The Mammoth Book of International Erotica Read online

  Kurt asked, “Are you hungry? Do you want to eat with me? Willst du essen?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Warum nicht? Ich will fressen,” I added, replacing the verb “to eat” with the verb “to feed” (like an animal).

  Kurt burst out laughing and leaned over to clap me on the shoulder. His hand slipped down by my breast.

  “Aber du sprichst Deutsch sehr sehr gut. Wo hast du alles gelernt?”

  “Right here,” I lied, and pointed over my shoulder to the well-appointed little Intertruck sleeper. “Hier . . . hier habe ich alles gelernt.”

  Kurt was already sitting almost next to me on the seat and weighing my tits on his palm. “Du bist so fantastisch! Ist das möglich?”

  Everything is möglich, I thought for a second, everything is possible, you horny, half-assed imperialist bastard. But right now you’re going to have to wait, old boy, because first we’re going to discuss the terms.

  I rolled that word “terms” around on my tongue and suddenly felt myself endowed with a power and strength I’d never known before. I was a girl who had the price of admission.

  At a rest area Kurt got out and went around to the food pantry he had on the side of his cab. He returned with bread, a hunk of cheese, and a big salami such as I’d never seen in my life: like Hungarian salamis, only more tender . . . and the smell, God, how good it smelled! My stomach started rumbling.

  Then Kurt showed me how to lift my seat and haul out from under it a huge storage chest of drinks in cans; I almost went blind gazing at all the different brands and types of juices, colas, beers, and soft drinks. I reached for one completely at random and opened it, careful not to aim it at myself. When it popped and a couple of drops sprinkled on the floor, Kurt gave me a congratulatory smile, almost like the one you give a good doggy when he offers you his paw. Oh God, how gifted I am! I can even open a soda can!

  “I’d like to take you somewhere for lunch,” he said apologetically, “but I don’t know of any decent restaurant around here. And besides . . . in Czechoslovakia, actually anywhere in your Eastern Europe . . . well, I really don’t like to eat at any of the places, I like to bring everything with me . . . Otherwise, I get sick, and I can’t afford that, you see?”

  He said it as if apologizing, but at the same time it didn’t occur to him that he was speaking with someone who practically never saw anything but the local food . . . It never made me sick, I was used to it . . . It suddenly hit me that he saw Czechoslovakia as something like a pigsty – even though I, poor little piglet, was cute enough, he wasn’t about to stick his snout into the slop that sustained me from day to day. It could make him sick.

  The Southern Road, by the way, unlike the Northern Road, was definitely not lined with homey, warm and smoky, cozily bespattered taverns. On the Northern Road you could have a plate of gristly goulash for a fiver or soup for two crowns – and that’s what we ate up there. The Southern Road, on the other hand, was lined with a bunch of so-called first-class restaurants, where trying to eat for less than fifty crowns was considered to be in bad taste, and the waiters, all spoiled by hard-currency tips, would give the cold shoulder from on high to any piddling Czech who happened to stray in there. In short, the places on the Southern Road were specially designed for the filthy-rich drivers of Western semis.

  Kurt unwrapped the enticing yellowish-brown loaf of imperialist bread and a packet of margarine. He sliced the salami and cheese on a paper tablecloth stretched out across the space between us – and meanwhile I spread margarine on some slices of bread. Perfect teamwork . . . I didn’t hesitate for a second that day: I was hungry – And good manners? Ha! Why pretend, girl? After all, is this guy really worth being proper? Is anybody really worth all those contrived social lies?

  I started stuffing myself with salami and cheese. I was dimly aware that this was the best salami and cheese I’d tasted in my life – and the bread with margarine was substantially better than if it had been smeared with socialist “Fresh Butter of the Highest Sort”. I was pigging out without mercy, and Kurt, taking only an occasional bite, looked at me agreeably and hospitably, as if he were feeding his favorite dog. He injected, “Gut?”

  I nodded with my mouth full and bit off another piece of bread. I suddenly found myself in the middle of a dream. Or – if I had any inclination toward acting – I would say I found myself in the middle of a theater piece. I’d plunged headlong into one of the leading roles, without a clue as to how the whole drama (or was it a comedy?) began or ended. I hadn’t learned my lines, I wasn’t thinking in advance about what to say the next second, and there was no time to recall what I’d said a minute ago. I was standing in the middle of an unfamiliar stage – and yet it was as if sometime long ago I’d played this role a hundred times before. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say, what would happen or what the male lead would say to me. But a prompter (not the one who poked her head out occasionally from a booth below the stage, but one that was fixed somewhere in my head and was speaking to me directly), an unfamiliar prompter always assigned me just the right line or gesture at just the right moment to fit my part. I could see everything from the inside and the outside at the same time, evaluating my dramatic performances as I went and finding it satisfactory. As for the rest, the director and the audience were irrelevant. The main thing was that I was completely satisfied with my role, that I was comfortable in it; it seemed to me that it had been tailored especially for my body, that the author of the play had written it for me and nobody else but me, for this second Fialinka, for a worse and more cynical I. I knew that I would never have wanted this to be my everyday existence – but I had always known that such a person lived somewhere within me, and it was intoxicating to be able to act out my second I . . .

