Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Oh, I would die without them.

Now, as at other times, she turned her self-pity into a passionate humiliation. With her slippery subservience she matched the selfishness, rejection, and superiority emanating from Lady Erna — eerily reminiscent of how she treated her son. She rejected him; there was hardly anyone in her life she had not rejected for the sake of some unfulfilled desire. There was no such person. Her daughter had rebelled against her and perished because of her; but her son, nevertheless, followed her loyally and unconsciously. Like a dog. For not only their flesh but also the quality of their selfishness and sense of superiority were alike.

Gyöngyvér went so far as to bend over and kiss the beautiful hand. She usually took men’s cocks into her mouth when she bent over so nicely.

Surrendering to their childlike selfishness.

In this fleeting moment, the silver box in her hand both confused and somewhat hindered Lady Erna. Her hand would have felt good clasping Gyöngyvér’s gloved fingers. The skin of the glove was smooth, tight, and cool. She saw the nape of Gyöngyvér’s neck for a moment. She was strongly tempted to kiss the closely shaved female nape, thin as a child’s. Her sense of aesthetic proportions would have demanded as much, as did her desire erupting from the depths, hitting her briefly and bluntly.

She shuddered; she was so moved her body grew damp.

If only Gyöngyvér’s lips had tarried a moment longer on her hand. They were soft, silky, and cool, like the touch of a lizard. But Gyöngyvér quickly sat up.

She could never count on mutuality or reciprocity; Ágost had never pampered her with either.

The dark gray clunky Pobeda reached the entrance to Margit Island and slowed down. Not so much because of the turn but because of the terrific northerly gusts of wind. This is the highest point of the bridge as it rises from the two riverbanks. Arriving from the Pest side, and with nothing else to do, one registers the sight of the hills ahead. But the cabbie could not have seen much of them now. The windshield wipers were working at top speed and the wind pressed the rain’s myriad drops like a robe around the taxi. An opaque curtain was dripping down each window. It was as if nocturnal darkness had descended on them, but with something continually illuminating or flashing in it. The sky turned black and dense over the entire city; but beyond, somewhere in the south, over the flatlands of Csepel, and in the west and north, behind the hills of Buda, the clouds opened up. The rim of the sky was clearing fast in a wide arc and from there a flat, white light shone into the bottom of the darkness. The mass of clouds, gathered and piled up by the strong winds, slowly began to move eastward where flatland, clouds, rain, and city seemed to touch. And the flatly falling light was reflected in the mud-darkened foam on the surface of the Danube, illuminating from below, under the swirling firmament, the faces observing each other. There was something frightening, otherworldly in this phenomenon, though it may have had a simple explanation.

The cabbie correctly sensed that something unusual was happening between the two women behind him.

They were both laughing, but very quietly. It was a vocal confirmation of the knowing twinkle in their eyes.

As if Gyöngyvér were saying, you see, I’m not lying now, I admit it; and Erna were responding, my sweet, as far as I’m concerned you can lie all you want. I understand you even when I pretend not to. And the laughter had nothing to do with the old female colleague in Gyöngyvér’s life who happened to be an old gentleman with heart trouble; they were beyond that already, had forgotten all about it, had brushed it aside. And they were laughing not at the sudden revelation but out of embarrassment, at their mutual state of exposure.

Each sat facing the other as if facing a mirror.

As if they both had drawn in their bellies, thrust out their chests, and with tightly closed thighs pressed themselves to the seat. It was pleasurable to be here together, at each other’s disposal. They were entrusted to each other, and that is very different from the usual, everyday routine, deeper and more carelessly familiar. If this was true, then it was possible to get to Erna through Ágost, and Gyöngyvér hardly even noticed how it happened. Whatever the moment contained had no opposite pole, no charge of attraction or repulsion, and therefore the moment’s space and duration became infinite. And Erna did not even notice that the dying man, who might no longer be alive, had vanished from her life. A burst bubble would leave more of a trace. Their gazes opened wide onto each other, mutually revealed that each was not unacquainted with these lesser-known territories where no males ever enter. Of the two, Gyöngyvér was more experienced but also the more cautious and reticent. Lady Erna had always relied more on her imagination and memory, which made her demanding and greedy. But now the cabbie, much as he would have liked to, could not look in the rearview mirror. The wind was pushing the taxi this way and that; the entrance road to the island — still paved with the same smooth yellow ceramic tiles produced in Demén’s brick factory in Budakalász back in 1898 when they began building the ramp off the middle pier of the bridge, resting on the tip of the island — was slippery.

A careless thought or a wrong move while taking the curve would have been enough to send the cab into a spinning waltz.

The two women did not notice.

Their sensation was much more brutal than what is felt by little girls crazy about their female teachers, or by female teachers dazed by their own feelings for their frenzied pupils.

Every emotion has a primal state, the seat of instinct. Laughter had thrown them back into this primal state, whence they could continue, arm in arm and led by instinct, down another path. Instincts work the same way in everyone. But primal states, to which everyone always returns, are not the same and may not even resemble one another. In some people, the primal state lives on as a single experience that the person remembers only vaguely or would prefer to forget. Others forget so successfully that a vacuum is created where the experience had been; and the only reason to be aware of deliberate forgetting is that one cannot fill the vacuum with any old thing, for then it becomes a burning lack that can no longer be named. In yet others, the primal state means a chain of rippling interwoven experiences that cannot be untangled, and whether or not a person remembers which sensation produced which subsequent sensation, the primal state reveals itself according to the person’s instinctual needs.

Showing one of its pulsating and throbbing countenances — now this one, now that one.

Lady Erna, from a distance of several decades, looked back to the sole experience she cherished above all others as a sacrament. Gyöngyvér might have looked in several directions but did not want to see her experiences, neither yesterday’s nor yesteryear’s.

Yesterday’s experience filled the place of everything.

Instinct cannot be steered.

Once it stirs in its reeking den, there is nothing can keep it from flashing into view a few unavoidable images from a primal experience, even if it does not show the entire storehouse. One of Gyöngyvér’s primal experiences was that she had no one in the world and therefore felt as though she herself did not exist either. Or the very opposite: she did have somebody somewhere in the world, and the moment she could find this somebody would mark the beginning of her existence. Until then, pitying, cruel, caring, or indifferent girls and women would keep passing her on from hand to hand because they didn’t know what to do with her. She does not even have to look at them; one is just like the other. They are different in every way but similar in that none of them is the woman she belongs to.