Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

How lucky can I get, Gyöngyvér screeched, I can take you to the Tisza. I’ll take you to my foster parents. We’ll go to the farm.

I’ve swum in the Mediterranean, in the North Sea, and in the Adriatic too. Abbazia was our home base.

That’s nothing, hardly worth mentioning.

I swam in the Atlantic Ocean, also in the Bay of Tangier.

Come on, come on, bay or ocean.

If I were to take you to a place like that, your jaw would drop. I’d like to inform you, sweet Gyöngyvér, that you were born in a hopelessly bleak country.

Please don’t move, I beg you.

What are you doing, moaned the man.

How come you have so much hatred in you. I don’t understand what we’ve done to deserve it, I really don’t.

What hatred, I don’t have any hatred in me, none. If I can’t move, don’t you move either.

And he said all this aloud so he could openly enjoy his own loud moans.

Tell me, my sweet, tell me what you feel now, of me, of my body, what do you feel so strongly.

I have never talked about things like this in Hungarian, never.

But you’ve whispered in the ears of every French slut what you do to them — now I’m doing this, now I’m doing that — or what you plan to do.

Why wouldn’t I have whispered, chuchoter . Remember this, il me chuchoté à l’oreille. Repeat after me.

Please, knock me out like that too. You know I must learn French.

But you still wouldn’t understand this. This comes long after the tenth lesson.

Two brief, staccato shouts escaped from her.

You’re wrong, that’s the only one I do understand, she moaned when she regained her senses, for her own barbaric shouts were distracting her. She was afraid Ágost would find her repulsive. While digging her nails into the wide muscles of the man’s back, she whispered again. She would have liked to satisfy the man’s every need and therefore she seemed to be singing deliberately either above or below every note, showing herself alternately cruder and more refined than she actually was. But this too came to an end. Deathly silence fell on the echoing little room or maybe on the whole world, and now she had to be all ears to ascertain it.

She had not noticed whether her landlady, Dr. Szemző’s widow, had left or already returned. The mute mass of lost time appeared in this deadly silence, though she had no idea where they were in what they were doing, or whether it was the previous evening or the following afternoon.

You’re wrong, a mistake, she gasped, just a mistake, everything’s a mistake.

Hearing her own gasping, she felt truly liberated in her entire being. Her thin body trembled as if someone were shaking her.

Nothing, don’t say anything. As if each spoken word made her colder. And don’t move either. I made the mistake. Now she was not playacting, she was not out to satisfy anything, please anyone, or seem to be anything she was not. Take me away, please, quickly, pick me up and take me away from here.

What she wanted to say, in fact, was that they should die together.

Hot and slippery with perspiration, locked into the hard scissors of each other’s thighs, melted into each other’s arms, they were lying under a light cover on the narrow creaky sofa in Gyöngyvér’s little sublet room. The woman was trembling. As if he could make her wish come true, at least with his arms the man completely surrounded and enwrapped her; that’s how he took her away. In their happiness, they both shut their eyes tight, for a little while did not even breathe. From under the cover, they could hear the wet contacts of their bellies and groins.

Something of the rubescent, stifling summer twilight was still glimmering in the spacious courtyard enclosed within the building’s unfriendly rear floors and bare firewalls.

Let’s lie like this, whispered Gyöngyvér into the man’s neck, just like this, stay still inside me, and as if it were pouring across the shivering skin, she felt her own hot breath skim across the perspiration’s cooler coating. Her shivering would not subside. If you speak, no, don’t speak, because when you do, I feel your voice entering me. She wanted to add that that was terribly good. She could not imagine how she would get up and go to work. In the depth of my body, in my womb I feel the waves of your silky voice coming into me, coming, and I am continually being gratified. But she kept quiet about this because she was afraid. Like a person hoarding something. Maybe it was dread that made her tremble. She felt the increasing pressure of things she could not, that were impossible to say out loud.

From outside, they heard the sharp squeaks of tricycles, shouts of children, bouncing of balls, and various radio programs from open kitchen windows. Their bodies were tossing on the pulsing, intermittent waves of intermingled music and speaking voices. The window of this maid’s room, placed much higher than was usual in buildings of the Újlipótváros section of the city, was open a crack; they felt the aromas of their soaked bodies in the pervasive, pungent smells of fried onions and peppers and sweet tomatoes. Gyöngyvér’s perfume mingled unhindered with the penetrating odor of sausages slowly seething in stewed onions and tomatoes, which the man found repugnant. While the woman was hoping to become familiar with Ágost’s strange fragrance.

Perhaps his hair, matted on his forehead, was the source of this fragrance. Perhaps every pore of his body.

For long minutes Gyöngyvér wormed her way into his armpits, licking the sopping sweat, eating the aroma off the long, dark, sticky hairs. And the man shuddered at every little contact of her tongue and begged her quietly, no, no, don’t do that, which did not necessarily mean that they had entered some forbidden zone and did not mean its opposite either.

They had been keeping each other captive like this for four days; they barely slept, hardly ate or drank anything; parted only for hours, and then continued as if in the next moment, against their will, they’d have to leave each other forever.

They left not a single moment unfulfilled.

Still, Gyöngyvér had not had time to go on a journey of exploration across the man’s body. For that she’d have had to let go of him, if only for a little while, and be at some distance from him. She could not afford to — on the contrary. The man, however, wanted to do a number of things simultaneously with her but had to be content with only one, which he found not enough. They could not tear themselves away from each other’s proximity. With their kisses they kept wrestling each other down, falling or dropping somewhere on the table or bed if they couldn’t stay on their feet; they would plop into a chair or onto the floor, even in the kitchen, and regain their full bodily security only when the man entered her again.

They barely glanced at each other before they were at it again, which made their closeness permanent, yet each time it seemed to them as if it were happening for the first time.

Silence reigned. They held their breath. At most, their blood was circulating.

They had no previous practice or experience with each other and oddly they did not gain anything like it now. Which made them lose not only their sense of time but also any interest in relating to the outside world. They became the only possible external world for each other and thus could not be, in and of themselves, so important to each other that they might, for some trivial reason, interfere with the time of the total occurrence. In fact, neither of them had a precise image of where or of what quality the other one was, because their awareness was in their hands or their lips and tongues or the fine hairs of the nostrils; they only intuited where one of them ended and the other began.