Parallel Stories: A Novel (78 page)

He hoped that the warm darkness would protect him and in his pleasure he would not have to throw himself on the mercy of others, of anyone.

And then he noticed the giant’s mustached assistant in the lineup, with his big head and tousled hair among the other heads turning toward him. Unlike the others, the assistant turned somewhat with his body too, simultaneously presenting, as it were, the emblem of his cock.

The assistant had no doubt he belonged among these men.

He considered his cock as the last argument, in case I still hadn’t made up my mind. After all, one must decide how to shape one’s life. To see the emblem was like seeing an old friend.

And seeing it, icy, fiery dread coursed through him like homesickness; if things were going this well, then the tar-smelling giant with his hammerlike head and the high bare nape of his neck must also be in here somewhere.

The man with whom, he still hoped, he might spend the rest of his life.

He’d fallen in love with this man and was ready to do anything for this love, to step across the boundaries of his own person if need be, or even across the shadow of the gods.

It does not take long for one’s eyes to get used to darkness. He now noticed for the first time that the giant was indeed there, his legs spread casually apart in his insanely relaxed mood, his loosened worker’s pants fallen over his ankles, right next to the vacant spot in the lineup that would be so easy to step into.

The vacant place is his.

He had never been granted such good fortune. As if after long and arduous research he had just discovered an unknown element that, look at the miracle, people, fit perfectly into Mendeleyev’s periodic table. The marvelous giant’s suddenly flashing smile with his wetly glittering teeth illuminated the stinking darkness.

It was a summons, come on, a raw, animal promise of his goodness, a down payment, but at the same time he was exuding an ominous cold, the icy breeze of madness, because the summons meant that you could not avoid your fate in this snare.

Just by looking at this man, I knew I’d walked into a trap. That this was indeed predestined. One place in this dismal universe had been left vacant, entrusted to this marvelous giant, that he should guard it, keep it for me, and not only is it unavoidable, but his goodness and solicitude positively compel me to occupy it.

He listened, wanted to remain cautious, but no one inside him protested this compulsion. He knew he’d give in; still he looked about coolly to see if there were any signs of a conspiracy. A liquid does not protest either, when it slowly fills the cracks and depressions in a vessel, but it fills them slowly. He was afraid that these two were setting a trap for him or would simply make him a laughingstock, or even beat him up when he took their bait.

While his hesitation stemmed rather from the obligatory anxiety of a man in love.

Would this perfect human specimen, blessed with that marvelous smile, really accept my imperfection for an entire life, or am I but one of his many nocturnal adventures whom he’ll forget tomorrow.

Whatever the situation, his smile proved to be a fiat of destiny in the feverish darkness.

In the meantime his mustached assistant also kept watching me from among the heads turned in my direction.

Doubt was pointless if the giant’s proximity was worth any humiliation. At the sight of his checkered shirt, I could already feel the hot whiff of his wild body, his enormous strong limbs, or perhaps I was overwhelmed by the odor of the tarred wall.

Any humiliation, even my entire future, for a single touch from him.

Let it be that way, any way it has to be. I’d do it in front of everybody too. That’s what everyone was trying to see, where I was headed, whether I’d pick someone else, what I was going to do.

But at that moment—perhaps already the moment before, just as he set off to take his designated place in the phalanx of men about to go into the most secret war of the night and, as it were, to fill the gap with his presence during the waiting period—the lineup, as if moved by a gust of wind, began to disperse. Passionate whispering was heard from the far end of the urinal, words of indignation; somebody vehemently protested something that had been done to him, kept swearing, and at the same time a gray-haired old man appeared from the same area, his shirt outside his pants, his hard-on in his hand. His welted shoes squeaked weirdly and in a split second he closed the long line by taking the spot that fate had supposedly allocated and held reserved for the new arrival.

As it turned out, he took away from me what the black-haired giant could not give me after all, because it was destined to happen differently.

