by Peter Nadas
Even in the most conventional position, he always worked rhythmically, almost inattentively, at least pretending to be aloof, or, conversely, he’d put everything into it, get on his knees to hold the woman’s vagina captive, yet leave enough freedom to slide smoothly between clitoris and the orifice of the uterus, keeping his movements strong and finely detailed so the woman would reach her first major climax as soon as possible and not be demanding, surrendering herself to a continuous gratification; and in this labor, his ass would inevitably spread, open wide, and he would be surprised by a good friend.
All he needed for this was to feel the coolness of the room in the crack of his buttocks, to have a current of air stroke his cleft. A close friend. Though he had no such close friend and normally would not even want one.
This fantasy spoke more of his naïve inexperience than anything else.
The friend had no face.
He put up with him though he abhorred him, did not see what was happening yet had to endure the violence.
So much for friendship.
Although he could easily sublimate this ungratified desire and secret dread of his excited anus, he tamed it. When with his mouth and tongue bathed in prodigal amounts of saliva, he slid from women’s vaginas to their tight assholes and they cried out in surprise. It was as if he were calming his own anus, as if he were searching for his own.
He didn’t think much of friendships.
He had no idea that feeling ashamed about this was unnecessary; after all, the tight bundled muscle curling back on itself, the musculus levator ani, closely binds genitals and anus together in everyone.
You probably have to get up early, said Mrs. Szemző apprehensively in the dark, as if she had not seen that someone was lying on top of Gyöngyvér.
Yes, unfortunately, I do, very early, replied Gyöngyvér, and despite all her efforts, her words sounded like gasps.
And here I am, so heartless, waking you up. Don’t worry, when I come back I’ll try harder not to wake you again. And now I really won’t bother you anymore.
Filling up someone must feel very different from being filled up by someone, these feelings are not interchangeable; yet, halfway between the anus and the genitals, at the point where the powerful dual self-enclosed muscles meet and cross in a figure eight, the image men and women have of themselves do not differ.
Go on, and have a good time.
I just wanted to tell you that I left the light on in the hallway on purpose.
I know, dear Irmuska, answered Gyöngyvér emphatically, as if she were talking to a slow-witted child. She’s still not leaving. And she felt like screaming. Get this old hag out of here. What’s she doing spying on me. She had no strength to scream, because insidious little vibrations and tremors were pouring into her from the man, and she shuddered with helpless fury. With the effort not to feel them.
They should not spread to her vaginal muscles, should not even come close.
With which she inadvertently took on Ágost’s preventive attitude.
Though she would have found it very amusing, a worthy revenge, to reach her orgasms mutely, right in front of the old hag.
Actually, wasn’t she basically trying to conform to the situation and satisfy everyone as best she could. The effort she was making to have it not be like that now only filled her pelvis the more powerfully with painful pleasure. She tightened up, she couldn’t do otherwise, she tightened her anus and the tightening immediately returned to the oval muscles of her vagina and spread in all directions.
This is how she returned it, amplified by her own strength, to the man; thus, the spreading not only didn’t stop at but brimmed over the sandy shores in ever greater volume.
She saw before her those not-too-distant shores.
Don’t turn it off.
Oh, no, I won’t turn it off.
It was as if her pleasure would make her give birth; her pelvis widened, ready to burst. She herself was the bed of the mighty river, which the water filled with its surging mass.
But yesterday you did turn it off.
By mistake, Irmuska, I promise I won’t this time.
For a moment Mrs. Szemző stared at her quietly. It’s one thing to have something in mind, to think about something, and it’s a whole other thing to see it right in front of us.
Over the man’s shoulder, virtually steaming with heat, she stared back at Mrs. Szemző, as if pleading with her.
But she did not budge.
There was no longer enough light in the small room for them to see each other, yet their looks were as if glued together. As though one of them used this look, wrested from the darkness, to spirit away what the other did not want to show; oddly, this impossibility became their compromise.
Well then, go back to sleep, said Mrs. Szemző. And thank you, it’s very kind of you, she added fleetingly. Pleasant dreams.
Yes, I thank you, Irmuska, came the hesitant answer from the darkness. Good night, she said loudly.
The door of the maid’s room closed, the draft it created made the window above them clink, but they could not move, because Mrs. Szemző still wasn’t leaving, was still rummaging in the hallway.
They didn’t dare open their mouths.
As if the wall between the maid’s room and the hallway had been broken through and they could feel on their skin the little noises of her rummaging. They didn’t dare laugh or express alarm or displeasure. And wild joy burst out. But they had to stifle it. They grabbed, held on to each other on the narrow bed with the bad springs. But this solved nothing. Because in the woman’s pelvis the trembling kept on radiating, with intermittent silent vibrations slashing through; it had no rhythm, she returned what she received, or she gave it and received it back and then, as if pushed along, it coursed through her spine and thighs; it would unexpectedly make her knees jerk, her brain jouncing painfully with every jerk. Which made her unable to speak. Oh.
