Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

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.

Had thrown him to the floor.

Had vanished in the night in search of other gratifications.

These two were really vampires, in which case he no longer had any blood, and they had also sucked the marrow from his spine and now death was happening.

Their black dog had been death’s harbinger.

The giant from the twenty-forint bill, with whom he wanted to share his entire life, had vanished.

Without an embrace, without a kiss, without either of them saying a single word to each other. He had no word for me, not a solitary word.

From now on an entire long life will have to be spent in death.

When Ágost opened his eyes again — he could not tell when he had closed them, if he had closed them at all — what he saw was an opalescent surface on which he did not immediately find his bearings.

He was lying on his back on a drenched bedcover, above him the wide-open window of the maid’s room and beyond the window the empty nocturnal sky.

He was staring into this emptiness.

The sky of diffused yellowish red reflected the city lights. As if he were looking into a geometrically designed space whose dimensions he was unable to conceive, unable to conceive his own life. In the depth of the motionless summer stillness the distant Váci Road was knocking, hammering, clattering, booming, and whistling with all its factories working through the night, and nearby something clicked.

He concluded that the lights were carried on an invisible mass of air.

Gyöngyvér had just come back from somewhere.

This told him he was involved with a woman again or at least had come up to her uncomfortable rented room.

A few years earlier, when they had unexpectedly recalled him from his post abroad, he had found the city’s cramped interior spaces especially exciting.

Forced into such congested conditions, people here live in intimate proximity.

They must move more carefully, maintain the goodwill of others. They cannot be cold and distant with one another, since they see into one another’s lives and with their every movement interfere with them. But for quite a while now he has found this behavior compulsive, unfolding like a pointless irritation from which they should free themselves. But this narrow space had no exit.

Where did you go, he asked lazily and sleepily.

Meanwhile he was glad he’d finally found the correct spatial perspective.

Even though every wall was depressingly close. And it quickly occurred to him that the strange feeling matched perfectly his own fate.

If matter has no mass, it cannot appear in the physical space and its perspective cannot be experienced.

I took a shower, but there’s lots of hot water. I left plenty for you.

I got lost, he thought, I got lost in this woman, I must admit.

I should scrape myself out of her.

I could have one more day, though; all right then, I’ll give myself another day.

I don’t feel like getting up, he said aloud. If it’s all right with you, if I don’t bother you with my excretions, I won’t go anywhere.

You don’t have to worry about the old woman because I can hear her way before she gets to the door.

I’m perfectly all right without a shower.

If you want me to, I can stand guard in the hallway and won’t let her in.

What time is it.

I don’t know.