a glass of water in our father’s face.
Sober up.
I think they should have gone through with the divorce. My sister idolized our father. Even though she had to accept that he had more than one woman on the side, and that our hapless mother caught him with her own seamstress and had a nervous breakdown. They couldn’t hide this from us. But don’t misunderstand me, I’m not blaming anyone.
But I feel you do, I can feel it in your voice.
Because I’m telling it to you the way I lived through it. This is a wound, a trauma, no doubt about it, a big psychological trauma. My father doesn’t want me. They outlaw something that originated in my mother, which she’d passed on to me and which made Father’s life miserable. This was terrible because it was my fault. Even though he paid no attention to me, did not even notice me, was busy with incomprehensible things. In which I disturbed him. And our mother could not give up this monster. Two days later, they were lovey-dovey again. If you want to know, that’s what you feel in my voice. Every word of theirs made me blush for them. That’s what you’re feeling. And my sister wouldn’t come with me. She stubbornly resisted, fought me as hard as she could. For the first time in my life I was left all alone, and you can probably feel that too. Although I knew French a little bit better than she did, I didn’t get very far with it. It was like being in a strange house. There you are, alone, in the middle of the night, and you don’t know where the light switches are. These are ridiculously small trifles but enormously large at the same time, and you can feel that too.
He stopped, because next he should tell her how they recorded all his mistakes, how they beat him every night.
The trauma remained; it was stronger than anything else.
As he turned away so he would not have to see the face of this strange woman, he saw Jean-Marie de Lecluse’s blindingly white neck through the steam. Standing there with his lackeys under the noisy showers, looking at him provokingly. He knew he was going to be beaten.
For a mistake in pronunciation, he received one slap in the face, for grammatical errors, three slaps. His hand, with the soap in it, slowly stopped moving. He could redeem ten mistakes with some service. He sewed buttons, shined shoes, and scrubbed their backs. Erasing was the most humiliating task. They would whistle for him and he would have to bring his own well-cleaned eraser to erase other bo
ys’ mistakes in their drawing and geometry papers. During the lessons, when they were free to move about in the huge hall on the first floor. Lecluse lent him to others, but erasing required Lecluse’s special permission, and he would watch from a distance. If Ágost smudged a drawing because his eraser wasn’t clean enough or if, in a hurry, he wrinkled the drawing paper or made a hole in it, the punishment was nail pecking: holding their fingertips close together, the boys would batter the top of his head as if they meant to break through his skull with their sharp nails. Or they would decide that the erasing mistake deserved punishment with another kind of erasing. They would drag his own eraser across his bare neck, pulling at the stubbles of hair. Lecluse most enjoyed the game when Ágost winced with pain or begged them to stop. That is when excitement made rosy blotches spread across Lecluse’s milk-white skin. Ágost couldn’t understand why he thought about the rosy blotches, the excitement, and the pain when he didn’t want to think about them, and why now.
He’d never speak of them to anyone.
When we were on vacation in Normandy or Anacapri, he continued, as if interrupting himself, the situation was very different, of course.
Actually, what Gyöngyvér should understand is what he is not saying and never will say.
Word got around that the Hungarian boy had a pecker bigger than anybody else’s.
He said, this wasn’t like a vacation abroad, when, though you jabber all day in a foreign language with other children, you’re still a Hungarian kid because the vacation will have an end, just as it had a beginning. At this place it didn’t matter whether you were Hungarian or not.
I am Hungarian, I would say. They didn’t understand why that should make anyone blush. Politely they nodded, all right, good, or maybe just shrugged their shoulders. It was of no importance. Or rather, the light switches were just in different places. There were all kinds of kids, but they felt at home in those two huge languages. This lends incredible self-confidence to even the stupidest of them. Believe me, we Hungarians don’t understand this, and this is also something you can feel in my voice. If a Congo native can speak a human language even though his nose is as flat as a gorilla’s, then what the hell am I boasting about with my Hungarian. Who cares. And with them, everything was nicer, neater, better groomed, and I liked that. Maybe that was the deepest humiliation. That everything was more beautiful. Most especially those wonderful mountains.
You see, again you use the word humiliation.
Until you notice that by two in the afternoon, the sun is gone in all the valleys. Or the women’s legs, as they make their way up on their strong, stockinged legs. Those fuzzy woolen stockings. If you see only the legs, you can’t tell whether they belong to a man or a woman, both kinds are strong, short, with bulging calves. The bathroom towels were also fluffier there. The doorknobs more beautiful, the locks more considerate of humans, surprisingly quiet and without grating clicks, the streetcars much more beautiful. You have to admit that. Maybe not more beautiful. You can’t even imagine there not being yellow streetcars, but the streetcars weren’t yellow.
What do you mean, not yellow, what isn’t yellow, asked Gyöngyvér, puzzled.
The streetcars are not yellow, the color yellow is reserved for something else, Ágost explained. Yellow is the color of summer, and blindness, and envy, or madness. You found yourself in a place where everything works differently, you understand. That’s a pretty big shock. You must have experienced something similar. If someone says streetcar, for you it means white, brown, or yellow. You can’t imagine any other kind of streetcar. Which means that you should be different from what you are.
