Secret Lolita: The Confessions of Victor X (7 page)

I took advantage of the time that the adults were having their siesta. In Russia, especially in the south, dinner is usually at three or four p.m.: it is the only proper meal in the day; as dinner is exceedingly long, it weighs one's system down so that most people feel the need for a rest immediately afterwards. They have a nap for an hour or two. Later, tea is served at seven or eight with slices of bread and butter, rounds of sausage, cold meat. Sometimes you also get supper at night; in most families that is only occasional. These suppers take place when there are visitors staying late - which is, actually, only too frequent in Russia. Then at midnight or one a.m. a big meal is served, as rich as dinner at three p.m. People sometimes stay at table until three a.m. to the utter despair of the servants who are overworked like slaves in Russia, even in the most liberal and radical families. Thus I managed to get a total of two or three hours - quite unlike my normal habits - when no one noticed where I was, since everyone was doing what I had done and nobody would meet again before evening tea. We got to bed rather late.

Alone in my bedroom I could hear the girl in the next room going to bed. It brought to mind my cousin's visit the previous night and I was overwhelmed by such violent sexual arousal that it made me take steps of a daring that was quite out of character with the rest of me - I was timid by nature. Wearing only a shirt I went into the student's room and told her I was afraid to sleep alone, asking her to let me sleep in her bed. After a moment's hesitation she consented. It must be remembered that I was only eleven and a half. I was astonished myself at the success of my rash request and was encouraged to take the experiment further. For half an hour or a whole hour - I do not know exactly - I stayed there without moving, lying by the girl's side, our bodies touching under the same bedclothes. Neither of us slept. Finally, I turned over, pretended to make an accidental movement and put my hand on my companion's bare arm. I started stroking it gently. As there was no resistance I grew bolder and touched her foot with mine, then the young lady's calf. I put my hand on the girl's knee. At last, under the spell of ever increasing excitement, trembling with sensuality and with fear at the thought of what my boldness might lead to, I took one of her hands under the blankets and put it on my strongly erect penis. The young lady took her hand sharply away, but said nothing. The silence reassured me. I took the risk of sliding my hand under the girl's shift and caressing first her belly, then her mount of Venus. The moment my hand pressed on the latter, the girl sighed gently and parted her legs. I realised that she too was sexually excited. Then I raised myself up, put my knees between my companion's thighs and tried to put my penis in her vagina. After some groping and a few failures I finally succeeded. While I was performing the act as best I could, she stayed immobile and silent. Only the sighs she uttered from time to time and the few movements she could not hold back told me that she was taking part in what was going on. After the act I lay down besides her without a word being said on either side.

In the morning when we woke up we had intercourse in the same way, I active, she silent with her eyes closed. Only this time when I kissed her breasts, she responded by kissing me on the head. Silently I went back to my own room to get dressed. During the day I was free to talk to the student, but we spoke about things that did not matter. We spent two more nights in precisely the same fashion, having sex with hardly a word being uttered. Then she left for Moscow and a few days later I went with my father to Kiev where I returned to school.

My third year at school was very different from the previous years. In thrall to endless erotic excitement, tired out by my precocious excesses, my system quickly weakened and I became lazy. I would be overcome in class by an irresistible urge to fall asleep. The only things in books that interested me were the erotic pages. I was not able to search for such pages in the Bible, since there is hardly a house in Russia - and that includes most bookshops - where you can find a Bible, but I devoured French novels which my parents left lying about - especially Zola's novels which were by then in print:
The Curate, L'assommoir, Abbe Mouret's Mistake, Nana, Pot-bouille
. Between the ages of twelve and fourteen these novels were my favourite reading, but I managed to get hold of many other naturalistic or licentious French works, eighteenth century authors &c.

The school syllabus no longer had any attractions for me and bored me to tears. I stopped being the great Latin scholar I had hitherto seemed and did not even get on with Greek which we began in the third class. My name no longer shone on the 'golden table'. My little friend of earlier years, whose innocence I did not upset with any sexual revelations, out of God knows what scruples, took my place in the ranking of pupils, and from term to term my position among the pupils' names arranged in order of merit came tumbling down. My parents could not work out what lay behind the change, nor could my teachers. My health was undermined. I got thin, had headaches, was sick and often caught bronchitis and colds - which had never happened to me before. I did now have friendly relationships, preferably however with boys I supposed to be sexually experienced. My own experiences too in that period were many. I also had frequent nocturnal emissions from the age of twelve; they came with erotic dreams. But let us keep to chronological order.

