Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  And me, you know, through all my years as a little girl I couldn’t get free of that thought. Sometimes I thought I’d go out of my mind, like you, Ágost, with that ballet school where they took you. This was an obsession, because I was thinking about it all the time—after all, my mother did see me.

  As if to say he should see how lonely I still am. But she did not say this out loud. Gyöngyvér wanted to talk but couldn’t. As though asking herself, where is the knife to cut my breast open with. She was paralyzed by the other person’s life being replete with details she couldn’t even imagine properly. How could she have hated her mother, or what sort of picture could she have asked for, and from what father. Her voice kept stumbling, sliding between different registers. Since she had not had similar experiences of her own, she could not penetrate other people’s thoughts, and that is why she had to keep returning to her obsession.

  She is somewhere, she exists, she should remember me, she said, as if suddenly she’d run out of breath. She had seen me, you understand, and I also saw her.

  You’re wrong, Gyöngyvér, one can’t remember even the person one loves. So why would they expect one to be faithful. To whom, I ask you, to whom, if one forgets everybody and everything. Tomorrow you won’t remember me. There is no faithfulness. It’s only a word.

  I don’t know if you can understand, I have never seen my mother. At least I can’t remember her. I don’t have any kind of picture, and that’s a pretty big difference between you and me. I can’t expect pictures like that from anyone. I should have seen all along that this was very simple. Everyone has a mother. There is no animal in the world that doesn’t have one. Piglets have mothers, calves, colts, she said, our cats licked their kittens to pieces, she said, and licked the man’s attentive eye.

  Gyöngyvér.

  Yes.

  Hush for a while.

  Go on.

  There is no mother. That is a pitiful illusion. I understand you, but you are longing for something that does not exist. God does not exist either. Sooner or later, one has to come to terms with these illusions. There is neither protection nor authority, autoritás, or however you say it in Hungarian.

  I don’t miss God, or my mother, she was an unfortunate woman, my mother. An ingrown toenail torments me more than her fate. I mean it. But I didn’t express myself well. What torments me is that others have something I don’t even miss. That they have somebody I don’t have. Even though my mother is alive, or most likely she is, I can’t be absolutely sure. When she dies, I won’t know about it, I won’t know anything about anything. But then what do I know. Not that it would hurt—how can something you’ve never experienced hurt you. It doesn’t hurt. But I don’t know whom I might be hating because of her. You hate yours and at least you know exactly whom you hate, and that hurts. I’ve got a life, but the whole thing has no shape. I can look at myself in the mirror, yes, she’s probably like this, maybe exactly like this, the way I am, but it’s possible she’s very different. That’s why I need the children so much. I wouldn’t dare think of having one of my own. If I could not see them every day, I’d smash my face in the first mirror.

  You’re a very smart girl, Gyöngyvér.

  Say that again.

  Wanting to hear it twice is a sign not of being smart but of being stupid.

  Who’s interested in being smart. I want my name to roll off your lips.

  Maybe you still don’t understand, but with my accent I can’t find my way back. It may be something like your mother. She no longer exists even if she still does. The Hungarian intonation got lost somewhere, disappeared, and we no longer know where it is. And it makes no difference that I live here in Budapest again or that you can make fun of me. And I’m not worried about how once, a long time ago, they pushed me out from among them. You’re right, who’d be interested in that. My concern was somehow to find my way to the first place in my life, and in this lies something impermissibly accidental. This is ridiculous, irretrievable. If they’d taken me to China, I would have had to find the Chinese in me there.

  But why wouldn’t I understand it. These are the things other people call homeland or homesickness. Far, far away is my homeland, she sang into the man’s face—a song that had once been forbidden. But for some reason you are ashamed of it. And so you rather overdo this too.

  I don’t know which of us is more prone to overdoing things. I think it’s you.

  Shall I sing it to you?

