Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Sooner or later she’ll start drinking too.

She cannot accept it and, yes, she is full of hatred. She doesn’t know what to do with their prole pieces of advice, she hates her miserable life and she’d be glad to blow it all up. If she had any dynamite. Simon would probably be better off with a strong woman, one of those clumsy, wide-hipped bitches. While she can’t even bring a child to full term, a real shame.

I am a dumb little high-class cunt.

Nevertheless she cannot accept it.

That man will kill her.

But even then she cannot accept it.

He has already killed her; because of him she has disowned her entire family.

She cannot accept it, but then why does she love him so much.

Kristóf grasped her hand and shoulder; he didn’t know exactly what he was grasping. To make her stop shaking the steering wheel so senselessly and so he wouldn’t have to be disgusted with her and her every word, or with his own self-hatred. With her body, her mentality, her bluntness, her commonness, with everything she had taken upon herself or forced on herself, with her words. She had soiled everything with her words; he detested her and the scent of the borrowed mink coat disgusted him.

He was not sorry for her.

At least she should stop shaking the steering wheel.

But Klára swept along, almost tearing herself away from Kristóf’s calming hands and arms.

She can’t accept it, she shouted in the darkness, while the windshield wipers kept slowly flapping back and forth.

Don’t you touch me, she shouted in the darkness, I won’t be responsible for myself if you dare to touch me, not one finger.

I can’t accept it, no, I cannot.

I don’t want your touch.

Oh, please don’t be so good to me, you, you goody-goody sensible little boy, you make me laugh.

His main task was not to protect the miserable creature from her hysterical eruption and its tectonic force, but to overcome his own shocked physical aversion. It was as if he were responding to the same thing with his own aversion, saying exactly the same thing. Not only don’t I want to make you pregnant, I don’t even want to touch you. Or he should get out of their filthy, cold car because he’d really had enough of her, and just leave. Although he couldn’t say where he’d go. And never see this shameless woman again. He seized her firmly to free her, he shook her to let the hysteric come to at last. She shouldn’t add to her troubles with this fit. Bumping against the steering wheel and dashboard, they struggled briefly in the narrow space. His fingers kept slipping on the mink coat, or rather the silk lining of the coat kept slipping on her dress, on her bare skin, it slipped backward, he couldn’t get a grip on it, could not find one; Andria Lüttwitz’s lousy mink coat slipped down, stripping her bare.

She swept the young man’s arms off her again, but she could neither know nor see how successfully.

Their desperation no longer had personal boundaries.

They grasped each other with both hands, to keep each other from being able to grab or put up a defense. Neither one could tell why or against what. Awkwardly they knocked against all sorts of sharp, blunt, and hard surfaces. While they clung to each other with incredible strength, pressing each other to the seat, their fingers keeping them from moving, a powerful sense of strength and grim hanging-on pervaded their skin, their bodies. One couldn’t tell which one was stronger. The mink coat slid off her shoulders and was caught between them, but finally it left her bare neck free, and in the light penetrating from the outside the radiant hills of her breasts in the black dress were revealed to him. With pure muscle power alone, they were getting nowhere. She yanked her head away from the kiss, even though Kristóf wanted nothing more than to avoid it, to avoid her lips, fragrant with the heavily applied lipstick.

Don’t you dare touch me, whispered the full, round, well-painted lips with their vertical grooves and the maddeningly white teeth in this mutual stupor of resistance. He wanted first to kiss her neck, despite the woman’s strong objection, though he didn’t know why. Suck it in, with its fragrance, then quickly if clumsily lick it clean, as if atoning for his aggressiveness; then senselessly, completely senselessly, nibble and bite all around this inviting, glistening part of her body; but he was also ready to stop at once since there was something extremely servile in him, childlike, beastly, something he did not feel or had no reason to feel for Klára, and it was impossible for him to do something that was not authentic and never would be. Then they bit at each other, painfully and awkwardly, as though they’d lost any inhibition about biting. And by now they were each in their proper place in the universe. Somehow they had to nibble their way across the other’s face, flitting to nose, chin, ears, eyebrows, and jaws, to pat and feel the elevations of the unknown celestial body. At the same time — almost unconsciously, a little ashamed and reluctant — they emitted all sorts of word remnants, incomprehensible to the other.

Until they found lips, which seemed never to have existed before, and then they were surprised to arrive so suddenly at the center of their mutual sensations.

It was too much.

Her lipstick was too flavorful for Kristóf.

The squeezing of their fingers did not let up.

On each other’s lips, having barely dipped into each other, they recoiled.

I’ll break in half, let me go, her whispering lips demanded.

Because of the steering wheel or gearshift or their own excitement, their bodies were wedged into impossible positions as they panted at each other. Now they didn’t know what to do with each other or with their reflexes, and therefore didn’t know what should come next; the obstacle may have been their own excitement. Yet their lips foolishly returned and opened into each other, alluringly and threateningly, which relieved the tension and the feeling that they were infinitely helpless and ridiculous.

But at least they shouldn’t let their tongues do as they pleased; they should retract them. They mustn’t lose their manners or concede their dignity; they must not easily surrender their independence. It would have been intolerable to get stuck to each other by tangled, stiffening tongues.

Their tightly gripped fingers could not let go, and that sealed their discomfort.

I lied to you.

Kristóf had to say this out loud, and he did, almost directly into her mouth, that he had lied.

What did you lie about; the temperature of the woman’s voice seemed to fall as she asked this.

I lied, but I don’t know how or why.

You’ll probably tell me.

I will, but frankly it really bothers me, it’s such a primitive lie, and that makes me such a lousy person. And now I have to tell you, please don’t be angry, I’m ashamed and I hate myself for it.

Come on, out with it, let’s have it, come on.

It’s not the School of Physical Education where I’m studying.

Klára said nothing, turned silent and stiffened.

What an ass you are, she said quietly a moment later, more calmly and contentedly than before.

I wanted to impress you.

I was wondering about that a little, because I heard from Terike that you were going to some teachers’ college.

I wanted to say something better than that, I admit it, to look stronger than I am, because I’m weak. I have no will of my own, believe me.

Laughable, she said, peacefully and contentedly, how laughable you are. All men are equally laughable, them and their wills.

I know, but I don’t even have a will.

And you’re laughable too, and how.

I know.

Why must every man be so laughable.

But women don’t lie less than men.