Only the loveliness and irony of an eternal promise remained, disappointment, longing, and a measure of consternation instead of an opportunity presented and missed. At the same time, others were also changing places but so quickly it was impossible to fathom what the prearranged plan was, what sort of strategy had brought about the new formation. The single possible vacancy was re-created at an entirely different location between entirely different individuals.

Now there were three men between us.

Actually, this was a characteristic of these nocturnal games: to make use of secret intentions and chance challenges lurking in the depths of the constant shifting of positions, in which one involuntarily lost rather than found and recognized oneself. There was nothing I could do but occupy the vacant spot.

At least that.

I don’t know how else it could have happened, and I understood even less the way it happened. The occurrence itself could be seen with the naked eye, yet the development of things went on being mysterious. Here we were, standing in this long, narrow space with our backs to the illuminated entrance. The lineup was now closed, man next to man. I was trembling among mobilized warriors waiting for orders, clenching my teeth to stop my trembling. It could have been a dream that one luckily forgets the next day, but it was not a dream. We pretended that all of us, precisely at this abandoned spot, precisely at this late hour of the night, were preparing to urinate or had just finished urinating and were ready to leave.

The silence spread once again; one could barely hear a few small unidentifiable noises.

I was staring at a tarred wall and my eyes were becoming more and more used to the darkness. Slowly I distinguished him in the blackness.

At least his mustached assistant is here very close to me, I consoled myself.

The giant must have been from the countryside and made a very strange impression in his blue worker’s overalls, but his assistant seemed to be from Pest, coming here from a distant suburb. Judging by his hands, he must have pursued a more refined trade, that of a turner or toolmaker. Behind his large, meaty nose and big Hungarian mustache, his features were positively childlike and delicate, though not his forehead or chin, which were thick, fleshy, and forceful. There was a tattoo on his lower arm, a coat of arms or bouquet of flowers, I could not make out which. I had stolen quick glances at it during the previous nights. A letter was tattooed on the hairy upper digit of every one of his fingers. Perhaps the letters of a favored woman’s nickname, perhaps of his own. Between us stood a nervous, blindingly blond, ungainly, idiotic-looking young man who once very carefully had approached me under the yellow acacias during one of the previous nights. He had something of the wild boar in him. Short light bristles covered his loins, his short stubby fingers, and his thighs. His hair stood up straight from his head, like gleaming stubble that couldn’t be combed. A disproportionately small, reddish pointy bulb glowed atop his misshapen, thick, short solid cock, swelling with veins and nerves.

He had sneaked up on me unnoticed, startled me, which in turn alarmed him, and he would have collapsed if he hadn’t leaned against the silky trunk of a thin tree and pressed his cock to it.

He pressed it against the tree so as not to come.

Now he alternated between watching the mustached assistant’s cock and mine, and he wanted to get his hand on mine. Then, by the tree trunk, he’d come with loud screams, his sperm shooting up incredibly high, and I’d run away through branches slapping my face. I did not want to look at his face now, either, or see any part of him.

Our shoulders almost touched.

One filled one’s place and became a captive of the somber lineup of men. I didn’t want to see who was standing on my other side. That man was very close to me too. I wanted to remain strictly with the impossible fiction to which all the others also clung.

We’re here to urinate, nothing else. Locked into this fiction, everyone stood there utterly alone.

Everyone was careful to avoid unwarranted glances.

However, everyone peeked out a little from behind his seclusion. Not to dispel solitude but to search for prey and gain some advantage; to keep an eye on the others lest they commit some incautious act. Being able to see someone else’s without showing one’s own was considered an advantage. Which allowed one to gauge and judge the members of others without submitting one’s own to a similar scrutiny. That would keep one’s place open in a virtual hierarchy. At first, most of the men relied on their peripheral vision. The mustached one showed his to me, but the boar-headed man could see it much better, which made him very aggressively proffer his own. The purpose of the jockeying was to see who could stimulate better and therefore emotionally surround the other one, who was the more adroit, the more cunning, the more attractive, the more competitive, who could exercise more power over the other and who would submit first to the secret hierarchy.