  Who am I now and who had I really been before? I had always been playing a part, I, the notorious seeker of truth. I had lied. I had deceived with my body . . . Was I deceiving any more than I had before? I adapted to Kurt, my fellow player, I made myself the way he wanted me to be: supple, just the slightest bit unlike the others, not stupid, but not overly clever either, with a superficial, suggestive wit . . . a promising girl, who’s easy to get to know.

  I stuffed myself with bread and margarine, greedily sucked at my fingers, still stained with Brno clay (my entire back and the back of my pants were caked with clay, but that made no difference at all at the time) – and the precise, perfect prompter in my head kept telling me what to do next. The prompter determined what I was to say, how to act, what faces to make, how to move my hands, my body. She decided what I was to think about. How I was to think.

  (You’re a shitty actress, Fial, Patrik used to say to me. You don’t know how to transform yourself, and if someone ticks you off, you insult him right to his face. If only you could just pretend a little for the pigs. Just the tiniest bit . . .)

  And now I could feel within myself dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of potentially possible lives, from which I’d chosen just one at some point long ago (and God only knows if it had even been I who’d chosen it). It was embarrassing: at some point I had developed into a compete personality, fully balanced according to all the psychiatric norms. But those ten thousand voices were arguing, fighting, and voicing their opinions inside my skull, and it was making my head spin. And those hundreds of complete, plausible, legitimate lives – each of which wanted to be lived – were locked in a battle for their rights. I was feeding on West German bread and perfect, moist salami, more delicately seasoned than any I’d ever tasted – and I allowed one of those other lives to grow and dominate. I gave it permission to be lived.

  No, this was no longer just a prompter. A little sadly, I closed my eyes (from the outside it looked like a blissful fluttering of the eyelids from tasting the salami) and plunged headfirst into metamorphosis.

  After a good lunch, one needs a rest, observed Kurt. He drew the curtains closed, and the atmosphere in the cab, heated by the summer sun, suddenly became erotically sultry. The curtains were red an
d turned my little German’s cheeks pink. The remains of lunch had long been carefully cleared away. After rolling them up in the paper tablecloth, this great lover of order had chucked the whole mess out the window and instructed me to do the same with the juice and beer cans. (A guy who had until then been sitting idly nearby in his little Skoda MB had immediately shot out to scoop up this rare prize.) A few last crumbs that had slipped out of the paper were now itching me under my back as this person pulled me over next to him and started sounding the depths with his hot, impatient hands. Actually, he wasn’t doing much sounding. He was quite sure of himself.

  I let him fondle my breasts a little – just through my T-shirt – and then I pulled away and got right to the point: “Ich tranche Geld.”

  (This time the prompter in my head seemed to have made a small mistake – even though Kurt had probably heard those words a million times, my tone didn’t quite fit the image of the average highway hooker. I said it too significantly with too much urgency: I was going to have to make a lot of money – as much as possible in hard currency – in order to get Patrik that wheelchair.)

  Kurt was a little taken aback. Just the tiniest bit. Then he reached into the glove compartment. He opened it a crack, just enough to stick his hand in (I wasn’t supposed to see everything he had in there, I realized), and groped around. He pulled out a large bottle of shampoo. “Willst du das? Willst du?” He turned the fine container around in his hands, like a shopkeeper displaying his merchandise. Look, little girl, how shiny! Now, how ‘bout a feel of those titties? The shampoo really did glimmer beautifully; it was tempting stuff: even from where I was sitting I could smell its sweet apple scent. “You have such beautiful, wonderful hair, Via . . . This will be a little something just for you . . . Just a sort of small gift. Out of friendship. Would you like it?”

  I shook my head – and I suddenly felt pretty awkward. I couldn’t explain my desire to him at all, why I needed cash. There was no time to go through the whole story about Patrik. He wouldn’t have listened – and if he had, he still wouldn’t have believed it. Any long-distance trucker could tell you that every single Czechoslovakian girl had, as a rule, all kinds of relatives and at least two dozen best friends, all on their deathbeds with terminal diseases.

