Secret Lolita: The Confessions of Victor X (5 page)

I spent the holidays between first and second class in the Crimea at the seaside. The next year after passing the leaving examination for second year with my usual success and being now a third-year pupil, I went on holiday with my parents. This time we went not to the seaside nor my uncle's village, but to a town very near Kiev on the banks of the Dnepr in the middle of forests. Family friends often came to visit, among them my spinster aunt who would bring Olga with her. The very day she arrived Olga lifted up her dress, showed me her sexual organs and said, "How hot it is today. You see, I haven't even put my knickers on." I turned my back on her; I did not feel the least bit moved. But a few days later my psychological balance was disturbed.

The country house we were staying in was rented furnished. Among the furniture we were allowed to use was a library full of books, most of them old and worthless. This was a godsend to me. As a budding scholar and a bookworm I spent hours rummaging in the piles of old books, browsing and reading. My eyes hit upon a big treatise on childbirth and a little handbook of venereal diseases. Neither of these books had any illustrations: the treatise on childbirth was supposed to have separate plates, which were missing. Out of curiosity I started reading these books and my eyes saw the light straight away. There was no explicit description of coitus in either of these books, but by reading between the lines I was able to guess what it consisted of. All my memories connected with sex came flooding back, illuminating one another. For the first time I saw them
simultaneously
. I recalled my adventure with the general's sons, which I had
never thought about
, my cousin's and the village girls' obscene jokes, dogs copulating, the episode with Masha etc. Though the treatise on childbirth did not describe childbirth, it explained that "the male's spermatazoa penetrate into the uterus, where they meet the female's ovum and fertilize it." Furthermore, in the pamphlet on venereal diseases, men were advised to wash their penis after coitus. These two remarks gave me the key to the sexual riddle, although I was not altogether sure that I had understood properly and got the facts right. I read the detailed description of the female sexual organs in the childbirth treatise (pubis, mount of Venus, clitoris, labia majora and minora, vagina etc.) and was moved to wonder: it gave me palpitations of the heart. The phrases about the clitoris, "organ of pleasure in women, analogous to the man's penis and capable of the same changes," I found particularly disturbing. I guessed that the vagina was where the penis was inserted. I re-read the same lines a hundred times with avidity. While I was reading them I had the first erection in my life. It worried me a little. But from then on every time I thought about the things discussed in those two books, which I often did, the erection recurred, it bothered and disturbed me.

So I had now understood everything. I was over eleven and a half. It was June - the long school holidays in Russia last from 15th June to 15th August. But I was not certain I had properly understood, I still had my doubts, I needed someone to tell me explicitly, yes or no, if babies were made by putting the penis in the vagina and whether serious, respectable people did the 'dirty things' that I had seen the general's children do with Zoya. This was an incident that had been completely effaced from my memory for years and had never come back; now it reappeared in all its freshness and was getting obsessive. I had at the same time an intense desire to see a woman's sexual organs, to examine them closely and touch them. I felt that to touch them would give me some extraordinary sensation.

