Eighty Days Amber (Eight Days)

by Jackson, Vina

  I couldn’t even pretend we became close friends. At best, from the advantage of her sixteen months seniority and the fact her breasts were already growing, she tolerated me, found my presence convenient as a messenger, factotum and facilitator. Luba, junior assistant when it came to anything illegal or forbidden, like smuggling cigarettes into the dormitory or concealing other’s banned make-up under her mattress – that was me. My early training in criminality . . .

  A few years into my time in St Petersburg, Zosia fell pregnant. She was seeing a boy from the physics institute, and I would, of course, cover for her absence on the occasion of her forbidden assignments. She was only sixteen at the time. When she was found out, the process was decisive. One day she was here, and the next day she wasn’t. Thrown out of the school and shipped back like a dirty parcel to her family near Vilnius. We were told that there had been a grave illness in her family necessitating her return home, but we knew better, we knew the truth.

  Almost two years later, in my final year at the School of Art and Dance, just as I was thinking that when I graduated I would take up a place in the corps de ballet in one of the city’s lesser dancing troupes, I received a brief letter from Zosia out of the blue. She’d had a little boy, named Ivan, and was now also married to an older man who worked in the local state council. She said she was happy and enclosed a photograph of her family. It had been taken in a garden where the trees looked like skeletons and even the grass was sickly green. Zosia by then was approaching nineteen, but to me she already looked like an older woman, at least years older than she actually was, eyes sunk, hair dull, the sparkle of her youth gone for ever.

  That was the day I swore to myself that I would neither marry nor have children.

  During those years, we had our normal classes in the morning: Russian grammar, Russian literature (my favourite), arithmetic and later mathematics and geometry, history, geography, civic duties and others I daydreamed through with arduous distraction. Our afternoons saw us learning, rehearsing, practising and dancing at the school. We each had three dancing outfits, one to be used only for actual performances, when the ballet piece we had been working on for months was finally allowed to see the light of day at a gala performance. I was never given a solo and it looked as though I would always be a baby swan in the fluttering ensemble of the corps de ballet. Though I felt more like a flouncing duck. Oh, how I hated Tchaikovsky!

  Ballet classes extended to the Saturday, so the only free day we were granted was the Sunday, but then most Sunday mornings were occupied cleaning our clothes, ironing, darning and bringing the dormitory back to tidiness, which left only Sunday afternoon as truly our own. Mostly we attended the local cinema house and the nearby ice-cream parlour. And had the opportunity to meet boys, before our curfew: 8 p.m. for the under fifteens, 9.30 for the older girls. The curfew was strictly enforced, and any defiance or breaking of the rules was always punished by a loss of weekend privileges.

  Boys . . .

  How could I not become interested in them, living for years on end – and teenage years do feel as if they last for ever – with seven women, a world of sly confidences, tall stories, raging hormones and peer envy? We monitored each other with the fierceness of hawks, purring with curiosity, brewing jealousy as if there was no tomorrow. Who was the prettiest, the tallest, the one whose breasts developed faster? Some concealed the onset of their first periods, while others proclaimed them loudly to all and sundry. I was no ugly duckling in their midst, the orphan from the Ukraine. I was not the tallest, the most opulent, or the first or last to bleed, but in my head I always knew I was special. Realised that, unlike my fellow students, I had ambitions to see the world while all they could think of was the immediate future, some form of academic success and the prospects of a good match. Everything in my surroundings whispered to me that there was more to life than this.

  Sex . . .

  Another popular topic of conversation during the dark nights in a girls’ dormitory. An endless chatter that extended to dressing rooms, rehearsal rooms, shower areas and the red-brick wall at the back of the building, which we knew none of the staff ever bothered patrolling in earnest and where all of us would take turns to smoke when, by hook or by crook, we got our hands on American cigarettes.

