Parallel Stories: A Novel (62 page)

They are locked into one another.

A force, functioning independently of them, condemned them to one another; they must break out of one another.

The question has become this, who will begin tonight, and who can bring about her breakout with the smallest sacrifice.

Of course, the warm evening had cooler edges, currents, breezes, brief thrusts and puffs from above the heavy, darkly rolling water, which the body unconsciously absorbed. The many sensations and fragrances of early summer colored their feelings, imperceptibly came between them, occasionally modified the measure and direction of their emotions. On Margit Island during these days, the yellow clusters of Japanese acacias burst into bloom among the ruins of the Dominican cloister, where human urine and feces stank and burning cigarettes glowed and died off in the darkness.

In the light of distant gas lamps, lonely men roamed, showing themselves to one another, and then stopped in one of the ruins’ impenetrable shadows and cautiously opened their flies.

The fragrance of the heavy, dense acacia clusters is not sweet but forbidding and scabrous, like chipped metal, or like raw beef.

VOLUME II

In the Very Depth of the Night

Margit Island

I’ve got another life.

Kristóf ran headlong into the bushes, flowery branches hitting him in the face.

Yes, he did have another life.

He was fleeing.

He heard the long, hurrying steps pounding behind him, the wild breathing of his pursuer; the tightly packed footpath through the trees and bushes reverberated under their feet.

I’ve gone too far, he whimpered to himself, much too far. He could not help going too far, no matter how much he admonished himself, because he was far from everything and everybody. He was playing with danger to feel he was alive, though his other self weighed everything soberly.

I stretched things past the breaking point, I truly got on their nerves.

In the fragrant darkness, in the balmy breeze, there was also the danger of muggers, pickpockets, possibly murderers or a police roundup. Let them kill me, I don’t care; that was not what he was dreading. He increased his excitement with the dangers of the night to the pleasure of intolerability. He had discovered this place four nights earlier, and though he’d returned home at dawn he could barely wait for nightfall to come again; he was spending his fifth night here. As if he were deep in ethnological research and was having difficulties finding his way among the tribe’s strict rules.

There was hardly any talking here; at most one could hear hisses and brief whistles. People suddenly appeared and disappeared. He could recognize some now familiar figures, shapes who looked for and followed him, or whom he followed, but the night would swallow them up without a trace.

There were too many of them.

They were on their guard, fleeting, sneaking, prowling, as if they could see in the dense darkness filled with little noises, sighs, moans. He discovered that he too could see in the dark and he especially enjoyed that. His mind recorded, gauged, established contact, combined data, and stored urgent questions; in short, it functioned at full capacity. After a while he understood or seemed to understand the intentions of those shadows and silhouettes, and he comprehended their passions, condemned to silence and mutual dependence. He was happy with his scientific discoveries. At the sight of different figures and the abundance of various desires, his lips, which he licked excitedly, became parched and his mouthy.

The younger man, the one with the mustache, will now make a wide detour, and, before one can get out of the park, with his enormous limbs he will block passage on the trail. Because sometimes he not only planted himself before him but roughly pulled him to himself, hugging him gently, and when this happened the first time he planted a kiss on his neck, so he remembered with his skin the touch of his limbs—and longed for it. He could anticipate this younger man’s grinning mug, his large meaty nose and the bushy Hungarian mustache overwhelming his lips; he felt his breath, with its commingling odor of alcohol and tobacco, a particularly repulsive mixture. Let him plant a kiss on his neck. He nearly fainted at the mere thought of it, the fear. The two worked as a team; he’d be caught between these two large-bodied men. Kristóf realized that the two used the older one as bait, because on this turf other men, mainly the young ones close to Kristóf in age, considered him more attractive. They fancied him; all their lives they’d dreamed of physical strength, of greater size and perfection, and with his sheer presence he embodied this dream. The two of them are waiting for him to walk unsuspecting into their trap. They’ve built their strategy on the physical perfection of the older one; regarding the temptation, there is total harmony between them. Neither of them wants to catch him alone, they want to do it together; and realizing this has made him suspicious of them. But he also realized that his continuing flight from them is part of the lure and serves to increase tension; he’s become a toy of his own permanent desire for greater physical perfection. Everything is preordained, and whatever he now discovers or foresees happens several times a night. There’s no longer any difference between the inner and outer worlds, everything was prepared during Creation, and now only the resolution, the cadenza, is lacking: the death rattle, or ejaculation. If he let them, they’d torture him mercilessly, tear his muscles apart with their sharp teeth and instantly devour his flesh.

That’s all he could think of; he could not imagine it any other way, or he did not want to imagine his pleasure any other way, the pleasure these two had treacherously been preparing for him.

The trembling darkness, mottled by lights from distant gas lamps, was full of hard-packed paths and trails. The men who stepped off the trails and headed into thickets were the ones who wanted to offer up their bodies as free prey, or who wanted someone who would mutely and willingly offer up his. This was one of the general rules of the place. Shortly after ten o’clock in the evening, when unsuspecting strolling lovers disappeared, naked limbs and other body parts flashed in the depths of the darkness that neither gaslight nor reflections of the city’s sky could penetrate. No one who must mature from being an unripe boy to being a ripe, full-fledged male could deny himself the curiosity, the urge to know what other men were like. Insanely, he tried to become like the others. He liked to imagine himself in their place as they offered themselves to anyone, or took possession of a total stranger’s naked body, though he kept telling himself he only wanted to watch, to see.

Mutual imagination became their aphrodisiac, and this made the darkness vibrate and tremble in a state of excited expectation that no mortal man could have gratified.

It was as if he had acquired forbidden knowledge, the city’s ultimate secret.

