Parallel Stories: A Novel (182 page)

Factually, he was not without hope.

He understood and comprehended everything very well.

How could he have wished for anything else or more from his fate.

Of course he had not forgotten it.

But how could he or why would he tell anyone about it.

It never occurred to him to tell anyone that those two had shared with him their most obvious secret. A curse would befall him if he did. The men knew that anyway, all of them, and would have killed him at the first word if he’d started to talk. And he hadn’t even had the chance to complete his research. If I had been born a woman, maybe then I could live with him, with the giant, without arousing suspicion; with some common sense, that was all he could think of to resolve the situation. But he was already very far from common sense, and this was something he took into account once he allowed himself to live. It would be better not to think about it, about the peculiar nature of his common sense, seeing as how he obviously had not been born a woman.

They didn’t want him, the men, that was the most painful part of his story, why would a giant like that want him, why would he want such a dark little lunatic like me, what for.

And he did not understand why not, could not fathom it no matter how hard he thought about it.

The most he could make his mind accept was that living beings in this world probably cannot simultaneously both understand the demands of their lives and satisfy them.

Those two people had appeared to be cheerful beings in the depths of the city night, yet sometimes he thought about them as obstinate and merciless Salvation Army soldiers. Mischievous elves, gleefully cruel in their loving. And why would they have wanted to take him on and lug his heavy historical baggage around. On the other hand, if they did not want him, why had they accosted him, why were they so steadfast in their seduction, or why had they disposed of him as they did, what did they gain by it. How did he fit in among other human bodies and souls. His rebukes were weighty.

He understood the accord between the two but how could he find his place between them.

Or why couldn’t he, with his sheer being, oust the other one. Perhaps he couldn’t understand things even when he knew them. And maybe he too should look at his life this way, enjoy its objects and themes to the full and then move on, however modest the return.

To not bother with getting to know things and making sense of them, to cast aside the more dangerous wishes since he’d get nowhere with them anyway and they had no satisfying outcome.

How could he get to know him better when he already knows him to the marrow of his bones, as though in the pain of pleasure he recognized him by the tissue of his bones.

Yet there must be something he does not know.

Not to keep still, not for a moment, and to plan things accordingly.

As if they had said, go that way, but how could he.

If he managed to comprehend this sort of existence, perhaps he’d understand why the others stay far away from curiosity about desire, from the nature of their physical common sense, from what their indifference to one another is all about. Why does the mind always want more. They had initiated him, why isn’t that enough; they had shown him the hidden, silently indifferent nature of the world, what else or what more could he wish for. For this moment right now, yes, we’ll take your body and show burning passion for every part of it we fancy, we’ll soften you up and bend you our way so you’ll obey us in everything, but not in the next moment.

But this thinking was pointless, inasmuch as he always got to the same place, and the most he could do was start brooding anew.

It made no difference what he did or didn’t understand. In his imagination the giant lived beyond all everyday hope or sensible condition; he had a life of his own with him, and for that he considered himself lucky.

What those two men had rubbed his nose in was precisely what he understood in this life of his. He’d follow the giant anywhere without giving it a thought; he understood that. And at any time; he understood that too, if only momentarily. Of course, his imagination did not bother with hope, madness, or norms. He would never again make the big mistake of not reciprocating the giant’s surprising and generous love calls and strange kisses, whether because of the giant’s lack of restraint or his own paralyzing dread. It took him a very long time to understand the sensual meaning of those kisses. But in time his imagination repeatedly completed or continued every unfinished movement and gesture. Nor would he behave differently; in his imagination he turned loose on the giant all his mental strength and physical cheerfulness. Perhaps the giant perceived his cheerfulness on his lips, perhaps in the kiss that was not an immersion but rather a brave staying on the surface. It was not a figment of the imagination that he had been living with him in his imagination ever since that first time. It’s not that without him there was no self-gratification, without his cheerfulness. They did it for each other, not he for himself.

