Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

I didn’t dare look at him.

  In a strong, large jet, as if bursting or erupting from me, urine began to gush out. I couldn’t have waited with it even if I had wanted to. It echoed as it hit the tarred wall.

  The effect on the others was as if in some polite company I had committed the worst possible faux pas.

  I had waited too long and that is why I became de plus en plus incommode.

  The strong pressure of the liquid opened the urethra despite the mild erection.

  I was making too much noise.

  At the sound of so much churlishness, the men on both sides stopped what they were doing and hastened to conceal their erect pricks in the funnels of their palms.

  I noticed only moving shadows between dark spots because, aware of my improper behavior and incompetence, I shamefully kept staring in front of me. I could see with my sense of hearing that they had indignantly given up on me and turned away. Hearing the splash of my urine, they right away had to look for different prey.

  Sometimes, nothing wants to turn out the way it should.

  With the unceasing searching and jockeying, everything stretches out indefinitely even though everyone strives to have things happen without delay. So that no one should have to wait another moment for the daily dose of pleasure. And nobody likes disappointing anyone, because he too might suffer the same disappointment.

  Holding awkwardly his thick, short, swollen cock with the reddish, pointy little bulb at its end, the blond young man with his nervous, sometimes irritated movements turned unhesitatingly to the mustached one. Who at this very moment realized the possibilities in his dominant position, and probably made a challenging gesture that confused the fellow so busy offering himself.

  These men, offering themselves to each other, often hissed or sent signals whose meaning an outsider could comprehend, if at all, only when seeing the resulting action in progress.

  They quickly changed places and unexpectedly the mustached one was now next to me.

  Something similar must have happened on the other side with the man who just a little while earlier had so startled me with his unruly erection that I hadn’t even wanted to see to whom his cock belonged. He too had been cheated. In his disappointment with me, and after looking through the gray-haired old man still gesticulating with his cock, and through the strange figure next to the old man, an underage, possibly crippled boy, as if they were made of air, he couldn’t turn anywhere but to the giant. He wanted to show it to him if he could not have me. The giant may have confused him, probably with some inviting movement, for he was showing himself not to this man but to me. Not only the giant’s cock but his entire loin was uncovered. Or so it seemed in the poor lighting provided by the thin beams of light filtering through the high windows. The crippled boy wore a platform-soled orthopedic shoe on one foot; his cane, which he could not hold, was leaning against the tarred wall. He was showing his to everyone, offering himself to anyone; a lit cigarette dangled from his lips.

  I knew the exposed loins of the giant. And he knew their effect on me.

  For five nights in a row, again and again, at different locations and in different positions he had offered me everything. Maybe his specialty was showing not only his prick but also his testicles, hair, belly, and top of his thighs. There was a certain merciless openness in this. The relief of his stomach, thighs, and loins, his head, and his entire splendid figure eerily reminded me of the man with anvil and hammer one can see on the twenty-forint bill. On each occasion, I had stupidly run away from him. To my shame, in the light of day I would take out the twenty-forint bill to see him and be with him. I couldn’t forget him. The only difference between him and his image on the bill was that on the latter the artist had used drapery to conceal the loins. It was because of the giant that I had returned every night.

  Because of him, or because of my finally wanting to find someone, anyone, who would love me for my body.

  Now, holding his cock, avoiding all other offers, he leisurely started toward me. With his other hand, he had to hold up his worker’s overalls, which had slipped down his thighs.

  This did not make him look ridiculous. There was something flamboyant in the entire man, permissive and contented but not self-satisfied, or at least not petty. As if he had not bared the huge muscles of his buttocks intentionally, either, as if it just happened that way. But perhaps he wore no underpants. And that excited me extremely, every night.

  Others quickly exploited the changing of places by these two and became active in the darkness. Again, it felt as if a gust of wind had blown across the landscape, only this time it did not pass on. I, or the person standing there in my stead, was the only one who could not move. However ill-mannered my behavior seemed in this company, I was very far from ending my noisy urination. As it kept pouring out of me in an ever larger and stronger spurt, my erection was gaining strength too.

  In the meantime, I found myself flanked by the two men.

  In my shame I glanced from one face to another. This seemed to them as if I were asking for their patience and their pardon for this unavoidable need of mine.

  As if I could keep them away from me with meekness and alarm. Or from the somebody standing in for me. Who was hoping that some kind of distance could be maintained between people.

  At any rate, I would be asking something from them, mercy.

  They did not touch me, didn’t dare, not yet, but were standing so close that the emanations of our bodies, their heat and odor, flooded and penetrated all three of us. By turns, they watched my cock, the jet of my urine, and my mouth. From this close, the face of the mustached one affected me differently than before because he did not seem nearly so calculating or aggressive as he’d been when seen from a distance. Until now I’d feared some sly cruelty. Now, on the contrary, he seemed gentle, attentive, expectant, and self-controlled, careful not to ruin things with a wrong move or give me reason to flee again. He mesmerized me, as one does a dangerous wild animal. At the same time, there were signs of sadness on his childlike features hiding behind his meaty nose and deeply grooved forehead. Like a person who does not expect much good to happen to him yet cannot give up hope completely. Perhaps there was a chance. Maybe this very minute. Maybe with this complete stranger. Perhaps with him he could return to that elemental joy he had once received, then lost and could not find again.

