Parallel Stories: A Novel (68 page)

Cut the crap, come on, show it to me.

In most cases they offered it up in a stiff or at least semi-stiff condition—first from a respectable distance, then at a different location but a little closer—and only then was the fateful decision made. Sometimes I too tried to show it from a good distance, but it was no use because my heart wasn’t in it.

You see, I am showing it to you.

My knees would start to shake and I’d grow weak, unable to calm my fear. My hands shook so that my fingers couldn’t undo the concealed buttons in the fly of my well-tailored pants. My decision to do it, to let it happen that once, was in vain.

What the fuck are you waiting for.

Another reason I couldn’t do it was my tight-fitting, slippery wool pants. They used to call them tube trousers. The men begged me, they whispered from the bushes; with my tight pants and fumbling fingers, I must have raised hopes I couldn’t deliver on.

Here, you can grab hold of mine.

My senseless reticence made them impatient.

Then what in hell’s cunt do you want.

And they surprised me by how willingly and excitedly they showed them, how meticulously they prepared their cocks for the showing and, at the same time, how furiously and jealously they’d hide them from unwanted eyes. Everything that had to do with this particular activity sent shivers up and down my spine.

Don’t be afraid. You can show me your little one.

It was like a foreign language I’d never heard before yet understood from the first syllable, with all its phrases and expressions. It was also very surprising that I wanted to show mine too; maybe not like this, not to these men or not to everybody, but to somebody, not just anybody; it also was a surprise to me that all these penises, including mine, whether erect or semi-erect, seemed rather ungainly and repulsive. In all my searches I saw not one about which I could have said, now this, yes, let this be the one. And no less surprising was the most familiar, profound tolerance and empathy I had for them. As if I were saying, it’s all the same to me, it could be any one of them. Nevertheless, I had to realize I had no idea what to do with my insatiable curiosity.

Perhaps I was excited by the process of erection, the untraceable transformation of a cool body, which changes only with aging and then only imperceptibly. Erections kept surprising me with their inevitability as I continued to be motivated by the chance I might see yet another cock, no matter what kind, and compare its condition and substance with the sight of the man it belonged to. In my other life, it would have been inappropriate to imagine there were so many people as passionately curious about this as I.

They were practically treading on one another’s heels in the early hours of the night.

No wonder they’d trampled and sullied everything around the ruins of the Dominican cloister.

Although I understood their curiosity, its depth and pervasiveness still shocked me and had me in thrall; I felt I could never be free of it or conquer it. And because of this feeling, everything seemed to be the other way around in this life of mine—one of my two lives—the opposite of what I’d ever thought or should have thought, with a man’s cock more important than the man himself. Since a man’s cock was unlike the man or his body. I was surprised by the lack of conformity in the visible physiological marks; there was no sameness between body and cock. Every person is put together out of several people. I too differed from my cock; perhaps my penchant for humiliation and self-lacerating brooding originated in this shameful truth. Not to mention that the nature of my thinking differed substantially from the nature of my instinctual life; seeing so many different cocks gave me the impression that this extreme disparity characterized others no less than it did me. One person differs from all others physiologically, but one also carries distinguishing marks that show how one differs from one’s own self. It surprised me that I drew a conclusion from this multifaceted differentiation, which could be said to be general, but I don’t know what the conclusion was. As if it were the kind of knowledge which one can never get enough of or reach the end of. In the eyes of the men, the cock might have been the emblem of this knowledge of unknown character. Perhaps it meant that there is no I or, more correctly, that the I is only part of a larger, undiscoverable whole, or one might say that a man’s exterior, psychological makeup, way of thinking, or character won’t reveal what kind of cock he has, even though his cock is no less defining than his soul or mind. Of course, I can’t say what I mean by soul, or in what way exactly a cock would be defining, and mainly what could rationally justify men’s elementary interest in other men’s cocks if women and their procreative capacity were excluded from their considerations.

It surprised me even more that no matter what they did with their cocks and though I did nothing with mine, from the depths of my soul I approved of the way they did it and not some other way, and that they did it with one another and without initiating women into the business. And perhaps the reason I don’t do it is not because I’m not hot-blooded, impulsive, or implacably manly enough, but rather, in harmony with the dictates of my spirit, I am a woman because of my horrible mother. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I first saw—and even later it took my breath away, made me tremble helplessly with excitement—one man finally grasp another man’s cock, saw the two of them elegantly thrust their hips forward with their cocks sticking out of their hands, saw them lean on each other’s shoulders and, each staring attentively at the other’s cock and both of them rubbing against each other’s thighs and legs, almost coolly, seeking a common rhythm, bring each other off.

They would start slowly, but their sperm quickly spouted up.

With the men I would have loved, I’d have loved to do it too.

It happened that one of them, before the spouting started or bubbled up onto his hand, would duck down to take it into his mouth, caress it with his tongue, suck and swallow the lilac ugliness rearing before him with its purplish head. To eat it, devour it, retching deep down into the back of his throat; sometimes they spat out the sperm. Others, excited by mutual desire, would fall to the filthy ground already fouled by others—they didn’t care where they fell—and mutually took into their mouths the other’s cock. Two silent pieces of flesh. Writhing on each other’s body like epileptics. Heaving, gagging, hurrying and gasping for air. The last moment before the end of the world. They weren’t bothered if they rolled around in other men’s excrement. To save myself I pretended to be disgusted, and that’s how I became disgusted. But with my countenance gazing into the darkness, I approved. They kissed into the other’s mouth the other man’s sperm.

I nearly fainted but I approved.

