Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

This open door turned out to be his great luck.

He figured that it wasn’t by chance they’d left the door open at night; they did it so they’d all walk into the trap.

He’d barely had time to slap some water on his face, just enough to wash the filth of others’ pleasure off his face, rinse it out of his mouth before going home, when the quiet night was shattered by the engine noise of the assault van, the screeching of its wheels and its spotlights; the policemen were already yelling.

To herd together so many shouting, whimpering men and then squeeze them into the open prison van waiting farther off can’t have been easy; if only because of the policemen’s quick, violent fury the job couldn’t be bloodless.

Huddled behind the open steel door, he was out of danger for a few seconds. But he thought that before doing away with himself, he should take off his clothes soiled by urine and other human secretions.

Should roll them up and make a bundle of them and his shoes, which later he could throw along with his shame into the depths before hurling there himself.

That the water should swallow it up, make it vanish at the bottom of its terrific current.

He would stand naked before his own death, with no way back, powerless to change his mind at the last moment.

He had nothing to change his mind about.

Ilona’s rice chicken crossed his mind, the leftovers waiting for him in the pot on the stove, nice and succulent, tasty with spices, unless Ágost had unexpectedly come home early, beaten him to it and eaten it right out of the pot. In this penultimate moment he was ready to develop a liking even for Ágost, whom he disdained because of his egocentric quirks, whom he could not bear, in fact, and who, with no consideration, would take for himself, and take away from Kristóf, every delicious morsel that Ilona put aside. Barely an arm’s length from his long-prepared death, he felt strongly the physical aversion that, given their shared family features, he experienced in his cousin’s company, the perplexing intimacy of familial aversion. On this night, however, Ágost had not come home unexpectedly early to eat his cousin’s supper but rather, lying on his stomach, one knee pulled almost to his chin, was sleeping peacefully and uncovered in the maid’s room of the seventh-floor flat.

At the moment before perishing, Kristóf wanted to understand Ágost’s crippling strangeness, to learn to love it as his own. But what he understood at most was that one is not alone even in aversion to one’s own body, because in family systems this trait too thrives in profusion.

He also remembered Ilona’s freckles and her pale little boy, whose fate would be no better than his had been. That’s what he thought about him. He felt sorry for the brooding, rebellious little boy and for his life to come. As if thinking that his own fate, which he was now leaving to these miserable survivors, might at least have someone in whom its cruelties would continue.

This child flesh will remain here, their common fate can rage as it pleases.

The idea that he might still have some of that rice chicken suddenly made him ravenous.

And another idea: that he would pass on his fate to the defenseless child, along with the leftovers of the rice chicken. Mainly, he was thinking about food because of the drop in blood sugar that comes with sexual gratification. The desire to stuff himself, gorge himself one last time. The way Ágost does; after each of his loud climaxes he gets up to wolf down something fast, eat jam out of the jar, be as disgusting as he is. If he were to stay alive, stay in this only life of his, the most dreaded thing would be his infernal climax, which the giant and his mustached assistant might somehow cajole out of his cool, insensitive body; he’d be an exemplar, a model to follow, yes, this is what you should strive for.

He should come back to them every night. Like two legendary heroes, outlaws, or highwaymen they had disappeared before the police arrived.

Which aroused his suspicion. Could they have been the ones who brought on the police to take care of the others — that’s what he thought, but he knew well that he could no longer live without them even if they were police agents.

He might even want them more if they were.

Only a few more seconds and he’ll be at the right spot and then, luckily, that scandalous thought — that nothing matters so long as they are willing to do it with him — will no longer live in him. Still, it was precisely this scandalous thought that made it seem that he was celebrating a victory over fate. After all, for the first time in his life he’d succeeded in attaining this scandalous bliss, and without getting caught or beaten up by the cops, avoiding the risk that his aunt would have to bail him out of one of the detention centers; he shuddered at the thought.

There is no punishment; there won’t be any. His last hour was becoming the best hour of his life; at least they could not humiliate him for it. His fate has no more time to invent and inflict new punishment. Death will not be a punishment for his innocent pleasure but, rather, a lavish present, a huge bonus, he told himself, and he did not fear it, not at all; he already loved it in advance, deeply desired it, desired nothing else. At least death knew how gravely fate had erred throughout his short life. He should have settled in another body because he was completely innocent, and he learned from his impending death that other people, when they were happy, were happy because of their damned offenses.

Or what sort of hope of happiness is it when the hope that men pursue treacherously abandons them, when they cannot give it up but it runs ahead, away from them, on swift feet. Thirst had parched his lips and the hollow of his mouth; nausea made painful sores in the corners of his mouth and chapped his lips.

It was uplifting — to be aware of what he had learned about himself and about other men for the first and last time in his life. And other men can just stay in this world with this knowledge if they want to.

He was taking with him the taste and smell of strange men’s lips, gums, teeth, saliva, and cocks; he cherished this, as he did his own imminent death, for which he had to take only a few more, possibly painful steps. He will take everything with him; he won’t share anything with anybody. And with the thought that he’d have nothing to relinquish in the new world, he wished that feeling would come back to his parched mouth, despite his nausea, yes, they should kiss it, thrust their muscular tongues into it, these other men, anybody. More than for the depth of the swirling water, more than for its surface made silky by the churned-up mud, he longed for the thick lips of the mustached man, the taste of his heavy sweat, the strange smells left by his spritzers, meat stew, and perpetual cigarettes. With his stinking mouth he should kiss the rest of his life to pieces, fuck him to smithereens. Gobble up every last bit of leftovers, wipe the juicy bottom of the pot with a piece of bread, chew clean every little bone and bite through every bit of gristle.

This somebody who temporarily was still himself was taking with him the stale odor of tar and urine in his pores, on his skin, on the fuzz in his nostrils, and on his wet clothes.

Only a few seconds are left, all he has to do is get to the middle of the bridge with this miserable creature. Nothing is more clearly known than this and never will be.

Joining these sensations was the silt-filled, all-pervasive smell of the water intermingled with the bitterness of smoke from nearby factories and, separately, the sweet breeze of jasmine.

On his short-cropped blond hair, a mixture of strangers’ sperm was drying.

And while she kept on trying, once, twice, even five times in one instant, because she didn’t want, just this once she really didn’t want to fudge it, she was really trying to put this fucking F sharp in its proper place as required by the sense and style of the phrase, treating it as objectively as Margit Huber, this Médike, demanded of her, and why shouldn’t she be able to treat it as a technician would, since after all she does have a brain in her head and knows I can hold back a little here and let go a bit there; still, defying all her good intentions, her shoulders trembled with suppressed tears.