Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  Nobody had taken the glass from Elisa even though she’d been whimpering and begging for who knows how long, stretching out her arms to get attention, to demand something.

  But the object of her wish was not easy to determine.

  Beyond the open glass doors, above the petunias’ fluttering funnels, the urban night was dazzling, motionless. Wet tree branches were swinging icily in the wind; the maid had to be called in to put more wood on the fire, the room was too cold, and then to bring more hot water.

  Elisa did not relinquish her glass; on the contrary she was signaling that she wanted something, and she kept pointing at another glass. Her eyes flashed wildly, she definitely wanted something, and her eyes, as Bella followed them with hers, were on Irma’s almost untouched drink.

  She wanted—no, seemed to demand—that she be given it; give me what Irma hasn’t drunk. Obviously it wasn’t the drink she wanted so much; jealousy was raging within her.

  In response Szapáry puckered her lips slightly and angrily shrugged her shoulders. What do I care, she answered Bella’s mute question. Let her get drunk if she wants to so much.

  The empty glass clacked on the tea trolley.

  They could still have talked, but at this phase of the evening they wouldn’t.

  Dobrovan in her dark silk dress, amply gathered over her breasts and at her waist, stopped behind the empty chair, making the smoke flutter again in the air; the excitement froze.

  This is what they had been waiting for.

  The card game relieved them of the burdensome, highly responsible obligation of conversing, but it took a long time before their concentration on the run of cards made them forget what was constantly on their minds, what had been overstraining their nerves. Once again they reached the point where, despite their intentions, each woman found herself face-to-face with each of the others. Mrs. Szemző smartly tucked her cigarette into the corner of her mouth with her tongue and kept blinking because the smoke irritated her eyes. She picked up a deck, shuffled it, and then spread the cards on the table in a large fanlike arc.

  Each of the four women picked a card, twanging it under her fingers as she flipped it. The value of the cards they picked determined the order of their turns, which also assigned their seating arrangement. To which they responded with little hisses, clicking tongues, giggles, sounds they could produce with almost-closed lips.

  The sounds had different qualities, all of them filled with satisfaction.

  Bella liked especially to make sounds with her lips because she could steal the kiss for herself across the years, the penetrating taste of the cock, its smooth slopes and strong rims, as it smacked her lips.

  It was almost the other way around for Mrs. Szemző; for her it was an enormous effort to keep up appearances. As she giggled, she and her mates were being driven across the old bridge of Regensburg, in the spring snowstorm, stumbling and sliding on the slippery cobblestones.

  Erna Demén’s daughter was no longer with her.

  According to the value of the picked cards, Dobrovan is to be Szapáry’s partner, and Mrs. Szemző will team up with Médi Huber. With their sounds of approval they in fact reveal disappointment. Mrs. Szemző, however close she was to Szapáry, liked best to be partners with the soft-spoken Dobrovan, while Médi Huber and Szapáry, despite the loud conflicts punctuating their relationship, preferred each other as partners in the game.

  Once again the cards had not complied with everyone’s wishes.

  Quickly they changed places as was necessary and sat down again.

  And those two in the maid’s room of the seventh-floor apartment realized that it had been quiet for a long time, that their bodies had been cooling off in the silence and that no more streetcar noises were coming from below.

  Above their heads a draft was slowly swinging the window giving on the dark sky.

  Tonight, luck arranged it so that Mária Szapáry again sat facing the terrace.

  That was the place they all liked most.

  Looking up from the cards from this position, one could see the pale dim lights of the gas lamps, like a flawed string of pearls along the promenade on the other shore of the softly rolling dark river, and the deep shadows of the Buda mountains, sliding in and out of each other above the flat block of the rowers’ clubhouse illuminated by reflected lights.

  From here, of course, they could not have seen what was happening on the island, around the clubhouse, or under the gaslights, but in the city, people knew in general what kind of place it was.

  It wasn’t proper to talk about things like that.

  As if the promenade were empty.

  Occasionally, however, one could see, even with the naked eye, solitary little figures stepping out from among the bushes and trees, waiting for someone or hurrying to escape someone else, all but fleeing on the promenade, and then, a few meters farther on, casting furtive looks about, disappearing into the sparse grove of yellow acacias and then returning to the trails cut in the meager undergrowth to the ruined medieval cloister, stinking with human excrement, where the gently swaying light of gas lamps could barely reach.

  Over Izabella Dobrovan’s silk-clad shoulders Mária Szapáry glanced at the other shore.

  It was like a victory that fell into her lap; she was waiting for her cards.

  She was deliberately avoiding Elisa’s eyes. Neurasthenia was visible on the features of the other three women. Try as she might to appear as a person of democratic persuasion, she considered everyone below her rank neurotic. She always saw their exasperation showing through their disciplined behavior.

  They were not free people.