How could he have thought he was hopeless.

He couldn’t think something like that because of Klára.

No greater devotion or loyalty is possible in a person’s life. How many months, how many hours had passed, and he was still clinging loyally and cheerfully to him. The clinging between them was not one-sided. Their mutuality had turned their lives into pure kitsch. Without it he’d never have known about lovers’ harmony. This clearly meant, however, that other people, if they could see into him, would consider him completely mad, because in reality he lived in the giant’s imagination as the giant did in his, and they would never find each other or their place among people, only the mere illusion of that place.

And knowing this for certain made him totally happy.

He should not have made the woman’s acquaintance. He thought of himself using the giant’s head. But using his own head, he had to think that the giant probably would not want to be betrayed.

Sometimes he did not know which one of them was doing the thinking for him.

Except for him, nobody could have known about this cheerful coexistence encompassing all the senses, but the giant did—and how.

What would he accomplish with a primitive and boring rebellion against his family such as the woman had suggested.

He knew of a different rebellion, perhaps the only heroic tale that might impress the woman.

Their imagination, or their mutual loneliness in the realm of imagination, the continually gained sensual knowledge about each other and their parallel lives, than which there was no stronger bond—this he had discovered on his own. Not the law of free fall, not the Demén-style coke basket—those he did not discover—but this he did. With the giant they did not look at the water to see its currents. It was very clear that Klára belonged in the realm of ordinary people, and it was to that realm that she wanted to entice him. She weighs the offenses and figures out the retaliations, but no thanks, he doesn’t want that, doesn’t want to accept her suggestion. And the giant’s mustached assistant believed they’d managed to get rid of this little prick for good, and since he needed the giant just as much, he said, let’s go, we don’t have to worry about this little jism anymore, but boy, was he mistaken, and he also couldn’t have known that the pictures mutually nurtured in their imaginations never faded, that Kristóf and the giant had made a gift to each other of the sensation of these pictures.

Ordinary people don’t consider such things.

Ilona could not help noticing the big stains on the sheet, some on the silk quilt cover too, where it must have fallen back after the semen had shot up in a double-beat rhythm as if breaking through an obstacle, soaring high and then falling down heavily. They did it every night, how could she not notice it; torn with jealousy, Ilona followed the events as she changed the bedding on Lady Erna’s instructions. Not to mention his handkerchiefs flung into the hamper, which Ilona sniffed fearfully; how could she not have sensed what was happening during the night without her. Sometimes he saw on her face that she not only had discovered their secret but was also afraid or afraid of herself for him. They did not talk about this either. Something happened between them early that morning when, after he’d failed to kill himself, he staggered back to the apartment on Teréz Boulevard, his clothes torn, his body filthy and, standing in the kitchen just as he was, bloody and unwashed, wolfed down the leftover rice chicken straight out of the pot; neither of them could mention this to anyone, ever.

To catch it at least with a handkerchief.

Even after the inevitable moment, he didn’t have the self-control to tear himself away from the giant. All he could do was follow him with the handkerchief. He was no longer in his right mind, and given the nature of the thing, this should not be understood metaphorically. And the reason he and Ilona could not talk about anything was not that their sense of decency forbade it, but because everything was right as it had happened. Which he also attributed to the giant’s strength. This made him feel so strong and powerful that he expected he’d be the one who at the right moment would block the giant’s way in his frightening and cheerful urge to run amok.

For that he would have to find him first, to go back to him from his imagination, as it were.

That is how the heroic tale might have been realized, their terrible happiness.