  No, don’t, said the man quickly, I don’t think it has anything to do with homeland, it’s more like the rhythm of life. At least I’m not deaf to it. This is part of every language, has a special place in every one of them. You pick it up in childhood, along with the rhythm of life, and never forget it. At most, you can transfer it once, but then there’s no way back. It can’t be done twice. The needle will get stuck, keep jumping back, play back a different melody, always, which makes everything sound off-key. What always remains are the new overtones, and I’ve chosen those. Anyway, I don’t want to be at home here, I can’t be.

  I noticed you can’t remember the names of streets.

  Maybe I don’t want to because I’m not interested.

  But why take it so much to heart. I think it’s very sweet the way you can’t get your tongue around my name. It disgusts me anyway. Vér. Blood. Blood on the streets of Budapest, in your panties when you menstruate, wherever, I don’t care, but not in one’s name.

  You’re saying rather strange things, I don’t understand them, said Ágost patiently, though hearing these phrases brought him to the verge of retching.

  And that first part, gyöngy, too, I think gyöngy is disgusting.

  And I think you chatter too much. Maybe you should look up the history of the name, stop wriggling.

  At least on your tongue you make my ugly name prettier. Especially if I’m not wriggling.

  And down there you open up, grow treacherously wide, and properly enfold me inside you, lock me up within you. Maybe that’s how one could say it in Hungarian.

  More, yes, go on, please, I beg you. I’m not interested in the history of anything.

  The way they do it to birds, to their legs. You put a ring around my cock, the poet would say.

  Oh my, how you talk, said Gyöngyvér, and her voice dropped from the top of pleasure’s register to the bottom. Breaking into laughter, they both sneezed and laughed at the same time, showering each other with spittle, which made them laugh more. Don’t you dare fly away, Gyöngyvér squealed. I’ll put my ring around you and catch you.

  I won’t give up my independence, don’t raise your hopes.

  More, please.

  You won’t catch me with anything.

  Please say cock one more time, please.

  But the man fell silent, and from then on he would have preferred not to say anything. He enjoyed the words around them; it was as if they helped him evoke the atoms of darkness; he felt a strong urge to speak, yet he thought the storyteller in him was strange and naïve. Who wanted to tell everything, absolutely everything. He would have been hard put to find a nondangerous subject in his life, and this may have irritated him. Something unusually childish also appeared in his narration, hovering over every sentence, and it might have been pleasurable to savor it, though until now he hadn’t noticed much of a distance between childhood and adulthood. It was good to tell everything, it would be better to tell even more, even though it was unpleasant to hear what he was saying; his words made him recognize the distance between the events being related and their present recounting.

  They were telling their tales directly into each other’s mouth with their eyes wide open, yet their bodies’ center of gravity shifted. They could not hold one position for long, because now an arm, now a leg would go numb from the weight of the other’s body and would have to be liberated. Slowly they’d roll about a bit. This made Gyöngyvér open up more; with her thighs she involuntarily slid up on his thighs and with her strong lower legs embraced his waist, her hands re
luctantly let go of the cheeks of his buttocks, taut and dented with the effort, and pressed his wide, relaxed back to cover her. At least her arms felt better. The man’s benumbed arm hesitated as if unsure what to do next. If he wanted to keep something of their symmetry, he could wander downward to grasp the woman’s small ass in both hands, to feed her into himself with his palms, to guide her by her ass.

  His hands would have wanted her ass, his loins wanted to be more inside, his cock and testicles wanted him to lift her even more irretrievably into himself, though there was nowhere further to go. At this moment, the issue was indeed his independence. That he shouldn’t have to surrender to the woman’s rhythm, that what they were doing should not become destructively monotonous and should not end with an ordinary unguarded ejaculation, as the woman would like, that it should have no end.

  Stupid. How infinitely stupid can this woman be. In the meantime her opened-up lap carried him along, smooth and unhindered, so that he had nothing to do; he had no way to resist. It is probably not by chance that little boys want to marry their mothers. She cheated on me with my father. Monotony, the winding spiral of uniformly increasing speed, was stronger than he. What convinced him was the lightness, smoothness, suppleness of the woman’s body.

