The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

by Maxim Jakubowski

  After the third day of the seminar, she knew there was no one there to fuck. Twenty men out of twenty-five people, and only one interested her. But he had a live-in girlfriend in tow, so she called her girlfriend in San Francisco, who wanted to introduce her to a man. “Tell me again about your friend, the man you want me to meet,” she said, “there’s no one here.” “He’s single, heterosexual, and interested in a lot of the same things you are, the same age, divorced,” her friend said. “What’s his phone number?” She called, they made a date, and here she was, a week and a half later.

  Twenty-four hours after they’d gotten almost to sleep, she slept alone the next night. Now fully awake the next morning, she let the recent time with Josh flood her memory as she poured herself a cup of tea, watching the steam rise as she stirred her tea with a spoon. What she had particularly loved about sex with Josh was that it wasn’t over when he had come. No more than, many times later, it was over when she had come first. After a pause, they always started in again until each had come enough. Although she didn’t know it yet, one of the things that made their sex so good was that it gave him as much pleasure to make her come as it gave her to make him come. She looked beyond the patio doors to the flowering trees in the backyard, enjoying her recollection of that first night, a little more than a day ago.

  His hand lightly tracing circles over her cunt brought her back. They lay together enjoying the feeling of having fucked their hearts out. She felt the cool of the wet spot on the sheets made by the mix of their fluids, and shifted her body a fraction to a drier spot. He moved with her, never breaking their contact. “You have to show me what you like,” he said, running a finger gently over her cunt lips, then veering toward her clit. She shuddered with pleasure, sensing the arch of her neck thrown back, the muscles of his hips and thighs. Lying there having her clit stroked and rubbed evoked a flood of images. Multiple screens flashed images of femmes fatales, discus throwers poised and bent to throw. She became a high-heeled, bejeweled, slinky-dressed femme, and he a tango-leading, tall and black-booted stud.

  He moved his leg over hers, feeling her tense against him. “There, like that,” she managed. He touched her lightly at first, in teasing motions, making her move toward him, show him with the motion of her pelvis toward or away from his hand exactly what she wanted. “Harder,” she said, and he continued, rhythmically and more firmly. She moved under his touch onto plateaus of more and more pure pleasure until she couldn’t bear it any more, coming with an arch of her back and a moan that surprised her. “Oh, my God,” she said, pressing herself onto his hand, still coming. “Oh, baby, come,” he said, smiling over at her as she opened her eyes. “Oh, God, that was wonderful,” she said, kissing him on the lips. “Next time, I’ll bring my vibrator,” she said. “Fine, I’d like to meet it,” he said.

  They lay together, quietly, kissing lightly, his hand cupping her cunt. What a beginning, she thought. I like him. Josh spooned her with his body, “Good night, baby,” he said. “Good night, love.” Unbeknownst to them, this was only the beginning.

  LUST

  Elfriede Jelinek

  Translated by Michael Hulse

  IN ALL SERIOUSNESS I call upon you: air and lust for one and all!

  The woman will be with you in a moment, can you hold? First she has to collect herself: for a kiss it’d be best to be collected, all five senses, collect the set. The student is well developed, a perfect picture of a man, no need for touching up, so she lets him touch her up. He places his arm between her thighs. With his eye on the way ahead and the main chance, he rummages under her clothes, which consist chiefly of a plain dressing-gown, which won’t be in the way for long. Many have to take terrible buses and regret it terribly when they remain on the wrong genitals for too long. The owner, or rather the passenger of his three-in-one wishes, grows too used to us and won’t let us out of his ground-level hospitable apartment. Let me explain that three-in-one: woman is a trinity of pleasures, to be grabbed up top, down below, or in the middle! Till at length they can move on to various amiable kinds of sport, possessing each other without understanding. Bawling and bawling. The woman is eager for the driver to drive her around a little, step on it.

  It can’t simply be because the toilet’s in the corridor that we feel impelled to go out at night and, in front of the door, look slyly around to see if anyone’s watching as we stand there with our hands on our sex, as if we might be due to lose it before we can place it in its hand-painted chipboard box.

