Secret Lolita: The Confessions of Victor X (8 page)

Through grammar school I had other liaisons. A friend in class told me that he had sex with schoolgirls who came to his house. His parents lived out of Kiev and he boarded with a family who gave him no supervision whatever. When he went home from school he would pick up schoolgirls to take with him when, normally, there was no one in the house: his bedroom had a separate entrance. Anyway, from a Russian moral standpoint, there was nothing shocking in schoolgirls' coming to visit a schoolboy alone or in groups. Nobody would have had anything to say about it. He made friends with one of these girls just as she was coming out of grammar school, literally in the street. He slipped a pornographic note into her hand with drawings to match; the next day, after school, she agreed to come to his house. My friend assured me that several boys in our class had liaisons of the same kind. He invited me to call by when he had girls with him, that is straight after school.

So I got to know three schoolgirls of about our age at his place. After kissing and touching, two of them got on their backs across the bed, their buttocks on the edge, their legs hanging over and spread out. We had intercourse with them, standing up between their legs. The girl I copulated with had less pretty sexual organs than Sara's: her mount of Venus and labia majora were not so chubby and the colour of her genital opening was not so striking a purple. Nevertheless inserting my penis in her vagina gave me a feeling of contentment. Then I noticed something that awakened my ardour: her vagina gripped my penis tightly like a glove, and consequently her mount of Venus followed all the penile movements, rising and falling in unison. While I was working hard, her whole genital mound was pulled by the penis and jogged like mad: it seemed to dive and slip in all directions over the pubic bone.

The third schoolgirl was a virgin and would only allow coitus
in ore vulvae
and cunnilingus. I believe another schoolfellow deflowered her a few months later. This girl had one peculiarity: when I sucked her clitoris, which was long and well-developed, and then let go, the end of her clitoris did not merge with the genitals now that they were closed - it went on sticking out like a wart, with a rebellious look to it, from the brown labia majora. Other girls had a clitoris which stuck out for only a few seconds when you let go of the end between the closed labia majora and then shrank and withdrew into the genital groove and vanished.

These relationships went on at more or less irregular intervals until the school year ended. Other schoolgirls with smooth or hairy pubes came to be worked over by the boys. Sometimes we got a party together of several boys and girls and each boy had a number of girls one after the other, for as long as his strength held out. This took place sometimes in the schoolboys' bedrooms, sometimes on trips to the forests around Kiev, in particular in an abandoned wooden house in the middle of the forest.

I mentioned that my favourite reading then was French novels. Russian novels were never erotic enough for me. Russian literature was very chaste at that time; it has changed a lot since then, especially in recent times. As far as the handling of sex is concerned, there is as big a difference (only in the opposite direction) between Russian literature of twenty to thirty years ago and today as between English literature of Queen Anne's day and that of the Victorian period. We have writers today delighting the public like Artsybashev, who take pornography as far as the most lewd French naturalist and decadent writers. That was not always so. Good literature used to be ascetic.

I also read scientific books, or chapters from them, on the anatomy and physiology of the sexual organs with great sexual excitement, when I could get hold of them. One item of reading especially gave me the strongest erotic experience. It was an article published in a medical journal, which fell into my hands at the house of a friend of my father's who was a doctor. While the grown-ups were chatting in the drawing room, I was reading the medical review feverishly in the doctor's study. It was a transcript of a trial that caused a big sensation in Russia then. An eccentric young woman, daughter of a very rich merchant, killed a man from good society - as was she - with the complicity of her debauched companions in a Moscow brothel. The girl was less than twenty and a homosexual, and the motive for her crime was jealousy: she wanted vengeance for the loss of her female lover. What transpired from the trial was that this rich heiress who was wallowing in luxury used to dress up as a man and tour the most wretched and the most opulent Moscow brothels in the company of rich young men. That was the background to the trial,
if I can trust my memory
, for I have never come across anything in print about it since. But I recall very precisely that the transcript published in the medical review gave a complete rendering of the expert medical evidence. Among other things, the girl's sexual organs were described, in fuller detail than anything I have seen since: the most minute item was shown either in graphic terms or with exact measurements in centimetres and millimetres &c. When I read this I was aroused by thinking how these measurements must have been taken, how they had arrived at the length of the clitoris, the dimensions of the labia minora in different places, the depth of the vagina; I imagined the experts evaluating the nuances of the vulva's colour at different stages. The following phrase sent me off into a dreamworld: "the patient's sensuality is revealed by the great excitability of the labia minora and the clitoris which both became violently erect at the slightest touch". As the girl was no virgin, there were details of what she felt, on her own testimony, in normal coitus and during homosexual intercourse. Essentially, reading this was for me like taking a powerful aphrodisiac.