  A little common, he thought to himself, a bit conventional for my taste, but this disturbed him for only a few moments.

  She’s too fast, doesn’t understand her own physical interests, but he enjoyed her greedy impatience.

  And now I will take my leave, he thought to himself, and he meant taking leave of the woman’s demanding rhythm.

  Yet he did not take his leave.

  No doubt Gyöngyvér wanted to get to the end of something they had not even begun. He was not certain there was anything that might restrain this woman in her urgent excitement. She’s on fire, though she is full of inhibitions and being so passionate doesn’t become her. It’s no accident that she’s a contralto, not a soprano. Alto is rarer but she’d like to be like everybody else. She is working on it. This is what they expect of her, and these same conventions hold sway in the theater too; they can’t wait for anything to ripen by itself. And that means she’s completely hopeless with him as well. These sorts of things crossed his mind, but he had little interest in his mind’s activity. And his hands were longing for her weight probably because the woman felt weightless to him, he was making love to a feather. Boorish, has no upbringing, yet she’s not, since boorishness would make her heavy. Dans la grosse paysanne la petite bourgeoise. And she is weightless. With the rhythms of his thrusts, he could not shake the thought that this was a peasant woman, this is a peasant. There were no barriers between them. And that is what tipped the scale.

  They were the secret semblances of each other.

  If he did not want to slip out of her, he had to get on his knees between her spread thighs.

  And if they hit gracefully on this exceedingly advantageous position, then finding it must have been the more important task.

  Now he could not slip out of her.

  No reason to worry about that: he was deep inside her.

  The senses still need some kind of preparedness. And taking into account loose sofa springs, grating squeaks, their delicate and predictable moves when arms would cross and maybe bump into each other, he decided to prop up his arms on the pillows. Even though what he wanted was the woman’s little ass.

  He would have preferred to lick everything on it, or out of it.

  To enjoy the humiliating service. To mix the saliva accumulated in his mouth with the mucous strong-smelling urine-spiced excretion that overflowed her cunt and in which he was now splashing about with his overhardened, aching cock as in a bottomless swamp full of dead fish and yellow lilies in bloom. To reach inside it with his pointed tongue, to slide upward between the strong fleshy labia into her elongated vulva.

  He scared himself with the image. He never dared do it for more than brief moments, dip into it quickly, as with a spoon. To make discoveries about a woman via the quality of her cavities.

  He had done it with Gyöngyvér once before, for a very short time, and now his mouth longed to repeat it. Meanwhile he was happy that he was finally forgetting she was just a country girl, a peasant. Which of course brought the thought back to mind.

  As though with his tongue he could truly understand her fleshy labia. To stumble into the strong pointed arch of the pudendal cleft and then return to her deep vagina, to lick the dense bud of her clitoris all around, everything that is in such contrast to the airy lightness of her limbs and their movements, and where it is so hard to penetrate. To melt it all with his mouth, to dissolve the primal aroma in his mouth. And then to do the most meaningful thing: with a single unexpected movement to turn her around and knock her on her stomach—so that his nose could hang into her arching, sweet little ass. To pry open the cheeks of her ass, lick again her cunt spread open on the sheet, suck in and keep licking the brownish, wrinkled, tightly closed, and mildly shit-tasting asshole, sin itself, to commit the greatest sin, until it would blossom in the warmth of the sticky saliva dragged over from her cunt, so that with his cock he could enter there too. To do violence to the instinct of reproduction and to hand it over to finality, to beautiful death. But he didn’t risk it. Wanting to enter everywhere. To discourage her from even dreaming of this, he brutally pinned her shoulders under him with his sharp elbows. An agitated face with bulging eyes lay on the pillow in the vise of his arms, and in the waning twilight it seemed that her lips were turning blue.

  Beautiful she was not.

  There was no trace of trembling anymore, but the light body shook and quaked gently to its depths. Her small, domed forehead, with its little-girlish hairs at the edges.

