by Peter Nadas
Quickly away from here and let him finally finish himself off.
He concluded at last that he did not need to wait any longer. In this other life of his, it was inadvisable to acknowledge the passage of time.
These nights could not end in glimmering semi-darkness because they had no dawns.
The Other Shore
Please, I don’t want you putting down roots, said Mária Szapáry quietly, and took the glass from Irma Arnót’s hand. Today it’s your turn to cut.
This made Elisa fall silent in the wheelchair, and Margit also understood Mária’s stern warning. She had to get ahold of herself. Wildly she began to look for her hairpins. First in the mass of her undone hair and then with her fingers searching blindly in the leather sofa’s folds and gaps. Now Izabella’s silk dress swished as she got up, almost as a response to Médi’s efforts, but before she left the room she tipped her head like a little girl, pretending to do it absentmindedly, and called back to them.
While I’m getting a washcloth, Médi will have time to apologize to Mária. Tout de suite, she said warningly, et pas d’histoires.
I can do that right away, of course, if you want me to, replied Margit Huber almost indifferently, and one after the other snapped up the found hairpins with her lips so that with her free hand she could pin up the crown of hair again. I beg your pardon, she said rather mockingly, speaking through hairpins and clenched lips. Je te demande bien pardon. But if you allow me, I’d love to have a repentant smoke.
Please, je t’ai pardonné il y a longtemps, answered Mária Szapáry. Go ahead, no problem at all.
Margit Huber had stood up from the leather sofa; they looked into each other’s eyes, long and cold, and did not know what to do with their mutual hatred. Everything turned cool. Médi kept herself busy with her hair, pinning it back with blasé nervous little movements, but she realized there weren’t enough pins; she was observing herself with Szapáry’s critical eyes. Her flame-red thick soft-leather belt was askew, her blouse had slipped out from under it, she had rumpled her snow-white petticoat, which somehow was stuck to the calico skirt, and with her tears she had smeared her makeup.
Before you tell me I look ridiculous I’ll go tidy up.
It won’t do you any harm, replied Mária Szapáry.
Médi, offended, hurried to the bathroom while Mária Szapáry and Irma Arnót remained, awkwardly, at the table. Elisa, hungry and jealous, was watching them. They could not know whose partners they would be in the card game or where they should sit. The spilled drink did not spread on the green felt table cover nor did the felt absorb it. It lay before them on the table, convex and opaque, like an antique cameo waiting to be worked on. This image occurred to Mária Szapáry because only a few weeks ago she had pawned her penultimate cameo and had been waiting for the mailman every day to see if they could make it on that money until the end of the summer. Now she has only one left, the most beautiful of her cameos. They neither said anything nor looked at each other. Elisa again injected a little whimper into their silence, slyly and quietly. Perhaps the tension in the wordless moments hurt her. Long minutes went by until Margit Huber returned and offered a cigarette to Irma, who smoked occasionally. On top of it all, Margit smoked Gauloises, and when people asked her how she could be so inconsistent she would answer, moving not a muscle in her face, that she did not have to sing, her students did, and she wasn’t teaching them with her throat—and she’d tap her forehead with her fingers. She’d obviously given herself only as much time in the bathroom as it took to tidy up her clothes and makeup. She did not want them to wait so long that they might have the impression she’d fought with Dobrovan in the bathroom.
Which, of course, she had.
Singers and dancers brought her Gauloises from distant cities and airports, sometimes from places where none of them had ever been or ever would be.
The two women lit up with great pleasure, both of them longing for the first deep puffs.
In the silence not only the clicking of the gilded leather-covered lighter could be heard but also the burst of its flame and then the crackling of the tiny tobacco embers. Mária Szapáry could not bear cigarette smoke, but every night she politely placed an ashtray on the tea trolley for the two neurasthenics. She glanced at the trolley and was surprised to see that a small Urbino dish used as an ashtray was still intact. If she wanted them to come to her house she had to be lenient in matters that were not quite to her liking.
