Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  Which his mind conjured up as a cave the color of congealed blood, where he had once before found refuge.

  He could not resist forcing his way back to a place from which he should have been withdrawing. He reached a space that was in the time neither of memory nor of imagination. The light summer blanket must have slipped off some time ago.

  If that’s the case, then everything happens uncontrollably, unguardedly.

  Finally he found it.

  Finally he left something in himself uncontrolled.

  He saw an unguarded gate in the night.

  It could be fatal. I am complaining like a child. Certain segments of time are falling away.

  Though the possibility of something fatal made him happy. He had found it, at last.

  You might even be able to make a child, yes, now, that’s right, whispered the woman; she seemed to be trembling and struggling for air.

  Please, I beg you, she would have wanted to say this clearly.

  Finally found it.

  He should have taken her whispering, full, flesh-smelling lips into his lips to suppress in himself his idiotic exultation, the uncontrolled times, the open gate, his aversion and his nausea. Moreover, why shouldn’t he be able to complain; after all, he was complaining to a kindergarten teacher. He was ashamed of himself for thinking of such an idiotic thing. And carefully he took into his mouth the woman’s lips, which were still slightly blue, and began cautiously and slowly to withdraw himself. He was still trying to protect, still feared for, his independence. He could not adopt, could not conform to her rhythm, though for a long time he could not avoid it either. He wanted to keep a little reminder of his own.

  At least not to let his own pulse dissolve in her throbbing.

  But Gyöngyvér denied entry to the fleeing man’s tongue; with her strong tongue, trained in her voice lessons, she shoved it away.

  She wanted to talk.

  The man tried again. He sank his teeth into her lips, bit her, but the woman shoved out his tongue and pushed him off her so she could talk at last.

  The taste of the strong tongue was salty, very salty.

  Driven by anger at being rejected, he arched his torso upward, the woman’s arms willingly let him, so with his lips he could leisurely inch across her neck and take a bite of the rearing tip of her breast; he barely reached it and was ready to suck it into himself—softly, not rudely. But the woman hardly felt his thick, parched lips and sharp teeth, she gave her body a yank.

  Yanked it out.

  Didn’t want to.

  Didn’t want anything.

  Vainly the man’s tongue snapped after her.

  But now it was as if she had to puke out her every stifled word.

  I’m flowing away, flowing in every direction. I feel it. For sure, now. Help me, I can’t hold on, I can’t.

  Ágost caught sight of the precipice’s edge where the woman could not hold on.

  She was wailing.

  But he saw it clearly, this was his own precipice, he watched the waves of falling rocks, and somehow he had to back out of this whole thing without letting the enormous weight of the crumbling ground hurl him along with it. This was the sound of cracking bone heard during a tooth extraction. The depth of the precipice rumbled up, the water churned, the hurtling rocks boomed and rattled against the sides of the precipice. And then, slowly, he returned after all. He stopped for a moment. He knew he would be unable to return. Because of the resistance of the vagina’s muscles shuddering, no matter how slippery the vagina was he needed more force.

  This was not without danger.

  Before he reached the deepest reachable point, he stopped again, couldn’t tell where he was, grew rigid, immobile, and several times against his will lowered himself into her; and to put an end to the struggle and not to ejaculate into the woman’s open womb, he squeezed the cheeks of his buttocks together with a single powerful jerk. The move threw his rectum into a spasm, the spasm applied pressure on his prostate, and with the stimulus of this pressure he disrupted the arc of his pleasure. For this to happen, it’s enough briefly to shut off the sperm duct, ductus ejaculatorius, located just above the prostate gland. The upward arc of pleasure plunges drastically, but the stimulus remains, and everything can start all over again. He broke the rhythms for both of them, which were becoming united in an even acceleration.

