Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Still, he could not give up the struggle whose purpose he could not know.

The gas lamps spread their mute and empty light over the deserted promenade. His fate cheated him again, or maybe he wanted to trick his fate. On the Pest shore, the lamps illuminated the empty pier in the same way.

On the Margit Bridge, seen in the cold blue light of distant arc lamps, a sluggish yellow streetcar was crawling upward.

Nobody followed him.

Instead, the older unknown man, who could not have been more than thirty, had followed him for a while, that was certain, he heard him panting behind him but then falling behind. And why shouldn’t he. What a hopeless character I am, really a stupid little prick. He was sorry they hadn’t caught him, wrestled him to the ground, and done it to him. And now here I am, feeling sorry about it. Torn to pieces and bloody, defiled by their sperm, he’d have been rolling in smeared excrement, but at least with his throat cut he’d be past everything, past this whole rotten hopeless life. The cops could have their turn. He had fought off the unknown man; he struggled with himself. It’s not enough that I was born a Jew, not enough that I’m an orphan, must I be a homo too. He did not understand his birth, and he knew he should part with his life for the sake of his happiness, since he couldn’t count on anything. And even this wasn’t quite true. His problem was that his life was stuck at the halfway mark. If only he had been born a Jew, but his mother came from a very Catholic family. If only he could have been an orphan — after all, the Communists had beaten his Jewish father to death — but his mother had simply abandoned her child.

That alone was reason enough to feel sorry for himself, but he thought he was better off without such a miserable mother.

This life he’d received at birth means nothing, and not only to him; it doesn’t mean anything to anybody. Never a better opportunity than the present, tomorrow will be too late, I have to do it today. For months, he’s been thinking that out of sheer humanity he should remove himself from among the living. If these shadows, emerging and vanishing in the night, were not around him, still their brutality and mercilessness appeared in his filthy imagination as something highly desirable, as the very last straw. Or they did not exist, not even now. He was not far from realizing that, given the painful lack of gratification, he should consider their existence as pure hallucination. Neither the dark-skinned, slow-moving, marvelous giant, who might be a Gypsy or half-Gypsy, existed, nor did his younger assistant, probably from the suburbs, with his messy hair and his Hungarian mustache hanging down on either side of his mouth; he was only running away from himself into the big empty world. Everything else is sheer imagination. He imagined the somber buildings with their tin domes on the other shore, which the weak lights of the Újpest docks barely illuminated. Lights were still on in some of the apartments, it seemed, and from the partly cloudy sky the city’s reflecting lights, rich in reds and yellows, were spraying down in a steady drizzle.

Scenery, that’s all it was, somber scenery; in reality, he stands alone on this empty island between the two waters.

Protected somewhat by his imagination.

A deluge that keeps overcoming and carrying him away but he’ll never have anybody, and that’s all human life is worth.

Breezes fingered his sweaty skin under the black shirt.

I don’t exist, he said half aloud, and I shall not exist either, he added.

If I want to stay alive, he added to himself, I have to get used to the idea that I don’t exist, he said again half aloud.

With long trembling lights on its back, the large, fragrant, swelling river rolled along darkly. It made no sound; the waves had subsided. The tiered riverbanks rose beyond the waves’ last laps. On steps under the water, clinging duckweed made bubbly sounds as it rocked back and forth. The two tugboats that had met here a little while earlier, both with dangerously low-floating barges and a grating din, were now far away, the sound of their horns fading in the distance. The puffing of one could be heard somewhere to the north, from behind the badly lit Árpád Bridge, that of the other from the opposite direction, perhaps from the wartime ruins of the Erzsébet Bridge.

The tugboats’ puffing in different registers lingered in the hazy air, and some of the oil fumes in their wake remained, trapped between the shores.

Sometimes he was convinced that his existence was nothing but hearing, smelling, and seeing — at which he took off after other people. Who perhaps also do not exist or, more precisely, who under the influence of contact instantly lose their dazzling corporeal existence.

The bodily magic of boys or adult males grew dim in the light of day, anyway; it dissipated at the slightest touch.

A rough, taut, resistant material remained in his hand; a strange feeling that soap would not wash off. The magic of girls or mature women lasted longer and penetrated more deeply because he had more confidence in them and this confidence was sanctified. He could even close his eyes so as not to see — with them he could cross the delicate border where body and soul meet — but when he did, he also sobered up. It happened when, after some reluctance, a kiss turned out to go on too long or when with tiny little kisses he returned to a woman only to be dragged back into the body-and-soul convention; but it never happened twice with the same female.

He played his part soberly, and this was painful to recall, or it would have been even more painful to return to its painfulness.

As if he had known in advance that he would trick them. While performing his duty in accordance with generally accepted requirements and rituals, which is to say while trying to discharge a duty about which he knew nothing, he looked with aversion at the female’s distorted features and quivering flesh. He fled from them when they approached again and asked for more of the same. As if he were grasping a peculiar substance that had little to do with oft-mentioned bodily desires and attractions; and the more aggressively they approached with their disgusting physical excitement, the stronger he felt this alienating substance.

From the moment of penetration, it was no longer he they wanted but something they could obtain from anyone with a sense of rhythm and a cock. And he could not even say what other idiotic men kept repeating, that women want only a cock, because in this regard women behaved, compulsively and politely, he had to admit, as if cocks didn’t even exist.

In fact only men dreamed of cocks, which made this whole thing impossible to understand.

He did not want to believe that people make a mistake about one another precisely in their intimate bodily contacts and vehement gratifications.

There was someone in him who with icy calm followed him in his every impulsive movement and sinful thought, but he did not believe this someone either.

Sometimes the presence of this someone was amplified, but it never spoke.

And he did not have enough strength to suspend the enormous gravity of physical existence.

He simply could not believe it.

In fact, he was struggling not with his double vision but with a special trinity. Even now, the third member of the trinity was with him, a little behind him and clinging to his side as he stood near the water thinking; for long minutes, taking cover in the deep shadows of the rowers’ white clubhouse, a boy, older than he by a few years, kept an eye on him.

From the moment he’d crossed the quietly squeaking promenade, sectioned by the pale haloes of gas lamps, still panting hard, he had been followed, naturally, by more than just the eyes of that older boy waiting patiently at his post.