Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

They aren’t in protective trenches anymore.

Dobrovan chose to wait a moment, and Mária hadn’t left the room either. They were tarrying not only because they had to split their attention in so many directions at once, not wanting to be left out of anything or to miss anything, not a single word, but also because Margit Huber’s emotional tactics were becoming clear to them. Not only did she not want Mrs. Szemző to throw out this unknown Gyöngyvér, but she was obviously fighting for her, hoping ardently that Irma would take her under her wing.

Which was something Mrs. Szemző would no longer do for anyone, not for anything. After she’d given up her practice, she’d found work in the district clinic as a medical clerk.

For ten years, until her retirement, she insisted on being a medical clerk and nothing else.

But now she was wavering.

Similarly, Mária Szapáry felt it would be better to keep silent about all this, that it was too perilous, but she would not prevent them from talking. Yet she could not tear herself away from them. All she wanted was not to confuse things more with her own words, and she could not have said what they should clarify or how that could be done. In the meantime, the two other women were not only talking but also watching Bella help Mária, who had fallen out of her role, and trying to figure out how all this was connected to Elisa’s whining.

Which Mária cannot bear, which is the reason she must leave the room. As if they are raking through her nerves.

They all led different and less personal lives; still, there were moments when the air filled up to the point where nothing more could be accommodated.

They are locked into one another.

A force, functioning independently of them, condemned them to one another; they must break out of one another.

The question has become this, who will begin tonight, and who can bring about her breakout with the smallest sacrifice.

Of course, the warm evening had cooler edges, currents, breezes, brief thrusts and puffs from above the heavy, darkly rolling water, which the body unconsciously absorbed. The many sensations and fragrances of early summer colored their feelings, imperceptibly came between them, occasionally modified the measure and direction of their emotions. On Margit Island during these days, the yellow clusters of Japanese acacias burst into bloom among the ruins of the Dominican cloister, where human urine and feces stank and burning cigarettes glowed and died off in the darkness.

In the light of distant gas lamps, lonely men roamed, showing themselves to one another, and then stopped in one of the ruins’ impenetrable shadows and cautiously opened their flies.

The fragrance of the heavy, dense acacia clusters is not sweet but forbidding and scabrous, like chipped metal, or like raw beef.

I’ve got another life.

Kristóf ran headlong into the bushes, flowery branches hitting him in the face.

Yes, he did have another life.

He was fleeing.

He heard the long, hurrying steps pounding behind him, the wild breathing of his pursuer; the tightly packed footpath through the trees and bushes reverberated under their feet.

I’ve gone too far, he whimpered to himself, much too far. He could not help going too far, no matter how much he admonished himself, because he was far from everything and everybody. He was playing with danger to feel he was alive, though his other self weighed everything soberly.

I stretched things past the breaking point, I truly got on their nerves.

In the fragrant darkness, in the balmy breeze, there was also the danger of muggers, pickpockets, possibly murderers or a police roundup. Let them kill me, I don’t care; that was not what he was dreading. He increased his excitement with the dangers of the night to the pleasure of intolerability. He had discovered this place four nights earlier, and though he’d returned home at dawn he could barely wait for nightfall to come again; he was spending his fifth night here. As if he were deep in ethnological research and was having difficulties finding his way among the tribe’s strict rules.

There was hardly any talking here; at most one could hear hisses and brief whistles. People suddenly appeared and disappeared. He could recognize some now familiar figures, shapes who looked for and followed him, or whom he followed, but the night would swallow them up without a trace.

There were too many of them.

They were on their guard, fleeting, sneaking, prowling, as if they could see in the dense darkness filled with little noises, sighs, moans. He discovered that he too could see in the dark and he especially enjoyed that. His mind recorded, gauged, established contact, combined data, and stored urgent questions; in short, it functioned at full capacity. After a while he understood or seemed to understand the intentions of those shadows and silhouettes, and he comprehended their passions, condemned to silence and mutual dependence. He was happy with his scientific discoveries. At the sight of different figures and the abundance of various desires, his lips, which he licked excitedly, became parched and his mouthy.

The younger man, the one with the mustache, will now make a wide detour, and, before one can get out of the park, with his enormous limbs he will block passage on the trail. Because sometimes he not only planted himself before him but roughly pulled him to himself, hugging him gently, and when this happened the first time he planted a kiss on his neck, so he remembered with his skin the touch of his limbs — and longed for it. He could anticipate this younger man’s grinning mug, his large meaty nose and the bushy Hungarian mustache overwhelming his lips; he felt his breath, with its commingling odor of alcohol and tobacco, a particularly repulsive mixture. Let him plant a kiss on his neck. He nearly fainted at the mere thought of it, the fear. The two worked as a team; he’d be caught between these two large-bodied men. Kristóf realized that the two used the older one as bait, because on this turf other men, mainly the young ones close to Kristóf in age, considered him more attractive. They fancied him; all their lives they’d dreamed of physical strength, of greater size and perfection, and with his sheer presence he embodied this dream. The two of them are waiting for him to walk unsuspecting into their trap. They’ve built their strategy on the physical perfection of the older one; regarding the temptation, there is total harmony between them. Neither of them wants to catch him alone, they want to do it together; and realizing this has made him suspicious of them. But he also realized that his continuing flight from them is part of the lure and serves to increase tension; he’s become a toy of his own permanent desire for greater physical perfection. Everything is preordained, and whatever he now discovers or foresees happens several times a night. There’s no longer any difference between the inner and outer worlds, everything was prepared during Creation, and now only the resolution, the cadenza, is lacking: the death rattle, or ejaculation. If he let them, they’d torture him mercilessly, tear his muscles apart with their sharp teeth and instantly devour his flesh.

That’s all he could think of; he could not imagine it any other way, or he did not want to imagine his pleasure any other way, the pleasure these two had treacherously been preparing for him.

The trembling darkness, mottled by lights from distant gas lamps, was full of hard-packed paths and trails. The men who stepped off the trails and headed into thickets were the ones who wanted to offer up their bodies as free prey, or who wanted someone who would mutely and willingly offer up his. This was one of the general rules of the place. Shortly after ten o’clock in the evening, when unsuspecting strolling lovers disappeared, naked limbs and other body parts flashed in the depths of the darkness that neither gaslight nor reflections of the city’s sky could penetrate. No one who must mature from being an unripe boy to being a ripe, full-fledged male could deny himself the curiosity, the urge to know what other men were like. Insanely, he tried to become like the others. He liked to imagine himself in their place as they offered themselves to anyone, or took possession of a total stranger’s naked body, though he kept telling himself he only wanted to watch, to see.