  Gyöngyvér, however, experienced this as mounting tension while feeling there was no room to increase it further. As if she had been jolted to a higher region from which she saw a landscape she had never seen before. Luckily for her, she had not said what she wanted. And she realized she shouldn’t dare say she’d like to have a child. That would mean she loves him. And she cannot reveal that. She has come to love him. Simply because this is a handsome man. Such a handsome man is not right for her. I shall fall in love with you. But not yet, no. Were she to say this aloud, she’d reach her climax, not because of him but because of herself. Because of that image of desire for a man she always carried with her, but then she would have to say good-bye to this man, to his handsomeness. Like a superstitious person who knows what to avoid, she said nothing, remained cautious. Just this once, not to ruin everything.

  She appeared to be protesting vehemently, hysterically, which Ágost immediately misunderstood.

  You don’t have to be afraid of me, he whispered not without a hint of pride, I’m telling you I can be careful.

  But the woman wanted to feel impersonality in his words, wanted to hear words from someone who wasn’t careful.

  His voice reached her from afar.

  She grasped the words but not their meaning.

  Still, doubt seeped into her regarding the man’s sanity. As though everything was taking place on different levels and it was impossible to reach the summit of pleasure. But amid her moaning and wailing, for four days she had been waiting for the end of the man’s death rattle, wishing for her own death, and for his. She could not understand how one could make sane sounds. Even though she herself was making them.

  To convince the woman physically too, of what perhaps she could no longer comprehend or could not hear because of the whistling of their ever-faster, crisscrossing breaths, he returned from the rough bumpy road, faster and forcefully, all the way to the exit, as if to signal his intention to break away, as if flooding his path with spotlights.

  And as if seeing something he had never seen before, though the image had always accompanied him, stayed close to him, familiar. He did not feel his cock anymore, or what he might have felt with his cock. Self-sensation and indirect sensation had become a single image, which held his attention and kept him occupied at least as much as his cock had before. He knew from experience that he had to be very reserved about images. It would be hard to acknowledge that the fantasized images caused greater pleasure than live people did.

  But this was not the work of imagination, which was stronger and could have extinguished the sensation.

  To observe everything, to touch nothing. His caution was at work. Not to get into her. Only from a distance, more on the outside.

  Which that instant the woman felt as if it were keeping her from approaching her own imminent death.

  For some reason the man is asking for some kind of delay, which she cannot possibly grant him.

  And the man, who thought he still had some self-control and saw the situation clearly, kept reassuring himself in his great excitement that after all he didn’t want to leave her, no, not at all, he was coming right back. But on this uneven terrain he already saw the floodlit pulsating wall of the abandoned cave, and he must not take a single false step. By then he had no idea just how long his eyes had been closed, but it had been quite a while. But because he was still keeping his distance, still reserving for himself the need to keep his distance, which others deliberately and much sooner long to lose, the obstinate pain of physical exertion did not contort his face.

  Other people always hasten toward some destination.

  He s
aw a fence, again the open gate, and strong headlights of a car speeding into the night. He was seeing the headlights of his own car.

  And it flashed through his mind that in live deployments, when suddenly everything turns very risky, he followed the same pattern of behavior he did in lovemaking. Before his death, he’d like to gain one more moment for his consciousness. Maybe two, some amount of time, a whole day, because he hadn’t put things in order.

  The little room was now wrapped in dimness, though the ceiling retained some of the waning twilight; their bodies kept their darkness enclosed and at the same time they were illuminated, now faintly, now more strongly but continuously, by their inner vision.

  In the dazzling summer light, the river’s waves, murky with mud and sand, were crashing over Gyöngyvér’s head.

  She was being dragged into the depths as if by her feet and ankles, and could not resist. Whirlpool. She would have shouted with her last breath, as if finally realizing what had happened to her in the past, but she could not shout because her mouth was stopped up with water, heavy water that smelled of mud, fish, and shells. So that’s why I have to take him to the Tisza, she thought suddenly, to kill him.

  Then I shall die, she said to herself contentedly and a bit surprised.

  Long pieces of silk caressed her body. But she did not die.

