Parallel Stories: A Novel (51 page)

The weakness of his will.

Their bodies were flowing, sliding on and in each other; suddenly they collapsed into each other and breathed aloud in the darkness of the bleak room.

The heat stung and burned them; every part of their bodies was ablaze inside. From the several days of rubbing, the woman’s labia were burning, her vagina ached, and the man again felt the pain of the torn frenum under the tip of his penis. Open sore rubbing against open sore.

They were moaning again because it felt good to give evidence of the pain. They were crying, choking, sighing, panting haltingly, whining, sniveling, wailing, sobbing, whimpering, hissing, and mewling into each other’s ears, unable to subside. And the man kept on thrusting, lazily, filled with his own emptiness and desperation.

They could neither guide nor control what they were doing, though they had regained enough consciousness to see the new impending torrent.

They were biting each other’s ears, nose, lips, even teeth. They were grasping, hugging, stroking, scratching, pressing each other’s back, and prompting each other to go on pressing everything that was so smooth and had dissolved in their heat: bones to press the flesh or flesh to press the bones. As if saying to each other I shall crush you. As if telling each other, oh, why haven’t I eaten you up, I’ll eat you up now, I’ll chew dry all your bones and gristle. But of course they did not have enough air to do this all at once or even to say it. This was, rather, pure joy cleansed by wild desire. And they had good reason. As if after all the pain and finesse of four long days they had finally succeeded in hurdling an incredible obstacle.

They looked back from the other side. Painfully they reveled and sloshed about in their success, which in the final analysis fell into their lap as a blessing of coincidences.

If only Mrs. Szemz
ő
hadn’t walked in on them.

It flashed through their minds that yes, she had been there, but it seemed an improbable phenomenon, and they quickly shoved it aside, because they heard their own insane screaming. God, maybe she hasn’t left and is still listening to them.

In fact, thanks to unfathomable providence and destiny, she had actually left. As their pulses returned to normal, their awareness of their bodies’ success became stronger. With its outlines and its pale and confused images, the past reappeared, ready to separate them.

In their contented arrhythmic sounds, slamming into and reborn out of each other, they deepened, increased, and tried to delay the eternal present, somehow to impede its disintegration.

Tension does not decrease at an even pace when the pulse suddenly drops, but rather, seeking the place of the previous contraction, goes back up; not finding it, it drops a bit more, hesitates nervously, trying to steady itself at this lower level. The eternal present, however, snaps in the effort, yet still prevents the past or the future from encroaching on it. And this is happiness, the famed happiness that cannot be independent of physiology though it is not identical with it. Heartbeats extend between the various possibilities afforded by the changing use and genetically defined rhythms of the carotid sinus. On the one side, there is the possibility which the heart is always ready to follow, and on the other side is the ability from which the heart cannot separate itself, the basic rhythm of personality to which it always returns.

And now it was trembling and sliding in both of them, between the different rhythms and levels.

When sensing happiness in another person’s breathing, one’s own breathing becomes happier, and not by chance does one feel that perishing of happiness is imminent. I’m going to die, I love you so much I’ll die of it.

Expanded and sodden pores, their limbs sliding on one another, loosened muscles, memory breaking through in flashes, barely visible outlines, their burning painful loins melted into each other, the penetrating smells.

Outside, evening was coming to life, now pushing shut, now opening wide the window above their heads, sending a lazy, fresh current of air lightly across their naked sweat-covered bodies.

It brought along a typically urban odor in which they recognized the vagina’s abundant
ejaculatum
and the dripping sperm’s strange, heady smell and their intermingled perspiration. It warned them of something that remained permanent around them, with hardly any changes.

The darkness no longer smelled of sausages in stewed onion and tomatoes, that was certain. The redolence of the cooling walls and watered plants, the sugary smell of decomposing garbage steaming up from the courtyard bins grew stronger.