I was not quite twelve when I entered the third class. My aunt had left Kiev and I no longer saw Olga. Our chambermaids did not look very frivolous, and so I had no sex for three or four months. As I did not masturbate, I was beginning in fact to calm down. But then we moved house and I made a new contact that threw me into an erotic fever. I was by then over twelve.

Our new neighbours on the same floor were Jews of humble origin who had got rich and showed off their new-found luxury. They had a son about my age who was also at the grammar school but in the class just below mine, that is the second, and a daughter of thirteen or fourteen who went to the girls' grammar school. We would leave for school at the same time each morning; only I went on foot, for my parents did not keep horses in town, whereas the little Israelites went by pony trap. Our parents did not know each other, but the children, as we were off to school one morning, offered me a lift in their trap. Then Ilya (which is what I shall call the Jewish boy) came to see me and his evening visits became regular, the pretext being to have the difficult points of Latin grammar clarified. Then I went to see him.

I was amazed by the luxury of Ilya and his sister Sara's life. Their parents did not just adore them, but, as often happens in Jewish families, had a kind of veneration for their progeny. Like most Jews they had an almost superstitious respect for intellectual work. Ignorant newly-rich, they sincerely admired children that went to grammar school and studied so many mysterious fine things there. So these children were household tyrants and had as much freedom as I did: nobody was allowed to disturb them when they shut themselves away in their rooms and they could receive any visitors they fancied. I often went to see them and told my parents, who likewise never got in the way of what I wanted, that we were doing our homework together. Actually, we did try to do our homework in the beginning, but soon our relationship took on a different character.

Sara was a marvellous child. She was as pink and bursting with health as Glasha, but she had much finer features, a more delicate-looking body. She had magnificent red hair, naturally frizzy, which made her face seem to be on fire, a fine straight nose, very black eyes, little milk-teeth and lips that were a trifle thick and sensual. Right from the start there was a sort of flirtation between us. Sara showed me her album and asked me to write some verse in it. One day Ilya told me in secret that he and his sister played with each other's 'pissers'. As was my habit I pretended to be naive.

The next evening, when her brother was there, Sara asked me whether I really was so naive that I did not know the difference between the sexes. She promised to show me what women were like and first of all asked me to show her my penis which she compared with her brother's. His was circumcised. Sara examined my foreskin with curiosity and pulled it over the glans with her fingers. Then she lay down on the sofa and let me examine her vulva. From then on we would often get together to amuse ourselves this way in the evening and sometimes, for instance on Sundays, during the day. Sara was a virgin: it was the first time I had seen a virgin's sexual organs, in particular a hymen. Sara did not want to lose her virginity and would not allow full intercourse, only intercourse on the outside,
in ore vulvae
(on the mouth of the vulva). Sometimes all three of us would lie down on our sides with Sara in the middle. While one of us tickled her anus with the glans of his penis, the other would rub her vulva with his penis. When my penis went the wrong way and pressed against her hymen, Sara would tug the dangerous organ away from that fragile place. During the act I loved to kiss the girl's fresh scarlet mouth, and I never tired of looking at her sexual organs. They were then for me - and still are in my imagination today - the incarnation of ideal beauty in a woman's natural parts. A very pronounced mount of Venus, podgy and chubby, elastic to the touch, was just perceptibly shaded by light golden down, through which you could see the pinky whiteness of her skin, whose fineness was marvellous. The plump labia majora revealed as they opened a little the richest shades of red, from pink to carmine and scarlet. The erect clitoris was pink and its firmness reacted elastically to finger pressure. The outer parts of the labia minora were also pink, but the groove that opened up between them was a magnificent blood-coloured crimson. Deeper in, you could see the mysterious shade at the entry to unknown regions, but if you widened the split far enough you could see the carmine disc of the hymen, pierced by two tiny holes. The many folds inside the genital opening were moist. They had a gracious harmonious shape and shone when the sunlight or the lamp struck them: this heightened the splendour of their vermillion colours.