  At the bottom of the sandy, silkily ruffled riverbed, another, more slippery, cooler dry land awaited her. She was free to set her feet firmly on it or to drift away, as she liked. The depths glittered as though the sun breaking through the water were afloat and aflame. And as dazzling as the world she had left behind for the sake of being mute. When in the dead center of the dazzle they put her down in the middle of the courtyard covered with chicken shit. The chicken stretches its tail feathers and the hole can be seen only in the instant when the chicken squirts its load. They were pecking all around her and she stopped crying. They did not come close.

  Crying didn’t get her anywhere, anyway.

  Instead she began cautiously to crawl away; no matter how many times they put her back, she would start again, to reach the brimming trough in which the water sparkled enchantingly.

  Before she had a chance to grab the old cracked wood of the trough warmed by the sun, to pull herself up and to hide her face in the sparkling water—she didn’t know it was not for drinking and she wanted to make her face disappear in the water—two hands dripping with soft soap and water picked her up. All she could do was kick and bite.

  Don’t be scared, yuh ugly worm, I said don’t be flustered, she hissed, beside herself, swearing in foul language, cursing mother and god, as she hauled her back to the middle of the courtyard, where under the merciless sun both soap and sand burned on her face.

  Plague eat yer guts, yuh worm.

  She protested, kicked.

  Y’think, yuh little worm, y’really think what yuh want is what’s gonna happen.

  And again she was carried in the air and slammed into the dust, the air knocked out of her; not only could she not speak for long seconds but she could not even breathe; she lost the guiding rhythm of life.

  Yuh’ll drop dead right here unless yuh open yer trap. Hey, y’hear me, I’ll lock yuh up again with the chickens, or where in holy hell should I lock yuh in, yuh stubborn mule, yuh. Yuh’ll choke to death when I stuff soap in yuh.

  Gyöngyvér still would not speak. She heard herself whimpering or, more precisely, along with her whimpering returned the quondam crying and, with the crying, the courtyard, its dazzling light, the glimmering gray shades of the acacias reaching to infinity, the unquenchable thirst, the taste of the soft soap, and the choking. From this she understood that the moment had come. When she would finally take her revenge.

  All she had to do now, to keep the man from making even the slightest move inside her, was to raise one hip. She fastened herself to the root of his cock. Me, me. Don’t. And no longer heard her own hateful whimpering. At last. She’d have to choke, after all.

  But at least not for lack of air, but because of the water, that would do it, she’d choke on the water; she’d been thirsty for so long.

  In the water I’ll get lost, finally. And when she thought about this and really wished it, she saw how sane and cold the outside world was.

  The familiar ceiling of her room.

  They were scratching and stroking the pig, kept slapping and patting the horse’s neck, she really remembered this. The young bride pressed the goose under her enormous thighs and hacked away at the bird’s windpipe, everything crunching under the knife, and then tore, ripped, and scraped at the gristle. She closed her eyes while the blood poured into the bowl and the bird was kicking and convulsing under her with its slippery large white feathers. And then she pushed it off the stool. Spoke to it gently, calm down now, stop kicking your mistress so much, cooed to it more emphatically, it’ll be all right, little goosey, you’ll see, you’ll be all right, while the headless bird thrashed about until it bled to death.

  The young woman was silent for a good long while. Feathers were flying.

  In the meantime it probably turned evening.

  And this is not something she imagines but is a memory she doesn’t really remember. How interesting. The hog they killed at dawn, the small livestock at sundown. She didn’t know when it might have been morning, if now it was evening. Until she grew up, she would have preferred to be an animal like a hog or any other beast.

  Not this kind.

  The children must have already been sent indoors, for they were no longer making noise in the courtyard. From somewhere a radio could be heard, and the sound of someone tenderizing meat or of some other muffled pounding.

  Luckily, she wasn’t the one being beaten. Smack, thundered the raw meat.

  That is how loud the pounding of her heart seemed to her, and on the ceiling she saw the mute, reflected lights of the warm summer evening. But in that instant it also became clear that somebody else was in the room. A sudden current of air and a strange smell could be felt.

