Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Kristóf couldn’t do much about this.

If this happened while he was asleep, he saw it from close up, as if touching it with his tongue. It was a frequently returning memory. On a hot summer afternoon, when in a darkened room Viola pulled off her panties and squatted above him and Lilla demanded that he lick it. This room was in Dunavecse, not far from the river. In the darkened, creaking, large rooms of the house, they could smell the heavy, pervasive odor of Danube mud. Lick it for her, lick it. She whispered excitedly. Lick it; it’ll be all right, what are you afraid of. He felt its taste on his tongue for a long time.

Nothing had a taste like that.

He also understood from the excitement that Lilla had already done it to Viola. The characteristic odor of the mud mingled with this taste, he couldn’t get rid of it. Thinking that other girls might ask him for similar services, he spied on them, though he despised himself for the girlish trait of spying on people. Lilla and Viola rubbed themselves red. After that, he only remembered there was a certain taste he no longer smelled in the mud’s odor. He looked for it in vain. He nurtured the thought that he might find it. Half asleep, he sank into the mud, could barely extricate his feet. That’s when he woke up, to the memory of the taste and the odor, of there being a real Lilla and a real Viola, two little girls who were his cousins. Still, the taste was nowhere to be found, no matter how much he moved his tongue in all directions inside his mouth. He didn’t know what it belonged to, whose taste he remembered in his dream, the taste he could not find in his own saliva. His agitation was separated only by a wall from the aggressive loud sound of splashing urine. There was no point getting irritated because he had been awakened again. As much as he resented it, he in fact found the noise of Gyöngyvér’s peeing attractive; he daydreamed about her cunt.

And if he also had to hear her cautious farting, amplified by the wide old-fashioned toilet bowl with its hairline cracks, he could say good-bye to sleep for good. Gyöngyvér did not fart every night. Even when she did, she would release no more than two small hushed ones, briefly, in quick succession, not letting herself go completely, though she probably thought no one would hear it. As if she were ashamed of herself. Every person is a master of dissembling; people sharing an apartment must pretend especially that they don’t notice the life signs of others, and that the attempts made to conceal these life signs are also invisible.

This is what Kristóf did, out of politeness, but when Gyöngyvér startled him out of his sleep, it was like hearing a nice, rude, irresistible joke. He was shaken by involuntary, almost uncontrollable laughter. What he saw before him was the woman’s continually clenched lips and the fart emerging from them. Her disgusting attempts to gratify every desire. She certainly gratified every desire now. He saw Viola’s cunt rubbed raw. He was writhing, practically coiling up in his bed as he kept laughing silently. He could not laugh aloud or he’d be discovered, Gyöngyvér wouldn’t dare fart again, and that would be the end of his recurring joy. He was guffawing while winding and burying himself in his cover and pillows. This miserable creature defines herself most appropriately with her cautious little farts. The harder he laughed in the darkness, the stronger he felt that this had less to do with his good mood than with humiliation. His tears were flowing, his sides were about to split, the linen shoved into his mouth was all wet. In fact, he was on the verge of crying.

Meanwhile there were noises from the kitchen; the lid of a pot brushed off and made a huge racket on the tile floor. Eating and shitting. And if not only men but women could fart like this, his life would not be the kind for which they’d been preparing him. Very different from the one this finicky woman, or the others with all their affectations, made it out to be. A glass clinked; a plate thudded on the table. A simpler, more amusing, much more disgusting, more ordinary life. Later, in the bathroom boiler, the gas, with a tiny explosion, caught fire. And in the kitchen Ágost turned on a damned faucet.

Every evening Ilona carefully prepared and put out food; Ágost preferred to eat straight from the pots, with spoons or with his hands, and pots make a lot of noise. For him it was a belated satisfaction to eat out of pots late at night in the parental home, to dip bread into sauces and let everything run, dribble, drip, and flow. No night passed without Ilona waking up in the maid’s room. But whether she got up to feed Ágost, or stayed in bed and from there followed the noisy events in the kitchen, she took care not to awaken her little boy. They slept in one bed. There was no room for another bed or even a cot. Lady Erna would not have stood for it, anyway, because she did not want to provide any support for, let alone any legal confirmation of, the fact that the unfortunate child lived here.

He was a peculiar child; she admitted she could not warm to him. Or she kept her distance because she didn’t want him around. This was the situation Ilona had to accept. And at the beginning of every month, when collecting the rent, the concierge grumbled that the child still hadn’t been registered and he could not have such a situation go on much longer. They didn’t tell Ilona to take the child back to his grandmother who had been raising him until now, but they didn’t tell her that he could stay either. She had to get up very early to make breakfast for everyone and also have time to take the boy to kindergarten.

The water in the old pipes, given to cracks and bursts, made a clanking sound, almost like a moan; unwanted air bubbles held it up before it began to flow, gushing out and pelting Gyöngyvér’s thin brown body, pattering on the tub’s enamel. Every other week, Gyöngyvér had to get up early, without an alarm clock, of course. She followed Ágost’s schedule; sometimes she would give up sleep altogether, but not her nocturnal shower. Perhaps this was the only thing she stubbornly clung to, even though the restless pipes, rattling in the walls, often seemed to threaten to explode. Her smooth body, delicately shaped limbs, elongated and strong musculature, taut and almost poreless skin had no fragrance until she applied her cheap perfume to the crook of her arms and the area behind her ears. And oddly enough, her short, thick hair had no smell either. Ágost did not think about this, but it was important to have no smell. She probably wouldn’t have smelled even without the showers, but she took them constantly. Like a compulsion, a passion or obsession of unknown origin. She took a shower before going swimming; she took one before going into the pool and after coming out, and at night she took one even if she had already showered in the afternoon because they were going to the opera or to a concert and she had to change her clothes.

Until he was taken to the hospital on Kútvölgyi Road, the professor was also startled to wakefulness every night by the unpleasant noise. Still, he slept a lot both during the day and at night, perhaps because of immoderate doses of medicine; he slept very soundly and if awakened was barely conscious of himself. Or he may have been conscious of something entirely different. He would sit in the dark, staring at the lights trembling and shadows shifting across the spines of his books. From the time his wife no longer put up with him in their conjugal bed, a good ten years earlier, he had been made to withdraw to his study, filled with books and papers, and onto the sofa that once had been only a place for an afternoon nap or snoozes during breaks from his work. No one knew whether he still remembered things like naps or work. His condition had been deteriorating rapidly and unstoppably for months, and then one day it suddenly leveled off. As if the process might be reversible, after all, bits of memory sometimes revived, and then quite unexpectedly he caught a glance of himself in his own situation. He stood among his books, sat at his cleared and cleaned-off desk, and wept.