Every cock differs from every other cock the way men do from one another, though each cock is always surprisingly different from the man it belongs to. The memory of these oddities kept coming back to him, but he did not know what it meant to uncover them. It was impossible to forget these differences even among fully dressed people. From then on, he knew that clothing concealed something about which everyone wants vital information. As if with men’s cocks the philosopher’s stone had been placed forcefully in his hands but he did not know what to do with it because he was stupid. And it was no help that the very idea of touching a strange person, especially a man, filled him with disgust — touching his lips, his stubbly skin, the first, slippery drops of sperm oozing out after a prolonged erection and leaving stains everywhere. He also refrained from closely inspecting his own prick. While washing, he deliberately looked elsewhere. When erect, his prick became so sensitive that he could no longer separate pain from pleasure. Once, after an erection of several hours, it became stuck in his underpants and he had to pull it free.
Once he’d discovered the playing field, he could not resist returning to it, tempting and challenging the insurmountable disgust he had for his own body no less than for those of all other men. He had no such disgust for women’s bodies — these experiences did not affect his feelings for women — yet even regarding women he could not erase the knowledge culled from his new experiences. As had happened before, it was hard for him not to go down to the subway toilets during the day and not to pay close attention to everything while around him the men pretended to be only urinating.
He did likewise.
The truth is, I had two interrupted lives, he would say later of himself, one proved to be not enough, the other promised to be too much, and in both I felt very much like a stranger. But now I knew it was the end, while I was running from the enormous, athletic older man, his chest and shoulders almost bursting out of his checkered shirt, his fist like a hammer. I must get away from here at any cost, my other self kept repeating desperately to itself like a mantra. If I can get out of the yellow-flowered Japanese acacia grove and reach the riverside promenade, I’m saved.
He ran toward the lights, saw himself running toward the lights.
In no situation in his life could he have escaped this always-watching icy countenance. He will never come back here again, he promised this countenance. It cannot be that I’m repeating my mother’s life.
When he unexpectedly cleared the thicket.
He stopped at the end of the trail and panted, freely, aloud. He was safe.
He inhaled deeply the heavy fragrance of the river water; he had won. And once again he had to acknowledge that the moment contradicted his previous expectations. No one blocked his way and nobody kissed him on his neck. And this he regretted. He could be more ashamed of his ridiculousness, but he could not sink deeper in his shame than this. No one’s steps were heard on the path along the riverbank, packed hard with black slag. An ordinary night on the island, far from both halves of the city, between the two huge arms of the river; if only a huge flood would cover and carry away his body. His stomach, his testicles hurt. It must be very late. Once again long hours must have passed like minutes with meaningless activity; he could never properly gauge the relationship between time and action. He would stay another half hour, he said to himself, and then go home. There is no such thing as good expectations. Again, he’d go home with many experiences, many things lived through, but the repeatedly granted half hours quickly filled the entire night, and he failed to meet a single soul. I have nobody, and I’ll never find anybody either. He was thirsty, sweaty, and hungry, he should have gone to one of the drinking fountains because he was all dried out. One solitary human being, he prayed, begged, and implored, like a monk.
I really can’t go lower than this, he threatened himself.
Still, he could not give up the struggle whose purpose he could not know.
The gas lamps spread their mute and empty light over the deserted promenade. His fate cheated him again, or maybe he wanted to trick his fate. On the Pest shore, the lamps illuminated the empty pier in the same way.
On the Margit Bridge, seen in the cold blue light of distant arc lamps, a sluggish yellow streetcar was crawling upward.
Nobody followed him.
Instead, the older unknown man, who could not have been more than thirty, had followed him for a while, that was certain, he heard him panting behind him but then falling behind. And why shouldn’t he. What a hopeless character I am, really a stupid little prick. He was sorry they hadn’t caught him, wrestled him to the ground, and done it to him. And now here I am, feeling sorry about it. Torn to pieces and bloody, defiled by their sperm, he’d have been rolling in smeared excrement, but at least with his throat cut he’d be past everything, past this whole rotten hopeless life. The cops could have their turn. He had fought off the unknown man; he struggled with himself. It’s not enough that I was born a Jew, not enough that I’m an orphan, must I be a homo too. He did not understand his birth, and he knew he should part with his life for the sake of his happiness, since he couldn’t count on anything. And even this wasn’t quite true. His problem was that his life was stuck at the halfway mark. If only he had been born a Jew, but his mother came from a very Catholic family. If only he could have been an orphan — after all, the Communists had beaten his Jewish father to death — but his mother had simply abandoned her child.
That alone was reason enough to feel sorry for himself, but he thought he was better off without such a miserable mother.
This life he’d received at birth means nothing, and not only to him; it doesn’t mean anything to anybody. Never a better opportunity than the present, tomorrow will be too late, I have to do it today. For months, he’s been thinking that out of sheer humanity he should remove himself from among the living. If these shadows, emerging and vanishing in the night, were not around him, still their brutality and mercilessness appeared in his filthy imagination as something highly desirable, as the very last straw. Or they did not exist, not even now. He was not far from realizing that, given the painful lack of gratification, he should consider their existence as pure hallucination. Neither the dark-skinned, slow-moving, marvelous giant, who might be a Gypsy or half-Gypsy, existed, nor did his younger assistant, probably from the suburbs, with his messy hair and his Hungarian mustache hanging down on either side of his mouth; he was only running away from himself into the big empty world. Everything else is sheer imagination. He imagined the somber buildings with their tin domes on the other shore, which the weak lights of the Újpest docks barely illuminated. Lights were still on in some of the apartments, it seemed, and from the partly cloudy sky the city’s reflecting lights, rich in reds and yellows, were spraying down in a steady drizzle.
Scenery, that’s all it was, somber scenery; in reality, he stands alone on this empty island between the two waters.
Protected somewhat by his imagination.
A deluge that keeps overcoming and carrying him away but he’ll never have anybody, and that’s all human life is worth.
Breezes fingered his sweaty skin under the black shirt.
I don’t exist, he said half aloud, and I shall not exist either, he added.
If I want to stay alive, he added to himself, I have to get used to the idea that I don’t exist, he said again half aloud.