For someone of my type, really, the strongest sexual arousal comes from the imagination. Mental images have as much or even more effect on me than physical sights. But this is not altogether auto-eroticism: shut me up behind closed doors and my sexual obsessions will soon vanish. To operate erotically my imagination always needs an outside stimulus: the sight of a woman's sexual organs, looking at an obscene drawing, pornographic reading, lewd talk. It is not enough for me to be sitting next to a pretty and attractive woman: the sight of the prettiest and most charming woman, if she is dressed decently and looking respectable,
never
sparks off a desire to have intercourse with her and
never
gives me an erection. If my venereal appetite is to be awoken, then I have to see the woman behaving provocatively, to hear her talking lasciviously, to see naked flesh or - even if I am still under the spell of erotic reading matter - to have an obscene conversation
just beforehand
. Old erotic memories stop arousing me, lewd reading generally leaves me cold unless it is new to me, that is if it is
dated
. At first the same piece of lewdness will excite me even if I re-read it several times without a break; after a few days the impact is blunted. Thus I can remain for a long time in a state of complete sexual neutrality; then a sensual image which happens to come from outside (it is absolutely vital for it to come from outside and not to be produced from my own mind) will suddenly come and disrupt the balance and inflame my carnal ardour. I do not know how far these psychological predilections are abnormal or morbid: it needs a specialist to judge.

Just as sadistic or masochistic tendencies, even in their mildest form, are subjectively incomprehensible to me, so I have never had any real homosexual feelings. All the same I do remember at twelve or thirteen the sight of a class friend the same age as me giving me a slight sexual kick. He had very fine skin and naturally curly hair and was very like a girl. I am sure that is why being close to him gave me pleasure; I liked pinching his slightly plump neck or putting my arm round his waist. I never thought about his sex nor whether carnal relations with him might be possible; I never even wished to see him naked, and yet his image sometimes came to mind in my erotic dreams. I would dream of a naked part of his body (not sexual organs but his arms or shoulders for example), of embracing him and kissing his cheeks, and this would end with nocturnal emissions. This is the only memory in the whole of my life that has anything to do with homosexuality. In any case we never exchanged any sweet nothings and made no show of any
special
friendship. I think that the only reason for my erotic feelings was the fineness of the child's skin. Little boys' genitals leave me quite unmoved and a grown man's arouse my disgust; I would never agree to put my hand on them.

Towards the end of that school year I had three experiences with grown up women. There was a young married woman, a rather pretty brunette who often came to see us, alone or with her husband. One day my mother told me to take back a book she had borrowed from this woman. The lady kept me rather a long time, talked to me about literature and made me promise to return the next evening to read some novels together, but to say nothing to my parents about this. "My husband," she said, "goes to the club in the evenings, I'm bored on my own and reading makes my eyes tired. You can read out aloud and I'll listen."