Finally Dobrovan came back too, swishing in her silk dress, but she was equally silent. She held out a wet washcloth for Mária to wipe her sticky fingers on. When that was done, with quick, surprising, and unjustified agitation she blotted up the opaquely glistening cameo. In her swishing silks she hurried out with the washcloth. She walked as if carrying an important object. She heard the shout, as if hearing it again over the distance of several decades. The other women stared after her. Suddenly she felt herself inside the brilliant plum-blue silk costume with shoulder straps, her knees bare. She shifted her weight to the balls of her feet, then rose on point and with rapid little steps hurried forward and became blinded by the footlights. Pas de bourrée with the feet lightly alternating devant, derrière. She stretched her arms ahead of her; on turned-up palms she was carrying the bluebird of happiness. It took wing. Left her here on earth but with the strength of flight she was on her toes again. She’d love to fly away with it, how she’d love to. She gazed at her empty hands en désespoire. She did not understand how she could so sharply recall that shout of long ago, et c’est fini.
She was barely twenty-one years old when at a rehearsal for her first major role a loosened batten crashed down on her.
It happened that in those days she was with a man—who took care of her, of whom her family knew nothing of course, who taught her how to talk again, but whom she did not take seriously until this accident, or rather whose proximity she did not want to acknowledge. She took him for one of those people who hang around theaters, a very good-looking penniless nobody who attached himself to her as he would to someone else tomorrow, and until then she deigned to accept his services but did not think much of him. In the evenings, during longer breaks in rehearsals or on endless spring Sundays, it would have been devastating to remain alone in the huge city.
Loneliness had eaten away at her suppleness and the smoothness of her style.
And she couldn’t commit herself to this sad young man because she was always, hysterically, on guard lest he make her pregnant.
He or anyone else.
Not to get pregnant, not that, for God’s sake, and certainly not by this character. Let him have his gratification on his own account; let him squirt his fluids somewhere else, anywhere, in any way.
The small puddle usually wound up on her belly or became long stripes running down her neck, into her face, her hair; she didn’t care where.
He was a frail, sickeningly white-skinned, easily injured person whose dark hair, twisting in little waves and curls, continually fell over his shiny, large, pale forehead. She had never met anyone so poor as this man and listened to his stories with aversion, though this made her feel ashamed because a poor man was, after all, still a man. It seemed as if his poverty also meant that he had all sorts of venereal diseases. She was always anxious, worried about catching some of them, she constantly observed herself, stuck out her tongue in front of the mirror or, with the help of another mirror, studied the roof of her mouth, her throat, to ascertain that fatal blisters had not appeared. He might be Lithuanian, maybe half Polish, even Russian, she couldn’t tell. He’d run away from a Warsaw orphanage when he was sixteen, and except for his grandmother, who had raised him until he was ten, didn’t know anyone.
At most she loved his mouth strictly for aesthetic reasons, but she was ready to forgo his kisses.
She was afraid of minor infections, even the common cold, anything that might take her off her feet. She liked his eyes too, somewhat, his deeply melancholic countenance, a little disguis
ed by his way of retreating under the protection of his eyelashes or by the unexpected vehemence of the movements with which he straightened the myriad curls of his hair. She looked for no lasting relationship with anyone because every little change disturbed her concentration.
Once a week she would wait for Médi in front of the Conservatoire, or the two of them together waited on the quai Malaquais for Médi’s love, another destitute young man, ramrod-straight, with a bad stutter, who was also Hungarian and studied painting in a studio at the École des Beaux Arts or was a model at other ones. Frankly, she didn’t want to see even these people, especially not Médi and her boyfriend, because their presence drew her attention to her lack of romantic feelings for anyone. Not even the man with whom she reached her gratification.
She was aware that her behavior was unusual or downright scandalous.
