Secret Lolita: The Confessions of Victor X (6 page)

Secondly, even the most virtuous ladies belonging to the best society have very broad ideas of sexual morality and cannot understand why anyone should take a dim view of any weaknesses in their own sex. An unmarried mother in Russia does not have to lower her eyes in anyone's presence; she is received everywhere and, if she has to, says without embarrassment that she is unmarried and has had a baby. I know of an unmarried lady who had four children by four different men: this did not harm her standing as a teacher in a state grammar school for girls, and all her pupils knew about what would have seemed quite inadmissible in another country. Similarly a woman who has left her husband to live openly with another man is received everywhere in Russia. Russian ladies make fun both of the rigid puritanism of those terrible English women and of the hypocritical worldly decorum of continental women. That is why the fact that the wife of my father's old school friend had been a café-concert singer and had probably had quite a few love affairs did not hinder her being received by a lady as upstanding as my mother.

So the theatre manager and his wife would often come to see us at our country house. Some days after my talk with Glasha, the two girls, whom I shall call Minna (the eighteen-year-old daughter) and Sofya (the sixteen-year-old niece), invited me to go for a walk with them and Olga in the surrounding forest. (Olga and my aunt were back to stay with us.) Since women now interested me, I accepted with alacrity. As soon as we were in the depths of the lonely forest, the two big girls turned the conversation towards erotic matters. They asked me if I was in love, if I flirted with little girls and if I was interested in women &c. Keeping to my new tactics, I pretended to be ignorant and utterly naive. Olga, who was with us, laughed and explained to the girls that I was as innocent as a new-born baby and that things of that nature were utterly beyond me. They decided on the spot to give me a
geschlechtliche Aufklärung
. In a very lonely part of the forest, in some bushes that gave us cover Olga lay down on the ground and Minna and Sofya got me to look at and touch her vulva with my fingers. They showed me and talked to me about the different parts of her organs - the clitoris, the labia minora, the urinary orifice, the entry to the vagina - then described sexual intercourse to me and invited me to have it with Olga. One of the girls pulled Olga's labia majora apart and the other likewise used her fingers to guide my penis to the entry. But it did not work; my penis knocked against flesh without finding the right direction. After a few failed attempts, Minna and Sofya made me lie down on my back and told Olga to crouch on me and ride my hips. They moistened my penis with saliva, guided it with their hands and managed to get it into the little girl's vagina: she had lost her virginity long before.

Sliding my penis into the vagina pulled back my foreskin and uncovered the glans: it hurt me rather a lot and, as I realised later, grazed me and left a few drops of blood; but the pain did not kill the erection. While Olga was squatting over me keeping my penis in her vagina, Minna started tickling the little girl's clitoris, which gave her an orgasm. That was the first female orgasm I had witnessed and I was almost frightened when I saw the girl's lips suddenly lose colour and her eyes roll while her breathing changed to panting and all her limbs contracted convulsively and her face changed colour. At the same time she moved her head towards my shoulder, making as if to bite me. Moreover this climax brought about a spasmodic contraction of the vulva and this hurt the shaft of my penis badly. Then the two girls turned us right over without separating us, carefully so that the penis never left the vagina during the operation. With Olga laid on her back I was on her belly in the normal position for intercourse. I did not move, but one of the girls began lifting me rhythmically by the hips, teaching me the coital movements. These movements hurt me, especially when Olga had another orgasm and another contraction of the vaginal muscles. I myself had no ejaculation and my erection gradually died away.

When I got up I was terrified to see blood on my penis and even more when I noticed that the glans were laid bare and slightly swollen. No matter how hard I tried I could not make the foreskin enclose it again and I could not get my penis back into my trousers because of the unbearable sensation in the glans when it touched clothing. But the girls started reassuring me; they said it would pass and they wiped my blood-stained penis with their handkerchiefs. And it did: after spending about half an hour chatting to them with my penis exposed to the air I was relieved to see that the foreskin retracted by itself and covered the glans again. Then we made our way back to the villa. Minna said to me, "Isn't that good? It's much better than Latin grammar, isn't it?"

I made no answer: I was feeling some remorse and shame. Furthermore, the act had not given me any pleasure and any enjoyment I had had came from the strong erection; what was more, I had felt quite acute pain which the pleasure did not make up for. Olga told us that she
did it
with Kostya and had been having intercourse with boys for years. Of course they made me promise not to tell anyone about what had happened. There was no need to: I was too ashamed to want to talk about it.

