Parallel Stories: A Novel (66 page)

Once a week she would wait for Médi in front of the Conservatoire, or the two of them together waited on the quai Malaquais for Médi’s love, another destitute young man, ramrod-straight, with a bad stutter, who was also Hungarian and studied painting in a studio at the École des Beaux Arts or was a model at other ones. Frankly, she didn’t want to see even these people, especially not Médi and her boyfriend, because their presence drew her attention to her lack of romantic feelings for anyone. Not even the man with whom she reached her gratification.

She was aware that her behavior was unusual or downright scandalous.

She had to be careful not to be conspicuous about it with her colleagues. Any reasonable girl would rather seek than avoid company; after all, she’d want to get married and would obviously adjust her conduct to her plans and intentions. But no, not she, not in the least. To some extent she had to keep her intentions a secret even from herself.

But this Korsakas managed to meet her most secret requirements. He satisfied her, nourished the suppleness and stylistic polish that otherwise loneliness would have consumed; and this was the most important thing for her career.

She practically begged his pardon when she too reached her climax.

And he did not want to rob Bella of all her time, because he worried about losing her. He did not demand her attention and did not even insist on penetrating her. Actually, there was something rather neutral in his behavior. And when he did penetrate her a bit, he did it carefully and with consideration, didn’t go too deeply, only filled the bays of the labia with his amazingly round bulb, which turned almost completely black with excitement. A powerful odor rose from down there, that’s where he stroked it and kept pulling it between the smells of the two of them, though in a way that let him yank it out anytime he wanted to.

With considerable effort she might have been able to deny herself the man’s body, but she always felt a renewed desire for his smell in hers.

Which was such a strange thought; as if she had said, yes, I caught a scent, and therefore I am a wild beast.

To suit their interests and needs, they developed a particular technique of communication, the sort of relationship that was not unusual in such a merciless big city. Bella did not ask herself about the source of the man’s polite neutrality. She had a cool calculation in her mind: this is what I give, this is what I get, neither more nor less.

I’m calculating and selfish, she told herself reproachfully, an egoistic beast, that’s what I am, she said to herself, as if waiting for someone to contradict her, but this was the truth.

Yet she felt that if things went on this way, if she failed to tame her egoism or relinquish her slyly extracted, selfish little gratifications, which differed from those produced in her own solitary smell and by her own hands, she’d become more and more like her father and mother, and her rebellion against them would be rendered meaningless.

She thought that she was deceiving the other person and that that was why her behavior was morally unacceptable, but she was only fooling herself, which made her very anxious, and she suffered greatly. Perhaps the man had more experience in making order of such calculations; he was ten years older than she.

Bella told herself that the business relationship would last as long as its benefit to her body remained greater than the loss or harm she might create with her infection phobias. She feared that frequent autoeroticism would leave some trace on her gestures and become obvious on the stage. She did not notice that the more efficient their calculations became, their techniques of gratification more studied and deliberate, the deeper they went into the areas where they became acquainted, in which case why would she belittle or disdain him.

She could not take seriously a body so poorly built as his, so crude and ill proportioned, and not in terms of professional considerations either. She would involuntarily close her eyes because she did not like to look at him naked. Perhaps that is why the image of what she did see remained so sharp in her memory. It was no use saying that the sight of a perfect body was boring and she’d had enough of it; for her it was as hard to accept this explanation as to accept its opposite. She would have withdrawn from the embrace of thin, long, weak arms, but the sharp sensation produced by sensitive fingers became more profound and more important than what she saw. What settled in her mind was the cautious encounter of their loneliness. And the man’s feet, his long legs and thighs, surprisingly well developed compared to the infirmity of his body as a whole.

Quite nice legs and thighs with thick black hair. All right, she didn’t love him, but she wished at least to accept his body a little.

She was most averse to his penis, which is to say she didn’t want to see it erect or withdrawn into itself, when with its dark round head it looked out of the thick pubic hair. She found his testicles positively ridiculous, undeveloped, like a child’s; she didn’t understand why a man like that didn’t sink into the ground for shame.

The man controlled the writhing of her loins, which she tried to restrain, with the convex edge of his fingernails, with the tip of his tongue, or with his taut shiny testicles. The latter, when excited, became a single red globe, with which he’d keep touching the woman’s labia very gently.

A maniac, she should really be afraid of him, the man is a maniac.

He kept on touching her organ, gently hitting and bumping it, maniacally, until she opened up, and from then on he seemed to be pounding inside, could even slide inside her, or at least that is what Bella felt, that is what she saw of him inside herself. As if he too had not testicles but a pair of labia, and the two meat-eating flowers, his and hers, were opening into each other, one devouring the other. And when she threw the washcloth angrily into the sink, she fondly remembered this too.

Along with her shame.

She felt ashamed and watched Médi; leaning out of her duplicity, she watched what was happening between Médi and her handsome stuttering Hungarian man to see if there was any similarity. She felt there wasn’t. No, what was happening to her was not legitimate at all. She thought Médi was untouched by these things, by all these raging abominations. She feared that her people at home might find out about her. She must not become pregnant. But the abomination was good. In the endless rhythmic pounding, the physical pain was wonderful, but certainly it would end. To strengthen her memory, with her loins she touched the hard ledge of the sink, a strange collision at the edge of her gently sloping mons veneris, twice in succession. Frugally she portioned out the sounds she produced, with which she also punished herself. She was afraid of breaking into hysterical screams. The man did not allow himself loud sighs or moans either, which helped deepen the feeling of their movements and shifting positions.

If this stranger’s exterior repelled or irritated her so much, she shouldn’t be loud when he helped her reach her climax.

This was the logic of self-punishment, and certainly without justification.