  Our proximity did not alter but rather deepened the beauty of the giant.

  He was the same on one twenty-forint bill as on another.

  As I turned my head toward him, I could immerse my soul in his real fragrance.

  With his incredible smile, he expected nothing, did not hope for or count on anything; he was only giving something one rarely receives.

  He gave it with his eyes, his lips, his amazing teeth.

  He still had plenty of surplus happiness, he did not have to be thrifty, he could go on giving and giving, he would not exhaust his supplies.

  I shouldn’t worry. I shouldn’t rush, should finish peeing at my leisure, he likes to see how I hold my weenie and let the gushing out in a large wide arc. It was not that he was waiting patiently for me; he was caressing me with his smile; he liked to hear it.

  I should dribble for him; I should continue.

  There’d be plenty of happiness left when I finished; he’d give me more even then.

  From that moment, I couldn’t follow the course of events, probably because the sight of inexhaustible plenty completely overwhelmed me with its promise. Most likely my entire body must have relaxed and my consciousness grown dim because the moment he put his open palm into the urine’s strong jet, to my great surprise, I let out a short, loud fart.

  No doubt about it, it happened.

  Everything happened at once, all sorts of things happened, and they happened everywhere.

  In the silence filled with tiny rustlings, several men broke into brief crackling and popping laughs, and then there was silence again. Undisturbed, the hand went on playing with the stream of
my urine; the two men standing closest to me with bated breath were not laughing.

  It was probably thanks to the promise of approaching happiness that anxiety left my body. These two did that to me, that’s why they had no reason to laugh. Then, from the depth of the silence full of scraping noises, somebody else responded with another fart. It was not as restrained and inhibited as mine; the sender played it with obvious pleasure, in long staccato sequences, as boys and young men do in boarding-school and barracks dormitories, where, for lack of other means, they entertain one another with sounds produced by the lower regions of the body.

  There was general laughter, many echoing explosions of the original guffaws.

  They did not even wait for me to shake the last drops of urine off my penis.

  My penis had grown so stiff I could hardly shake it anyway.

  The mustached one, now behind me, drew me to him with his strong bare arms, embracing my shoulders and back as if wanting to crush me. The giant bent over me, covered me, and grabbed it with his hand still wet with my urine.

  They laughed loudly into my neck.

  Their panting, their voices, their lips, all in one fell swoop. So much strength and novelty made me very weak, and I was surprised at the unfamiliar hardness of the male body. I laughed along with them. If the mustached one hadn’t supported me with his chest, I’d have fallen backward like a swooning lady in a nineteenth-century romantic novel. Not only was I no longer interested in the appearance of my own manliness, but I was positively amused by giving it up and surrendering myself. It seemed as if he wanted to twist my free hand behind my back; I did not understand why he wanted to do that. He planted a kiss on my eyes with his full mouth and then tenderly, very sensuously, he buried his face in my neck. I was left alone with him, for the giant quickly disappeared.

  His lips were glued to me, he was childlike, as sweet as the past, and he swarmed over me with the strong multilayered smell of his hair, mustache, and mouth.

  The pleasure coursing through my spine put an end to the laughter.

  And then I felt what the giant was doing too. Thrusting his knees against mine, he found a different grip on my prick, let it go for a second, and then clung to it with the heat of his open loins, tapping and rubbing against it, gathering it together with his own, and this was painful. On my prick, I felt the well-proportioned, moist surface of his, the slippery rim of his bulb on my tautening frenum. Which, I believe, made me faint a little, or maybe I strayed over to an unknown otherworld. But he continued calmly to unbutton my fly to free me.

  I thought they knew what they were doing and I could entrust myself to their common sense.

  He wanted to get to it from a better position, uncover my loins, make me more like him, give me everything one gets when unclothed. While the mustached one placed his in my hand that was twisted behind my back. He was the only man I saw whose cock was of the same substance as his body. That must have been the reason the giant had accepted him as his assistant. In this one thing, he surpassed the giant’s perfection. But I scarcely had a chance to feel its strength and heat with my fingers, having barely closed it in my palm, when his mouth landed on mine. I leaned with him, with my head and entire back I gave myself to him. He absorbed the weight of both of us because the giant was leaning along with us. With his mustache he seemed to arrest and embrace my face.

  He enveloped me.

  I would have kissed him back, but with my cock freed from the pressure of my pants the giant was kissing it, and I felt the shock of this in my brain. He lightly pressed his tongue into my testicles, gently rooting in them. He roughly sucked one in, licked it all around while it was in his mouth, and then with his tongue quickly and mercilessly plowed the spine of my cock. With his teeth he pulled back the foreskin caught on my bulb. He pulled it down, nibbled it, and then in a single devouring suck made it disappear in the hot hollow between his lips and throat.

  He deceived me a little.

  Until then I hadn’t been thinking there were women in the world.

  The way a man’s lips took possession of me suggested that I should possess myself, yet it felt as if I had wound up in the vagina of a woman.