My aunt had now come to stay with Olga. Friends came from the nearby town and often spent the night. In Russia people are very hospitable - or, to be more honest, custom forces them to be very hospitable. In the heart of hearts our good housewives curse - and they only wish they could do so openly - good friends who put them to expense and whom they have to lodge at the risk of upsetting the whole household. But what can you do? Custom is tyrannical and even the most miserly people in our country have to give hospitality which in the depths of their hearts they hate and detest. As a result we were always overcrowded. There were lots of rooms, but never enough. Often I slept on a settee in the drawing room. At the other end of the room two mattresses were laid on the ground side by side for Olga, Glasha (diminutive of Glafira), a little servant girl of twelve or thirteen and Kostya (Konstantin), a little boy of eight or nine to sleep on. Kostya was our cook's son; he could have slept with his mother, but she would not let him because of her husband who was often drunk and would start beating the child at night. This little boy was very experienced sexually, as were his two sleeping companions too. Before my
geschlechtliche Aufklärung
I had paid no attention to these three sleepers and went to sleep when they did. But what I had chanced to read had completely changed me. I had an intense desire to see the two girls' vulvas. The day after my unforgettable reading, very early, before sunrise, I got out of my bed and tiptoed barefoot to the mattresses where the three children were sleeping. All three of them were stark naked; they had taken off their night shirts and were fast asleep, curled up on their sides, 'like gundogs' as the French say, that is in a S, or rather a Z. Glasha was sleeping in the middle. Kostya was facing her and she had her back turned to Olga's front (Z,Z,Z). Olga had one hand between her legs and so her sexual organs were completely hidden. Glasha was clutching one of little Kostya's hands between her thighs, pressing it on her vulva so that the latter was likewise hidden. Lastly, Glasha was holding in her sleep the boy's sexual organs with one hand. I was rather annoyed that I could not get a sight of the girls' sexual organs, but Kostya's and Glasha's sleeping posture aroused me a lot and I had a strong erection. In any case, seeing Glasha naked was bound to arouse erotic feelings. The little girl was a delightful type of Ukrainian maiden. She had luscious dark chestnut hair, black eyebrows which seemed to be painted with a brush, very long eyelashes just as black, eyes which were not black but a yellowish brown or tawny colour, a little darker but just as warm as old sherry with a ray of sunlight playing on it. Those magnificent big eyes sparkled with intelligence, malice and irony. Her shape was remarkably well developed for her age (twelve or thirteen): her body exuded health and was strong and plump with dimples everywhere and folds of fat under a fine, satiny, shining, deliciously pink skin. The colour, the plump and chubby child's body all reminded one of Boucher's nudes. I had not achieved my aim, since I had not been able to see what I most wanted to see, but I was able to feast my eyes on the little servant girl's pink rotundities and I quickly went back to bed on the settee before anyone could catch me.

Naturally, I did not dare turn to adults to convince myself that I had drawn the right conclusions from what I had read. I felt that the two little girls would be in the know on this topic. So the very same day after that early morning I have just talked about I found myself alone with Olga and was about to ask for information, when she got in before me by talking about Glasha and Kostya.

"You know, they do some lovely things at night. After we've gone to bed I can hear them chatting. And Glasha says to Kostya, 'Go on, like that. Do it again to me. Put it in. Harder! Oh no, that's enough, you're hurting me, you're putting it in too far."

"But what does that mean?" I said, pretending not to understand. "What is he putting in and where?"

"What," said Olga, "don't you get it? He's shoving his pisser in her belly."

"What you say," I replied, "isn't possible. Can a boy's pisser get inside a girls?"

"Of course it can," said Olga, "I ought to know! Even a man's!"

"But the hole's so little."

"It gets bigger. If you like, I'll show you." She hitched up her skirt and the sight of her vulva which stood out as something browner against the whiteness of the rest of her body - a sight that had left me quite unmoved a few days previously - now excited me greatly. But there things stopped. Someone was coming and that made Olga pull down her skirt. I could only ask in a low voice:

"But why do people do the things you say?"

She replied, "Grownups to get babies; children for fun."

Neither that day nor the next did I find any opportunity to carry on with the conversation. Later Olga went away with my aunt for several days.

Though I had had my conjectures confirmed by Olga, I was not yet utterly convinced, knowing that she was a terrible liar. But another talk, this time with Glasha, finally overcame my doubts. We were alone in the garden and there was no-one in the house. A little way from us Kostya was sitting next to a bigger boy of about fifteen - the gardener's son from the next villa - on a high wall which divided the two villas. They were sitting with their backs to us and their legs hung over the other side of the wall. Seen from behind, the movements they were making meant nothing to me, but the smart experienced Ukrainian girl started laughing maliciously and said to me:

"Can you see what they're doing? Can you see what they're doing?"

"No," I answered, "I don't think they're doing anything."

"What, can't you guess what they're doing? They're pulling out sausages from between their legs," said Glasha, still laughing.