  Being one of the youngest, I became a voyeur in the house of lust. During those years, all my dormitory companions flowered but, despite all the ballet classes and arduous exercises I was prescribed, I initially found it difficult to shed the puppy fat of my childhood. They would all say that I had a lovely face, but my body was slow in emerging from its cocoon. And so, in the communal showers, I stood like a spy, the water dripping down my body, endlessly watching, envying the other girls and the way their hips curved, their breasts hung, their arses spread, while I was still just a pack of bones surrounded by flabby skin, lacking definition and grace.

  Oh, they talked a lot after the lights were out, about the boys they had met and the ones they would meet, and the things they would do. Silently, I listened, trying to distinguish the truth from the lies, sometimes shocked to my core, at other times burning inside with every bit of taboo knowledge that filtered my way. Always confident that one day I would join their ranks. Become an adult, become a woman.

  The ice-cream parlour on Lugansk Avenue was the place where we hung out, an old-fashioned relic from the Stalinist years. On nine visits out of ten, all they could offer was vanilla flavour, and even then it wasn’t natural and left a bitter chemical aftertaste in the mouth, but the two old babushkas who ran it, on behalf of the State of course, did not mind us girls lingering there for hours on end, exchanging scurrilous gossip, swapping make-up tips, meeting the guys from out of town who traded in nylons and often pressured the older girls into stolen kisses, not in lieu of payment – as that was always inescapable – but almost as a tip that guaranteed they would return another time and consent to sell us stockings that were unavailable outside the black market.

  And then, as we got older, some of the girls began to boast of the fact they had granted the men more than just a kiss.

  I couldn’t afford nylons anyway so the whole subject was academic, but from the time of my first period, every time I visited the ice-cream parlour on Lugansk, I think I blushed as a curious buzz raced through my lower stomach and my imagination ran wild. It also made the taste of the ersatz vanilla palatable.

  The year after Zosia’s sudden departure, the girl occupying the nearest bed to mine was a girl from Georgia called Valentina.

  Valya was a wild one, always getting into trouble, not so much out of any inherent sense of evil but mostly out of mischief and provocation. She was the one who instructed me in the art of giving blow jobs, which she insisted men liked and provided us girls with a direct path to their hearts or, as I discovered later, their loins. She kept on joking that I would never be a true Russian woman until I knew how to suck a man’s cock. She even stole bananas from the kitchens on the rare occasions our esteemed Cuban friends shipped boatfuls of bananas over to the motherland in exchange for the moral support we were providing them with, according to the newspapers and the Central Committee.

  Initially I was more interested in the blissful taste and consistency of the bananas than in their shape, but Valya insisted I practice for evenings on end until she pronounced I was ready to do the deed.

  His name was either Boris or Serguey. I still can’t recall his features in much detail, or his name. Because after Boris (or Serguey) came Serguey (or Boris) a few days later, as I quickly became a recidivist. He studied – well, they both did – at the nearby Technical Institute. I was sixteen and I guess he was just a year or two older. Valya had engineered our meeting, advertising the fact I was willing and, no doubt, pocketing a few roubles for the service. We met at the ice-cream parlour. I remember it was a day when they had additional flavours, and I chose to sample the wild strawberry alongside the classic chemical vanilla. He paid. Later, we walked hand in hand to the red wall behind my schoo
l and Valya acted as a lookout. He undid the belt circling his thin waist and pulled his frayed corduroy trousers down to his knees. His underwear was halfway between white and grey. He looked me in the eyes. He seemed even more terrified than I was. I gingerly extended my hand down to his crotch and took hold of his penis through the cheap cotton. It felt soft, limp like a piece of cheap meat. He froze. For a moment, I suddenly didn’t know what to do next, however much Valya had rehearsed me in preparation for this moment.

  Then I remembered. I got down on my knees. The ground was cold. I pushed the material aside and saw a man’s cock for the first time. The spectacle was both frightening and fascinating. It was not what I’d expected. Smaller, maybe. I took a deep breath. A musty smell reached my nostrils, the smell of man.

  I now took Boris’s (or was it Serguey’s?) cock in my hand. It jerked. I could feel his pulse through it.

  I opened my mouth, steadied it, and presented his cock to my lips.

