Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

She was wailing.

But he saw it clearly, this was his own precipice, he watched the waves of falling rocks, and somehow he had to back out of this whole thing without letting the enormous weight of the crumbling ground hurl him along with it. This was the sound of cracking bone heard during a tooth extraction. The depth of the precipice rumbled up, the water churned, the hurtling rocks boomed and rattled against the sides of the precipice. And then, slowly, he returned after all. He stopped for a moment. He knew he would be unable to return. Because of the resistance of the vagina’s muscles shuddering, no matter how slippery the vagina was he needed more force.

This was not without danger.

Before he reached the deepest reachable point, he stopped again, couldn’t tell where he was, grew rigid, immobile, and several times against his will lowered himself into her; and to put an end to the struggle and not to ejaculate into the woman’s open womb, he squeezed the cheeks of his buttocks together with a single powerful jerk. The move threw his rectum into a spasm, the spasm applied pressure on his prostate, and with the stimulus of this pressure he disrupted the arc of his pleasure. For this to happen, it’s enough briefly to shut off the sperm duct, ductus ejaculatorius , located just above the prostate gland. The upward arc of pleasure plunges drastically, but the stimulus remains, and everything can start all over again. He broke the rhythms for both of them, which were becoming united in an even acceleration.

Gyöngyvér, however, experienced this as mounting tension while feeling there was no room to increase it further. As if she had been jolted to a higher region from which she saw a landscape she had never seen before. Luckily for her, she had not said what she wanted. And she realized she shouldn’t dare say she’d like to have a child. That would mean she loves him. And she cannot reveal that. She has come to love him. Simply because this is a handsome man. Such a handsome man is not right for her. I shall fall in love with you. But not yet, no. Were she to say this aloud, she’d reach her climax, not because of him but because of herself. Because of that image of desire for a man she always carried with her, but then she would have to say good-bye to this man, to his handsomeness. Like a superstitious person who knows what to avoid, she said nothing, remained cautious. Just this once, not to ruin everything.

She appeared to be protesting vehemently, hysterically, which Ágost immediately misunderstood.

You don’t have to be afraid of me, he whispered not without a hint of pride, I’m telling you I can be careful.

But the woman wanted to feel impersonality in his words, wanted to hear words from someone who wasn’t careful.

His voice reached her from afar.

She grasped the words but not their meaning.

Still, doubt seeped into her regarding the man’s sanity. As though everything was taking place on different levels and it was impossible to reach the summit of pleasure. But amid her moaning and wailing, for four days she had been waiting for the end of the man’s death rattle, wishing for her own death, and for his. She could not understand how one could make sane sounds. Even though she herself was making them.

To convince the woman physically too, of what perhaps she could no longer comprehend or could not hear because of the whistling of their ever-faster, crisscrossing breaths, he returned from the rough bumpy road, faster and forcefully, all the way to the exit, as if to signal his intention to break away, as if flooding his path with spotlights.

And as if seeing something he had never seen before, though the image had always accompanied him, stayed close to him, familiar. He did not feel his cock anymore, or what he might have felt with his cock. Self-sensation and indirect sensation had become a single image, which held his attention and kept him occupied at least as much as his cock had before. He knew from experience that he had to be very reserved about images. It would be hard to acknowledge that the fantasized images caused greater pleasure than live people did.

But this was not the work of imagination, which was stronger and could have extinguished the sensation.

To observe everything, to touch nothing. His caution was at work. Not to get into her. Only from a distance, more on the outside.

Which that instant the woman felt as if it were keeping her from approaching her own imminent death.

For some reason the man is asking for some kind of delay, which she cannot possibly grant him.

And the man, who thought he still had some self-control and saw the situation clearly, kept reassuring himself in his great excitement that after all he didn’t want to leave her, no, not at all, he was coming right back. But on this uneven terrain he already saw the floodlit pulsating wall of the abandoned cave, and he must not take a single false step. By then he had no idea just how long his eyes had been closed, but it had been quite a while. But because he was still keeping his distance, still reserving for himself the need to keep his distance, which others deliberately and much sooner long to lose, the obstinate pain of physical exertion did not contort his face.

Other people always hasten toward some destination.

He saw a fence, again the open gate, and strong headlights of a car speeding into the night. He was seeing the headlights of his own car.

And it flashed through his mind that in live deployments, when suddenly everything turns very risky, he followed the same pattern of behavior he did in lovemaking. Before his death, he’d like to gain one more moment for his consciousness. Maybe two, some amount of time, a whole day, because he hadn’t put things in order.

The little room was now wrapped in dimness, though the ceiling retained some of the waning twilight; their bodies kept their darkness enclosed and at the same time they were illuminated, now faintly, now more strongly but continuously, by their inner vision.

In the dazzling summer light, the river’s waves, murky with mud and sand, were crashing over Gyöngyvér’s head.

She was being dragged into the depths as if by her feet and ankles, and could not resist. Whirlpool. She would have shouted with her last breath, as if finally realizing what had happened to her in the past, but she could not shout because her mouth was stopped up with water, heavy water that smelled of mud, fish, and shells. So that’s why I have to take him to the Tisza, she thought suddenly, to kill him.

Then I shall die, she said to herself contentedly and a bit surprised.

Long pieces of silk caressed her body. But she did not die.

At the bottom of the sandy, silkily ruffled riverbed, another, more slippery, cooler dry land awaited her. She was free to set her feet firmly on it or to drift away, as she liked. The depths glittered as though the sun breaking through the water were afloat and aflame. And as dazzling as the world she had left behind for the sake of being mute. When in the dead center of the dazzle they put her down in the middle of the courtyard covered with chicken shit. The chicken stretches its tail feathers and the hole can be seen only in the instant when the chicken squirts its load. They were pecking all around her and she stopped crying. They did not come close.

Crying didn’t get her anywhere, anyway.

Instead she began cautiously to crawl away; no matter how many times they put her back, she would start again, to reach the brimming trough in which the water sparkled enchantingly.

Before she had a chance to grab the old cracked wood of the trough warmed by the sun, to pull herself up and to hide her face in the sparkling water — she didn’t know it was not for drinking and she wanted to make her face disappear in the water — two hands dripping with soft soap and water picked her up. All she could do was kick and bite.