So good. More, it hurts, oh, but it’s good. How it hurts. She knew nothing else, wanted nothing else; more, it hurts, oh, that was all she wanted. Though she had pangs of conscience; why did she have to bring here a man who weighed a ton.
And that is why she wanted to stop, slow down, absorb the jerking with her muscles. She might have been ashamed of the sounds she made, of her own stupidity, of her pain, of being busy with her own gratification even in such an impossible situation. She could not stop the jerks, not the trembling, nothing. They kept coming. They hurt. She wanted them. Her orgasms came. She could not reject any of this, her brain was rattling.
In the dim hallway, Mrs. Szemző discovered that for months she hadn’t put away her winter gloves.
As if to say, that’s the limit. As if profoundly upset by her own carelessness.
She found herself alone in the unventilated hallway crammed with furniture, and this felt like a slap in the face that could not have been avoided or mitigated. And the walls were indeed not so thick that she couldn’t have heard them, but she kept to the recent compromise. Those two inside didn’t want to make a sound, so she wouldn’t hear them. If she left right away, she’d be breaching the compromise she had made. And their bodies went on working whether they liked it or not, they did it several times, in succession, the bed creaking under them. It was becoming uncomfortable. If they hadn’t been making selfish little moves the bodies simply couldn’t have endured it.
Mrs. Szemző did not hear much of all this because she was busy with her anger, but her anger had painful fissures in it. She loved her gloves. It was not a question, not for a moment, whether or not she knew what her soul was or wasn’t doing to her. She needed to avoid unnecessary dramas, yet she was in them up to her neck, and she could not deny that perhaps she wanted to be in them.
It would be ridiculous to think she was unaware of all this since for two decades, until her practice ended, she had been one of the most celebrated and best-paid psychoanalysts in Budapest.
Her gloves had to be finely lined, the kind that cling snugly to the f
ingers. To feel the root of the fingers in them was an exceptional, almost insolent, pleasure.
Impossible, this forgetfulness really makes things impossible, she said to herself; she was unfazed by these alleged impossibilities of hers, though she was keenly aware of them too.
Her forgetfulness was her only refuge.
She was so upset about having left her gloves for months on various pieces of furniture in the hallway that she blushed in the darkness. Which managed to surprise her. She felt hot in her two-piece pearl-colored dress patterned with blue stripes. She tried to dismiss the feeling with a wave of her hand: she was not about to deceive herself with blushing and hot flashes. She was outnumbered by these subtle bodily actions, though, and she had to repeat for the third time what she had said to curb her upset self and satisfy the controlling one. Her head was nodding vigorously; in her excitement, this otherwise hardly noticeable and cleverly hidden little tic grew stronger. It’s really impossible the way I’ve been leaving things all over the place and then forgetting them. And all the time, she observed disinterestedly, she was regaining her composure.
The truth was that everything existed simultaneously in her mind, and she couldn’t forget anything, because she purposefully did not remind herself of anything. And in fact she brought about her forgetfulness artificially.
Yes, she was now going to put away those miserable winter gloves. Her famous glove collection had survived the devastation. She did not remember how handy a pair of gloves could be in certain situations. She had been taken away, along with her two sons, in the middle of summer. Instead of real objects, she invented objects and filled her memory with them, or she smuggled objects out of her memory and pretended they’d never existed; she freed her memory of everything depressing. She could not bear this anymore. She had to upset herself with all sorts of meaningless and invented triviality to allow her mind to run on empty. But it should have something to go on. She kept saying things to herself, continually, so as not to allow a single interjection concerning anything she thought improper or incorrect to acknowledge. She did not feign being deaf or blind: she truly did not see or hear what she did not think she should see or hear.
She let her body and soul play tricks on her. She knew how to please both of them, keep them calm.
Not for a moment would she leave herself without strict supervision.
By himself or herself, each human being is a relatively transparent, mechanical system—she firmly believed this. Only when together with others do the systems become complicated, and that’s bad enough. Living together with a subtenant includes several generations of Sozialgeschichte; the soul and all its mechanical tricks lie somewhere beyond this. Stories about the soul and about social relations scarcely touch each other; rarely is there a direct connection between them; they are two different categories written side by side. At every moment they must be peeled apart. Which is what everybody does, all the time. This she firmly believed. Mrs. Szemző always thought very abstractly; if she wished to lighten up, she’d smirk and simper to conform to other people’s tastes. Only after this thought did she slam down her handbag. Right into the drawer. Making a loud thump.
There were two large cardboard boxes in the drawer, one for winter gloves, the other for summer ones.
The ceiling lamp’s gray light filtered through the panes of the glass door.