  This worried me; I could not allow the female and male principles to get mixed up, and fear of that happening led me back to this world.

  But then, in the fluttering of his tongue I felt that no, no, we are in an entirely different place, and women have nothing to do with this.

  From the sensations converging under the influence of abstract thoughts, my mouth would have been ready for a rasping shout, but the mustached assistant not only absorbed my physical exposure with his fleshy lips but also stabbed me with his stiff, hard tongue. In the taste of his saliva I could tell he smoked Munkás cigarettes, that the spritzers he drank were made of tart wine grown on sandy soil, that he had had someone else’s cock in his mouth before me, and before that had eaten something made with onion, maybe meat stew.

  I hadn’t been at home for supper the previous evening, but now I remembered that the remains of Ilona’s rice chicken at the bottom of the pot were still waiting for me on the stove.

  Unless Ágost had come home and gobbled it up.

  I was tossing between their hands.

  Nobody made better rice chicken than Ilona. She made it with chicken necks, livers, and wings, with tomatoes, and she always made a point of telling me, Kristófka, don’t forget, we’ll have rice chicken today.

  I had never before had a stranger’s cock in my hand like this, nor my own in another man’s mouth.

  Sometimes, without hesitation, Ágost would eat what was supposed to be my portion.

  They had been looking for him in vain for three days; he disappeared with his great big cock, for which I’ve always envied him no end. He was just as voracious as his mother was.

  They couldn’t find him anywhere.

  It would have helped to know what to do with it, now that they bothered to put it in my hand.

  I also thought of Pisti, of what would happen if he walked in and saw what I was doing.

  I was grasping it, squeezing it as a baby would its rattle, though I thought that might not feel good for him.

  I don’t know when, but they unbuttoned my shirt, along with my underpants they yanked my drainpipe trousers down below my knees and, grasping me by my ass, the giant lifted me into his mouth. They grabbed my nipples between their nails, twisted them until they hurt. I don’t know which one of them did what. I lost my interest in particular persons; to be more precise, other persons must have appeared, because my entire body had already accepted the giant and his assistant.

  They knew everything about me; they could do with me anything they wanted; I no longer had to be busy with them.

  I kept squeezing what was in my hand, because I did remember whose it was and would have liked to reciprocate. With rapid little grasps and squeezes the giant felt the tense muscles of my thighs and calves. At least I hoped it wasn’t somebody else doing that. I felt as if I were hovering in the air among their four hands. Occasionally, I felt his entire hot loin, his cool stomach, and his cock tightly held with mine, somewhere between heaven and earth.

  Which would have made me scream, this whole thing they were doing to me; it spread me and stretched me out like a bow. I threw myself down from somewhere high into the depths, saw my own fall, but never reached bottom. There was no ground to absorb my weight. In my dread I must have opened my tightly clenched eyes, because I saw from very close up how he was leaning over me. I must have opened my eyes to be sure. I saw his crazy smile with his teeth and that told me it was he, after all, who was doing this to me, he was the one playing on my helpless body as on a musical instrument, and I also saw that this man was a lunatic. As if he had not only induced but with his entire being also followed every convoluted branch of my pleasure and thus increased his own joy.

  And mine, mine.

  I’d have screamed with this brute joy if the mustached one hadn’t thrust into my mouth�
��instead of his tongue, which was quick, slippery, strong, sharp, and pierced me like a spike—two of his long fingers. This hurt me, his nails bruised my tongue, I was choking. I had to bite him; I’d say that I didn’t do it consciously yet it was intentional. He wasn’t the only one who screamed; it hurt him and he enjoyed it, in my mouth his blood mixed with mine, but by then the darkness was full of these repressed moans, whimpers, wailings, and barely repressed shouts.

  There were no intelligible words among them.

  In the depth of the darkness, two intertwined bodies were shining, and it seemed to me that except for their pants down to their ankles they had nothing on. They were immersed in each other’s mouth and the heads of their cocks were peeking out from between their bodies pressed against each other.

  But now the giant raised my ass even higher and with one of his fingers tried to enter my anus.

  That scared me a lot.

  Luckily, my sphincters would not let him.

  Yet even the fear felt good because it made me feel as if I were looking back from the time when I was an infant.

  And this strange countenance also saw something of what others were doing around it.

  However, he could not tell when he wound up on the flagstones.

  He could feel with his naked buttocks that he was lying in cool wetness and he could feel, through his wet shirt, that his back was in contact with the floor. Who did this. Maybe he was lying not in water from the faucet, which was still dripping behind the open door, but in piss, other people’s piss. This must have been his first thought when he regained something of his consciousness. Then he saw enormous shadows towering above him. He couldn’t have counted how many men were there, all of them making strange little sounds, as they went on slinging sperm onto his stripped body now lying on the stone floor.

  The sperm landed on his belly and chest with soft splashes, warmly.

  From this he finally understood that although he was neither aware of nor feeling anything, and although his perception was considerably delayed, he too must have reached his satisfaction earlier and the two men he loved so much, and who within a few short seconds had induced in him this now-dissipating pleasure, had already left him.