It did not occur to him that the giant might have another life, small children who were his spitting image, but that the giant daydreamed about him he felt on his skin, in his aching frontal lobe or in his unavoidably erect penis, in the temperature of his body and the rhythmic tempo of his breathing. Or that the giant might be making love to someone else in his stead, doing it very seriously and, along with this stranger, might be looking for him, Kristóf, in the universe. He saw how they filled him with themselves, with their parts, but he was not envious of them, he had no reason to be jealous. In his imagination the giant had to remain as free as an outlaw. This was the basic condition in the functioning of his imagination, and it would have been senseless to cancel it with jealousy. Neither his body nor his soul was tied to anyone but the giant; that was the big truth; he had become the giant’s prisoner, his slave. Impartial curiosity and imagination had set him loose from everyone else; there was no one left to whom he’d earlier been bound or belonged; put another way, impartiality would not let him get close to anyone. He observed impartially even those to whom he was close. He had to distract Klára’s attention from all this so they could more thoroughly observe each other. And while flitting among his various stories about the city and its architectural styles, explaining things loudly and pragmatically as they drove along, he felt how immoderate a man he was, what an evader, a rambler who made himself laughable with his awkward, pitiful life, and no matter how hard he tried, his story was never nice and round, and there was no way back.

Only forward, deeper into the thick of things.

When it comes to sharing one’s story with someone else, the storyteller tries to retailor the story to fit the measurements of the listener, as it were. Then many things come to mind that cannot be told or shared with anyone, which slows down the telling; and with the constant jabbering the storyteller never gets to the end of anything or never returns to the beginning. Either another story joins the storyteller’s own censored tale, or the storyteller trails some silly fairy tale behind the original story.

It’s not necessarily modesty that keeps him from the story of the other person; of course, that too.

But he wouldn’t even know where to begin.

Which makes him think he should strictly separate the stories so that they won’t ever again make contact so dangerously and unguardedly. To separate the secret story from the acceptable one; they mustn’t dribble into each other. But how could things have turned out differently from the way they did. The mere question tortured him. Or what might have happened if he’d managed to make them turn out differently. After all, when telling one’s life story to someone else one manufactures not chronicles but legends for oneself. He keeps telling the legend until he too is taken in by the credible presentation, according to which his life has a nicely rounded conclusion, a brief clever punch line, an epilogue, and a lesson to give some meaning to it even beyond death. And it occurred to him again how many things he and the giant should have done differently to arrive at a different fate, one that might have led him not only to the shuddering happiness of presentiment, intuition, and imagination, but also to the other man’s ordinary, boring, everyday life story.

No matter how he looked at things and events, this other possibility, this should-have-done-it-differently, planted itself before him, constantly, demandingly. The way things did not happen and wouldn’t have been decent if they had. To achieve another story, he most likely would have had to do things about which, without information concerning the giant or himself, he could not know. How many things they had missed. One after the other they’d mishandled every illusion. Perhaps they missed another story. But lacking the necessary information, how could he describe his misses, or how and to whom could he complain about the lost illusions. His body had revealed much more of the giant than he could factually be aware of; his palms, his thighs, everything, the scent of his hair revealed him, and for that Kristóf did not even have to know his name. Perhaps he had come to possess knowledge of his soul. But he remained unfamiliar with his ordinary weekdays and couldn’t share his own with him. And what if he could. Did fate’s plan, if fate had a plan and if there was human fate at all, include impetuosity, profligacy, and enormous omissions.

And if these latter were taken into account and his fate could not be imagined without them—because the Creator, let’s say, built them into the plans as a gaping lack—is it worth talking about misses and omissions.

Why would it be.

Is it worth trying to make up for his omissions and to pursue his pleasure to the point of exhaustion. Or, to put it the other way around, one should ask how the giant could have known him well enough to hit all the right keys on the keyboard of his guts and take possession of him just as he wished. How could there be such congruence in nature. He did not understand this. Perhaps there are no differences between men because they are nothing but stupid mirror images, which is why they immediately recognize themselves in one another. And in that case, men’s life stories are nothing but repetitions and empty experiences. Any intelligent mind can foresee everything that might happen to them. Sometimes primitive things are harder to understand than complicated ones. And how can he hope to make up for his omissions with a person whom he’ll never meet again, no matter how hard he searches day and night all over the city.