Parallel Stories: A Novel (43 page)

For him, denial is the summit. To which no road leads. Which means there is no road to him either.

But what attracted her to this man was precisely that he too was so alone and so untouchable. Yet their inner rhythms were different, incompatible. She finally understood this, though she did not formulate it for herself because she understood it with her hearing, she comprehended his syncopated rhythm with her sense of rhythm.

She gave no thought to the possibility of stroking her own body either. To do to herself clumsily what the man was doing to himself. Her uncertain, nervous, and quick fingers glided over the silver-gray silk clinging to her body. Which, in fact, felt good. Not so much because of the contact, but because it revived their dormant relationship, alluded to a time when, sometime, in the past, their inner rhythms had conformed to each other.

It conjured up the intoxicating days and hesitant nights of their first weeks. By duplicating the man’s movements on herself, she filled in the lack of their mutual physical contact.

She did it by feeling herself, which strengthened her observation and returned some of her consciousness. She could at least shed the superfluous feeling of shame. That she was watching, yes, watching that cock. Of which she had seen enough, though she had never allowed herself to look at it, observe it so unashamedly, how it worked, how it reached the center of her awareness. Ultimately, everybody is raised with the warning that one should not touch oneself in front of others, and spying on others is forbidden. In her confusion, a fingernail caught in the lace of her nightshirt. Which barely covered her pudendum. Finally, she could look at the cock, and now she was seeing something that was very different from what she was thinking about. And it did not have much importance, because she could not use it to get in better touch with her own thinking, but she saw things at the center of the world that she did not and could not understand.

At that moment Ágost roughly and unexpectedly yanked and then let go of the foreskin’s beak, and his other hand released his tormented testicles. It was impossible to guess what he would do next. The erect cock was trembling in the air. It would have reared farther, higher, but since it did not curve upward, it barely reached a horizontal position. Gyöngyvér seemed to sense, indeed identified with and lived the tension of the frenum hiding under the bulb as it held back the penis, not letting it rise further. She kept the memory of the frenum’s tension at the tip of her tongue and felt it in the arched muscles of her vagina. The impression was as if in preattack fury the cock were thrusting forward its lowered, large, dark head; done quite amusingly. She could identify with the stubborn fury, because the desire to rage made her tense too. In this fury she saw the physiology of her own bodily rapture. But she could not tell herself about this either, because her raving would not subside. She could see and feel how the down-curving head of this cock, as she continues to rave, reaches her swollen clitoris and how, when her labia finally roll back the foreskin, the folded-up collar of the bulb, now thrusting into her vagina, pushes the foreskin onto and then pull it back from the protruding head of her clitoris. She could see all the correlations. And although this had put an end to some of her unconsciousness, she did not know what to do with this new awareness.

Along with the cool stale air, a different kind of unconsciousness was streaming toward her from behind the opening doors.

When the shutters were closed in the rooms facing the courtyard and there was no draft at all, a mysterious heavy smell of old age seemed to pervade the air.

The current of this different kind of consciousness was hardly familiar, but it carried her along. The only time she’d ever felt anything like this was when, while singing, she could convince herself with her own voice. When she was not rummaging about for the right method or technique of singing, but rather when the written-out notes sang with her and she with them, producing a real character in whom she was surprised to recognize herself, and while with her thinking she still, stubbornly, violated herself. The singer does not hear her own singing but can feel exactly what others hear as her voice. She would obstruct her breathing, hold it back, would not let go of it—and then she was anxious about it. As if there were a commandment according to which her breath was allowed to mix only with the other person’s breath. Carnal pleasure and joy cannot remain within her; that way they are not permitted. She stopped at the commandment regarding her breathing, insisted on it, but she could no longer stop what she saw, what she was looking at, and what she was doing. She could not be stopped because, for the simultaneous occurrences to reflect one another, it was not enough for her two spread-out fingers to glide across her pubic hair and then open the gates of her mons veneris and slip inside. With her new awareness, she realized this was merely technique, and what her movement lacked was exactly what was so moving and convincing in the other person: selfishness, the refinement and unconscious elegance of selfishness.