  A slight clink on the window. Her heart skipped a beat. Quickly she raised her head—oh my god—to look out over the man’s tensed-up shoulder.

  The maid’s room was barely longer than the bed. Only now did she come to her senses enough to see where she was. This was not a trick played on her senses.

  Mrs. Szemző, Dr. Irma Arnót, had indeed opened the door on them. Her white lace glove glowed on the doorknob; her white face hovered in the shadow of her hat and at the same time seemed to be nodding approvingly with each of her words. This means something entirely different. Indeed, this must mean something very different. Yes, that’s how it is. I’ve opened the door and now I am here.

  Gyöngyvér made desperate belated moves. She would have wanted to pull the cover over them but it had slipped off some time ago. She found a corner, but the cover was stuck in or on something, and she had to yank and tug before it freed up enough to cover only partially the bottom of the man kneeling over her. There was not enough to hide his broad, sopping back, flashing in the light now entering the room, or the shoulders, the tousled hair and dark head.

  She could not make him disappear.

  My dear Gyöngyvér, my sweet, said Mrs. Szemző from the doorway, her voice at once grating and sugary, I just dropped in to tell you I’m leaving now.

  She spoke in such a natural conversational tone, perhaps a bit higher than necessary because of the darkness, as if she hadn’t seen anything or didn’t want to acknowledge what she was seeing or perhaps did not believe her eyes.

  I definitely won’t be back before two, she added more softly.

  But with these words she destroyed the confidence with which she had entered the room, and it was as if, after all, she should acknowledge something of the sight and the vaporous smells that assailed her. Genuine alarm stole into her voice.

  If I’d thought you were asleep I wouldn’t have come in. To tell you the truth, oh god, I thought you were listening to the radio.

&
nbsp; She regretted this foolishness the moment she uttered it. As one exposing herself. After all, I did see it was dark in here.

  Yes, I could have sworn you were listening to the radio, she added quickly. Please forgive me.

  Oh, please, no need to worry, go ahead and leave if you have to, Gyöngyvér replied, her voice barely audible, as if still hoping that this was nothing but a hallucination or dream, and that if she behaved properly and produced appropriate sounds to indicate that nothing was going on everything would turn out well.

  The old lady would evaporate, vanish. And she would unexpectedly wake up and forget the whole thing. But how could she produce acceptable sounds. The man was stiffened into himself, as if he had turned into a piece of furniture. Because of his incredible weight and mass, she could neither budge nor breathe properly, could not speak as if he were not inside her.

  At the same time, there was a touch of indecent flirtation and derisiveness in his immobility. And why not, seeing that his face was concealed. However alarmed he may have been, he was enjoying the embarrassing situation.

  Obeying some incomprehensible command, he had to behave like a bug; he became motionless, stiff, as though he understood the limitations of anthropoidal behavior. Yet he did not mind that his naked body was revealed to someone he’d never seen before and, to his great good fortune, was not seeing now.

  In fact he was sorry Gyöngyvér had so quickly and adroitly covered at least his ass.

  In his rectum, in his swollen testicles, drawn up high in excitement, there slumbered the wish and the pleasure of exhibitionism, as well as its recurring concomitant shame.

  In truth he didn’t know why he did what he did and why he desired his own shame. In the boarding-school shower room it had reached his consciousness, what was expected of him and what commercial value a shameless exhibition had, and, realizing how high a price the sight of his body was quoted at on the secret stock exchange of his inmates, he accepted their undisguised glances; he ceased to have serious doubts about his naked body’s effect on others. His self-confidence was reinforced by the interest not of women but of men. However, liberating and slightly hasty waves of lovemaking had barely flooded his body when, at the threshold of his youth, he was surprised by a depressing fantasy that refused to leave him and accompanied him into manhood. The harder he objected to it, the deeper the fantasy cut into him. And it came with a powerful sensation; the larger his doubts as to whether all this fucking was worth anything, the stronger the pleasure became, or at least the painful imagination of great pleasure. Which made him sink even deeper into depression.