  I extended my tongue and first licked his stem, and then traced the vein downwards to his balls sack, something Valya had recommended should he not be hard at first sight.

  Again, a tremor coursed through his penis.

  Finally, I took a deep breath and placed the mushroom-like head of the cock inside my mouth.

  Within seconds, before I could suck, lick, grip or anything, I felt it growing, filling me.

  It was a revelation.

  As my lips took a firmer hold on the quickly hardening cock, I felt its smooth solidity, its sponge-like, resilient texture.

  He was moaning, even when I did nothing.

  My mind was geared to overdrive, storing the experience, noting the sensations, dissecting the conflicting emotions. It was like entering a whole new world.

  But the moment barely lasted for more than a minute before Boris (or was it Serguey?) brutally withdrew from my mouth and spurted a white stream of ejaculate across my chin and the top half of my dress. He looked at me quickly, mumbled an apology and pulled up his trousers. He turned and fled, leaving me on my knees like a supplicant, my mouth still open, my mind still abuzz.

  ‘So how was it?’ Valya asked. ‘Exciting?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I told her truthfully. ‘It was interesting, but it all happened too fast. I’d like to try again.’

  ‘Really?’ Valya said.

  ‘I don’t think I was doing it wrong,’ I added. ‘Maybe it was him.’

  The next morning when I was brushing my teeth, I took a long hard look at myself in the mirror and I saw a new person. The child had gone. I finally looked into the eyes of a woman. Now, I know the transformation does not take place overnight, but it was as if a metaphorical bridge had been reached and crossed, triumphantly conquered.

  I realised that I had achieved a distinct sort of power over the young man’s cock and I was the one who had enjoyed the sensation most, contrary to expectations and tradition.

  The second one, who could have been Serguey, was already hard when I pulled him from his trousers, and his penis was even more beautiful, straight like a ruler, a beautiful pink hue, unmarked by veins and with heavy balls hanging low beneath it.

  He even tasted different.

  Over the next year or so, led by insatiable curiosity and a deep attraction to the world of sex, I would come across a whole variety of cocks. I had no interest whatsoever in the men they belonged to. They were typically local, so often uncouth, inarticulate, clumsy, heavy drinkers for the most part, quite uninteresting to me. But they were the only sort around.

  In my dreams, I imagined bad boys with more sophistication, elegant men with a sense of the wicked who would seduce me in all impunity and weave their evil ways around my deflowered innocence. I wanted the big league players, the men whose voices could make your knees tremble and electrify the senses. I knew that somewhere they existed and were waiting for me, ready to plunder and excite me. But until they came my way, I had to satisfy myself with the provincial boys who just weren’t bad enough but nonetheless gave me a taste of the forbidden.

  Once the rumour spread in our limited circle that I was willing and available – at any rate for blow jobs – they came running. Few were satisfied with just that, though, and invariably sought more, but I made the rules very clear. My body would retain its mystery and any attempt to breach my limits would result in immediate dismissal from my favours. Of course they tried it on, but my will was implacable. I would suck cocks but nothing more. And, of course, none of them were ever allowed to touch me, either.

  The young Russian men I had the opportunity to meet seemed cut from the same unattractive pattern, but the rumour was that foreign men were another species altogether. Nina, one of our seniors, who had once had the privilege of travelling abroad as a replacement in the corps de ballet of a minor touring company had informed us girls in the dormitory that foreign men not only had bigger cocks but also were poets.

  In my own naive way, it was a quest. How mistaken I was! And to compound my unease, my willingness to entertain the boys gave me a bad reputation and I found it difficult to make friends. On one hand they were jealous of me, while on the other they feared I might one day steal their men. The minds of young women do work in mysterious ways.

  But even though now I no longer remember the faces of any of my Russian bad boys, I still recall with a smile on my face – call me mischievous, if you will – the cocks I serviced in the interest of my worldly education. Ah, my bad boys! But quickly I tired of them and their lack of originality and vocabulary and their clumsiness, and longed to meet bad men.

  I resolved that I would move overseas at the first possible opportunity.

