Secret Lolita: The Confessions of Victor X (9 page)

We spent the holidays in my uncle's village, a place I had not seen for two years. But this time I went there a changed person, as experienced erotically as any adult. Now my cousin had someone who could understand the obscenities he had to say. And with the many household servant girls, farm girls, field girls I was plunged into a really Cytherean atmosphere. I wasted no time in working up relationships with most of the girls, and my cousin made things easier for me by helping with the initial approaches. He explained to me how to get anything you wanted from these strong viragos with small presents - a packet of hairpins, a fourpenny ribbon, sweets, a cake, even a loaf of sugar. Indeed, for offerings as derisory as these, the 'strong virgins' of the Ukraine really did let me look at and feel the most secret parts of their bodies. This could take place anywhere - in bedrooms, in barns, in stables, behind a mill, in bushes. The virgins would only let you touch them; those that were no longer virgins could not have been more willing to let you copulate.

I would go with my cousin and other young men to see them bathe in the river. I would bandy words and double meanings with them. They burst out laughing at any obscenity they heard. Once my cousin and I were crossing a room where a magnificent girl of seventeen or eighteen, a real personification of strength and health, with cheeks as red as peonies and breasts that pointed outwards, was bent double on her two spread-out legs, as massive as pillars, with her skirt tucked up to her knees so that you could see how white her legs were, was washing the floor. Not wasting a moment, my cousin approached the girl from the rear and grabbed a firm hold of her sexual organs under her skirt. The girl shouted out and tore herself away from her assailant's hand; she was not angry but laughing. The fact is that the country girls were used to liberties like that. The most daring familiarities were allowed in the big manor kitchens where dozens of servants and working girls ate their meals or had tea with dozens of grooms, watchmen, field workers &c. and where I often went now that I was egged on by erotic fervour. The usual talk was a running fire of obscenities and the gestures were as bad as the language. For example I saw a youth brandishing an extinguished brand that had burnt into a phallic shape at the girls and asking them whether they would like their lovers to be endowed with a tool as impressive as that. None of the girls looked shocked; they were all laughing until they nearly cried. Turnips, cabbage or horseradish stumps were all pretexts for similar jokes.

Sometimes when a girl was busy with the stove fire or was dealing with the samovar on the ground, a young man, if the fancy took him, would grab her from behind, stick his belly against her buttocks (though not taking his penis out or rucking up her skirt of course) and would simulate the movements of coitus
a recto
, saying that he was a stallion or a bull mounting a mare or a cow. These comparisons did not offend the good-looking country girl, who thought the joke fun as the rest of the audience did.

As I said before, the girls and youths (
parubki
) bathed naked very near each other. Sometimes the boys brought horses with them to wash and several times I saw one of these bathers quite naked, ramming the animal's rump with his belly and his sexual organs, mimicking the movements of coitus, moreover in front of the girls who were likewise naked and who called him a pig, though they were enormously entertained by the charade. I have even heard of a boy of nineteen who really did have intercourse with a mare during one of these regular performances, while the girls watched him do it; they insulted him but stayed right to the end of the act.

In the servants' kitchen (the kitchen where the servants' and workers' meals are cooked is called the 'black' kitchen) I often saw young men wrestling with girls for fun or as a joke; when a young man managed to to turn the girl over and lay her on the ground, he never failed to lie down belly to belly on the girl he had defeated in the wrestling match and, although he never unbuttoned himself, to imitate the postures and movements of copulation to all-round amusement. Children watching these scenes shook with laughter: they very well understood what the simulated act stood for. I have been told that sometimes when there were feasts in this kitchen and people were warmed up by the free vodka distributed by the master or the farm managers (a holiday is not a holiday for a Russian peasant if it has not been wetted with copious libations of vodka), the men went in for rather more reprehensible tricks. They would grab some good-looking girl from behind when she was not looking, pull her off the bench she was sitting on, turn her over and hold her upside down for a time with her legs kicking about in the air. The ordinary women in Russia do not, as I have mentioned, wear knickers and everyone could feast their eyes on the victims' most secret charms. But even the victims were not angry for long with their attackers, so coarse were their morals.