Ecstatically, intoxicated with admiration for the man, Gyöngyvér was the first to speak in this exceptional, somewhat strange summer night. Because she did not exactly know to whom she was now talking, she wound up sounding a shade too distant.

You were like, she panted, her eyes wide and round in the strange darkness and a bit out of focus because of the closeness of his face, you are like a technician.

And as she spoke she rather forcefully hooked her graceful feet into the crooks of his knees.

Her relaxed limbs seemed to be gathering some indefinable, cheerful, unbridled strength. Her strange, separate spirit was in a frenzy. She was especially glad to have finally said this. Even though it couldn’t have occurred to her earlier, because she hadn’t yet had enough experience to give the man shape with words for herself. Perhaps the word felt appropriate because she surprised herself with them. She tightened her loins, thrust her hips forward, her whole body arching upward. In her slackened vagina, she already felt him as an immovable keel.

She will sing.

With it she could sail out to the open sea. Without it she would sink. He’s yours, her soul whispered to her playfully and extravagantly. And with a single vigorous movement she flipped and turned the body so much larger and heavier than her own, and now it was under her.

The bed creaked again, but it no longer mattered; their bodies were banging and thudding on each other. The complete turnabout was almost successful.

Perhaps the man unconsciously yet firmly helped her; still, they slipped a bit off the bed. To keep from slipping out of each other, Gyöngyvér had to kneel above him, opening her lap completely. Perhaps from the sudden change of position, the general physical exhaustion, the protracted excitement, or from something entirely different, she felt nauseated. Although she managed to suppress it, the cavity of her mouth filled up with a sour taste. Her entire body convulsed with the effort, her stiffened body, especially her arms, back, and breasts broke out in goose bumps, as if she were realizing in retrospect what had happened in the previous hours. As someone whose hairs stand on end, she shuddered at what was happening.

Holding on to the bed frame with both hands, she literally sat into him.

Just as she had done earlier with words, she was now overcoming him with her body and looking down on him from somewhere very far away. As if they hadn’t reached a final destination, she did not lower her full weight, only kept sinking and rising. She also opened her mouth; let the unpleasant smell leave, even if through a loud belch; she yawned into him with her pelvis, with her expanded loins.

The entire woman was a surprising revelation.

Ágost could not avoid her and could not get enough of her, though he felt sated. He felt sick, did not really want her, wanted to urinate, was thirsty, ached all over, wanted to flee from and out of her, his mouth was dry, and it would have been good to move his limbs around a little.

Simultaneously, they broke into deep laughter. They both felt at the same time that in their common satiety they were now each other’s prisoner.

You’re completely out of your mind, said the man, recovering from the laughter, which is all right, but why say something so stupid.

Say what.

That technician thing.

What’s the matter with that.

Shallow.

I like it. On the nail, that’s all.

You wouldn’t say it if you didn’t like it, replied the man, taking on her clipped rhythm. What I want to know is how you think of such a thing in the first place.

He was thrusting more strongly; at last, again he knew what he was doing.

He saw that Gyöngyvér shrugged her shoulders slightly. And strangely, it was in this slight shrug of hers, more than in anything else, that he recognized himself.

Her hot, odorous, slushy, softened loin stubbornly stuck to its own rhythm, which did not abate. They were similar in their stubbornness too. She made a deep circular pass, and when she reached the end of the circle, the man should have thrust into her, but then she was already rising.

Did not wait for him.

It’s very simple, she said languidly. I feel I am always being serviced. Nothing more.

It was strange she did not need to decide to say it like that, to characterize the situation with such hurtfully emotionless words. And since the surprised man could not respond, though he was also always ready for dry and illusion-free responses, the woman added, after a while, well, that’s why I said it.

It’s a good thing I’m not a fitter.

What is that.

You can’t be serious. You mean you really don’t know.

How would I know.

It means a mechanic, if you really think I’m some kind of technician. And in our case, I’d have to be a pipe fitter.

