Parallel Stories: A Novel (41 page)

The pelvic nerve plexus can remember.

As if she were helping him, she could hear inside herself the rhythmic shouts of encouragement. Let Ágost’s willpower triumph over his pleasure.

Oh, no, please, don’t let him come.

She identified with him because the restraint wrenched her own throbbing away from its own rhythm, causing veritable explosions. The vagina’s oval muscles were already resisting with stronger throbs. And while she pressed her knees and thighs together, let out hoarse shouts, her orifice opened and contracted to the rhythm of the man’s writhing; while she was thus assisting him in not ejaculating, she often reached a retching orgasm of her own, thrusting her hands between her thighs.

She acknowledged that this was an odd habit, what else could it be. Other men could not convince themselves to do a thing like that even when they needed to, when they wanted it. Excitement broke through and overwhelmed their consciousness; more precisely, they would have found that kind of self-restraint humiliating. If they were able to control themselves and interrupt even at moments when the sliding and the touching were perfect, then they must not have wanted the woman, couldn’t have desired her so much. They did not want to be seen in her eyes as so petty as to stop their ejaculation; they preferred to take their chances. And if she could not yank herself away in time, things might become more than risky. She didn’t want to get pregnant all the time. She dreaded abortions not only because of the pain involved, but also because dread increased the pain and lengthened her periods. But with Ágost she could not become pregnant no matter how much she wanted him to come in her womb so long as Ágost didn’t want to. She was glad, at last, to see how a man denied himself a pleasure to which his own body responded with resignation. Why shouldn’t she help him if it’s good for him, and if it feels good. She did not admit it to herself, but actually, her own satisfaction was much deeper and longer-lasting than it was when the man, polite and attentive, tarried in her. And if that was possible, then fate was not inevitable. Then one could make a crack in even the thickest wall. Then she might become a singer. She did not know them, but she always learned from them, experienced more because of them. She wanted to be like them. Sometimes, unexpectedly, she’d get an idea from them. She observed their habits, imitated their cool behavior, and, although she could not use everything, she learned she could not hold their caprices against them either. And of course no one forced her to take those caprices seriously. Because no one could shake her profound, almost religious conviction that men and women were created to desire and find their gratification in one another. That was the way things had to be.

Anything else would be immoral.

But now she also saw, in the man’s beatific smile she saw that what he was doing was to give alms, all the time and to everyone. He does it when from under his lashes he looks at someone with his small piercing eyes. At the sight of the adored body, she was overcome with shudders of disgust. Even his most beautiful smile he keeps for himself.

And she struggled with an impossible nausea, as if not Ágost but she had gone mad.

In Ágost’s limbs, she recognized the bodies of other people. His arms, legs, and hard abdominal wall he inherited from his father, his joints, the shape of his fingers, and even their length from his mother. Something had rounded off his muscles, in their powerful bundles, including those of his shoulders and buttocks, and that was his mother in him. The shape of a woman showed in his musculature. Gyöngyvér looked at him and thought, oh god, it’s not him I’ve been sleeping with. With his mother’s fingers, with the hard pads of his palms he barely touched his father’s abdominal wall. Gyöngyvér stared at him as at a person she had nothing to do with, couldn’t have. While she seemed to feel his palm’s familiar hard pads on her breasts. Which meant that her nipples declared their independence; they did remember these hands. But she has more to do with the old man, when he soils himself and they have to bathe him, she thought, because she empathizes with him, feels sorry for him. And she could not understand what in the world she could have worshipped only moments earlier in this strange man.

