Parallel Stories: A Novel (47 page)

Yes, came the response from the agitated face, from the depths, from gaping, parched lips, hoarsely, perturbed, yes, what could be better.

But she could not laugh at herself or at the man.

Like a seriously ill person, she signaled—but only with her mouth, her strong eyebrows, the deepening, vertical little furrows of her smooth and domed little-girlish forehead—that she preferred to laugh at such silliness. But Ágost’s declaration troubled her, profoundly shocked her. It opened up an unknown perspective. For the first time in her life, she had to take a deep, hard look at her own bodily phenomena. Not before or after, but right now in the middle of it. No man had ever done this to her.

Maybe with Irénke, when they made their nipples touch and could see what they were feeling; they talked about it, how their nipples grew hard at the same time, look, yours too.

Her breathing became so strong because of this uncalled-for thought, the smell of her breath so pervasive, not unpleasant but hinting of skin, saliva, teeth, and stomach, that for a second the man was shaken by a cold nausea of revulsion and disgust.

I could even make a child for you now.

Indeed, her vagina was ringed around his cock, which, with its swollen head, filled her beyond the brim.

Her hips rose and sank, her vagina convulsed in contrary directions, she wanted to give some rhythm to the spasms but the man kept her down with his arms and elbows, pressing her with his hips, not letting her move, wrestling her down to where he wanted her; she could only thrash about with her head, tossing it from left to right. On her neck a vein bulged and twitched, the
vena jugularis externa
, running in the muscles under the skin. As though her fears gripped her again precisely when she had managed to get close to the other person. That’s why she was doing it. She wanted to show the man what indignities she had been subjected to, how they had crippled her pleasure, and how unjust it was, as was her entire miserable life.

Which, no matter how hypocritical or self-disciplined she was, she could not endure.

I can’t bear it, I can’t bear this either.

Because she couldn’t tell whether this was happiness or pain.

Can’t get any closer, the man heard too, inside him, in his own voice. It sounded like an interdiction. Don’t try, you’re not supposed to. As if forbidding himself something, and the cosmos would crumble if he did not obey. He eased his hold on her a little so he could withdraw himself a bit, his cock. He felt as if he had fatally miscalculated something at that moment and could not see the situation clearly. Gone was the cool self-assurance, because not only did he not withdraw, but for a withdrawal he’d have to penetrate her even further, and he felt the length of the way he was to make inside the woman’s vagina.

Which his mind conjured up as a cave the color of congealed blood, where he had once before found refuge.

He could not resist forcing his way back to a place from which he should have been withdrawing. He reached a space that was in the time neither of memory nor of imagination. The light summer blanket must have slipped off some time ago.

If that’s the case, then everything happens uncontrollably, unguardedly.

Finally he found it.

Finally he left something in himself uncontrolled.

He saw an unguarded gate in the night.

It could be fatal. I am complaining like a child. Certain segments of time are falling away.

Though the possibility of something fatal made him happy. He had found it, at last.

You might even be able to make a child, yes, now, that’s right, whispered the woman; she seemed to be trembling and struggling for air.

Please, I beg you, she would have wanted to say this clearly.

Finally found it.

He should have taken her whispering, full, flesh-smelling lips into his lips to suppress in himself his idiotic exultation, the uncontrolled times, the open gate, his aversion and his nausea. Moreover, why shouldn’t he be able to complain; after all, he was complaining to a kindergarten teacher. He was ashamed of himself for thinking of such an idiotic thing. And carefully he took into his mouth the woman’s lips, which were still slightly blue, and began cautiously and slowly to withdraw himself. He was still trying to protect, still feared for, his independence. He could not adopt, could not conform to her rhythm, though for a long time he could not avoid it either. He wanted to keep a little reminder of his own.

At least not to let his own pulse dissolve in her throbbing.

But Gyöngyvér denied entry to the fleeing man’s tongue; with her strong tongue, trained in her voice lessons, she shoved it away.

She wanted to talk.

