Parallel Stories: A Novel (80 page)

I should dribble for him; I should continue.

There’d be plenty of happiness left when I finished; he’d give me more even then.

From that moment, I couldn’t follow the course of events, probably because the sight of inexhaustible plenty completely overwhelmed me with its promise. Most likely my entire body must have relaxed and my consciousness grown dim because the moment he put his open palm into the urine’s strong jet, to my great surprise, I let out a short, loud fart.

No doubt about it, it happened.

Everything happened at once, all sorts of things happened, and they happened everywhere.

In the silence filled with tiny rustlings, several men broke into brief crackling and popping laughs, and then there was silence again. Undisturbed, the hand went on playing with the stream of my urine; the two men standing closest to me with bated breath were not laughing.

It was probably thanks to the promise of approaching happiness that anxiety left my body. These two did that to me, that’s why they had no reason to laugh. Then, from the depth of the silence full of scraping noises, somebody else responded with another fart. It was not as restrained and inhibited as mine; the sender played it with obvious pleasure, in long staccato sequences, as boys and young men do in boarding-school and barracks dormitories, where, for lack of other means, they entertain one another with sounds produced by the lower regions of the body.

There was general laughter, many echoing explosions of the original guffaws.

They did not even wait for me to shake the last drops of urine off my penis.

My penis had grown so stiff I could hardly shake it anyway.

The mustached one, now behind me, drew me to him with his strong bare arms, embracing my shoulders and back as if wanting to crush me. The giant bent over me, covered me, and grabbed it with his hand still wet with my urine.

They laughed loudly into my neck.

Their panting, their voices, their lips, all in one fell swoop. So much strength and novelty made me very weak, and I was surprised at the unfamiliar hardness of the male body. I laughed along with them. If the mustached one hadn’t supported me with his chest, I’d have fallen backward like a swooning lady in a nineteenth-century romantic novel. Not only was I no longer interested in the appearance of my own manliness, but I was positively amused by giving it up and surrendering myself. It seemed as if he wanted to twist my free hand behind my back; I did not understand why he wanted to do that. He planted a kiss on my eyes with his full mouth and then tenderly, very sensuously, he buried his face in my neck. I was left alone with him, for the giant quickly disappeared.

His lips were glued to me, he was childlike, as sweet as the past, and he swarmed over me with the strong multilayered smell of his hair, mustache, and mouth.

The pleasure coursing through my spine put an end to the laughter.

And then I felt what the giant was doing too. Thrusting his knees against mine, he found a different grip on my prick, let it go for a second, and then clung to it with the heat of his open loins, tapping and rubbing against it, gathering it together with his own, and this was painful. On my prick, I felt the well-proportioned, moist surface of his, the slippery rim of his bulb on my tautening frenum. Which, I believe, made me faint a little, or maybe I strayed over to an unknown otherworld. But he continued calmly to unbutton my fly to free me.

I thought they knew what they were doing and I could entrust myself to their common sense.

He wanted to get to it from a better position, uncover my loins, make me more like him, give me everything one gets when unclothed. While the mustached one placed his in my hand that was twisted behind my back. He was the only man I saw whose cock was of the same substance as his body. That must have been the reason the giant had accepted him as his assistant. In this one thing, he surpassed the giant’s perfection. But I scarcely had a chance to feel its strength and heat with my fingers, having barely closed it in my palm, when his mouth landed on mine. I leaned with him, with my head and entire back I gave myself to him. He absorbed the weight of both of us because the giant was leaning along with us. With his mustache he seemed to arrest and embrace my face.

He enveloped me.

I would have kissed him back, but with my cock freed from the pressure of my pants the giant was kissing it, and I felt the shock of this in my brain. He lightly pressed his tongue into my testicles, gently rooting in them. He roughly sucked one in, licked it all around while it was in his mouth, and then with his tongue quickly and mercilessly plowed the spine of my cock. With his teeth he pulled back the foreskin caught on my bulb. He pulled it down, nibbled it, and then in a single devouring suck made it disappear in the hot hollow between his lips and throat.

He deceived me a little.

Until then I hadn’t been thinking there were women in the world.

The way a man’s lips took possession of me suggested that I should possess myself, yet it felt as if I had wound up in the vagina of a woman.

This worried me; I could not allow the female and male principles to get mixed up, and fear of that happening led me back to this world.

But then, in the fluttering of his tongue I felt that no, no, we are in an entirely different place, and women have nothing to do with this.

From the sensations converging under the influence of abstract thoughts, my mouth would have been ready for a rasping shout, but the mustached assistant not only absorbed my physical exposure with his fleshy lips but also stabbed me with his stiff, hard tongue. In the taste of his saliva I could tell he smoked Munkás cigarettes, that the spritzers he drank were made of tart wine grown on sandy soil, that he had had someone else’s cock in his mouth before me, and before that had eaten something made with onion, maybe meat stew.

I hadn’t been at home for supper the previous evening, but now I remembered that the remains of Ilona’s rice chicken at the bottom of the pot were still waiting for me on the stove.

Unless Ágost had come home and gobbled it up.

I was tossing between their hands.

Nobody made better rice chicken than Ilona. She made it with chicken necks, livers, and wings, with tomatoes, and she always made a point of telling me, Kristófka, don’t forget, we’ll have rice chicken today.

I had never before had a stranger’s cock in my hand like this, nor my own in another man’s mouth.

Sometimes, without hesitation, Ágost would eat what was supposed to be my portion.

They had been looking for him in vain for three days; he disappeared with his great big cock, for which I’ve always envied him no end. He was just as voracious as his mother was.

They couldn’t find him anywhere.

It would have helped to know what to do with it, now that they bothered to put it in my hand.