While one of his hands reached his drum-tight belly, the other one was close to his pubic hair, into which Gyöngyvér too would have gladly sunk her fingers, her repugnance notwithstanding. But the hands hesitated, made no further advance. She seemed to smell the smeared shit from which they’d had to free the old man in his bath. And this one here doesn’t need anybody to touch him, his skin, his warmth, any part of him, not even a little bit. I still adore his hands, she thought jealously. He sees himself a little, touches himself a little, but even so he enjoys himself enough. Why would he need anyone else. Ágost twitched several times, excitement skimmed over his skin from the soles of his feet to the top of his head, shaking his limbs; his torso stretched up, bent forward, backward, and then unexpectedly relaxed again. From then on he kept his head thrust upward like a mutely gaping animal searching for the moon. Ágost’s face did not become distorted in the throes of pleasure, unlike other men’s. He wasn’t looking anywhere; there was nowhere to look except at himself. One can’t say he became more attractive in his pleasure, but his features grew more translucent. And his smile radiated even more strongly, more provocatively.

The floor creaked under the swansdown slippers.

He truly wanted to show something of himself, this was a deliberate decision, but he was doing it almost desperately, as if reaching for the last of his reserves. If you don’t understand this, it will be all over. It is over. Let Gyöngyvér take notice. She saw it, surely, but no matter what she noticed several forces were at work simultaneously. One, striving for understanding and sense, thrust her away from the man and held her back; the other, greedy and demanding, which acknowledged only the raw power of the moment, could not let her obstruct gratification. She’d have plowed through everything for it. Even through sense and understanding. One force was waiting, listening, felt deep empathy, weighed things, and that is why she managed to stop herself halfway, in the middle of a movement.

The high heels of her slippers rapped uncertainly on the floor.

But then she should go with the other, there was always the other. Now the one with eternal urges stepped forward, making the floor creak under the treading soles. This wasn’t anything like what other people call desire. She was driven by her conviction that in such a situation, Ágost would need physical first aid, and there was nothing more appropriate in the world than her body to provide that. Which may have been true; desire has its own reasons. The sensation of being exceptional and chosen needs no reasons of the mind. This sensation, usually called passion or love, had survived for a few weeks after they had met. Then it developed some cracks and slowly crumbled away, but neither of them could have said why. She must hug him. Cuddle up with him, cling to him, and suck him off. Take him inside her. She didn’t even notice that she was not only thinking faster but breathing faster too, and at the same time, as if to calm herself, she pressed her fists to her breasts. This was a very willful movement, which surprised her, because when she glanced at herself in this position she did not believe it was she, or that she had strayed on this forbidden path and become violent. Usually she suffered her greatest defeats in situations like this. But from this moment on it was her breathing and not her thinking that led her on; a rhythm, a rhythmic speeding-up that she no longer controlled.

Don’t move, stay there, said Ágost loudly, as if deterring an intruder. Stay where you are.

The voice was energetic enough to be heard by Kristóf in the adjacent room, though he could not make out the words.

Don’t you think it would be better if I could at least close the fucking door, Gyöngyvér replied with stifled anger.

But she obeyed him immediately. The man didn’t even look at her, yet she stopped where she was.

As if their bodies were torn out of time. They were no longer stoppable on their own paths, but for a second they both froze. Aware of one’s goal, one does not hurry. They were no more than an arm’s length from each other.

Gyöngyvér wondered what had happened to the man’s breath. Nothing was coming out of him but stifled silence. That’s what made her hear her own urgent, violent, painfully excited breathing. Which made her loathe herself, not the man. She could always turn around any animosity she felt toward the other, but she usually fell into a trap she couldn’t escape from. She could see how gentle, how considerate the other person was while she was crass, common in all her thinking, uncouth, with instincts that did not function above the animal level.

The deliberate selfishness of the man seemed more attractive to her than her own false generosity.

He was now turning blindly toward the lit-up ceiling and, while his fingers moved on gently and relentlessly, his entire torso lengthened, as if he had to keep away from his own touch and as if his body were rearing up against his own will. This position was still too much. Less would be more. Just a bit more, upward, as though it were possible to evade himself. To stretch his body so he couldn’t reach it, or only with great difficulty. He inched his way down, avoiding his belly, and from below, with his fingers crawling on the inside of his thighs, he approached his testicles. His lips parted farther, the nightlight illuminated the roof of his mouth, yet his voice still had no sound coming from the dark space. His knees quivered slightly when with two fingers he reached his testicles, which caused the two convex bundles of muscles to contract suddenly and then bounce back.