  The man was thinking that perhaps his entire life, anybody’s life, was nothing but a constant search for advantageous and ever more advantageous situations. For a situation worth getting into.

  This is ridiculous.

  Why does one search, at whose command. And how can one compare one situation to another if one doesn’t know what new situation the next step will bring, and if tomorrow one has anyway forgotten the old one. But now he has found it: there’s probably no more advantageous situation than this. Simple physics, this is simple biology, he thought dispassionately and wryly, as if thinking that although this was lovemaking there was nothing personal about it. He heard his own panting. Had nothing to do with his personhood or that of his lovemaking partner, even if she makes me pant or I make her pant. Everything is only physics or mere convention.

  For the sake of perfection, he had to cool himself down a little.

  Even if he was in the middle of fucking.

  It doesn’t happen so often, though by necessity it could happen to anyone.

  It rarely becomes perfect, perhaps that much is personal. Nothing more. One aspect of the eternal imperfections. Nothing more. But before the woman could make a fatal or irresistible movement with her head, loins, fingernails, vagina, or any other part, he spoke in a loud voice.

  We’ve found the most advantageous position.

  Which of course sounded ridiculous. What the hell had they found. And it echoed for a while between the cold walls. A little helplessly, a little threateningly, because his voice was as dispassionate as the way he thought about himself, or at least he believed it was dispassionate. They hadn’t found anything, but they might lose something, and perhaps with his talking too loudly he might have already gambled it away, though all he wanted to do was keep what they had and share his joy with this strange woman, to make at least this moment last.

  Yes, came the response from the agitated face, from the depths, from gaping, parched lips, hoarsely, perturbed, yes, what could be better.

  But she could not laugh at herself or at the man.

  Like a seriously ill person, she signaled—but only with her mouth, her strong eyebrows, the deepening, vertical little furrows of her smooth and domed little-girlish forehead—that she preferred to laugh
at such silliness. But Ágost’s declaration troubled her, profoundly shocked her. It opened up an unknown perspective. For the first time in her life, she had to take a deep, hard look at her own bodily phenomena. Not before or after, but right now in the middle of it. No man had ever done this to her.

  Maybe with Irénke, when they made their nipples touch and could see what they were feeling; they talked about it, how their nipples grew hard at the same time, look, yours too.

  Her breathing became so strong because of this uncalled-for thought, the smell of her breath so pervasive, not unpleasant but hinting of skin, saliva, teeth, and stomach, that for a second the man was shaken by a cold nausea of revulsion and disgust.

  I could even make a child for you now.

  Indeed, her vagina was ringed around his cock, which, with its swollen head, filled her beyond the brim.

  Her hips rose and sank, her vagina convulsed in contrary directions, she wanted to give some rhythm to the spasms but the man kept her down with his arms and elbows, pressing her with his hips, not letting her move, wrestling her down to where he wanted her; she could only thrash about with her head, tossing it from left to right. On her neck a vein bulged and twitched, the vena jugularis externa, running in the muscles under the skin. As though her fears gripped her again precisely when she had managed to get close to the other person. That’s why she was doing it. She wanted to show the man what indignities she had been subjected to, how they had crippled her pleasure, and how unjust it was, as was her entire miserable life.

  Which, no matter how hypocritical or self-disciplined she was, she could not endure.

  I can’t bear it, I can’t bear this either.

  Because she couldn’t tell whether this was happiness or pain.

  Can’t get any closer, the man heard too, inside him, in his own voice. It sounded like an interdiction. Don’t try, you’re not supposed to. As if forbidding himself something, and the cosmos would crumble if he did not obey. He eased his hold on her a little so he could withdraw himself a bit, his cock. He felt as if he had fatally miscalculated something at that moment and could not see the situation clearly. Gone was the cool self-assurance, because not only did he not withdraw, but for a withdrawal he’d have to penetrate her even further, and he felt the length of the way he was to make inside the woman’s vagina.