So my first sexual act was something of a disappointment for me since I had had painful rather than pleasurable sensations. Yet I was tormented by a burning desire to repeat the experience all over again. In the days that followed I arranged to be alone with Olga and also with Glasha so as to have more or less complete coitus with them. Once I joined them when they were sleeping with Kostya on the drawingroom mattresses and had them each alternately with Kostya. Now I was getting more enjoyment, or rather less agony, from sexual intercourse, but the venereal spasms of the vulva still hurt me and I dreaded the moment when I could tell by looking at the girls' facial expressions that they were on the verge of a paroxysm of supreme pleasure. Glasha, like Olga, had lost her virginity years before.

A week after that walk in the woods, Minna and Sofya took me to Kiev. The pretext was a charity fete which was to take place in a town park. Part of the programme was a tombola for children, various competitions and games also for children, but some of the entertainment was meant for adults. The girls' father and mother were going to take part; he was declaiming a poem and she was singing romances. My parents were invited, but they backed out and without the least apprehension let me go on my own with Minna and Sofya, whose passions they had no inkling of. We went to the fete which seemed rather boring to me; then the girls left their parents behind in the park and returned with me well before the end of the fete. The sun was still high in the sky and the girls told me that their parents were invited out somewhere and would not get back before nightfall. The family were staying at a hotel where they had three or four rooms. The girls took me to their bedroom.

First of all they showed me some prints of ordinary nudes, reproductions of Titian and Rubens paintings, then a few dirty photographs, which was the first time in my life I had seen such things. One of these photographs that Minna's father had bought in Egypt showed a pederastic scene. That staggered me; I would not admit that such things were possible. Minna and Sofya assured me that it was not faked, that this was a
sport
widespread among men, and that women could also love one another and have sex with each other. Even more astonishment and incredulous utterances from me. Then the girls took to action to prove their words. They took off their knickers, got onto the settee, interlaced their legs, pressed their vulvas together and had sexual intercourse while I watched. In the course of the act the two cousins showed the thrills they were experiencing by the changing colour of their faces, by panting, little cries and moans, passionate kisses interspersed with gentle nibbling and finally by involuntary bodily spasms. But looking at them made me almost as aroused as they were and my erection was so intense that it became painful. When it was over, Minna got up; Sofya stayed there lying on her back, her legs apart. I noticed that the girl's vulva was lubricated by some liquid - a thick whitish thread of it was oozing slowly down her genital groove and the perineum, falling onto the faded velvet of the settee and staining the covers. I recalled what I had read in the handbook of venereal diseases and took it to be some suppurating secret disease and said so to the girls. They started laughing and told me that this sort of 'juice' always flows from women's sexual organs whey they get pleasure in that part of their bodies.

I saw that the two girls had hairy mounts of Venus and finally realised that all grown up women had the same pubic hair. I have already mentioned my distaste the first time I happened to touch the hair on a woman's sexual organs (that was during my experience with the servant girl Masha). This disgust vanished after my adventure with the two cousins, but nevertheless it left a deep trace on me. At least that is my explanation for the fact that female pubic hair holds no attraction for me; the more abundant it is, the more unsightly I find it. If it is too long, to see it is to destroy my erection. But the sight of a mount of Venus with short, slightly tufty hair, like that of most girls of fourteen to fifteen, and which therefore looks juvenile, excites me strongly. I have an even stronger response when it is covered with just wispy hair or down, like that of many girls of thirteen. But what I like best is a completely smooth mount of Venus. Here I share the orientals' or ancient Greeks' tastes. The reason for this preference in my case, I am sure, is that little girls - Olga and Glasha - gave me my first sexual emotions, and intense ones too, and they were the first to let me have a good look at female genitals with prurient libidinousness. Orientals may well have the same reason for this predilection. For quite a long time, until they are eleven, twelve or even thirteen, oriental boys stay in the women's quarters which are saturated with sensuality, full of lubricious talk. As sexual maturity comes early in warm countries, they are likely to attempt sex play with the little girls who are brought up with them; at the very least they can see them naked. By association of impressions smooth vulvas remain a specially suggestive erotic
symbol
for them. Moreover young Muslim men are usually married off at fourteen and fifteen, even at thirteen in the hottest countries, for example Africa, and they are often given prepubescent wives. In some countries the wives are little girls of ten, nine, even eight; normally the girls they marry are not less than twelve or eleven, but at that age even in hot countries, they have no pubic hair. The ancient Greeks let children of both sexes play naked together until eleven or twelve and sexual curiosity must have woken early, as happens for the same reasons according to Mantegazza's observations on the banks of La Plata, in Uruguay and also in Madagascar, where all observers agree that sex between children begins at six or seven. These childhood erotic memories decide the course of the rest of life and so the ancient Greeks went on with a cult of hairless women. In northern countries where climate and custom put knickers and even long flannel drawers &c. on little girls, boys do not get so many chances of seeing female sexual organs, and perhaps that is why the taste for smooth pubes is less widespread. But I must get back to my story.