The man tried again. He sank his teeth into her lips, bit her, but the woman shoved out his tongue and pushed him off her so she could talk at last.

The taste of the strong tongue was salty, very salty.

Driven by anger at being rejected, he arched his torso upward, the woman’s arms willingly let him, so with his lips he could leisurely inch across her neck and take a bite of the rearing tip of her breast; he barely reached it and was ready to suck it into himself—softly, not rudely. But the woman hardly felt his thick, parched lips and sharp teeth, she gave her body a yank.

Yanked it out.

Didn’t want to.

Didn’t want anything.

Vainly the man’s tongue snapped after her.

But now it was as if she had to puke out her every stifled word.

I’m flowing away, flowing in every direction. I feel it. For sure, now. Help me, I can’t hold on, I can’t.

Ágost caught sight of the precipice’s edge where the woman could not hold on.

She was wailing.

But he saw it clearly, this was his own precipice, he watched the waves of falling rocks, and somehow he had to back out of this whole thing without letting the enormous weight of the crumbling ground hurl him along with it. This was the sound of cracking bone heard during a tooth extraction. The depth of the precipice rumbled up, the water churned, the hurtling rocks boomed and rattled against the sides of the precipice. And then, slowly, he returned after all. He stopped for a moment. He knew he would be unable to return. Because of the resistance of the vagina’s muscles shuddering, no matter how slippery the vagina was he needed more force.

This was not without danger.

Before he reached the deepest reachable point, he stopped again, couldn’t tell where he was, grew rigid, immobile, and several times against his will lowered himself into her; and to put an end to the struggle and not to ejaculate into the woman’s open womb, he squeezed the cheeks of his buttocks together with a single powerful jerk. The move threw his rectum into a spasm, the spasm applied pressure on his prostate, and with the stimulus of this pressure he disrupted the arc of his pleasure. For this to happen, it’s enough briefly to shut off the sperm duct,
ductus ejaculatorius
, located just above the prostate gland. The upward arc of pleasure plunges drastically, but the stimulus remains, and everything can start all over again. He broke the rhythms for both of them, which were becoming united in an even acceleration.

Gyöngyvér, however, experienced this as mounting tension while feeling there was no room to increase it further. As if she had been jolted to a higher region from which she saw a landscape she had never seen before. Luckily for her, she had not said what she wanted. And she realized she shouldn’t dare say she’d like to have a child. That would mean she loves him. And she cannot reveal that. She has come to love him. Simply because this is a handsome man. Such a handsome man is not right for her. I shall fall in love with you. But not yet, no. Were she to say this aloud, she’d reach her climax, not because of him but because of herself. Because of that image of desire for a man she always carried with her, but then she would have to say good-bye to this man, to his handsomeness. Like a superstitious person who knows what to avoid, she said nothing, remained cautious. Just this once, not to ruin everything.

She appeared to be protesting vehemently, hysterically, which Ágost immediately misunderstood.

You don’t have to be afraid of me, he whispered not without a hint of pride, I’m telling you I can be careful.

But the woman wanted to feel impersonality in his words, wanted to hear words from someone who wasn’t careful.

His voice reached her from afar.

She grasped the words but not their meaning.

Still, doubt seeped into her regarding the man’s sanity. As though everything was taking place on different levels and it was impossible to reach the summit of pleasure. But amid her moaning and wailing, for four days she had been waiting for the end of the man’s death rattle, wishing for her own death, and for his. She could not understand how one could make sane sounds. Even though she herself was making them.

To convince the woman physically too, of what perhaps she could no longer comprehend or could not hear because of the whistling of their ever-faster, crisscrossing breaths, he returned from the rough bumpy road, faster and forcefully, all the way to the exit, as if to signal his intention to break away, as if flooding his path with spotlights.

And as if seeing something he had never seen before, though the image had always accompanied him, stayed close to him, familiar. He did not feel his cock anymore, or what he might have felt with his cock. Self-sensation and indirect sensation had become a single image, which held his attention and kept him occupied at least as much as his cock had before. He knew from experience that he had to be very reserved about images. It would be hard to acknowledge that the fantasized images caused greater pleasure than live people did.