Hallways in Budapest apartments are usually pitifully shapeless. As though Hungarian architects had said, it makes no difference how you enter or what you find when you do. And in this apartment, the hallway was jam-packed with pieces of furniture much too large for the space. One could barely get past them, and they cast chaotic shadows, which made it worse. As if everything was temporary when in fact nothing had changed in ten years.
Just as the movers had put them down.
She kept deferring, pushing the task before her from day to day like a lifeless object, as though the one who’d do the job in her stead were still alive. One spring morning, ten years earlier, in the sunny bathroom of their house on Orbán Mountain, Dr. Szemző, a reputable dermatologist, had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Which event, since then, had claimed for itself an eternal yesterday.
Szemző collapsed, letting out a single surprised shout. In those years, many of those who had survived the earlier devastation died like this, suddenly. With his death he displaced every last little tomorrow.
He had managed to slink out of the marching column at the corner of Személynök and Balaton streets.
He learned much later where they had shot the rest of them into the Danube.
After her husband’s funeral, for a token sum Mrs. Szemző turned over the rental rights of their already nationalized villa to a high-ranking national security officer, a timid blond man, father of several children, whose family had been hastily moved to the capital and whom the authorities would have foisted on her as a co-tenant no matter what. Had she insisted on staying in the villa on Orbán Mountain, she’d have had to move down to the basement, and she wasn’t willing to do that. She moved into the apartment on Pozsonyi Road that she was no longer allowed to use as her office. This was the essential part of the transaction, which the ÁVH officer arranged for her, allowing her as a favor to hold on to the right of ownership in the villa in exchange for moving out of it. That is when the furniture was crammed into the apartment, along with many meaningless objects she could not bring herself to throw out, even though she was not expecting or waiting for anything. The crammed furniture was something she permitted, and not unconsciously, one of her selves to have. If she could not create in her apartment a new order like the old one, at least she could more easily conceal from others how much this existence humiliated her.
Not from this one or that one, but from everyone she had been dragging along with her.
She felt as if all her pores suddenly opened up.
What will happen now.
Ágost barely breathed his words on the other side of the wall, whispering like a low fire.
Eyes wide open, they stared into each other’s face, grinning like children after a prank gone awry, hiding to avoid the dreaded consequences.
I don’t know, Gyöngyvér breathed her reply.
Skin shone in the dark, eyes were on fire. They were beautiful, wild, and strong. And they had been waiting for an entirely different storm than the one that now caught them.
I’m afraid you’ll get in big trouble for this.
I don’t think so, maybe she didn’t notice.
Why does she need the light.
Scared. I don’t know.
What is she scared of.
Of you. I don’t know what she’s scared of. Maybe burglars.
Then where the hell is she going.
She plays bridge with her girlfriends.
I see. What time is it anyway.
I think nine thirty, I’m pretty sure.
How do you know.
She leaves before the main entrance gate is locked, before they lock the gate there. The old girls can’t sleep.
They laughed at this remark.
You’re kidding.
Why would I, they play into the wee hours, sometimes she comes home the next morning. But shut up already. They stay awake together. Can’t you hear her, she’s still dawdling in the hallway.
Of course I can hear her.
A movement that took place only inside their bodies followed this. And they laughed happily.
Why, who died.
How should I know. Everybody. Nobody.
Laughter would have overtaken them if they hadn’t stopped up each other’s mouth.
Get a hold of yourself, until she leaves.
Their tongues glided inside each other’s mouth and they thrust them in deep. In place of one forcible pleasure, they found themselves another. There was nothing to fear, they could trust themselves because they were intertwined, they could not be torn away from each other, and this seemed to be an unexpected, unhoped-for, very pleasant bonus. They co
uld not be tamed. Their tongues linked, embraced and danced, each very considerate of the other. They were retching at this depth and sank lower, becoming aware of things turning into sharp pain as they trembled, freely, unashamedly, rhythmically, as the bed bounced, creaking, under them.
She’s going, I know, she’s going right away.
And again they held themselves back a little.
Though they did not exactly know what they were holding back, they did, along with their breath. One shouldn’t do such a thing. Absolutely not. Except that the brave decision made both of them feel, and they felt the strength of the feeling, that their bodies might become completely independent of their will. This was something neither of them had ever experienced.
Everything is falling and tumbling and pouring and running; running, though they are lying here as quietly as you please, waiting politely for the old woman to leave so they can finally lose their sanity.
Maybe she’s gone already. But she’s not, she’s still fiddling about in the hallway.
Oh heavens, she has no intention of going, the pest is eavesdropping.
No, I know her, she wouldn’t do that.
They kept whispering and listening.
She’s looking for something she can’t find.
Again they laughed.
It would be impossible to tell which of their worlds was more uninviting or more vulgar—the world admitted by their faces, mutually blinded by their wide-eyed proximity, a nearby world that alternately brings the twilight-colored walls closer and moves them farther away; or the world that sternly conjures up, in minute detail from head to toe, the impersonal acts of male-female copulation and mercilessly compels them to perform them.