The man’s pitiable, almost hollow chest with its ridiculously short little ribs, and his awkward shoulders from which every little bone separately protruded, gave her a most disgusting feeling that she was not a grown woman but a little girl playing with a stupid doll. The stomach wall flattened by much starvation, and below it the childlike, protruding, somewhat puffed-up belly; I must be mad, she kept saying to herself, going to bed with a man like this when I could do it with much better ones.

But he was the one she went to bed with; others could not get this close to her. Which logically could not be comprehended. Why it was like this and not like that.

Or what about his pale bony little buttocks, which didn’t have enough flesh for its cleft to close properly under the volume and pressure of muscles; just touching it filled her with irritation.

She had no way of embracing or molding this body to her own. She kept telling this to herself, as if to apologize or accuse.

She chose to let happen what could not but happen, and in her stabbing, throbbing climaxes she considered herself deaf, blind, and dead.

Quickly she turned on the hot water, which instantly filled the bathroom with a sulfurous odor. She didn’t want to stay by herself for long, and she washed the washcloth so angrily it was as if she had to remove sperm from it. She was not comfortable about the physical characteristics of sperm. Given its consistency, she thought of it as snot. She was always surprised anew when it didn’t have little knots in it and its thick body easily dispersed in water; it was not snot after all, but an embodiment of her dread, anxiety, and fear that she’d ruin her life with her dissoluteness.

Fulfilling the prophecy of her parents.

Not to get pregnant.

Sometimes she left a strongly outlined, yellowish stain on the sheet, though she wasn’t sure that it was not copious vaginal discharge flowing out during orgasm. Because it was so dark, she took it to be the first sign of syphilis. There’s blood in it. Or it left a stain on the handkerchief she used to wipe it off; in worse cases stains were left on her clothes, or it dried and turned white in her black hair, which to her shame she noticed only in the rehearsal hall’s mirror.

She kept rinsing and squeezing the washcloth, as if worrying that she couldn’t get rid of the stains. After she hung it up and quickly, with a bad conscience, returned to the others, she still did not know what to do with her agitation; in Mária’s living room, everything appeared to be the way she remembered the hotel room to which Vladas Korsakas took her after her release from the hospital.

As if there had been no operation and no anesthesia, he was standing there before her, alive, warm, and real in his white corkscrew-patterned wool sweater. And it didn’t matter that so many things were happening in her head. The three women were still in the same positions around the table; their every little move made the layers of smoke around them flutter slightly. In his thick, white, high-necked sweater, Korsakas looked more athletic than he was, and he wore no shirt under the sweater. The bed, the heavy curtains on the window, and the Japanese sitz bath in the corner behind the screen were just as she had left them; the accident had caused no change in her hotel room. She saw no signs of joy, pain, or empathy on any of the objects.

Nobody had taken the glass from Elisa even though she’d been whimpering and begging for who knows how long, stretching out her arms to get attention, to demand something.

But the object of her wish was not easy to determine.

Beyond the open glass doors, above the petunias’ fluttering funnels, the urban night was dazzling, motionless. Wet tree branches were swinging icily in the wind; the maid had to be called in to put more wood on the fire, the room was too cold, and then to bring more hot water.

Elisa did not relinquish her glass; on the contrary she was signaling that she wanted something, and she kept pointing at another glass. Her eyes flashed wildly, she definitely wanted something, and her eyes, as Bella followed them with hers, were on Irma’s almost untouched drink.

She wanted—no, seemed to demand—that she be given it; give me what Irma hasn’t drunk. Obviously it wasn’t the drink she wanted so much; jealousy was raging within her.

In response Szapáry puckered her lips slightly and angrily shrugged her shoulders. What do I care, she answered Bella’s mute question. Let her get drunk if she wants to so much.

The empty glass clacked on the tea trolley.

They could still have talked, but at this phase of the evening they wouldn’t.

Dobrovan in her dark silk dress, amply gathered over her breasts and at her waist, stopped behind the empty chair, making the smoke flutter again in the air; the excitement froze.

This is what they had been waiting for.

The card game relieved them of the burdensome, highly responsible obligation of conversing, but it took a long time before their concentration on the run of cards made them forget what was constantly on their minds, what had been overstraining their nerves. Once again they reached the point where, despite their intentions, each woman found herself face-to-face with each of the others. Mrs. Szemz
ő
smartly tucked her cigarette into the corner of her mouth with her tongue and kept blinking because the smoke irritated her eyes. She picked up a deck, shuffled it, and then spread the cards on the table in a large fanlike arc.

Each of the four women picked a card, twanging it under her fingers as she flipped it. The value of the cards they picked determined the order of their turns, which also assigned their seating arrangement. To which they responded with little hisses, clicking tongues, giggles, sounds they could produce with almost-closed lips.

The sounds had different qualities, all of them filled with satisfaction.

Bella liked especially to make sounds with her lips because she could steal the kiss for herself across the years, the penetrating taste of the cock, its smooth slopes and strong rims, as it smacked her lips.

It was almost the other way around for Mrs. Szemz
ő
; for her it was an enormous effort to keep up appearances. As she giggled, she and her mates were being driven across the old bridge of Regensburg, in the spring snowstorm, stumbling and sliding on the slippery cobblestones.

Erna Demén’s daughter was no longer with her.

According to the value of the picked cards, Dobrovan is to be Szapáry’s partner, and Mrs. Szemz
ő
will team up with Médi Huber. With their sounds of approval they in fact reveal disappointment. Mrs. Szemz
ő
, however close she was to Szapáry, liked best to be partners with the soft-spoken Dobrovan, while Médi Huber and Szapáry, despite the loud conflicts punctuating their relationship, preferred each other as partners in the game.

Once again the cards had not complied with everyone’s wishes.

Quickly they changed places as was necessary and sat down again.