Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

But what attracted her to this man was precisely that he too was so alone and so untouchable. Yet their inner rhythms were different, incompatible. She finally understood this, though she did not formulate it for herself because she understood it with her hearing, she comprehended his syncopated rhythm with her sense of rhythm.

She gave no thought to the possibility of stroking her own body either. To do to herself clumsily what the man was doing to himself. Her uncertain, nervous, and quick fingers glided over the silver-gray silk clinging to her body. Which, in fact, felt good. Not so much because of the contact, but because it revived their dormant relationship, alluded to a time when, sometime, in the past, their inner rhythms had conformed to each other.

It conjured up the intoxicating days and hesitant nights of their first weeks. By duplicating the man’s movements on herself, she filled in the lack of their mutual physical contact.

She did it by feeling herself, which strengthened her observation and returned some of her consciousness. She could at least shed the superfluous feeling of shame. That she was watching, yes, watching that cock. Of which she had seen enough, though she had never allowed herself to look at it, observe it so unashamedly, how it worked, how it reached the center of her awareness. Ultimately, everybody is raised with the warning that one should not touch oneself in front of others, and spying on others is forbidden. In her confusion, a fingernail caught in the lace of her nightshirt. Which barely covered her pudendum. Finally, she could look at the cock, and now she was seeing something that was very different from what she was thinking about. And it did not have much importance, because she could not use it to get in better touch with her own thinking, but she saw things at the center of the world that she did not and could not understand.

At that moment Ágost roughly and unexpectedly yanked and then let go of the foreskin’s beak, and his other hand released his tormented testicles. It was impossible to guess what he would do next. The erect cock was trembling in the air. It would have reared farther, higher, but since it did not curve upward, it barely reached a horizontal position. Gyöngyvér seemed to sense, indeed identified with and lived the tension of the frenum hiding under the bulb as it held back the penis, not letting it rise further. She kept the memory of the frenum’s tension at the tip of her tongue and felt it in the arched muscles of her vagina. The impression was as if in preattack fury the cock were thrusting forward its lowered, large, dark head; done quite amusingly. She could identify with the stubborn fury, because the desire to rage made her tense too. In this fury she saw the physiology of her own bodily rapture. But she could not tell herself about this either, because her raving would not subside. She could see and feel how the down-curving head of this cock, as she continues to rave, reaches her swollen clitoris and how, when her labia finally roll back the foreskin, the folded-up collar of the bulb, now thrusting into her vagina, pushes the foreskin onto and then pull it back from the protruding head of her clitoris. She could see all the correlations. And although this had put an end to some of her unconsciousness, she did not know what to do with this new awareness.

Along with the cool stale air, a different kind of unconsciousness was streaming toward her from behind the opening doors.

When the shutters were closed in the rooms facing the courtyard and there was no draft at all, a mysterious heavy smell of old age seemed to pervade the air.

The current of this different kind of consciousness was hardly familiar, but it carried her along. The only time she’d ever felt anything like this was when, while singing, she could convince herself with her own voice. When she was not rummaging about for the right method or technique of singing, but rather when the written-out notes sang with her and she with them, producing a real character in whom she was surprised to recognize herself, and while with her thinking she still, stubbornly, violated herself. The singer does not hear her own singing but can feel exactly what others hear as her voice. She would obstruct her breathing, hold it back, would not let go of it — and then she was anxious about it. As if there were a commandment according to which her breath was allowed to mix only with the other person’s breath. Carnal pleasure and joy cannot remain within her; that way they are not permitted. She stopped at the commandment regarding her breathing, insisted on it, but she could no longer stop what she saw, what she was looking at, and what she was doing. She could not be stopped because, for the simultaneous occurrences to reflect one another, it was not enough for her two spread-out fingers to glide across her pubic hair and then open the gates of her mons veneris and slip inside. With her new awareness, she realized this was merely technique, and what her movement lacked was exactly what was so moving and convincing in the other person: selfishness, the refinement and unconscious elegance of selfishness.

She’d like to be like the other person, and here she is, failing at her very first, clumsy attempt. Perhaps she should be headed not toward but away from him. She couldn’t find the wetness, either, which she had felt so abundantly in herself only a moment ago.

I’m dry, completely dry.

Gyöngyvér did not have particularly nice hands, which made her attracted to and envious of women who did. Her fingers were quite long, and to increase their effect, she let her fingernails grow perhaps too long. She could do this because they were not brittle but strong, healthily and nicely arched, manicurists loved to work on them. But when an inspector visited the kindergarten and noticed those nails, Gyöngyvér did not get away without loud altercations and vengeful written reports.

She had them filed, polished, and treated carefully so they would not be dangerous weapons. The children liked them a lot, especially the little girls. And not only in the kindergarten did she have to mind her every move, which made her gestures seem slightly affected. With men it was enough for her fingers to slide unguardedly between their thighs and reach under their testicles, or to touch the sphincter muscles of the anus between the spread cheeks in the heat of vehement thrusts, or with the blades of her nails to plow across the blood-filled bulb’s rolled-up collar, to unerringly produce surprised moans, painful shouts, and a spontaneous ejaculation erupting in successive tectonic waves.

But she was as unable to surprise her own body as she failed to surprise Ágost’s. With the tip of two fingernails she reached the anteroom of her clitoris, the first fold of the skin. She was not careless, yet the sensation was more unpleasant than pleasant, even though the sensations penetrated each other.

No, they didn’t just push me, he continued a little more loudly, it was something much rougher, or cruder. They dumped me into a ditch. The way they throw out dead animals.

What the hell are you talking about. Did you ever see a dry well full of carcasses.

I didn’t understand why they were doing it, how could I. Or they would put me in a cloakroom, I don’t know, like checking an umbrella or a coat. I’ll put it that way if you like.

Why would they do anything deliberately against you. She was whispering, with tiny breaths of words, into the man’s speaking lips while watching, cross-eyed, those lips — fleshy, with very taut skin. Why are you talking about them like this, not nice of you, I don’t understand. I don’t believe they wanted to do anything bad to you.

She wanted the man’s lips, she wanted to lap up his words from them; that’s why she was squabbling, acting contrary.