But this was not the work of imagination, which was stronger and could have extinguished the sensation.

To observe everything, to touch nothing. His caution was at work. Not to get into her. Only from a distance, more on the outside.

Which that instant the woman felt as if it were keeping her from approaching her own imminent death.

For some reason the man is asking for some kind of delay, which she cannot possibly grant him.

And the man, who thought he still had some self-control and saw the situation clearly, kept reassuring himself in his great excitement that after all he didn’t want to leave her, no, not at all, he was coming right back. But on this uneven terrain he already saw the floodlit pulsating wall of the abandoned cave, and he must not take a single false step. By then he had no idea just how long his eyes had been closed, but it had been quite a while. But because he was still keeping his distance, still reserving for himself the need to keep his distance, which others deliberately and much sooner long to lose, the obstinate pain of physical exertion did not contort his face.

Other people always hasten toward some destination.

He saw a fence, again the open gate, and strong headlights of a car speeding into the night. He was seeing the headlights of his own car.

And it flashed through his mind that in live deployments, when suddenly everything turns very risky, he followed the same pattern of behavior he did in lovemaking. Before his death, he’d like to gain one more moment for his consciousness. Maybe two, some amount of time, a whole day, because he hadn’t put things in order.

The little room was now wrapped in dimness, though the ceiling retained some of the waning twilight; their bodies kept their darkness enclosed and at the same time they were illuminated, now faintly, now more strongly but continuously, by their inner vision.

In the dazzling summer light, the river’s waves, murky with mud and sand, were crashing over Gyöngyvér’s head.

She was being dragged into the depths as if by her feet and ankles, and could not resist. Whirlpool. She would have shouted with her last breath, as if finally realizing what had happened to her in the past, but she could not shout because her mouth was stopped up with water, heavy water that smelled of mud, fish, and shells. So that’s why I have to take him to the Tisza, she thought suddenly, to kill him.

Then I shall die, she said to herself contentedly and a bit surprised.

Long pieces of silk caressed her body. But she did not die.

At the bottom of the sandy, silkily ruffled riverbed, another, more slippery, cooler dry land awaited her. She was free to set her feet firmly on it or to drift away, as she liked. The depths glittered as though the sun breaking through the water were afloat and aflame. And as dazzling as the world she had left behind for the sake of being mute. When in the dead center of the dazzle they put her down in the middle of the courtyard covered with chicken shit. The chicken stretches its tail feathers and the hole can be seen only in the instant when the chicken squirts its load. They were pecking all around her and she stopped crying. They did not come close.

Crying didn’t get her anywhere, anyway.

Instead she began cautiously to crawl away; no matter how many times they put her back, she would start again, to reach the brimming trough in which the water sparkled enchantingly.

Before she had a chance to grab the old cracked wood of the trough warmed by the sun, to pull herself up and to hide her face in the sparkling water—she didn’t know it was not for drinking and she wanted to make her face disappear in the water—two hands dripping with soft soap and water picked her up. All she could do was kick and bite.

Don’t be scared, yuh ugly worm, I said don’t be flustered, she hissed, beside herself, swearing in foul language, cursing mother and god, as she hauled her back to the middle of the courtyard, where under the merciless sun both soap and sand burned on her face.

Plague eat yer guts, yuh worm.

She protested, kicked.

Y’think, yuh little worm, y’really think what yuh want is what’s gonna happen.

And again she was carried in the air and slammed into the dust, the air knocked out of her; not only could she not speak for long seconds but she could not even breathe; she lost the guiding rhythm of life.

Yuh’ll drop dead right here unless yuh open yer trap. Hey, y’hear me, I’ll lock yuh up again with the chickens, or where in holy hell should I lock yuh in, yuh stubborn mule, yuh. Yuh’ll choke to death when I stuff soap in yuh.