Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

It was almost completely dark.

She didn’t know where she was.

She had been looking for this place or this sensation. Now she couldn’t see any cracks in the ceiling. I’ve always been looking for them, she thought, though she had no idea what she was referring to. Surely not to the man. Strangely enough this man no longer interested her. A moment just after twilight yet before evening descended, and the man had become part of that moment. Perhaps with her countenance she had brought something to a halt, thus lighting up for herself an otherwise invisible landscape.

I love you: she would have loved to shout that into the landscape. Though she didn’t know to whom. As if for a moment everyone who had ever been inside her made an appearance. To keep the night from crashing down on her, she would have to stop the earth from spinning. She could not return to the person who was filling her up.

She didn’t know who he was.

She still didn’t know.

Like the mouth of her womb, the little room grew gigantic from this loud desire, as if to devour the entire apartment with all its odds and ends.

Rhythmically, they breathed into each other’s mouth.

The man concentrated on her cautious movements, guided by the rhythms of two mouths breathing into each other and not by sensations and certainly not by her feelings. He had an inner countenance with which he saw her. He saw that the relatively long vagina’s angle of inflection and that of his cock, shortened and thickened by excitement, were in virtual opposition. The vagina arced upward while the cock, as if pulled downward by the mass and weight of its blood-filled head, bowed willfully.

They were wedged into each other sternly and stubbornly. With his every thrust forward and every retreat, they mutually increased the tension in each other.

He was managing things economically. Such a tiny movement mustn’t make a noise that could be heard through the wall. Another reason to be on the alert. As if he were controlling two worlds at once. And they were not equally elastic. He knew where he was, and what he had to do if he did not want to injure the real world. He saw how far he had penetrated, the road behind him and the stretch that was still ahead. He could not give in to the woman, who, if he did, would writhe under him in spasmodically interrupted, hysterical rhythms that would not match his. She would pretend dutifully to demonstrate how good it was for her, and with that it’s impossible to get anywhere.

Their hips collided several times, almost unpleasantly. Actually, it was the first thing he had noticed at the swimming pool, the woman’s hips.

How her torso became elongated when she came out of the pool and drops of water rolled down, sticking to her cold brown skin, around the hip bone. Now the pain claimed his attention. Although he could see with his eyes, he was seeing better with his skin and cock; his body no longer had a separate bulk, independent parts, limbs of its own; and with their parts and limbs thus shared, they could not separate and their mutual sensations could not become independent.

White was the strongest.

He should have pulled his cock out of her at least for a moment, to see it, to delight in it; he missed his sense of ownership. Pain is darkness. The white pillowcase illumined all his senses, its sunken wrinkles and shadows almost irritatingly bright around the expanding and contracting face. Lips opening to the sound of breathing; flaring, finely opening and closing nostrils; a barely audible, painful whistling in his ear.

And she is still doing it.

She’s always doing it, he thought, exasperated. As if she’d been trying to convince him. Or herself. And the enlightening decision was right at hand. I won’t let her. He no longer felt skin, only the heat filtering through it, and he didn’t feel the flesh under the skin either. This was the only remaining task, which was somehow familiar from somewhere. He entered into darkness, into the pervasive odor of the cunt, with its sloshing sounds at every little movement. He must face the task, or at least find appropriate means to deal with it, if he had failed until now. To outwit the woman.

He also saw the white stones sticking or popping out of and falling back into the ground bubbling under him. The water was boiling, producing bubbles on its surface, which was exactly like the sensation of crumbling under his body. He was watching her as the other boys had watched him through the swirling steam. He had to watch his every move to counter the woman’s simulations, to find a small crack. But he felt this more as a challenge to break through to something. He even thought, I should break through to her because alone she cannot free herself or take care of herself.

The probability of succeeding in this was very low.

Or at least someone might call down from the third floor, in an unfamiliar voice, before he’d topple over. You know what I mean. Of course he knew, because the dried-up shrubs he could hold on to only moments earlier were now bending away and disappearing, one after the other, in the depths. Now he couldn’t cling to anything.

When his father left him there alone, the first thing the school principal said was that this area was very lovely, sans doute , but he shouldn’t let it dazzle him, because it wasn’t without dangers, therefore he should never, not in winter or summer, not during the day or at night, take a single step by himself.

And he had understood this.

There was only the ground that was going to swallow him now as it caved in and crumbled. How could he have understood, what could he understand if he had never before seen a landslide or avalanche. He was thinking what enviable images a child has of danger. He did not ask where he wanted to arrive at, where he would like to go or how he would like to go back home from here. Now I’ll be home, he thought when the earth moved under him, even though he couldn’t have understood why it moved. Whenever he’s in trouble, his mind rears in fright but his body acts calmly. He grasped a pillow, but the incredible sensation of crumbling stayed in his hand.

I can break through, of course, but only if I let myself.

The keys clinked in Mrs. Szemző’s hand, but she hadn’t gone out the door.

He kept moving up the ribbing of the vagina, and the higher he moved, the greater the tension became, which he was yet to conquer.

He could see the gray stone steps in front of him, the ones he ran on when he escaped from the boarding school; he followed their lead. He always thought that the safety and decisiveness of his thrusts were more important than their strength, and that they should be free of selfish motive but contain, rather, an alertness, based on being aware of the surroundings, and why he was on the alert.

Critical situations demand the greatest circumspection.

Circumspection, however, has an unavoidably high price.

These time-pitted steps were unusually steep. As if forcing his tumescent cock to touch the vaginal wall, but just barely, just barely to draw his cock across it, seemingly to make it contract but in reality to fill it to the hilt and, in addition, to mark with special emphases the starting and concluding points of each thrust. They were not worn down, these steps, as if no one had ever stepped on them, that is what was so interesting about them, they had become somewhat spongy. Which meant that time chewed rather than eroded the stone. He quivered himself into the vagina, an act that managed to double the sensation of being inside and of being stiff. He also realized it wasn’t infinity he should try to traverse.

The distances to be traveled are short.

He calmly noted a smooth top, the last of the steps. I am taking off now, he signaled, and gave a ritual emphasis to each thrust, wresting it from the general monotony. He also signaled, I could go further inside you, though in fact there was no moving further, but he had to open the way for imagination. If he wanted to, he could have counted the stairs. The top step reached into the deep gray sky and touched thick clouds, without moving. To meet the requirements of the steps, not to miss them, he had to stretch out the length of the thrusts and unexpectedly change their speed.