If he approached them very carefully, minding the slightest crackling sound, they would fly apart, continue elsewhere, and look for different partners for their games, or they’d call him, signal to him, gesturing and hissing for him to come and join them, be the third or fourth among them. It was all the same to them. They offered him their lips, opened for kissing or sucking, or their asses, or simply their erect cocks for a blowjob. They ridiculed the desire for married life or any sentimental notion about mating.

Anything could happen. And he was the one who had to bolt, frightened.

Yet they were not indifferent to everything and everyone, not always.

In general no one was faithful to anyone, nothing could be considered permanent, not even for a moment, every occasional relationship could be dissolved at any time because everyone possessed a certain amount of manliness, so it was always possible to make, with anyone or in any way, a defensive or offensive alliance based on the cult of manliness. But even these strict basic rules were constantly being rewritten and modified.

I can’t decipher it, that’s what he felt, and he went after them, dazed.

Some among them would suddenly find his one and only and leave with him, laughing happily. Some among these returned after a few minutes and, as if nothing meaningful had happened, would go back, indifferently or disappointedly, to searching for someone else. To be more conspicuous and provocative with their nakedness, some men hid their clothes among the ruins of the Szent Margit monastery,
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some in the niches of statues, or in portal arches and jambs, or behind dismantled Gothic corbels; others made them into small packets that they strapped to their waists or lower legs. Formidable tribal warriors. He envied them, in his heart he felt great warmth for them, though they were the ones he had to be most chary of: they were wild, merciless, tough, and unpredictable. Sometimes they’d attack as a group. Hissing and snickering like children, they’d make stinging remarks, behavior that was artificial and, despite the manly display of muscles, very feminine. They left behind a scent of cheap cologne and the strong smell of sweat. Without a thought they kissed, sucked, and pummeled. They must have decided at some point to live their lives in this unrestrained and licentious manner.

But I could not decide.

I couldn’t imagine what role I could possibly have in such an insane game designed for more than two people. I wasn’t ready to make a decision about anything. First, I wanted to watch, to see everything with my own eyes, to see through these appearances; everything these men did with one another seemed like sheer humiliation or self-abasement to me, and I simply could not comprehend it. As if I were watching, repelled and estranged, my own inadequacy for submissiveness.

As if I were watching the readiness of someone whose life, despite ceaseless self-rebuke, was one long temporizing. It would have been better to decide right off, especially if this thing was hereditary anyway. But this someone had no idea what to do to bring about a decision. That is why he’d better stay on the trail.

Not step off it.

According to local custom, the trail provided a measure of safety, respite, and protection; staying on it meant, for the others, that I hadn’t yet decided. As if I were saying to them, hold your horses, I’m still searching, waiting for the great unknown, and I’d like not to be touched by you until I find my right to self-determination or voluntarily relinquish it.

I also feared stepping into shit, another reason it was dangerous to go off the trail.

There were others also, who, driven by unrealizable desires, roamed the trails endlessly, went away, and then came back—quite a few like that.

They searched in vain, all in vain; they found no one.

The reason was not necessarily their timidity but rather their squeamishness or their exceptional needs.

It was impossible to understand everything.

Perhaps this was one reason he’d have been glad to exchange his life for that of the bravest ones, so as to understand at least something of the indifference of those who didn’t care whom they were with so long as they could go on being with someone. If only he could accept every stranger’s approach and understand it; if only he could let them have his way with him but without his touching anyone. Which would mean remaining untouched himself.

If only he did not suffer so shamelessly from lack of bodily contact.

He could not touch himself, because here that gesture’s meaning was unequivocal: it meant that you were offering up your body as free prey, and your every move would be watched from every direction, just as he was watching others. One enticing signal was all that was needed for two men to fall on each other and quickly satisfy each other, or to engage in the act for a while, careful not to reach gratification, and then part—with a gesture a little like a thank-you or good-bye—and vanish without a trace into the very depth of the night, only to resume with others. As though they believed permanent attachments to be superfluous and mawkish. They were conspirators, ready to initiate him into their most jealously guarded and dangerous secrets, but only if he first swore to uphold their principles. He probably should have turned his body over then and there. But he could not find the required submissiveness or this kind of self-abasement in himself. Yet the situation was not unpleasant, even though he was excluded and inexperienced, because the fear and trembling kept him in a constant state of excitement. He’d have liked to become completely shut up in himself, but he had to keep himself open. It was important to behave as if he belonged with them, to show that if he wanted to he could give up this tenacious defense of his body’s integrity at any time. Otherwise they wouldn’t put up with him. His sperm kept on seeping. His erection referred not to just anyone but precisely to that someone who might pop up at any moment, that someone whom everyone here idolized and worshipped, that someone whom he too was looking for but hadn’t yet found. Or rather, though he did profoundly understand them, it would be better and he’d complete his knowledge if he sacrificed himself; but—and here’s the rub—he does not understand that here no one is looking for a real person; everyone is chasing his own imagination.

His desire was directed at all of them, almost all of them, but the moment one man stepped forward and approached him, his desire no longer focused on a single person; it focused on no one.

And that is why he would then flee.

He ran from the encroaching figures, from having to respond to this magical attraction; his feet pounding on the hard trail, he ran ahead of them like a wild animal, trusting himself to his sharpened senses, his feet carrying him blindly. Shrubs with branches like sharp arms hit him in the face and wrapped themselves around his body, cracking and snapping as he dragged them along and broke free of them. They were embracing him with their tendrils and tentacles, meaning to pull him back and punish him for refusing to surrender to reality as he must for even the shortest moment of gratification.