Straight after homosexual intercourse, Sofya invited me to have sex with her, which I did with far more enjoyment than I had had before; I believe that this time I even had something like an ejaculation, though obviously without sperm. But the contraction of the girl's vulva during orgasm was still somewhat painful for me. A little later I tried to have intercourse with Minna, but did not succeed: I had doubtless been exhausted by my previous effort. Then Minna asked me to do cunnilingus with her. Oddly enough, I felt no repugnance for this exercise: in fact I found it acutely pleasurable from the start. For the rest of the evening the two girls tried to finish off my education by explaining various sexual refinements, talking to me in detail about the different
figurae Veneris
&c. These two young women were real walking encyclopaedias of erotic knowledge. They made me a bed on the living-room settee and I fell asleep before their parents got back to the hotel. The next day they took me back home to my parents who had not the slightest suspicion of the sort of initiation I had just been through.

In the days that followed I had sexual intercourse with Minna and Sofya on three separate occasions with more and more enjoyment. The holidays were nearing their end: there was less than a fortnight before school began again.

My father had a property with a farm house, a big garden and so on about twelve miles' distance from my uncle's estate. We usually spent the summer at my uncle's, however, and not on my father's property because the latter was rented out. This particular year my father needed to see his tenant and as he was only going to spend a few days there he took me as a travelling companion. We were installed in our house, spent ten days in it and then went back to Kiev for the new school year. During those ten days I had a new erotic experience which I shall dwell on, since it was one of the few occasions when I was the one who took the initiative in sex. Here is how it happened.

Our farmer-tenant had a big happy family, and friends and relatives came to visit. Among them was a young woman relative, a university student, a
kursistka
as they say in Russian, that is a woman taking tertiary education. This girl of about twenty was studying history and literature in Moscow. As soon as we had arrived, my cousin - the young Don Juan of the village I have already had occasion to mention - came to see us; he arrived on horseback from my uncle's village. He and I were given a bedroom together in a sort of turret or mezzanine at the top of the house. This mezzanine had two bedrooms with separate doors opening on to the top of the stairs; but the two rooms also had a common door between them. My cousin and I had one room, the student slept in the other. Once I awoke by chance in the middle of the night. From the next room I could hear the sound of kisses and the creaking of bedsprings. Moonlight was filtering through the windowpanes and I saw that my cousin had left his bed and our room. I was no longer the innocent child I had been a month ago and I immediately realised what was happening. With great stealth I crept up to the door that led to the other bedroom; first of all I had a look through the keyhole, thinking that the moonlight would show up the young lady's bed. But the bed was positioned so that it could not be watched from the keyhole. So I stuck my ear there instead. The silent country night enabled me to catch all the noises in that neighbouring bedroom, even the faintest ones. By trying to guess the source of the sounds I was violently aroused. I could hear not just kisses, sighs, panting, little, repressed female cries, the dancing of the bedsprings, but even more intimate ones: the banging of bare bellies in collision, the slap and splash which must have been made by the rapid to-and-fro of the penis in the vagina's and vulva's streaming folds of mucous that were palpitating with sensual pleasure. At least that is how I interpreted some of the sounds that reached my ears. I was using my ears as it were to see with. I could follow the stages of carnal ecstasy right to the climax. Then my ears told me that the act was over. I heard whispering: at first they were having a banal conversation about what had happened that day. Then my cousin started telling dirty stories to his companion who occasionally uttered tiny short laughs. They had intercourse several more times that night. Worn out with tiredness, aching all over with sexual excitement, my penis erect all the time, with pains in my testicles and groin, I stayed standing by the door, incapable of forcing myself back to bed. At last, towards morning, I got back to bed and went to sleep, not without difficulty. I woke up rather late, in the Russian way; my cousin was back in his own bed - he must have left the girl while I was asleep. I never said anything to him about what I had discovered. During the day he left us to return to his father.