They both giggled at this and attentively, almost distrustfully, a little incredulously, scrutinized each other in the darkness.

Strictly speaking, they were already past everything anyway.

It was impossible to spoil retroactively the pleasure they’d gained from each other or to take it completely away.

The way the man saw it, this strange being was unattainably far from him. As before, he still hadn’t understood how anyone, from another world so different from his, could get so close to him, and a woman to boot. She was swaying above him like a dark stain, with her tousled short-cropped hair, a wild medusa head. A moon dweller.

And in the woman’s face the sharp glitters of his similarly unattainable features; down in the hot depths the thick mouth, the cleft chin, the forehead, and the strong ridge of the nose. What could she possibly expect from someone like that. Then why is this constant desire of hers, if from women, if only for a brief moment, she would always get more.

Nothing bad, nothing hostile; they were both being very careful to say nothing excessive or final.

All right, then, make it an engineer, and I humbly beg your pardon.

You can’t make it up like that.

Chief engineer then, she shouted cheerfully, that’s my last offer.

No, don’t. Think carefully about what you’re saying.

This must mean I really hurt your feelings badly. But that’s the truth.

She let go of him with her vagina, though the man hoped she would mend things with attacks of tenderness.

But what she seemed to be saying was that if he was going to be so unreasonably touchy about the truth, he might as well leave, go wherever he wants.

His aching member slipped out. It literally jumped out into the air, shaking in its regained freedom.

He would have reached for it right away, mercifully to pull the foreskin over the head because even contact with the cool air was painful, but he couldn’t reach it. He couldn’t calculate the length of this motion, couldn’t calculate anything.

Gyöngyvér threw herself headlong on his body, their contact ending in a loud thud. She clutched his shoulders with her sharp fingernails, her fine featherweight torso and pelvis pressing down on him. The cock became stuck between their slippery bellies. He could barely retrieve his hand so it wouldn’t get stuck there too. There was a slight cool breeze. Ágost with his heels, Gyöngyvér with her toes made contact with the cool, sobering, and indifferent floor.

A breeze came off the Danube, bringing with it a smell of dampness that over Margit Island had gathered the fragrances of various plants and flowers. They listened as the number 15 streetcar started off with a clatter on the other side of the building, and its bell rang twice at Sziget Street.

Of course, in this building too the tenants neglected to close the main entrance gate behind them, and the glass-covered tubular shape of the stairwell amplified the street sounds.

Mrs. Szemz
ő
stepped through the gate just as the lit-up empty streetcar moved on between the trees of Pozsonyi Road, mottled in the spotty light from the streetlamps.

Don’t be angry, but this way it hurts a bit, said the man a little more loudly, but he did nothing to free himself of the weight.

Oh, it hurts me too, the woman whimpered. I think you’re too big for me. Which sounded like fawning that concealed a strong rebuke. She knew what men liked to hear about themselves.

What is that supposed to mean, asked the man, irritated and cool.

It means you’ve rubbed me completely raw. It hurts. One day, I’ll tell you a story. I’ll tell you my most interesting memory. And, after a breath, she asked if he’d like to hear it.

As if, in the meantime, the man had somehow been told by some secret source what she meant to tell him.

No, I don’t want hear it now. Let’s be quiet for a while. I don’t want anything.

Which means that in spite of everything I’ve seriously offended you again.

No you haven’t, replied the man. Only most of your statements make no sense. For example, the color of my eyes is not blue. What can one say to that. And if you really want to know, you are the demanding, impulsive one. I think that’s the cause of your problem.

Moreover, you don’t give anything enough time.

Gyöngyvér froze for a second in surprise. She did not understand the unexpected iciness in his voice. That she wasn’t willing to give time to things. She, whose voice teacher never stopped praising her for her sense of timing. She felt she had tried her best but could not understand what the man was saying, so she shouldn’t bother with him.

Listen, she continued heatedly, once—this is what I want to tell you—once I was left all alone in the empty boarding school.