  They were not sufficiently self-disciplined; they could not provide an acceptable framework for a base emotion.

  She despised them.

  The three despised women, however, were busy wondering whether Elisa’s behavior truly left Mária Szapáry cold.

  She seemed neither interested in nor touched by it, but merely to be waiting for the cards to be dealt.

  The mutual anger lasted into the next day. After their friends left Mária severely reproached Elisa, though by then she had managed to calm herself down; she knew, idiot that she was, that she’d forgive Elisa. And that Elisa would throw a fit, slap at things, cry, rave and rant. I always forgive, she said to herself, as if hypnotizing herself to forgive, yes, forgive her, but it was becoming harder and harder to force forgiveness out of herself.

  There will come a moment when the accumulated pardons will keep her from any further forgiveness.

  She will kill her and then herself. But she laughed to herself about this, remembering she had another choice.

  She could go to confession.

  The question was whether to kill first and then confess or the other way around.

  To confess and then not kill.

  They all had a way of covering one illusion with another; a tiny bit of reality would show through only when they had lost their way among the illusions or failed to hide themselves in time behind another illusion.

  Informed of Her Own Existence

  I did feel it on my back.

  They had been watching me, flaring up now here, now there with their cigarettes under the blooming trees. There might have been four of them altogether, maybe more.

  I did not recognize them, though the older one might have been among them, the marvelous giant with his mustached assistant. Sometimes they pretended not to belong to each other. The older one is very excited in his gingham shirt that’s too small for his chest and his dark-blue, much-laundered overalls. When I walked past him, something exceptional emanated from him along with the strong odor of his sweat.

  It reminded me most of hot tar.

  They stood quite far apart from each other but about the same distance into the flowering grove.

  From where they could see the wide promenade on the riverbank, who came or went on it, but where the darkness kept their figures incognito. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t identify any of
them. Something showed of their shirts, but the greens, yellows, and blacks of his shirt’s little squares I could of course only hope to see; this marvelous man had disappeared. There were those who always returned to the same places, like me, and others who appeared only once and then disappeared for good.

  From the depths of the foliage’s shadows, strangers called out with the flaring embers of their cigarettes.

  The night whispered with light breezes; the water made bubbly sounds on the stones.

  What I understood of this was that they were intentionally revealing their presence with their cigarettes.

  As if they were saying, pay attention to me, I am watching you, and at the same time they were competing with each other, watch me, I’m here. With their insistent glances they almost reached across the promenade, I almost understood their words on my body. More correctly, they weren’t talking to or reaching for just anybody above the jasmines, not at all. First, for a long time they observed everything from behind the mask of darkness, and when they finally selected someone, they took a brief drag on a cigarette. I’m here for you, that’s what that means. I’m waiting for you, come to me.

  And if the other one replied to this signal with a signal of his own, then they took a longer, deeper puff, with which they prolonged the duration of the embers’ flaring and their faces glowed a little, and thus they strengthened the alluring promise of their devotion and fervent wishes.

  These four, under the trees there, probably couldn’t even see one another’s silhouettess. The jasmine along the promenade covered lots of things; maybe they could see one another with their embers hovering above the white budding bushes. They took care, or so it seemed, not to signal simultaneously, to be understood each in his own language. One would make his cigarette flare up for me very briefly, another would do it rhythmically or lazily, or maybe in a more leisurely way. It was flattering to know that four of them were courting me at the same time. Because of that leisurely signal, I thought the older man was among them in his awful checkered gingham shirt that somehow looked good on him.

  It’s possible that the cigarette flares signaled something whose meaning I did not grasp. If they hid the embers in the palms of their hands, that meant they weren’t interested in contact. Get lost. In which case their mute signals had an offensive edge. Scram, skedaddle. Something that made a person stay away in his other life too. You’re ugly was the verdict.

  What are you bothering me for with your puny prick.

  Don’t spoil the air around me.

  I’ll keep my secrets for somebody else.

  I myself would never have risked smoking, because even the act of lighting up has a heavy meaning. Not even in my nervousness dared I light up, no matter how much I wanted the heat of the bitter smoke in my mouth and throat, because if I did I’d declare that it wasn’t by chance I was taking it deep into my lungs and heart but because of someone who happened to be watching me from somewhere, and I was watching him too, hungering for him. I did not urinate either, except in secret, and I walked far away from this dangerous place to do it.

  Or it would have been like declaring that I’d finally come home, that I was at home among you, and what I wish is that someone, anyone, in any way and at any time will make me his own. Which I could not have declared, least of all to myself. Because it wasn’t true.

  Sometimes, someone would stop me in the dark or I’d stop on my own because I saw his bare cock staring at me, and he’d ask in a whisper, what would you like. This was the conventional question. I couldn’t answer it or, if I wanted to be truthful, I would have said, don’t know, nothing.

  They had two kinds of answer.