  I didn’t feel like going into that whole story. He simply wasn’t worth it.

  (Oh yes, if we had met under different circumstances, I would have run up to your truck . . . refused your cigarettes . . . I would have used the formal Sie with you, at least at the beginning . . . and we might even have talked for real. Actually communicated. But I had already decided that my words were not going to communicate anything; I would use them only to weave a web, in which I had to catch at least a few West German marks. Perhaps we could even have gotten along, Kurt, you don’t look stupid. But you have been chosen, selected for this beginning, and you can’t change a thing about it now. Neither of us can. It’s impossible.)

  “Ich Brauche Geld,” I said. With shocking offhandedness (shocking to me), I pulled a Marlboro out of his pack – and without making even the slightest move to light it for myself, I waited for him to lean toward me with the lighter flame.

  “Do you understand?” I said through the cloud of smoke. “I don’t need your damn shampoo. If you want it . . . if you really want it . . . then I need cash.”

  With no less shocking offhandedness, I undid the button of my jeans and the fly unzipped by itself. (The majority of zippers of Czechoslovakian manufacture immediately leaped at such opportunities to unzip themselves – Patrik always claimed that this was one of the methods by which Czechoslovakian manufacturing enterprises contributed to the campaign to encourage population growth.) I undid the jeans sort of casually. They peeled away from my hips a little.

  “Wieviel?” he whispered. He was getting to the point.

  (It occurred to me later that this must have been monotonous for him, to say the same words to various girls. Veefeel? –this much some of them must have understood. Veefeel? Veefeel?)

  He didn’t look as if he wanted to pay very much, even though at the moment, by all appearances, he was longing to make love to me. Christ, why put it so delicately – I mean, he wanted to fuck, it was clear from certain physical signs. Impressively obvious physical signs, I couldn’t help thinking, and the not-for-profit part of my physical instinct had already begun looking forward to it, more or less. The commercial part asked, “How much can you give me?” and it repeated, “I really need cash, get it, I need cash.”

  This was a sport, a game, I was gradually realizing. Kurt was definitely not poor, and even though he probably picked up some girl on every trip he made through Czechoslovakia and had to pay for it, I was sure he could afford to hand me a couple of hundred marks. It was a sport: pick up as many girls as possible in the East and then outdo all the other drivers bragging about who nailed what girl for how little. Supposedly, the consensus among Western Intertruckers was that “Czech whores are good whores, the cheapest whores on earth” – and except for a few insignificant cases, the truckers tried not to spoil them . . . it was a sport. I remember this one Dutchman, a pretty nice guy, who once gave me a lift on the same route I was riding that day, but under different circumstances: he gave Fialinka Number One a lift, while today a newborn second Fialinka rode that highway. He told me how he and his friend once made a bet on who could score a Czech highway girl for the lowest price. I had one for five marks, the Dutchman said modestly. I couldn’t get breakfast for that in the Netherlands. But my friend, he outdid me. He bargained this one girl down to one mark, one mark, can you imagine, howled the Dutchman, and she wasn’t all that bad. True, she gave him the clap . . .

  I’d always laughed at those prices, determined more by location and nationality than by the quality and appearance of the girl. And sometimes I was ashamed for my countrymen – still, it’d simply never occurred to me just how damn personally those highway prices could affect me. “Verstehst du mich?” I repeated. “Ich tranche Geld.”

  And poor, dear Kurt (in different circumstances I certainly could have gotten along with him and, God knows, maybe even have made love to him on an entirely different philosophical basis), this Kurt stared at the strip of tummy below my T-shirt, sighed, and said, “Funfzig Marks? Ist das okay?”

  I thought it over, then nodded.

  The red curtains were made for lovemaking (that is, if this particular act didn’t call for a change of terminology); the conditions were almost brothel-like. The sun, already substantially lower in the sky, shone straight into the cabin and illuminated it perfectly. Redly. Shamefully. Maybe red actually is the only color for this, I said to myself, and I noticed the shadow of the fabric pattern on that other face; maybe only red light will do, because suddenly there was not a trace of shame in that cab.

  I’d never done anything like that in the cab of a truck during the day before; not that I needed darkness for such acts, quite the contrary; but that clear summer day outside somehow didn’t seem right. Actually, I just didn’t feel like it – even the other one, the buyer, didn’t show any special enthusiasm. Any real desire. He was simply buying himself a whore and he’d just closed the deal with her . . .

  He quickly kissed me: tongue thrashing in my mouth, a kiss supposedly passionate but in reality commercial and lukewarm. I guess he figured it was his duty.

  He hurriedly checked the swaying folds of the curtains, to make sure no prying eye could look in. “Gut,” he said, satisfied.