She had to be careful not to be conspicuous about it with her colleagues. Any reasonable girl would rather seek than avoid company; after all, she’d want to get married and would obviously adjust her conduct to her plans and intentions. But no, not she, not in the least. To some extent she had to keep her intentions a secret even from herself.
But this Korsakas managed to meet her most secret requirements. He satisfied her, nourished the suppleness and stylistic polish that otherwise loneliness would have consumed; and this was the most important thing for her career.
She practically begged his pardon when she too reached her climax.
And he did not want to rob Bella of all her time, because he worried about losing her. He did not demand her attention and did not even insist on penetrating her. Actually, there was something rather neutral in his behavior. And when he did penetrate her a bit, he did it carefully and with consideration, didn’t go too deeply, only filled the bays of the labia with his amazingly round bulb, which turned almost completely black with excitement. A powerful odor rose from down there, that’s where he stroked it and kept pulling it between the smells of the two of them, though in a way that let him yank it out anytime he wanted to.
With considerable effort she might have been able to deny herself the man’s body, but she always felt a renewed desire for his smell in hers.
Which was such a strange thought; as if she had said, yes, I caught a scent, and therefore I am a wild beast.
To suit their interests and needs, they developed a particular technique of communication, the sort of relationship that was not unusual in such a merciless big city. Bella did not ask herself about the source of the man’s polite neutrality. She had a cool calculation in her mind: this is what I give, this is what I get, neither more nor less.
I’m calculating and selfish, she told herself reproachfully, an egoistic beast, that’s what I am, she said to herself, as if waiting for someone to contradict her, but this was the truth.
Yet she felt that if things went on this way, if she failed to tame her egoism or relinquish her slyly extracted, selfish little gratifications, which differed from those produced in her own solitary smell and by her own hands, she’d become more and more like her father and mother, and her rebellion against them would be rendered meaningless.
She thought that she was deceiving the other person and that that was why her behavior was morally unacceptable, but she was only fooling herself, which made her very anxious, and she suffered greatly. Perhaps the man had more experience in making order of such calculations; he was ten years older than she.
Bella told herself that the business relationship would last as long as its benefit to her body remained greater than the loss or harm she might create with her infection phobias. She feared that frequent autoeroticism would leave some trace on her gestures and become obvious on the stage. She did not notice that the more efficient their calculations became, their techniques of gratification more studied and deliberate, the deeper they went into the areas where they became acquainted, in which case why would she belittle or disdain him.
She could not take seriously a body so poorly built as his, so crude and ill proportioned, and not in terms of professional considerations either. She would involuntarily close her eyes because she did not like to look at him naked. Perhaps that is why the image of what she did see remained so sharp in her memory. It was no use saying that the sight of a perfect body was boring and she’d had enough of it; for her it was as hard to accept this explanation as to accept its opposite. She would have withdrawn from the embrace of thin, long, weak arms, but the sharp sensation produced by sensitive fingers became more profound and more important than what she saw. What settled in her mind was the cautious encounter of their loneliness. And the man’s feet, his long legs and thighs, surprisingly well developed compared to the infirmity of his body as a whole.
Quite nice legs and thighs with thick black hair. All right, she didn’t love him, but she wished at least to accept his body a little.
She was most averse to his penis, which is to say she didn’t want to see it erect or withdrawn into itself, when with its dark round head it looked out of the thick pubic hair. She found his testicles positively ridiculous, undeveloped, like a child’s; she didn’t understand why a man like that didn’t sink into the ground for shame.
The man controlled the writhing of her loins, which she tried to restrain, with the convex edge of his fingernails, with the tip of his tongue, or with his taut shiny testicles. The latter, when excited, became a single red globe, with which he’d keep touching the woman’s labia very gently.
A maniac, she should really be afraid of him, the man is a maniac.