He hadn’t yet touched his testicles when the hurtful comprehension in his brain was extinguished and he was looking into a light much brighter than the one that had so rudely penetrated his half-opened eyes.

All sorts of thought fragments were swirling in his memory, but they had little to do with the images he now deliberately conjured up. Like a person rising on tiptoe who at the same time had to open his loins wide. To keep his thighs from absorbing the weight of his testicles. And there was an even more urgent command: to free the muscles between scrotum and anus from all tension and pressure. In a supine position, this is very simple; he’d only have to spread both legs and pull up the knees a little. In a standing position, however, this meant two mutually exclusive movements, which tensed his muscles on both his back and his chest. He thrust his buttocks backward slightly. He has to get to it. To something that does not exist, of course, yet that might be called forth from the body. To open up ever wider and at the same time become ever taller and to reach for it higher, so that he can touch his entire body with his entire body. It was no longer warm in the room; the mild chill of the skin’s surface indicated the bodily boundaries on his neck, chest, thighs, feet, and soles. He had already grown beyond these points both down and up, yet he held back, economized, so that he would still have room to go on rising and sinking. He immersed himself in an image and wanted to hold on to it.

There came another one; it’s not possible to hold on to anything.

The lightly sketched hand-drawn figures were sliding in and out of one another.
Vous voyez là les nus féminins en mouvement.

You see there female nudes in motion. Usually, when talking to himself, he switched languages without noticing it. Once he arrived at French, for example, he could glide on to another more easily. Hungarian had a deeper, more elementary attraction for him but he did not feel identical to the man who spoke or thought in Hungarian within him. Now, in addition to words, a badly tuned piano could be heard. The naked figures were those of girls who were in motion. The hammers of the piano pounded dully. It occurred to him there was no way back.
Sur les pointes, s’il vous plaît.
Because if he spoke in German or Italian, he could not switch back at all. There is no path like this. First, he must touch on the French. Then the girls were running—on point, please; the pictures were running in the mirror in quick succession as if projected ahead of him and for him to follow. And he was probably thinking this way because for them there was truly no way back. One mirror was reflected in the other. Now I’ll grab it, I’ll grab it anyway, he thought. As if he had to reach into the reflections but could not grasp anything. There were many of them; bright footlights shone up on familiar faces, loins, and pointy little breasts.

Their noses cast funny little shadows that crawled up their foreheads. He never had to say to himself that these young girls had anything to do with anyone he had ever known or would have wanted to touch. They bent over, straightened, stood on tiptoe, and tossed their heads in all directions, higher, higher yet, quickly, with short broken movements.
Une pirouette, s’il vous plaît.
Someone gracefully transferred them to the corrugated paper. Pirouettes, please, single first. He drew what he was instructing others to do in his familiarly throaty voice. He was clapping rhythmically for the little idiots.
Et encore une autre, et une autre, magnifique.
The crayon barely stuck at the edge of the corrugated ribs. Like the girls who for a flash remained in the air and used their arching feet to keep from falling. But then they fell like stars. Everything was going so fast he couldn’t tell how many there were in the pictures. The napes of their necks were spinning by as they took their turns. A one-and-a-two-and-a-three, wonderful, shouted the woman with the throaty voice; that’s all. He could see them in the mirror simultaneously from the front and the back; with a magnifying glass, he went over their breasts and their backs. Of course, he put the magnifying glass back in its case. Into the black leather box whose brass safety catch was slightly worn. And then he put the black leather box into the upper drawer of the glossy yellow-red cherrywood desk. The large red eye of the stove was shining bright. Outside, it was growing dark over the lake of Zurich, the snow turned blue.