Even today I have only to shut my eyes to see all this in my mind's eye, right down to the smallest detail. I was never able to appreciate Sara's nudity in its entirety, for I never saw her naked. She would lie down fully dressed on the sofa, lift her skirt, undo her drawers and all I saw of her exquisite bare body was the abdomen and the inside of her thighs. At that time she would not let me feel her bare burgeoning breasts.

Putting what Minna and Sofya had taught me to use, I offered to do cunnilingus to Sara. She was against it at first but ended by giving into my requests. After a taste of it, she liked this pastime better than coitus
in ore vulvae
. And you could see for a fact that this new method gave her more enjoyment. You only had to watch her face, to see her body contorting, hear her breathing and the shouts she could not help making. I could see her belly convulse and quiver, her abdomen twist and the chubby pad of her mount of Venus would be wrenched out of my mouth by the unintentional movements of her flanks. While I was sucking, licking and nibbling her clitoris and labia minora, her whole vulva would pulse and I saw the opening of the vagina get wider and close up in spasms. A viscous liquid would ooze from the orifice more and more copiously and would stream everywhere. Meanwhile the girl would throw herself about in a frenzy, wave her arms in the air, clench her fingers or grab whatever was within reach - my shoulder, my arm or her brother's arm which was next to me, or even his penis when it was exposed. Sometimes she would nearly suffocate me by clenching my head hard between her downy fragrant thighs; sometimes, however, she would open her legs wide and spread them out as far as she could, as if she wanted to split in two; sometimes she lifted them into the air, waved them about and put them over her head. She writhed so energetically that any moment her sexual organs could tear away from my mouth and I would have to find them again straight away. Her clipped utterances also proved how intensely the girl was enjoying herself.

Her brother learnt to do the same as I did. In return, she decided to rouse his penis with the tip of her tongue and masturbated him by hand. She offered to do the same to me, but I refused, since I had a panicky fear of anything resembling masturbation. I was happy with coitus
in ore vulvae
which I did not consider to be a sort of masturbation. As for practising cunnilingus, I liked doing it, above all because it enabled me to watch the girl's acute orgasm; it also gave me the direct thrill of intimately handling and looking so closely at these secret parts, that scarlet, gaping, pulsing vulva whose warm moist folds seemed to give it a sort of face, an expression of languid sweetness or inflamed desire. I am telling all this not for the pleasure of description, but to analyse my sensations exactly. Even the
taste
of sexual mucous was pleasant to my tongue and mouth. In fact, all rakes react the same way: they often say that there is no dish more tasty than those parts of a woman. A woman's mucous when she is enjoying herself (
qui jute
, as the French say) is just as palatable, despite its bitter salty taste, even if Aristophanes calls it (in
The Horsemen
)
ton droson apoptyston
(the loathsome dew). Once I took a teaspoon and collected some liquid from Sara's genital crack; as I masturbated the girl I swallowed this salty nectar with ecstatic delight. The smell of urine that I could detect when I passed my tongue around the urinary opening was, however, not nice, but I could smell it only at the beginning of the act and it soon disappeared, doubtless because of the plentiful sexual secretions which masked the traces of urine.

Sessions such as these could not happen very often. Sometimes in fact schoolfriends would come to see me and would keep me at home. Other times, frequently too, Ilya and Sara had visitors; but I was the only one of their friends they would have allowed to take part in their sex play and nothing compromising ever took place in front of anybody but me. In any case, although their parents did not usually come into the children's bedroom, the latter hardly ever dared amuse themselves sexually unless they were sure that they were alone in the house. (Servants did not count since it was easy, if need be, to refuse to open the door to them.) So they waited for evenings when their parents were out. This meant that we could only have our fun occasionally. Such were the pleasures I enjoyed with the two Jewish children during that school year. They themselves had been playing sex games long before they got to know me. A chambermaid who was now no longer there had initiated them into venereal pleasures.