Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Their noses cast funny little shadows that crawled up their foreheads. He never had to say to himself that these young girls had anything to do with anyone he had ever known or would have wanted to touch. They bent over, straightened, stood on tiptoe, and tossed their heads in all directions, higher, higher yet, quickly, with short broken movements. Une pirouette, s’il vous plaît. Someone gracefully transferred them to the corrugated paper. Pirouettes, please, single first. He drew what he was instructing others to do in his familiarly throaty voice. He was clapping rhythmically for the little idiots. Et encore une autre, et une autre, magnifique. The crayon barely stuck at the edge of the corrugated ribs. Like the girls who for a flash remained in the air and used their arching feet to keep from falling. But then they fell like stars. Everything was going so fast he couldn’t tell how many there were in the pictures. The napes of their necks were spinning by as they took their turns. A one-and-a-two-and-a-three, wonderful, shouted the woman with the throaty voice; that’s all. He could see them in the mirror simultaneously from the front and the back; with a magnifying glass, he went over their breasts and their backs. Of course, he put the magnifying glass back in its case. Into the black leather box whose brass safety catch was slightly worn. And then he put the black leather box into the upper drawer of the glossy yellow-red cherrywood desk. The large red eye of the stove was shining bright. Outside, it was growing dark over the lake of Zurich, the snow turned blue.

He could put the pictures away.

When he was left alone in the blue light of the dormitory, he could take them out and sniff his fingers. He could conjure up the voices, the little idiots’ giant leaps; he could stare into the large red eye of the stove. At such times, he usually lay on his side, curled up, and, as if mumbling in his sleep, adroitly worked his weenie in between his thighs. This was not so easy to do. Occasionally he would have to reach under the covers to help with his hand, which he didn’t leave there too long. Or he could go for the magnifying glass; this wasn’t the way he had it at home, because here he could enter this room at any time, open the black leather box, and take out the album. He placed it in his lap, possibly so that at the same time he could squeeze his testicles stuck between his thighs. And since his weenie was already between his thighs, it grew painfully hard. He held it like that; the pain increased or decreased depending on whether he tightened or loosened his thighs. And the book always opened at the same place, at the dancers. If he’d let it, it literally burst free of the burning thighs, and that made him feel that down there, in the darkness under the covers, there was another, separate and thinking head; but he didn’t let it. He’d rather go on squeezing it gently, for which he didn’t even have to slide his hand under the covers. They could not catch him. He remained alert, no matter how much his body was overtaken by excitement that was stronger than thinking. Not to mention his fear that it would stay like that forever, never subside again. He’d have to move among his fellows like that, which would be his punishment. He knew nothing more than what he knew from himself. He learned fear from himself and that fear was pleasurable. In the silence, he could hear the ceaseless susurration of the pine trees over the big house. And he could hear that the others were also doing something, not just he. He couldn’t know what they were doing, because, although he could fathom their noises and their voices, he could not fathom their muteness. If he wanted to, he could stop what he was doing at any time and then pick up where he left off because the excitement would make him slip into a slumber, or the pleasure wrest him out of his fear, chase away the dread, and then his pleasure itself would slip away while he slept. As if he had fallen into a terrible pit in which everything he had was taken away from him.

As much as she would have liked to, Gyöngyvér could not fall on him and fight him tooth and nail. She could not tackle him or run him down, because he was receding from her on his own orbit, moving ever more slowly; he could not have been slower or more absorbed in himself. The smile over the face dissolved unnoticed. He wasn’t anywhere. He was wiped away by pleasure, which commanded seriousness. He plowed the spine of his cock with his thumb, a very fast move in the general slowness, barely touching the surface of the strong, slightly slanting vein spreading toward the tip of the tightening foreskin. He was plucking the strings of a musical instrument. There was such an excess of skin there that despite the swelling and tension at the tip, the foreskin had not retracted as it would with other men. This might have happened partly because his long cylindrical penis curved downward and not upward, bending back into itself, as it were, and therefore, except for the brief tense moments prior to ejaculation, it could not rise high enough for the taut little frenum, huddling under the tip of the penis, to withdraw all the foreskin from the steep rim of the tumescent bulb. Gyöngyvér’s breathing, pulse, blood pressure, and imagination all worked against everything she was seeing, everything she knew about this cock, whatever she acknowledged or admitted. Her pulse was fast, as if she were running, and her blood pressure was rising, but she held back her breathing. She did this because she was kept from touching the other person at the very moment when that person began to talk about himself, without words, to tell a story that no reasonable mind could possibly follow.

She did not comprehend it; she could not, though she suspected the man was expecting something similar from her. Holding her breath made everything look slightly red and hazy. Not only did she see what she was looking at, but whatever she looked at penetrated her unhindered. She couldn’t have understood it, because her sensual experience was dominated mainly by the rapid, vehement, violent, and exaggerated satisfaction that her purported sensuality exacted. A play whose every scene was more or less written in advance. Not like this coolly restrained and passionless show designed unalterably for this one performer, its sole, distant focus, vulnerable to surprise and improvisation. For a few weeks they had thought their temperaments were well matched, but now they both had to see that their temperaments could not even meet in their strangeness. They were moving farther and farther away from each other. Gyöngyvér’s life progressed between the steep banks of extreme ambition and petty existential danger, which was why she rarely risked anything with men with whom she was unfamiliar. With women it was even worse; she shrank from them. Indigence, want, necessity, and resignation were stronger than she, and her experiences predetermined what she could know, what she was allowed or forbidden to do, and what she must deny herself.

A flat landscape extended as far as the eye could see; she was ambling toward the horizon, but behind that horizon was another one. The place at which she might arrive was no different from her starting point. All the while, some unapproachable, unfamiliar, and alluring high ground, which she had to reach at all costs, kept rising before her, vibrating vaporously, illusion and mirage.

Maybe this time I’ll make it up there, she thought. She imagined there would be one magnificent moment when suddenly everything took a turn for the better. There was no such turning point, but at least she sensed that the man had started out from a different place and wanted to arrive at a place very unlike the one she longed for. He was in a different landscape. It was hard to understand how she could possibly follow him in anything so alien to natural requirements. What principles should she abandon, what habits should she break if she wanted to relent, make concessions, and demand nothing that the man obviously does not desire and until now, probably, had only pretended to desire. For a moment she even thought, wait, he might be gay. And what should she do in that case, with herself, without him. Not only does he not want to come in her — and she could find no acceptable explanation for that either — he doesn’t want to enter her at all, and she’s not even allowed to come close to him. Just keeps on doing his exercises. Impossible to endure, and yet that’s the way it is. She didn’t understand what else she could relinquish.