Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Helplessness helps one cross borderline situations. From behind paralyzed desires, raw instincts, and persistent habits one’s other self appears and goes right into action. It knows what to do. This rarely happens, but when it does, one assesses the situation based not on experience and mainly not in conformity with socially accepted norms. Her loins wanted Ágost’s rough, strong hands. She was deliberating whether to surprise him from the back — snuggle up to him, hug him, take his cock out of his hand — or attack him from the front, kiss him, gobble him up with her groin, thrust her belly against his. She could do none of this and not only because he forbade it, but because she now saw something that was more than comprehensible.

It was already her other self looking out of her head, with her eyes.

This whole cock thing, this whole busying himself with it so much, is becoming something like a major and ominous natural phenomenon, and first of all she should acknowledge it. Until she does, she should say nothing, make no move and definitely not go close to him. Her body was throbbing with her breathing, or the violently stifled breathing was throbbing with her convulsing body. Red spots of excitement began to spread on her brown skin, on her neck, the strong cheekbones, her aggressive little forehead. She felt as if the hot wetness that flooded her vagina was pouring out on her labia. She wished in the depths of her body, in her womb and in her brain, in her shoulders, now covered in fine shiver-provoking silk, in her arms, and in her swollen nipples, she wished to be free so she could reach him and comprehend him; to touch the fine bones and taut muscles of his chest first with one nipple and then with the other; she wished for her belly to comprehend the tight wall of his belly, his hands to pry open her sopping vagina.

She knew she wasn’t going to touch him, no. He doesn’t want me. Her imagination tugged her back and forth between the possibilities and impossibilities that common sense dictated. He doesn’t want me anymore. And all her wishes were in vain, she could see, because the man was busy with his ominously rising, elongated, tumescent, and recurving cock, and with nothing else. Nothing left except this hollow piece of meat, enjoying its own tension and expansion, and all the relevant temptations and prohibitions in the indifferent brains of both of them.

She couldn’t say why things would go better barefoot, but she kicked off her slippers; they flew and landed with proper thuds, one here, the other farther away.

The next morning she couldn’t find them.

With a single tug, she freed herself from her dressing gown, slipped, slithered out of it without giving her actions a thought.

The next day, when in the corner of the taxi’s backseat she absentmindedly looked out the rain-swept window, she saw nothing but the half-risen, recurving cock she was not supposed to touch. As if seeing it for the first time, but at the same time seeing all the other cocks she had ever seen without the men the cocks belonged to. This image seized her attention as strongly as if she were backing away with it into a dusty courtyard of her girlhood. And the odor rising from the wet rubber mat on the taxi floor reminded her of some variation of the man’s scent. She kept the pills she had just retrieved in her half-closed fist. Saw Ágost’s hand on his cock, his mother’s cautious, thin fingers, and not the darkened facades of the buildings gliding by along the sharply curved Margit Boulevard.

The wind could not lash more strongly this section of the road, shaded by large buildings. Lady Erna was conversing with the cabbie, but these voices reached Gyöngyvér as if from afar, from an imaginary, elusive, and hostile world. She should have called over to this world to ask what to do with the pills. Instead, she seemed to be aware, even hear, how in the nocturnal light the sparkling silk dressing gown softly slid off her body and gathered on the floor around her ankles. And it was as if someone were opening before her a secret door whose existence was new to her. She had no idea that now a large dark hall would follow and behind it another, lighter one, and then a third, even darker than this one, and there is no end to the halls.

God, I’ve nothing to fear.

She’d have to traipse through it barefoot.

She still had on a short, sleeveless nightshirt, matching the color of the dressing gown, a huge V cut low between her breasts; static caused by repeated friction made the nightshirt cling to her body like a mucous membrane. She didn’t think about taking it off or leaving it on. Perhaps she was trying to hold on to the last vestiges of her self-respect; she can’t surrender completely. To someone who doesn’t want her, who doesn’t even look at her. To someone who is interested only in himself, and not even in himself, only in his cock. From this safe point she sent out volleys of rebuke. This, at least, I now understand. What she wanted to do was rip the mucous membrane off her feverish body. It can’t be that every man is like this. If for no other reason than the man, who had no particular inhibitions about himself and whose sense of duty was the only force restraining his extreme egoism, had already crossed a magic border. Holding his erect cock in his fingers, he pulled the taut foreskin backward and forward, protruding like a funnel, slowly, as if surprised by every little movement, while with his other hand he gently raised his low-hanging, heavy testicles and, as if entrapping himself, squeezed them tightly once, twice, and then grabbed at them to cause himself pain; they slid smoothly over each other. From behind the foreskin’s beak now began to appear the dull, purple-colored tip of the penis’s bulb, with the solitary, deep-seated, large eye of the urethra, but not completely, only partially, and then it disappeared again among the skin folds, in the funnel of his cautious fingers.

With her glances, Gyöngyvér would have liked to bring things to a halt or to full gratification.

But now, everything located between her mind and clitoris, the former stimulated by will, memories, wishes, and needs, and therefore compelled to run on parallel tracks, and the latter swelling with blood and pulsing to the rhythm of convulsing vaginal muscles, was concentrated on the single question of whether the tip of his cock would appear again and whether she would see it in its entirety. The means at her disposal, between mind and clitoris, included intense attention, involuntary dissolution of the nuclei of some cells, breathing, blood pressure, acid production, intestinal contractions, and extra heartbeats. In this scene, her person was left without a role except, to her shame, to look and to wait for the response of the person slumbering behind the strange body.

No way, it’s not going to happen, the bulb was distinctly outlined inside the skin, but he would not expose it.

She felt ashamed and was jealous of Ágost’s hands, which denied her; jealous of the cautious, loving movements with which he was following his own inner story and refusing to look at anything outside of it, jealous even of his mother, whom he resembled with his fine elongated fingers, and of his father, from whom he inherited his slightly protruding, tight abdominal wall, jealous of this whole rotten bunch of Jews. Someone inside her was raving. But the stubbornly down-facing head of the cock again refused to make an appearance. He wouldn’t show it. He was only playing, teasing. That’s him, all right, she recognized the man in him, yes, that’s him; someone who avoids repetitions, who does not go along with the steady acceleration, because he hates the monotony of life and therefore denies himself and others the expected peaks.

For him, denial is the summit. To which no road leads. Which means there is no road to him either.