  But without Valya to line up men for me as she had boys outside the school wall, my sexual discovery came to an abrupt end when I left St Petersburg.

  Until Chey.

  My first real lover. The first man who had entered me, owned me.

  And he was a man, not a boy like the ones from the ice-cream parlour. He had known exactly what to do with his cock and, better still, what to do with me. Life with him made me selfish in bed, bored with other, inferior men.

  My relationship with Chey had marked me, with lines as permanent as the ones I later had etched onto my flesh in the form of a tiny smoking gun, only an inch or two from my inner thigh, a place that most women kept secret, for only the most intimate friends and lovers to see. But by then I had become a nude dancer, and Chey’s gun was displayed to a roomful of people night after night. I saw when their eyes alighted on it. The initial curiosity, as they wondered what it was, perhaps a flower in bloom, and then the shock when they realised that I had a weapon burned onto my skin, pointing directly at the most powerful weapon of them all, my cunt. And then the hunger from men and sometimes women who saw it as a sign that I was wanton, dangerous in bed or looking for pain. A bad girl.

  But I wasn’t a bad girl. I was Chey’s girl.

  I remembered the day that we met. I was nineteen, and I’d just arrived in New York.

  Encouraged by a well-meaning older tutor, I’d auditioned the previous year by videotape for a scholarship with the American School of Ballet, in the Lincoln Center.

  My application was declined.

  Another girl in my year got in, but she had wealthy parents, a father who had made quick money buying up steel and fertiliser plants for next to nothing in the economic collapse of the eighties while the rest of the population starved.

  She was blank faced with limbs as thin as a bag of matchsticks, but she had grace and an obvious pliability, a uniformity to her movements that must have appealed to the scrutineers.

  I took her address, and used her as a contact for my visa application after I graduated. Through my aunt, who had distant relatives living in America, I managed to get sponsorship. I was granted a three-month post-graduate stay, long enough to find my way around and build up a little local work experience as a waitress, and when my permission to remain expired, I melted into the back streets of Ridgewood, Queens, a neighbou
rhood that was full of Eastern Europeans. Slavs, Albanians, Ukrainians, Romanians, they had all come looking for a new life in America and ended up living virtually the same existence on new soil under the shadow of a different set of buildings.

  I found a dingy apartment on a quiet street that was fairly cheap and close to a subway line that could deliver me quickly into Manhattan where I had found a job in a patisserie and coffee shop on Bleecker Street. The cafe was run by a Frenchman named Jean-Michel who had just broken up with his wife and didn’t care that I was illegal, so long as I was beautiful and applied only the most delicate touch to his pastries. The croissants and petits pains au chocolat he baked were the best in the Village, light, fluffy, their smell a siren call to delicate stomachs, and the mille-feuilles were to kill for, so it was no hardship selling them. I’d always been a patient person, perhaps as a result of having no particular ambition, no maternal clock ticking, no one to hurry me along, no one to report to, so I never rushed the dough, always let the uncooked croissant mixture sit for as long as it needed to before gently rolling it out and over a butter square, turning the dough and rolling it again and again, folding it into towers with each turn, and eventually adding the bittersweet chocolate mixture and baking it in the oven until the shop was filled with the rich scent of two dozen pains au chocolat ready to be stacked on a glass dish in the window. And Jean-Michel’s frequently wandering hands across my rump as he repeatedly instructed me in the art of baking according to his style were just a minor inconvenience, as long as I made it quite clear that was as far as I would allow him to venture.

  Fall was just beginning to turn into winter. The days were still bright and the sky blue. Local New Yorkers had started to carry scarves and gloves in their handbags in preparation for frosty evenings, but I was accustomed to much colder weather and I liked the chill that settled on my bare arms as I walked down West Broadway. It was the first Sunday in November, and I was alone in the shop. Jean-Michel was out running the New York marathon, pounding the sidewalk in a desperate effort to stave away the pounds that had inevitably gathered when he’d succumbed to middle age and American servings and his belly had grown in accord with the size of his croissants.