  Then he pulled down his shorts.

  The prompter in my head, that precise, intrusive internal voice, never let go of my hand. I knew exactly what to do, even though I’d never slept with anyone under these circumstances before: it had always started with my consciousness becoming pleasantly, mistily bedewed by someone I liked, so that the pleasurable feelings were always clear and unambiguous. But today I didn’t even know whether I liked Kurt or not – and it made no difference at all. I had always wanted to be warmly intoxicated with perfe
ctly mellowed (though perhaps only transient) desire; I would let myself dissolve into pleasant reverie – and the truckers who caught on were then allowed to come after me. Come into me. Pay a tender, longed-for, intimate visit. Always for a limited time.

  But now – now I saw everything with perfect and loathsome sobriety. Without ardor. Without desire. I examined the shameful lighting in our little cab without shame: everything had perfectly clear, absolutely sharp outlines; gone was that undulating, dewy translucence I needed so badly during my Nights of Distances, my Nights of Instants. I was stone sober and wide awake: I was an actor on the stage of my own private theater, and the role was translated by my lips and movements with perfect precision. It became the way I could seductively (like a typical easy woman) slip out of even that clay-caked T-shirt. It became the bowing of the head I used to inconspicuously avoid direct eye contact; the precise and realistic movements of body, hands, lips. I knew exactly what to do, although I had never behaved this way before. And he didn’t get it. How could he have guessed I had a prompter directing me from inside my defenseless-looking head? He surrendered himself to my hands and lips without the least sign of surprise. I did exactly what he anticipated. I did exactly what he expected and wanted, and if anything especially turned him on, it was that he didn’t have to ask for anything. He was not so experienced that I couldn’t surprise him. I was functioning. I didn’t try to assess him, to figure out whether I liked him at all. I paid attention only to myself – concertedly, critically. I did everything I could think of doing – and although I’d never studied what was most pleasing to (average) men, my intuition helped me. I kissed him deeply, a kiss no less clinging than the one he had given me before – and I let him sigh blissfully. Or semi-blissfully. It was an experienced and wet kiss, well calculated – but still just a sort of half-kiss. Everything was halves and semis . . . Our semi-rapport. Our semi-commercial exchange. The half-light. Semi-desire. And we were half-human. We were marionettes, waving our hands, moving, living according to the puppet master’s nimble fingers . . . And when that large, actually very large, and hard piece of flesh (Fleisch, it occurred to me, Fleisch) plunged into me, I realized that even this time I would feel pleasure. Semi-pleasure. I was making my acting debut on the stage of the Southern Road – and the sun had shifted slightly in the sky, so that the shameful lighting colored my rival’s face. (Yes, he was my rival, though not my enemy.) Perhaps all my old sins and loves returned to me and aroused me as I conscientiously, attentively (and no doubt artfully), rode him like a hobbyhorse, rocking and plunging. Men like it when they don’t have to exert themselves too much, reasoned the prompter in my head. And I was willing to provide good service for good money. I rocked and plunged, more vigorously and deeper, to the point where it hurt – and through the filter of perfectly sober thought I felt my eyes becoming moist and saw the same voluptuous moisture in my rival’s eyes and my thighs quivering with the first tendrils of pleasure that were beginning to spread from my crotch, after all. . . After all . . . ? No, there was no after all about it, this was the approach of a powerful, compact, nearly painful orgasm, its potent, absolutely unfeigned spasms gripping my rival like a velvet vice. I bit his shoulder and neck to stifle the moans and the scream that struggled to leave my throat. We weren’t the only ones parked at that rest area. I gripped him again and again in the velvet vise and looked with my misty but perfectly sober eyes directly into his; I observed how his face twisted, how he cried out and groaned and pulled me toward him, his nails digging into my buttocks, one hand on each, spreading them. He pulled me toward him and his face twisted with the animal grimace of genuine ecstasy: the quivering spread to my thighs and groin and down my legs . . . I knew the convulsion would come soon – and it would be a painful one – but payment had been made. I held on, and when I felt the hot liquid streaming into me like a firehose into a burning house, I calmly realized how perfectly my prompter had everything planned: these were my safest days of the month . . . Soon the convulsions stopped in my thighs, replaced only by a trembling exhaustion, and my rival, or sexual partner, was still quivering too. He was overcome. And lying next to him afterward, tired, trembling, my prompter did not forget to speak up and show me precisely how to place my hand on his heaving shaggy chest so that it would seem intimate without applying too much pressure – though, of course, this meant nothing at all. I was still trying to catch my breath in the sultry atmosphere of the shamefully lit cab. That was good, solid lovemaking, it occurred to me.