She’d like to be like the other person, and here she is, failing at her very first, clumsy attempt. Perhaps she should be headed not toward but away from him. She couldn’t find the wetness, either, which she had felt so abundantly in herself only a moment ago.

I’m dry, completely dry.

Gyöngyvér did not have particularly nice hands, which made her attracted to and envious of women who did. Her fingers were quite long, and to increase their effect, she let her fingernails grow perhaps too long. She could do this because they were not brittle but strong, healthily and nicely arched, manicurists loved to work on them. But when an inspector visited the kindergarten and noticed those nails, Gyöngyvér did not get away without loud altercations and vengeful written reports.

She had them filed, polished, and treated carefully so they would not be dangerous weapons. The children liked them a lot, especially the little girls. And not only in the kindergarten did she have to mind her every move, which made her gestures seem slightly affected. With men it was enough for her fingers to slide unguardedly between their thighs and reach under their testicles, or to touch the sphincter muscles of the anus between the spread cheeks in the heat of vehement thrusts, or with the blades of her nails to plow across the blood-filled bulb’s rolled-up collar, to unerringly produce surprised moans, painful shouts, and a spontaneous ejaculation erupting in successive tectonic waves.

But she was as unable to surprise her own body as she failed to surprise Ágost’s. With the tip of two fingernails she reached the anteroom of her clitoris, the first fold of the skin. She was not careless, yet the sensation was more unpleasant than pleasant, even though the sensations penetrated each other.

The Quiet Reasons of the Mind

No, they didn’t just push me, he continued a little more loudly, it was something much rougher, or cruder. They dumped me into a ditch. The way they throw out dead animals.

What the hell are you talking about. Did you ever see a dry well full of carcasses.

I didn’t understand why they were doing it, how could I. Or they would put me in a cloakroom, I don’t know, like checking an umbrella or a coat. I’ll put it that way if you like.

Why would they do anything deliberately against you. She was whispering, with tiny breaths of words, into the man’s speaking lips while watching, cross-eyed, those lips—fleshy, with very taut skin. Why are you talking about them like this, not nice of you, I don’t understand. I don’t believe they wanted to do anything bad to you.

She wanted the man’s lips, she wanted to lap up his words from them; that’s why she was squabbling, acting contrary.

Why do you say they humiliated you. How could they have humiliated you anyway.

She didn’t kiss him, to see more of how the lips spoke.

I didn’t say they humiliated me.

You did.

Why would I have said that, in connection to what. It’s not a word I like to use.

But why do you say you didn’t say it when I heard you say it, with my own ears. Their lips touched, just barely.

She could not resist the touch.

You did say it.

All right, you’re officially protecting the terrible parents, he laughed,
les parents terribles.
He enjoyed seeing the uneducated woman’s recurring embarrassment. I know what you’re thinking. But I’m talking just about myself. If you’re interested. Not about them. And I’m not going to go into their moral qualifications.

She hasn’t the foggiest idea what I’m talking about, he thought.

He had managed to revive his hatred and contempt for his parents, but this robbed him of strength, since it divided his attention, yet it made him more attentive and his moves more cautious.

They wanted to give you a good education, whispered the woman, making a final effort to think this through. A good one, she said more loudly, a very, very good one, she said against her will, her voice gibbering, the foolish sounds knocking apart what had been a sensible dialogue. If I had such a sweet little child like you, oh, your mouth, please, please give me your mouth, she said, breathing hard, and had lots of money too, she tried to continue more sensibly, I’d throw my child in an institution too. She was kissing him. And whispering the words: you’re unjust to them, very unfair, believe me. I’m sure they love you more than anything in the world.

The man’s body fell silent again.

Come on, you’re talking nonsense. Something else entirely was going on. Bringing us up well isn’t even close.

He barely returned the kisses, but endured hers.