There were also a lot of odd things going on in the village. Once my cousin and I burst into a public place (a wash-house I think it was) and I saw a young coach driver having sex on the floor with one of our servant girls. "Hey, what are you doing there?" my cousin shouted. "We're having it off," replied the driver, using the crudest term, of course, for the act and calmly going on with his work until my cousin forced him to let go and get up by kicking him in the rear. The servant girl let down her skirts and went off without seeming to be the least bit abashed. I knew too that the evening parties in the village (
vechernitsy
, 'vespers' in Ukrainian) were get-togethers in the evening and at night for unmarried girls and young men, during which the fair sex would work at spinning, embroidery &c. and the young swains make music, sing and try to make the ladies laugh with funny stories, and that they ended in a special way: people waited for the lights to go out when the oil ran dry - and sometimes hurried the process up - then each man put the girl next to him on his lap and masturbated her while she in turn masturbated him in the dark. After that everyone went home, pleased with the 'vespers'. To illustrate the coarseness of country morals, I can recount an episode from our village history. I was not a witness of this episode: I arrived at the village a few weeks later, but I can vouch for its authenticity since it happened in public, officially as it were.

There was a lad of twenty among the young peasants; the girls spread a rumour that he only had one testicle. There was no end to the joke; no sooner had he turned up to a party where there were girls than they ran away from him as if he had the plague and shouted at him "one-ball" (
odnoyaits
, monorchid, from
odno
, one and
yaitso
egg or testicle). He was heartbroken and complained to the village court of slander. 67 This court was a
volostnoy sud
, a local court often made up of quite illiterate peasants so that the whole procedure is oral, and yet this court can often impose cruel thrashings, not just small fines or a few days' detention. It dealt with peasants' petty crimes and minor disputes between villagers. The decisions reached by this rough and ready tribunal for basic policing were not guided by written law in any case: as in the East the judges' whim was the final arbiter and decisions were often swayed by offerings in the form of a bucket (
vedro
, two and a half gallons) of vodka from plaintiffs or defendant. Our village's
volostnoy sud
took the young man's misfortune to heart. The guilty girls (there were more than twenty of them) were summoned to come up before the judges who pronounced the following sentence: each one of the guilty girls was to be brought in on her own, one after the other, into the public room where the judges and the plaintiff were, to put her hand in the latter's trousers, make sure that he had two testicles, not one, and receive two slaps on the buttocks from the plaintiff's hand. And so it was done. The public room was full of people, the girls were brought in one after the other and after they had been made to put their hands down the plaintiff's flies they were asked: "Has he got two testicles or one?" The girl had no alternative: she had to answer, "He's got two." After this they were taken up to the head of the tribunal (
volostnoy starshina
) who sat on a bench, his back to the wall; they had their heads placed on the judge's knees as in the game of 'hot hands'. At the same time their skirts were lifted up from behind, so that the victim's pose revealed not just her buttocks but her 'charms' as well, as they used to say in the eighteenth century. At any rate their behinds were turned to the public. Then the young man who had been slandered gave two resounding slaps to their solid cheeks. I heard all these details from the lips of those who actually took part in this comedy.

Among the vast number of my uncle's servants there was a girl of thirteen or fourteen called Yevdochka (diminutive of Yevdokiya), a driver's daughter. If I had not known this specimen of country morals, I might have thought that all the many young female characters in Zola's novels who stand for pure animality and sheer personification of sexual instinct (like la Mouquette in
Germinal
) had nothing to do with reality and were merely poetic symbols. But Yevdochka was a very good example of this type. At any hour of day or night, except perhaps when she was asleep, she thought only of sex. Like a bitch on heat she roamed anywhere she might meet a male on his own and did not care whom she abandoned herself to, child or old man. She was even accused of bestiality. Once my cousin and I met her with a girl friend of her age in a brushwood thicket. The two girls lifted up their skirts and showed us their vulvas, spreading their legs and encouraging us with words and gestures to have intercourse. But my cousin told me that Yevdochka could give one a disease and we held out against the temptation. I do not know if there was a good reason for my cousin's fears: all the young men of the village had sex with Yevdochka and nevertheless I never heard of them catching anything.

