Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Let go of me, shouted the woman, agitated.

I will not. I’ll flatten you.

If you don’t let me up I won’t be responsible for what I do.

Then you don’t understand, really don’t understand why I’m telling you things and why I can’t let you up. You just don’t understand.

Ágost was raging, like a child whose mother doesn’t understand him and whom only the act of murder can calm. Whenever he was upset, his accent grew stronger. He seemed to be speaking Hungarian words as if they were French. Not his senses but his awareness was running wild. He heard his own accent becoming more pronounced and he knew it was time to stop. He had gone too far. Coolly he asked his senses whether it was truly possible that this woman didn’t understand him and there was nothing left to do but to commit murder. Which, for him, was not a rhetorical question since he had already killed several people, though not in the heat of anger.

What do you want from me? What?

Gyöngyvér was shouting and shaking hysterically as if she were truly afraid of being murdered.

They pulled themselves apart simultaneously, neither of them could remain intertwined for another second with so unforgivably insensitive a partner, and as they slipped out of each other they lost their balance and fell off the bed.

Their bodies slammed together; with great thumps they fell on each other like sacks, and then they continued their tussle on the floor.

Helpless fury drove them both to the brink of tears, of childish bawling. Neither of them could accept defeat, or, more precisely, the strength of their rage rose in direct proportion to their urge to weep. The energy spent on suppressing their tears was terribly painful, and their need hurt them greatly as it gaped open with all the devastating experiences of their lost, horror-filled childhoods, compared with which the physical pain caused by falling out of bed was hardly noticeable; it only created incredible physical chaos — a head banging against the door, the warmth and softness of the blanket they yanked around them, hiding the treacherous cracks and splinters in the uneven floor, where skin grazed under the weight and pressure of the other’s body, jabs of salient body parts, hard angles of elbows, chins, and knees. No doubt something had happened, but it could scarcely reach consciousness via the senses. Compared to the pain of the soul, physical pain is but a sobering realization, calming in its simplicity. Its sobriety is short-lived. They both felt and sensed the blows and bruises, that is to say, they both comprehended instantly the complete senselessness of their attraction and their scuffle, summed up in the question, what am I doing.

Naked in the sunshine.

Yet they continued to scuffle because they didn’t know what to do with their feelings for each other. They wanted both to stay where they were and to peel away from the other one.

They could have gotten up; why not let go of each other; why not give up the insane attempts at uniting; why not just continue on with their lives where they had left off a few hours or days earlier. Ágost should really go home, or at least telephone his mother, so they wouldn’t wait for him in vain or look for him at his friends’, there was nothing to worry about, he had something to do. Again, he had gone out to do some senseless fucking; he’d be coming home soon.

The strictly confidential text he had been translating from the Italian remained by his typewriter just as he had left it when four days ago he got up and went to the swimming pool. To comply with regulations, he should have locked it up. And Gyöngyvér should go to sleep, she must sleep, because she had to get up at five in the morning to begin her work at the kindergarten at six. It would have been a lie to claim they didn’t see the sober, gray workaday life ahead of them. But they couldn’t deal with it correctly. To get up now because I have to make a phone call. Or to say, oh, I think I’d better get some sleep. When either of them said or did something, it was impossible for the other to abandon the rhythm created by the first one. Even though their physical proximity no longer had a calming effect but, rather, frighteningly increased their sense of frustration. And this indefinable something had no arms for hugging or lips for kissing. Nothing with which to soothe the raw pain of emptiness.

While busy with these thoughts, he felt the strange female body shivering in his arms; someone he had nothing to do with, whom he did not know and with whom he had no reason to become acquainted. It was as if he were pressing to or thrusting away from himself a helpless being, trembling from head to toe. He could not possibly do that. Now that he had ruined her. But if he did not thrust her away, his own muscles would take on the strange trembling. And he did not let that happen. Such gentleness would make him falter. He set his protective armor in place.

It wasn’t the first time that Gyöngyvér had trembled during that evening and night.

It seemed, rather, that the trembling kept sending her back to her more treacherous and unpredictable ways, squeezing barely audible little whimpers out of her.

My sweet, my darling, what have I done, I’ve ruined you.

As he uttered these tender and emotional words, surprising himself with them, and as he put his arms around the woman’s strong shoulders, he broke into a sob.

No, don’t mind me, he said, choking. I don’t know what this is.

The words came from the very depths of his chest, one might say from an unknown, primal time.

It was like two consecutive bellows from an animal. He didn’t hold back; he had neither the time nor the presence of mind for that. Perhaps his back muscles, or his tautening abdominal muscles, didn’t let it break free. The invisible armor under his skin would not let it out, would not allow others to penetrate him with their superfluous emotions, but also would no longer let him out. He must live and die locked into himself. Which, to his shame and without producing another sound, made tears burst from his eyes and flow down his face.

Which felt good.

Mortified, he felt he had to be ashamed of his muscles holding him back. He had had, once, a more vulnerable life, and that was the reason he’d told the woman so much about those ancient times, which he himself did not remember, no matter how much he looked for them, and which, even if he’d found them, he could never get close to. His hardness and much forgetting would not let him.

And this hurt more than anything else. He shuddered, but did not want to allow himself even that.

As if he were saying, no, I won’t allow anything.

Which made Gyöngyvér break down too, bubble over. As when at the sight of one another’s trembling shoulders, every girl in a boarding-school dormitory cries, under the covers.

She had never seen a man cry, and now, of all men, to see this one cry.

In her joy she accompanied him with tiny bursts of laughter, which is what brings on hysterical, happiness-filled bawling in a dormitory. She was grateful to him — after all, he was crying because of her — but this also frightened her. Her entire body trembled and her teeth chattered, as if she had a high fever. She mourned someone while laughing at her own sorrow. She mourned someone unknown who should have perished long ago. I will destroy my mother.

To tell the truth, you know, I have a twin, she said, sobbing inconsolably.

She had just invented this so as to have something to say.

Where is this sibling, how would I know you had one. You’ve never mentioned it, sniffled the man.

She invented the twin to avoid thinking of her mother. Who, truth to tell, should have perished long ago in her daughter. Otherwise the daughter cannot love this man either. Her mother was the deceased twin. These things were as clear to her as given elements in a formula.