They wanted to be free of us for a while—it’s as simple as that. Not only because something terrible had happened between them but because something had really ended. Maybe they didn’t believe it themselves, but we felt it. My older sister kept whispering to me that they wanted to get divorced and that I should believe her. She wanted to torture me because she was suffering too. We eavesdropped on them. They were looking for a perfect reason to send us away, and they found the perfect place. Actually I was lucky, because if I hadn’t gone away they would have destroyed me as they destroyed my sister.

That’s not true either. They weren’t the ones who destroyed her, that’s another gross exaggeration. They loved you. They did what they did because they loved you more than anything.

My sister understood a lot of things then, but how could I, a ten-year-old boy, protest. She didn’t want to leave either. Much later, I understood that the poor thing was in love for the first time in her life—how could she leave that boy. And they seemed to guess—no, not guess, they knew what was coming. One day at the table, my father said, well, you bore two Jewish kids for me and now I have to suffer the consequences. Our mother put down her fork and knife and said, what, you can imagine. We just sat there. She got up, smiled as if she had just heard the best joke ever, kicked the chair out from under herself, and before she turned to leave threw a glass of water in our father’s face.

Sober up.

I think they should have gone through with the divorce. My sister idolized our father. Even though she had to accept that he had more than one woman on the side, and that our hapless mother caught him with her own seamstress and had a nervous breakdown. They couldn’t hide this from us. But don’t misunderstand me, I’m not blaming anyone.

But I feel you do, I can feel it in your voice.

Because I’m telling it to you the way I lived through it. This is a wound, a trauma, no doubt about it, a big psychological trauma. My father doesn’t want me. They outlaw something that originated in my mother, which she’d passed on to me and which made Father’s life miserable. This was terrible because it was my fault. Even though he paid no attention to me, did not even notice me, was busy with incomprehensible things. In which I disturbed him. And our mother could not give up this monster. Two days later, they were lovey-dovey again. If you want to know, that’s what you feel in my voice. Every word of theirs made me blush for them. That’s what you’re feeling. And my sister wouldn’t come with me. She stubbornly resisted, fought me as hard as she could. For the first time in my life I was left all alone, and you can probably feel that too. Although I knew French a little bit better than she did, I didn’t get very far with it. It was like being in a strange house. There you are, alone, in the middle of the night, and you don’t know where the light switches are. These are ridiculously small trifles but enormously large at the same time, and you can feel that too.

He stopped, because next he should tell her how they recorded all his mistakes, how they beat him every night.

The trauma remained; it was stronger than anything else.

As he turned away so he would not have to see the face of this strange woman, he saw Jean-Marie de Lecluse’s blindingly white neck through the steam. Standing there with his lackeys under the noisy showers, looking at him provokingly. He knew he was going to be beaten.

For a mistake in pronunciation, he received one slap in the face, for grammatical errors, three slaps. His hand, with the soap in it, slowly stopped moving. He could redeem ten mistakes with some service. He sewed buttons, shined shoes, and scrubbed their backs. Erasing was the most humiliating task. They would whistle for him and he would have to bring his own well-cleaned eraser to erase other boys’ mistakes in their drawing and geometry papers. During the lessons, when they were free to move about in the huge hall on the first floor. Lecluse lent him to others, but erasing required Lecluse’s special permission, and he would watch from a distance. If Ágost smudged a drawing because his eraser wasn’t clean enough or if, in a hurry, he wrinkled the drawing paper or made a hole in it, the punishment was nail pecking: holding their fingertips close together, the boys would batter the top of his head as if they meant to break through his skull with their sharp nails. Or they would decide that the erasing mistake deserved punishment with another kind of erasing. They would drag his own eraser across his bare neck, pulling at the stubbles of hair. Lecluse most enjoyed the game when Ágost winced with pain or begged them to stop. That is when excitement made rosy blotches spread across Lecluse’s milk-white skin. Ágost couldn’t understand why he thought about the rosy blotches, the excitement, and the pain when he didn’t want to think about them, and why now.