That’s impossible, he went on angrily, and in that instant, Gyöngyvér could see the erstwhile little boy in him.
Simply not possible. And as soon as he said, you know, your mouth is not fixed right for this rotten strange world, he saw before him Lecluse’s aggressively red lips, sickly pale face, and cruel blue eyes. He did not know what the boys saw when they looked at him. He had to take it because he was on his own and there were so many of them. He wanted to back away but his feet found no firm support, they were slipping on the wet wooden grating. He didn’t think it mattered who had a bigger one, and all he could think of was that he was in for another beating. There was no other world, no world he could understand better.
After all these years, he understood from the bewildered attentiveness of this strange woman that Lecluse’s countenance had made him accept the impossible. He had to trade in parts of his body. From his fictitious worlds, which he carried along in his native tongue, he had to move over to the only realistic world. Everything depended on size and strength, after all.
And Gyöngyvér began to giggle bashfully that no, no, not so.
And right away entered into the spirit of protest.
You’re kidding. How could I have had similar experiences. Where.
She thrust him away from her.
I’ve never been abroad, not anywhere.
Their torsoes, slippery with perspiration, on which only the purple-brown of their nipples glowed in the dimness, separated. She pounded the man’s chest with her fists, you’re kidding, and her small breasts quivered. How would I know, for god’s sake. I know only what you tell me, and I don’t even understand that completely because I’m silly, a very silly girl. Of course, how could you people here know anything like that, Ágost responded slowly.
He was thinking that one always prepares for something other than what really happens. They had not beaten him. He disdained these Hungarians, especially this woman with her submissive tendencies who was playing up to him; he despised them all, every Hungarian. He looked down at them for their sham naïveté, their insane selfishness that had nothing to do with individuality, and he scorned them for their real gullibility. Still, he was attracted to these traits as to something kinder, more intimate and time-honored. Withdrawing behind a smile of contempt, he tried to relive his former disowned self, the shared Hungarian self turned loose from every form of reality and locked into itself, self-pity within self-hatred. The tense feeling of lacking something, the continued Hungarian longing for something else, which simultaneously produces insatiable voracity, painful envy, haughtiness, incredulousness, and destructive indifference. But this was not what held his attention, because now appeared before him Lecluse’s other face, the attentive, caring one, the face of the great tempter.
And why should anyone here know anything about this, he added, still drawing out his words.
I’ve been to Lake Balaton twice, though, Gyöngyvér whispered back, making a face, and that was really a big thing in my life, don’t forget. Making faces gives the impression of being ashamed of something, but she actually meant to boast a little. She admits, she said, that something is missing from her life, but this lack makes her life unique.
Which they both liked so much they pounced on each other with their laughing lips. Once, twice, their teeth knocked quickly together. This hurt a bit, and they assuaged the pain on each other’s lips with the tips of their tongues.
A foreign tongue, you know, is paralyzing and alluring.
I know, squealed Gyöngyvér.
How would you know, you don’t know. It can swallow you up mercilessly, it can reject you—he would have continued the earlier subject because he wasn’t quite in the present; he was still back there trying to cope with the situation in the old shower room on the wet wooden grating.
Let me, don’t reject me, Gyöngyvér giggled into his hesitant sentence, which he had meant to be somewhat instructive.
Such a pampered little idiot shouldn’t try to teach him lessons.
Come on, let’s have that paralyzing foreign tongue of yours.
As if she were both interested in everything and bored by each new piece of information.
In response, with their tongues they reached into each other’s nostrils, ears, and eye sockets. Ágost was merely following her like a good pupil; he was busy trying to break free of Jean-Marie
de Lecluse’s presence, his wet body.
And now you must wash everybody’s back.
He thought the woman was common, her idea primitive.
Who was working herself more and more frantically into the situation; your seductive tongue, she moaned, more.
She was demonstrating the reverse side of their pleasures; she was being deliberately rough, but this is what made it interesting.
This means she can also be sarcastic with me, Ágost thought, surprised. She sucked in her lips and thrust them forward; what she wanted to do was conceal her sentimentality. As one making amends with her tongue for what had or could have happened to the man, which she did not see as having been all that bad—behavior radiating such warmth and candor that the man could not ignore it, despite his aversion.
They filled the little room with their continued laughter, and it responded with strong, cold echoes. The apartment houses on Pozsonyi Road had been built at the end of the 1920s in accordance with pre–First World War regulations that called for enclosed courtyards in this district of the capital. The builders used the latest, sometimes most expensive materials, among them bauxite-based concrete. This not only proved to be brittle but also created unpleasant echoes in the apartments.
All right, so you’ve seen the whole wide world, Gyöngyvér cried out, into this echoing laughter, but I don’t think you ever swam in the Tisza.
They had to be careful about shouting in the apartment because of the landlady whose subtenants they were.
Gyöngyvér modulated her cries to harsh whispers, filled with all sorts of seductive force, firmly sliding her voice as if along a sharp spine on which she was pulling herself back and forth.
Her single voice included two or three opposing shades.
Admit it. You have never but never swum in the Tisza.
You’re right, I have never swum in the Tisza.