Or what about the naked tribal warriors in the darkest thickets, with their clothes fastened to their waists or strapped to their legs, arching their butts upward, opening their star-patterned sphincters, free of humiliation, abjection, or servility, falling on their knees and letting themselves be pounded; reaching back very adroitly with tentacle-like arms to grasp the pounding body by its thighs or hairy ass lest it slip out, and even giving little counterthrusts, slyly, helpfully, until the other man, whose name they don’t know, withholding his screams, quickly and forcefully ejaculates into them.

There were those who pulled it out before their climax, wanting to see the gushing geyser sprinkle into the darkness, into something that could not be seen, into nothingness.

There may be people whom even shit won’t stop from screwing a stranger’s ass, because for them it’s nothing more than a bit of swallowing that nobody keeps track of or judges morally; anyway, I still wouldn’t want this to be my life.

With such loathsomeness in it.

All right, I watched it, I saw it, though I don’t know why I had to; I’ve done it, that’s all I know, I’m leaving. True, I went back the next day, couldn’t stay away. And again I stayed until dawn.

And not only that, but also my own sentimental self, longing for brotherhood, would not let go of me; that was my problem, being buffeted by these different intertwined selves that I could not separate. Because of my birth I wound up in a world where in certain cases yes might mean no or no could mean yes. Yet I simply couldn’t imagine or accept about myself that I might have anything to do with these repugnant characters and what I saw them do. I wished myself back in the time when I knew nothing of this. There must be some people fortunate enough to go through life without ever being aware of this world. And if this is the way things are in the end, and I’m too craven to admit that I’m just like these people and have been looking in vain for the real world behind the appearances, now that I’ve found it and see that every other kind of life is but a gross illusion of this ungainly reality, then I must opt for the bridge.

But if my desire is to grasp a cock, anybody’s I can, then why on earth should I kill myself, I asked, rattling and panting with carnal desire and self-hatred.

I would have preferred, with the same effort, to laugh at myself for being so ridiculous.

How ridiculous and ignoble, and willing to sink even lower.

I had no place where I could get away from tormenting doubt. I knew no one with whom I could share any of this. I could just as easily have taken it into my mouth, mutely, anyone’s, so that when the hot sperm was ejected from the depth of his body I could feel at least once what I’d be like as the other man. But I didn’t have enough power of imagination to think this thought through to the end. Even though I stated clearly why I would not want to do it. I did not want to be the way I was, as defined by my natural qualities.

Only God could see things correctly, if there was a God and if he could see. But the no stayed stronger in me.

Whether I reject or approve and adopt a life like that, I can’t endure it for long.

I had to get to that point from here.

Out of the darkness and onto the lit-up bridge. Let the cold of the water swallow me forever, and let no one ever find me either, being a person of such miserable birth. I cursed my mother, whom I did not know, of whom I barely had memories, who left me for a large, bony, pale, blond Frenchwoman. And because my father didn’t notice any signs of this in my mother’s behavior and because he did not keep her from leaving, I cursed him too, a man stupid enough to want to fuck a woman like that. But he was taken away one ordinary early summer morning, in unknown circumstances and for unfathomable reasons, maybe killed by mistake, so my curse could not settle on him as I wanted it to. I was the accursed one. Because I did remember what this dead man’s reproductive organ was like, how it rested on his testicles, I had the brains to remember a thing like that, what his belly was like and his pubic hair when the water rained down on him from the showerhead.

I remember the hair on his body, long and black, how it clung to the deep brown skin of that marvelous body; yes, I remember that very precisely.

By the time I grew up mine became just like that of the murdered man, even though I was blond like my mother and blue-eyed like a pure-blooded German. I wore a perfectly strange cock on my body; the skin had a different consistency and color, but the only real difference between our cocks was that for this brief transition called life I was not circumcised, so that I could reveal our sameness in the mirror only if I pulled back the dark foreskin from the bulb and in that state laid the hanging cock on the testicles, which appeared almost black under the blond pubic hair. All right, so I have a Jewish cock, though I always tried to console myself with the thought that my body at least was like my mother’s and completely Christian. The wrinkled beak of the foreskin remained very narrow because I did things like this only very rarely, preferring to stroke it through pajama pants or underwear, so that when I did pull it back, the pain was greater than the pleasure.

From this I learned that I too was condemned to a terrible death.

I wanted to follow him faithfully, so that it would happen as soon as possible.

I heard in advance the grating noise my footsteps would make. It wouldn’t make sense to waste more time on sentimental thoughts. I felt like a person who in his sleep has lost all his clothes and is now made to appear stark naked in public. I had no choice. My impending death did not upset me, it was like a fait accompli; what bothered me were stupid trivialities such as the question why I couldn’t stay with them now that I had turned around and noticed them trying to get my attention with the glowing embers of their cigarettes. In this place every movement and gesture, or their absence, had an agreed-upon order and meaning, and just as I could haltingly read and find my way among their signals after a few days, they could already read me fluently. It was impossible to avoid being an open book that the eyes of these men could read. It was exactly the opposite of what happened in my other life, where nothing was uncovered, where behind the appropriate concealment of customs and rules, within the flexible frameworks of appearances, a person was sustained by his or her intentions.

I shuddered when I realized that since I was unaware of my own intentions, I must be even less aware of other people’s.

In our other life, something must happen to us that slips through the cracks between obstinacy and dissembling. In fact, darkness must have lurked behind everything all along. In which case, however, reality made visible must also have something behind it, and I can’t get to the end of either one, I can’t see their boundaries. I can’t decide which of my two real lives, so trickily covering each other, is the more robust one. Everyone has another life that must be kept hidden, I knew that, but in the concealed background of a life hiding behind appearances or brutality there is yet another life, and that one I didn’t know. Because while what men did to and with one another was rough, common, and brutal, the language of their communication was exceedingly refined, more complex, civilized, and flexible than spoken language and at the same time very clear and practical.