  To suck you, they’d say, becoming emotional with excitement and the words melting in their mouths, or, for you to suck me, they would say, disinterestedly and dryly; and one kind of man, with the first answer, could not be mistaken for another with the second answer. Everyone dreaded rejection even though it was unavoidable. Very cautiously, they would say, if you want to, I’ll make an exception with you and let you put it in me. Or they said, if you love it so much, I’ll put it in you.

  Or they said hoarsely, reaching in between each other’s legs, we’ll do everything, everything.

  I could not have accepted this; thinking reasonably, I could not accept that contact between humans ultimately boiled down to a series of such primitive movements and crude gestures which I saw with my own eyes. But there was no doubt about the credibility of their actions. I could not take my eyes off them. I spied on them, I followed them, and because of them I became like a soft cat’s paw. The more hair-raising the sight, the more eager I became for newer and newer surprises.

  I could not gauge the boundaries in the darkness.

  It surprised me and filled me with abhorrence that middle-aged or older men almost without exception right away pursued me, followed me; it meant they must have found something attractive in me. These men with their dark faces, incredible outfits, and richly tattooed bodies were criminals thirsting for tenderness; there was one whose curly chest hair pierced through his purple lace shirt; there were superannuated sportsmen with still-trim figures, and sickly government clerks with their briefcases, who found no place to put the Panama hats they wore with their summer suits; you might also see some old-fashioned forever-finicky dandies ceaselessly pampering themselves, bursting with the sour dread of their loneliness, sporting heavy gold chains on their sunbaked skin and huge signet rings on their fingers; or burly, balding tradesmen in sweat-stained shirts worn outside their pants, their brand-new welted shoes creaking painfully, their faces prettified with thin mustaches and their heads with frizzled remnants of hair; there were also bums reeking of alcohol and tobacco, and aging catamites; and once, an army colonel showed up in his parade uniform replete with gold braiding; he stood among the ruins stinking with urine, indifferent to everything and everybody, his briefcase at his feet and his cock fully erect, marveled at by a veritable procession of admirers, many of whom took several turns because he let anyone hold it or suck it for a while, but he, rooted firmly to his spot with his red-striped pants lowered to his ankles, neither budged from his briefcase nor answered questions addressed to him by anyone about anything, and he did not seem to enjoy what was happening.

  In the eyes of others, he must have been something like a devotional object promising healing and absolution to which people in large numbers make pilgrimages.

  The men came and went, spied and hunted, kept searching, and, if they did not find a prey who pleased them, often settled for one another. For me, their hesitant yet aggressive approach was like a fatal stab, because in their eyes I was prey. I watched what they were doing and I fled. It seemed probable that they wanted their youth back for at least a few moments, to grasp my firm, pliant flesh, which had little to do with my personal traits. As if the very impersonal slumbering in me had set them on fire. I was longing for someone who would find my personality suitable, while they wanted anyone who with his body would satisfy their obsessions.

  And I was similarly surprised that boys my age or a little younger steered clear of me. Of course, some of these boys made older men pay for the services they rendered, and they looked through me as if I were made of glass because I wasn’t going to pay them; but others must have smelled on my body’s scent that I was a complicated case. They gave me a wide berth or deliberately fished in the darkness for someone else, anybody, while making disgusting faces at me; in fact, they beamed with excitement as they made sure I watched what they were doing, in sheer revenge, right before my eyes, and this truly surprised me. I don’t know what I was supposed to see, but I saw that when they were having their pleasure with others for my sake, they were staying more indifferent to their own pleasures than to the pleasure they meant to provide for me.

  The measure of things, the moral of their passions, was the most mysterious thing.

  There was a square-built, very strong-looking boy with a large reddish boil on his neck who actually s
pat whenever we passed each other on the silent trail. He looked depraved, his nose and ears mangled; he might have been a boxer or wrestler. As we passed each other he said in a muffled tone that it was shit-faced guys like me whom he hated most, from the bottom of his heart. He said this even though he could barely have seen me in the dark. When we passed each other again under the flickering bluish-yellowish gas-lamp light, he spat again and asked me aloud how much time I had left of my working hours.

  So maybe he thought I was a stool pigeon, and probably there were some real ones among us.

  Don’t you worry; the guys will fix your mug but good.

  I was rooted to the spot, but I also felt like laughing because hearing his threat it occurred to me that police informers here would have to show their pricks while on duty.

  Without exception, every one of them showed a huge and insatiable interest in the others’ cocks, in their attributes and especially in their size.

  I did too, but tried not to evaluate myself according to these standards.

  However passionate the mutual emotional or bodily interest may have been, judging by what I saw I don’t think any relationship could develop without the introductory showing. This too was exactly the opposite of what happens with women. The men had to show a calling card, an invitation, some sign of the relationship’s preliminary condition. Perhaps they noticed that I wasn’t doing this, which would make me suspicious.