I have already mentioned that I was allowed to go out as I wanted; so I left home at the agreed time, just telling my parents that I was off to see a friend, and went to the lady's house. She set me down next to her on the sofa and gave me a novel by Goncourt to read. When I got to an erotic page I felt a little embarrassed and my voice trembled. Then the lady stopped me and began asking me questions, to see whether I understood the erotic allusions properly. As I always did in such cases, I pretended to be ignorant. This seemed to charm my partner and she joked gently about my being naive for my age (I was twelve and a half). She told me I ought to have a little girl friend by now and offered to show me what women were like and how to make love. She kissed me on the mouth, then unbuttoned my trousers and took hold of my erect penis. Enthusing about its size, asserting that it was very big for my age (in fact my sexual organs have always been very large), she kissed it and told me: "You've got such a pretty tool and you don't know how to use it. See how hard and hot it is; that proves that its owner already wants a woman, even if he doesn't know it. With a thing like that you can make a woman happy."

I went on as if I did not understand. Then she explained more, describing copulation in lewd terms, lifted her skirt and showed her bare legs and her sexual organs which she got me to feel. She had no knickers on. Half reclining, she pulled me onto her and used her hand to insert my penis in her vagina. We had very voluptuous intercourse. When it was over she told me again not to talk to anyone about what we had done, and added that she had done it only because she was thinking of my welfare, to keep me off onanism and bad women. After that we had a few other
tête-à-tête
which always ended with copulation.

The other two experiences happened with pupils from the top classes of grammar school, girls of seventeen and eighteen who also were charitable enough to "enlighten" me. I was visiting one of them, we were talking about horses and I pretended I did not know the difference between stallions and geldings. The girl was amazed, asked me whether I knew how babies were made and when she detected my ignorance laid me on my back, took my erect penis out of my trousers and, raising her skirt, lay on me and stuck my penis inside her belly. Then she rode me with rapid movements of her belly and thighs until she had an orgasm which almost made her faint. While she was copulating, she kissed me on the mouth
more columbarum
(with French kisses): that was the first time I had sampled that pleasure. I still remember what it felt like to have my penis squeezed hard and tugged by the girl's muscular vulva. At her climax her face went quite cadaverous. I never had the opportunity to have sex again with that young woman.

The other school girl talked to me about sex the very first time we were alone together. I played the booby as was my habit. She described the difference between a man's and a woman's organs, showed me how the venereal act was performed and, when I begged her to, showed me her genitals. However I never managed to get her to let me have coitus. She said she was a virgin and would not even let me have coitus
in ore vulvae
. But she did let me feel and tickle her vulva with my fingers and even put my finger in the
vestibulum vulvae
as well as stroke her bare breasts. I could see that all this was exciting her, as was proved not just by the expression on her face but by the fact that her genital opening, which I let my finger explore, was all wet, warm and quivering. We saw each other quite often to have the same game. Each time I had to beg and implore her for a long time to show me her genitals. After several refusals she would yield to my begging and sit on the edge of a piece of furniture - a bed, a settee, a trunk, an armchair - lift up her skirt and spread her legs. I would kneel down to see better and would explore the genital opening with my fingers. But she never let me open it wide enough to put my finger far enough in to see or touch the hymen. She told me that a clumsy or rough movement could easily rupture that membrane. Nor would she let me masturbate her properly, that is by continuous rubbing: she would only put up with light, quick short touching. Then she would make me sit next to her and would play with my stiff penis, but without masturbating me - which I would not have stood in any case. Meanwhile I would stroke her bare breast and we would kiss on the mouth. These practices did not lead to my ejaculating, only to a pleasant erection. Every time I pleaded with her to let me have coitus, just coitus
in ore vulvae
, but she never would consent, any more than she would agree to being masturbated by mouth or tongue.

The holidays came. I was to be allowed to move to the next class (the fourth) only because my teachers made a lot of allowances for me and harked back to my past brilliance. In actual fact I had been fully preoccupied by eroticism and had done no work at all in the third class: my marks for the year were deplorable. But there was only a written examination for entry into the fourth year and I was saved by cribbing, which made it easier for the examiners to be forbearing, and in the end, by hook and by crook, I got the average mark I needed.