I realised she was talking about masturbation, which my father had put me on my guard against and which, for a long time, I had an almost mystical horror of, although I had only a vague idea of what it was. But I had decided to get as much information out of Glasha as possible and pretended not to know what it was all about. I was so hypocritical that I pretended I did not even know the difference between the sexes. That is how I went about it. I asked her why people did such things. She told me that it gave pleasure. Then I wanted to know if she herself had had this pleasure. After a few hesitations and embarrassed denials she finally admitted she had. Then I deliberately asked her a silly question: I asked her if she pulled at just her penis or her testicles as well. My faked ingenuousness made her laugh like a demented child. "What," she said, "don't you know that little girls aren't made like boys?" And she told me that girls had an opening and not a pipe between their legs. I pretended I did not believe her and so she invited me inside the house (where there was nobody about) to show me how girls were made.

We went into a bedroom, and she lay across the bed, lifted up her skirt, parted her thighs and showed me what I was burning to see. The sight of a gaping scarlet slit between the soft, rosy, plump little thighs did not disgust me at all as it had during the incident with Zoya: it transfixed me with ecstasy, though it did not prompt me with any desire for intercourse. But Glasha began explaining the reason for the difference between the sexes, describing the sexual act and asking me if I should like to do it with her. I don't know what scruples overcame me, but I said no that it was not 'right'.

"What do you mean it isn't?" the girl persisted. "But everybody does it. All the ladies do it with their husbands, and not just with their husbands; all the young men do it with their girl friends; all the schoolgirls do it with schoolboys: it's much nicer than sweets." She took hold of my penis through my trousers and added:

"See how swollen it is, it wants to come in my
cake
."

I wanted to bring the question of erection into the open and said to Glasha, "It isn't a disease then, if it's swollen like that?"

"How silly," she replied, "it's always swollen up like that when it has to be stuffed into women's cakes. It couldn't get in otherwise."

Glasha could not induce me to have intercourse with her. To look at and handle her vulva was pleasure enough for me; I did not yet have any other desires and I was glad to have resolved all my doubts. I re-read the pages that bothered me most in the childbirth treatise and the handbook of venereal diseases, and I saw that it was absolutely impossible to interpret them any other way than the way I had done at my first reading. And I read and re-read these books, with strong erections each time.

During the next few days Glasha let me look at and touch her sexual organs; she did the same to mine. But I would not let her masturbate me when she offered to. Then I became more fully initiated into sex, as I shall now relate.

Among the acquaintances who used to visit us from Kiev in our villa there was a family of slightly dubious reputation whom my parents however were only too trusting towards. The head of this family was an old schoolfellow of my father's; after his youth my father had lost sight of him and had met him again by chance that very year in Kiev. After all sorts of adventures and mishaps this gentleman had become the manager of a travelling theatre company; their career was anything but brilliant and they had just arrived at Kiev after crossing the whole of Russia from the Pacific to the Black Sea. My father looked on his childhood friend as an incorrigible and disorderly bohemian, but a good sort and, at worst, harmless. After lighting on my father this adventurer would not let go: he was counting on his generosity and hoping for financial help. In that he was not mistaken. His wife was a Rumanian, a former operetta or even café-concert singer. She had two young ladies with her: her daughter who was then eighteen and her niece of sixteen. With bohemian casualness these four pushed themselves into our family and constantly came to dinner without being invited, as is in any case the Russian custom. (It is even one of the principal features that distinguish Russian from western European domestic life.) One might wonder why my parents, rather austere persons, accepted in their intimate circle people whose past was largely shady and who in any event belonged to quite a different world. The answer is easy. First of all, Russian society - even more aristocratic society than that which my parents belonged to - has a moral simplicity, a familiarity, an easy-going outlook which is unknown in western Europe and which makes it impossible sometimes for people to ward off importunate intruders. Stiff English social relationships do not exist in Russia. Even in the highest Russian aristocracy caste spirit is far harder to detect than in the English or German aristocracy. In his memoirs about his time as tutor to the present Emperor of Russia (who was then the heir presumptive), M. Lanson, Professor of French, tells us that Alexander III's court had a free and easy atmosphere which bordered on loose morals, and that no one took much heed of etiquette. Conventional rules don't agree well with Russian morality.