The more protracted the preparation, the higher the fever rose and the more general the tension became. Everyone received some of it and everyone helped increase it. It was enjoyed even by those who for some reason had been excluded from seeking a mate or didn’t want to participate actively and instead preferred to take larger gulps from the common source of pleasure.

With little tricks and a constant increase of tension, it was possible to compel a targeted person to leave his foxhole at last and submit to the potential verdict of the phalanx.

This was not an entirely new situation for me because I had conducted serious fieldwork in the subterranean urinals on Grand Boulevard, though I thought the results not quite satisfactory. I had worked there like a thoughtful ethnologist who had to keep a distance from the influence of observed forms of behavior. If one man felt confidence in another or, because of his deep attraction, lost patience and showed a small measure of initiative, it remained an open question whether the second man would be satisfied with what he saw and, abandoning the mutually nurtured polite appearances, reciprocate the confidence, and also who else might profit from this secret dialogue disguised as a chance occurrence, and as a third party might be induced, precisely by what he had seen, to interfere in the adventure.

At any rate, after a while it was possible to know who was or was not curious about someone, whom one feared, who might wind up as a third party, insinuating himself between the initial two and snatching away the chosen one, who was ready to flirt with anyone or everyone, what a person’s cock was like and whether it would fulfill the promise of the man’s body. Or, if it was impossible to answer these questions right then, because the chosen one was too far away and concealed by others, at least one could guess by their behavior where his place might be in the secret hierarchy.

One could also be aware that the subject, direction, and temperature of a person’s interest, despite every visual agreement, even despite the hierarchy, might change very rapidly and sometimes for no good reason.

What happened then was probably something other than what the men had expected even of themselves.

After another bit of time had passed in this seemingly motionless silence, one could sense who were the ones who had already managed to establish contact, how they were flooded by their mutual attraction, how they began to lose their inhibitions and find their way around obstacles. One could also spot the ones who remained hopelessly alone, or guess who’d be scrounging off the sights of developing reciprocity between others. Because there were men who wanted nothing more than to watch and follow others only with their glances. From the beginning these men behaved as if they had no interest at all in the busy activity around them. With their eyes and ears they followed and absorbed the smallest movement and coldly rejected any attempt to approach them. They refrained almost pathologically from direct bodily contact. They must have been satisfied with very little. Peeping was their profession and they had no shame about it. Persistently, for hours at a time, they’d stand in the same spot and, no matter what happened, their faces remained indifferent to everyone and everything.

Of course they never showed their own to anyone.

They took the rich nourishment of their sense organs with a certain reservation, which had a touch of gourmandise.

It was impossible to know when and with what they had their fill, but suddenly they’d button up their flies and, behind countenances transformed into masks with neutral gazes, they’d make their way from the depths of the urinal up the stairs to take home their daily booty.

Occasionally, though, they were denied even this small gain. Not everyone liked having others witness their pleasure. Some were angered or embarrassed by the presence of others, though some were indifferent to voyeurs or even liked the peepers’ quiet indifference, gaining an unexpected boost from the mute witnesses’ enjoyment.

Many things could be clarified in the motionless silence in which the tap kept dripping evenly.

It must have been leaking somewhere, because there were glistening spots of water on the flagstones.

The question of what one’s intentions were regarding the other was left open.

Among these men, intentions had well-defined genres, and they strictly observed the borders between genres. It was impossible to tell by another’s exterior what that person wanted to do, how reserved he was or how far in shamelessness he would be willing to go, where he would want to do it, whether he had a place of his own or would insist on staying here and doing it in front of the others, or what they might do with each other emotionally, whether this connection would last for only a few minutes or possibly for a lifetime, and what the others would make of all this, but, based on a certain amount of practice, everyone could have his own intuition.