Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

On the rainy street, among umbrella-carrying pedestrians, it occurred to him he might need better bathing trunks. One thinks of lots of things that luckily one forgets in the next moment.

He found the store somewhere behind Wittenberg Square; in the store window, torsos sunk in sand and rolled-away heads were lying about.

As soon as he entered, the salesgirl unerringly sensed the lost country boy in him. She pounced on him at the door with a fawning, well-rehearsed sales pitch, oh yes, those splendid little bathing suits, of course, and she’d also have something special to recommend. Would the gentleman follow her, please. One would think that underwear was really a little nothing, a small piece of colored artificial fabric, without realizing that the simplest things demand the most refined art.

Döhring not only had no idea that he had wandered into the city’s most expensive undergarment establishment but was also unaware that here they sold underwear made to the most exceptional requirements, and to satisfy these requirements they were willing to go to great lengths, the sky was the limit.

There is this brand-new material, the salesgirl was explaining, evenly and with great enthusiasm, while quickly and purposefully leading him into the spacious, mysterious interior of the store. It’s called living, breathing polyurethane, the realized dream of the age, if one may put it that way. It is the first synthetic that successfully combines the positive characteristics of natural materials with those of artificial ones.

It’s the invention of the century, and of course we can thank several earlier scientific achievements for its existence. It is thin, easy to wash, prevents perspiration, dries in seconds, dries in the natural warmth of the body without stifling the skin in the least, and because it is like silk or velvet to the touch, it never causes a rash. It’s available in every hue on the color scale; its design is so clever and handsome it can be worn as either underpants or swimming trunks, which makes it very comfortable; one might say it frees one from the last inconvenience and, what’s more, from the least inhibition, which, until now, in the absence of this material, no designer had managed to solve.

This was nothing less than a hit at the very center of the bull’s-eye. As a result, we now have a wide-pored, breathing, elastic material, silky to the touch, willing to adhere to the body as a second layer of skin.

She is confident in claiming that this material can perform miracles on the body.

It will not expand, won’t lose its shape, won’t lose its color. One wears it as one’s own epidermis, and would never be caught in the embarrassing situation in which one couldn’t undress in anyone’s company, at any time.

The salesgirl fell silent for a moment and, as if expecting Döhring’s approval or support, turned around.

She was lithe, tall, surrounded by a delicate cloud of scents.

In the dimness, their faces were intimately close to each other; and while Döhring felt that this was not unintentional, the salesgirl, with a single glance, saw that she had the young man hooked. But no matter how ingratiatingly she spoke, no matter how soft and familiar her tone was, as if they had known each other for a long time and were now only continuing a former, professional conversation, her heavily made-up face remained as indifferent as a mask. Her eyes were beautiful, her countenance lifeless in its self-control; there was something deliberately deterrent in her manner.

Perhaps this was the only way to speak of such delicate matters in the dark.

Or she succeeded in discussing the intimate lives of others, without offending any code of decency, because she had donned the armor of chastity.

From then on Döhring was more interested in the performance; he did not feel he had a role in the play. The salesgirl was only a few years older than he, yet she had already mastered something to perfection. As though it were not exactly she who spoke or moved; as if she had made another living and breathing person vanish in her, lending or renting out her corporeal shell to this stranger along with her voice. A completely attractive person radiating icy indifference. But she must have retained the natural attributes of her body, Döhring thought, though he could not see where or how she had made her personal traits disappear.

Her attractiveness, in spite of all this, remained intact, she took it along everywhere; and Döhring stayed on the trail, defenselessly going with her.

Her hair, cut boyishly short, glittered with gel; she wore dark pants, a dark jacket with a much too large, dimly striped, bright-white man’s shirt unbuttoned to the waist, very high heeled, finely designed shoes. She shouldn’t appear completely as a girl, rather as a slightly feminine boy. Döhring was quite intoxicated not only by this peculiar creature’s deliberately dubious exterior but also by the lighting and furnishings of the place. He had wandered into an unfathomably large, softly glimmering space; more precisely, he had entrusted himself to a knowledgeable and decisive being who would introduce and guide him across the labyrinth of this space of unfamiliar quality.

With the help of a silently turning windbreak, the store was hermetically sealed from the side street, which was not that busy anyway. Inside, in muted silence, barely audible psychedelic music played — softly elongated melodies, repetitive predictable rhythms. Coarse or sudden emotions were invalid in this space; everything that might interfere with the contemplation necessary for buying goods was excluded. In a restrained voice, driven by neutral enthusiasm, the salesgirl went on speaking evenly, irresistibly. Arced, elegantly bent graceful counters and whimsically scattered folding screens could be intuited in the soft dimness. Out of faint depths, huge mirrors with curved surfaces glimmered. As in a real dream, it could not be established where the place of anything was or where was the beginning or the end of anything. On graphite-gray wall-to-wall carpet, they were progressing toward a distant counter; the ceiling was black. A few concealed spotlights provided some illumination.

White, naked plaster torsos sat, stood, and lay about in the oval puddles of light.

Döhring was quietly resisting, as though grumbling a bit.

Breathing or not breathing, he said, he couldn’t bear artificial material on his body. There is no nylon or who knows what kind of synthetic, whether with small pores or large, that wouldn’t cause a rash, chafe his skin, and give him little sores.

All artificial materials make him sweat like a pig.

He deliberately used strong words. He hoped to lure the unknown person from behind the mask.

The salesgirl stopped again briefly. Quickly, expertly, she looked him over as if to assess more closely the physical qualities she would have to deal with. As if she were looking under his clothes, appraising the shapes and forms she might find when she undressed him.

Döhring actually enjoyed this look, though there was nothing personal in it. On top of everything, he’d had the impression all along that there was someone else besides the two of them in this space; someone was watching from the darkness.

And in that case, the salesgirl was working for someone else, not for him.

She understands every bias, every preconceived notion, the salesgirl said while they continued on their way. She herself is fond of wearing natural materials, silks, cotton, wool, linen, but why deny that from an aesthetic point of view traditional materials have disadvantages. Take cotton, for example. No matter how strong it is, after a few washings it stretches unpleasantly, in most cases it loses its color too, and there is nothing more pitiful and laughable than stretched-out faded underpants. There is no perfect male body that wouldn’t look ridiculous in one of those. Not to mention silk or Milanese knit; today we won’t even talk about those. Pleasant materials, but not at all durable. They don’t give headaches to designers of women’s lingerie, because here I can put a little frill, there a little lace, but a material that’s by nature incapable of keeping its shape is automatically alien to the philosophy of male undergarments.