He kept on touching her organ, gently hitting and bumping it, maniacally, until she opened up, and from then on he seemed to be pounding inside, could even slide inside her, or at least that is what Bella felt, that is what she saw of him inside herself. As if he too had not testicles but a pair of labia, and the two meat-eating flowers, his and hers, were opening into each other, one devouring the other. And when she threw the washcloth angrily into the sink, she fondly remembered this too.
Along with her shame.
She felt ashamed and watched Médi; leaning out of her duplicity, she watched what was happening between Médi and her handsome stuttering Hungarian man to see if there was any similarity. She felt there wasn’t. No, what was happening to her was not legitimate at all. She thought Médi was untouched by these things, by all these raging abominations. She feared that her people at home might find out about her. She must not become pregnant. But the abomination was good. In the endless rhythmic pounding, the physical pain was wonderful, but certainly it would end. To strengthen her memory, with her loins she touched the hard ledge of the sink, a strange collision at the edge of her gently sloping mons veneris, twice in succession. Frugally she portioned out the sounds she produced, with which she also punished herself. She was afraid of breaking into hysterical screams. The man did not allow himself loud sighs or moans either, which helped deepen the feeling of their movements and shifting positions.
If this stranger’s exterior repelled or irritated her so much, she shouldn’t be loud when he helped her reach her climax.
This was the logic of self-punishment, and certainly without justification.
The man’s pitiable, almost hollow chest with its ridiculously short little ribs, and his awkward shoulders from which every little bone separately protruded, gave her a most disgusting feeling that she was not a grown woman but a little girl playing with a stupid doll. The stomach wall flattened by much starvation, and below it the childlike, protruding, somewhat puffed-up belly; I must be mad, she kept saying to herself, going to bed with a man like this when I could do it with much better ones.
But he was the one she went to bed with; others could not get this close to her. Which logically could not be comprehended. Why it was like this and not like that.
Or what about his pale bony little buttocks, which didn’t have enough flesh for its cleft to close properly under the volume and pressure of muscles; just touching it filled her with irritation.
She chose to let happen what could not but happen, and in her stabbing, throbbing climaxes she considered herself deaf, blind, and dead.
Quickly she turned on the hot water, which instantly filled the bathroom with a sulfurous odor. She didn’t want to stay by herself for long, and she washed the washcloth so angrily it was as if she had to remove sperm from it. She was not comfortable about the physical characteristics of sperm. Given its consistency, she thought of it as snot. She was always surprised anew when it didn’t have little knots in it and its thick body easily dispersed in water; it was not snot after all, but an embodiment of her dread, anxiety, and fear that she’d ruin her life with her dissoluteness.
Fulfilling the prophecy of her parents.
Not to get pregnant.
Sometimes she left a strongly outlined, yellowish stain on the sheet, though she wasn’t sure that it was not copious vaginal discharge flowing out during orgasm. Because it was so dark, she took it to be the first sign of syphilis. There’s blood in it. Or it left a stain on the handkerchief she used to wipe it off; in worse cases stains were left on her clothes, or it dried and turned white in her black hair, which to her shame she noticed only in the rehearsal hall’s mirror.
She kept rinsing and squeezing the washcloth, as if worrying that she couldn’t get rid of the stains. After she hung it up and quickly, with a bad conscience, returned to the others, she still did not know what to do with her agitation; in Mária’s living room, everything appeared to be the way she remembered the hotel room to which Vladas Korsakas took her after her release from the hospital.
As if there had been no operation and no anesthesia, he was standing there before her, alive, warm, and real in his white corkscrew-patterned wool sweater. And it didn’t matter that so many things were happening in her head. The three women were still in the same positions around the table; their every little move made the layers of smoke around them flutter slightly. In his thick, white, high-necked sweater, Korsakas looked more athletic than he was, and he wore no shirt under the sweater. The bed, the heavy curtains on the window, and the Japanese sitz bath in the corner behind the screen were just as she had left them; the accident had caused no change in her hotel room. She saw no signs of joy, pain, or empathy on any of the objects.