One morning before sunrise my cousin took me to a public place, a sort of barn where the young work-girls slept. It was high summer: as it was very hot, the girls slept in just their shifts on straw mattresses on the ground with no bedclothes at all. There were about twenty of them and they were fast asleep, like anyone young, full of health who has done a whole day's hard physical labour. Most of them wore shifts which had rucked up or got pulled about while they slept and you could see bare thighs and bellies. Some were asleep on their backs with their legs apart. We could take a close look for as long as we wanted at the brown vulvas with the pinkish crack, the hairy mounts of Venus. There were locks of genital hair of all different colours. I remember one pubis covered with an auburn or rather a russet mop: it made a particular impression on me. All this female nakedness gave out a very strong smell. Though very aroused, we did not dare wake any of them up and we quietly slipped away without the girls' suspecting our early-morning visit.

My cousin had sexual relations with a great many servant girls, farm-workers, young peasant girls. Some nights a servant girl would come to his bedroom, where I had my bed too, and would not be in the least put out by my presence. The bucolic simplicity of their morals! On nights like those I could not get to sleep: I listened to the kissing, the bed creaking or other characteristic coital noises which would start up again when my cousin told the girl dirty stories and
tentigine rumpebar
(I was bursting with lechery) as the Romans used to say.

I too, as I said, often had sex with the country girls and the servants:
in ore vulvae
with virgins and in the normal way with those that had already been deflowered. They were strong females, marvellously strapping, and exuded health and animal vitality. They had red cheeks, enormous behinds, firm jutting breasts, legs like Doric columns, muscular, powerful vulvas. They made the most of their youth and you saw them rolling about with boys in every ditch, barn, under every mill, in any corner with enough room for a couple to embrace. If they got pregnant they resorted to abortifacients (all the girls knew what rye ergot was for) or had themselves aborted by old women who knew how to use the instruments expertly. People were in any case very easy-going about weaknesses of the flesh. For example everyone knew of a widower who had got his two daughters pregnant, one of them under age; it did no damage to the general esteem in which he was held.

To complete the picture I ought to mention that during those holidays there was also a married woman, a landowner and neighbour, who thought I needed sexual 'enlightenment'. She thought I was innocent and explained what I had long known; she got me to have sex with her in a summerhouse in her garden.

I was just under thirteen when I returned to Kiev as a fourth-former in grammar school. From the scholastic point of view this year was even more disastrous than the last for me. I just could not concentrate on academic books which I was anyway finding more and more boring. My marks got worse and worse. I was among the worst pupils in the class. My parents accounted for my failure by saying that I was too young (thirteen to fourteen) for the fourth class; however there were several others my age in the class. Whatever the cause, that year my class and examination marks were too low for me to pass into the next class and I had to retake the year - something I had once considered to be very shameful. So I spent my fourteenth year still in the fourth class and I was nearly fifteen when I went into the fifth. I not only had to retake the fifth year as well, I could not pass the tests for acceptance into the sixth. (I was by then nearly seventeen.) As one cannot stay three successive years in the same class in Russia. I had to leave grammar school. I was put into a so-called
real
(technical) school (a grammar school without Latin or Greek), but there too I failed. Some way was found of cramming me for an examination which got me back into the classical grammar school - which was more important, since it gave you more right - in the sixth class. I was then eighteen. But I failed the examination for passing into the seventh. I was then about nineteen. I tried to retake the sixth, but my marks were still so poor that I lost heart and left school for good in the middle of the year. I was nineteen and a half. All those years my health had been rather bad and I was often off school because of chest illnesses or neuralgia, and that did not contribute to academic success. At the age of seventeen I lost my mother who had a baby late in life and died of puerperal fever she caught thanks to the obstetrician's negligence: he had not disinfected properly after visiting a woman patient. The baby also died shortly afterwards.