I also thought of Pisti, of what would happen if he walked in and saw what I was doing.

I was grasping it, squeezing it as a baby would its rattle, though I thought that might not feel good for him.

I don’t know when, but they unbuttoned my shirt, along with my underpants they yanked my drainpipe trousers down below my knees and, grasping me by my ass, the giant lifted me into his mouth. They grabbed my nipples between their nails, twisted them until they hurt. I don’t know which one of them did what. I lost my interest in particular persons; to be more precise, other persons must have appeared, because my entire body had already accepted the giant and his assistant.

They knew everything about me; they could do with me anything they wanted; I no longer had to be busy with them.

I kept squeezing what was in my hand, because I did remember whose it was and would have liked to reciprocate. With rapid little grasps and squeezes the giant felt the tense muscles of my thighs and calves. At least I hoped it wasn’t somebody else doing that. I felt as if I were hovering in the air among their four hands. Occasionally, I felt his entire hot loin, his cool stomach, and his cock tightly held with mine, somewhere between heaven and earth.

Which would have made me scream, this whole thing they were doing to me; it spread me and stretched me out like a bow. I threw myself down from somewhere high into the depths, saw my own fall, but never reached bottom. There was no ground to absorb my weight. In my dread I must have opened my tightly clenched eyes, because I saw from very close up how he was leaning over me. I must have opened my eyes to be sure. I saw his crazy smile with his teeth and that told me it was he, after all, who was doing this to me, he was the one playing on my helpless body as on a musical instrument, and I also saw that this man was a lunatic. As if he had not only induced but with his entire being also followed every convoluted branch of my pleasure and thus increased his own joy.

And mine, mine.

I’d have screamed with this brute joy if the mustached one hadn’t thrust into my mouth—instead of his tongue, which was quick, slippery, strong, sharp, and pierced me like a spike—two of his long fingers. This hurt me, his nails bruised my tongue, I was choking. I had to bite him; I’d say that I didn’t do it consciously yet it was intentional. He wasn’t the only one who screamed; it hurt him and he enjoyed it, in my mouth his blood mixed with mine, but by then the darkness was full of these repressed moans, whimpers, wailings, and barely repressed shouts.

There were no intelligible words among them.

In the depth of the darkness, two intertwined bodies were shining, and it seemed to me that except for their pants down to their ankles they had nothing on. They were immersed in each other’s mouth and the heads of their cocks were peeking out from between their bodies pressed against each other.

But now the giant raised my ass even higher and with one of his fingers tried to enter my anus.

That scared me a lot.

Luckily, my sphincters would not let him.

Yet even the fear felt good because it made me feel as if I were looking back from the time when I was an infant.

And this strange countenance also saw something of what others were doing around it.

However, he could not tell when he wound up on the flagstones.

He could feel with his naked buttocks that he was lying in cool wetness and he could feel, through his wet shirt, that his back was in contact with the floor. Who did this. Maybe he was lying not in water from the faucet, which was still dripping behind the open door, but in piss, other people’s piss. This must have been his first thought when he regained something of his consciousness. Then he saw enormous shadows towering above him. He couldn’t have counted how many men were there, all of them making strange little sounds, as they went on slinging sperm onto his stripped body now lying on the stone floor.

The sperm landed on his belly and chest with soft splashes, warmly.

From this he finally understood that although he was neither aware of nor feeling anything, and although his perception was considerably delayed, he too must have reached his satisfaction earlier and the two men he loved so much, and who within a few short seconds had induced in him this now-dissipating pleasure, had already left him.

Had thrown him to the floor.

Had vanished in the night in search of other gratifications.

These two were really vampires, in which case he no longer had any blood, and they had also sucked the marrow from his spine and now death was happening.

Their black dog had been death’s harbinger.

The giant from the twenty-forint bill, with whom he wanted to share his entire life, had vanished.

Without an embrace, without a kiss, without either of them saying a single word to each other. He had no word for me, not a solitary word.

From now on an entire long life will have to be spent in death.

A Brand-New Civilization

When Ágost opened his eyes again—he could not tell when he had closed them, if he had closed them at all—what he saw was an opalescent surface on which he did not immediately find his bearings.

He was lying on his back on a drenched bedcover, above him the wide-open window of the maid’s room and beyond the window the empty nocturnal sky.

He was staring into this emptiness.

The sky of diffused yellowish red reflected the city lights. As if he were looking into a geometrically designed space whose dimensions he was unable to conceive, unable to conceive his own life. In the depth of the motionless summer stillness the distant Váci Road was knocking, hammering, clattering, booming, and whistling with all its factories working through the night, and nearby something clicked.

He concluded that the lights were carried on an invisible mass of air.

Gyöngyvér had just come back from somewhere.

This told him he was involved with a woman again or at least had come up to her uncomfortable rented room.

A few years earlier, when they had unexpectedly recalled him from his post abroad, he had found the city’s cramped interior spaces especially exciting.

Forced into such congested conditions, people here live in intimate proximity.

They must move more carefully, maintain the goodwill of others. They cannot be cold and distant with one another, since they see into one another’s lives and with their every movement interfere with them. But for quite a while now he has found this behavior compulsive, unfolding like a pointless irritation from which they should free themselves. But this narrow space had no exit.

Where did you go, he asked lazily and sleepily.

Meanwhile he was glad he’d finally found the correct spatial perspective.

Even though every wall was depressingly close. And it quickly occurred to him that the strange feeling matched perfectly his own fate.

If matter has no mass, it cannot appear in the physical space and its perspective cannot be experienced.

I took a shower, but there’s lots of hot water. I left plenty for you.

I got lost, he thought, I got lost in this woman, I must admit.

I should scrape myself out of her.

I could have one more day, though; all right then, I’ll give myself another day.