  Of the many kinds of accommodation he might choose, the young man opts for this one alone. But the closet won’t keep still, no, it’s even hurrying off ahead in the dark and the cold! This Gerti beats him to the enclosure. Many a one has talked of kissing here. Spread their torchlight wide. And cast great shadows on the walls, so that for one other person they will be greater than just anyone, just anyone on a ski lift. As if sheer carnal desire could make them greater, bigger! As if they could draw themselves up so erect that they’d slam the ball straight in the basket! Players can be mighty fine specimens, tall and erect, and there they stand before their partners, fully equipped, with all the necessary tackle. So many requirements, all of them pressing, pressed into the service of hygiene and filth alike, simply to possess each other. As the phrase inaptly goes. This dusty junk shop’s where we end up. Two household objects. Of simple geometrical design. Wanting to fit together and be good as new again! Now! Suddenly there’s a woman in combinations in the corridor, a jug of water in her hand; has she been casting spells, calling forth a storm, or is she only going to make some tea? In no time at all a woman can make a home of the plainest, barest, most spartan of places. That is to say, even the plainest of women can make a man feel at home by baring all, in no time he places his spar. This young man who has entered her life might be the great intellectual? Now everything will be different from how it was planned. We’ll make a new plan on the spot. Our heads will swell good and proper. Oh, your boy plays the violin as well? But not at this very moment, surely, since no one’s punching his start button.

  Come on, she yells to Michael. As if she were demanding money of a shopkeeper who hates us customers. And yet he can’t get by without us. He has to tempt us into his store or go penniless. Now the woman wants a pleasure that lasts at last. First of all, one! two! (you can do it too, sitting in your car, your speed as limited as your mental horizons) we lunge at each other’s mouths, then we plunge into all the other orifices; in thy orifices may I be remembered. And all of a sudden our partner means everything to us. Presently, in a minute or two, Michael will penetrate Gerti, whom he hardly knows and has barely taken a look at. Just as a sleeping car attendant always knocks first with a hard object. He lifts the woman’s dressing-gown over her head and with his mouth, in an excitement of his own creation, prompts her who was without form and void to make a frightful commotion in the queue. The queue at the cash desk where we’re all waiting, money clenched and balled behind our flies. We are our own worst enemies in matters of taste. People all like different things, isn’t that so? But what if we want to be liked? What will we do, in our infinite indolence: call upon sex to do the work for us?

  Michael yanks the woman’s legs about him like the legs of hightension masts. In his exploratory zeal he gives intermittent attention to her undouched cleft, a gnarled version of what every other woman has on her person in a discreet shade of lavender or lilac. He pulls back and takes a good look at the place where he is repeatedly disappearing, only to reappear, a huge great thing, fun for one and all. A funster, this fellow. But flawed. Sport being one of his flaws, and hardly the least. The woman is calling him. What’s got into him? Why hasn’t it got into her? Since Gerti didn’t have an opportunity to wash, her hole looks murky, as if it were plastic-coated. Who can resist jamming a finger in (you can use peas, lentils, safety pins or marbles if you like), try it and see what an enthusiastic response you’ll get from your lesser half. Woman’s unyielding sex looks as if it were unplanned. And
what is it used for? So that Man can tussle with Nature, and the children and grandchildren have somewhere to come trailing their clouds of glory from. Michael scrutinizes Gerti’s complicated architecture and yells like a stuck pig. As if he were dissecting a corpse, he seizes her hairy cunt, stinking of secret dissatisfaction and dissatisfied secretions, and buries his face in it. You tell a horse’s age by the teeth. This woman isn’t so young any more either, but nonetheless this wrathful bird of prey is flapping at her door.

  Michael laughs: he’s terrific. Will we ever learn from these transactions? Will the one ever be able to cross the gap to the other, to talk and be understood and understand? Women’s genitals, so outrageously located in a hillside, tend to be quite distinct, claims the expert. Just as no two people are entirely alike. They can wear quite different headgear, for instance. And the ladies are particularly prone to difference. No two of them are entirely alike. Not that a lover cares, when they lie prone: what he sees is what he’s used to seeing on other women. In the mirror he sees himself reflected, his own deity. In the waters’ depths. Fishing, plenty of fish in the sea, just hang out your dripping rod and wait for a catch, another woman to toss off your godhead in and then toss back. Ah, the privy parts and privy arts of mankind! All that’s required of womankind is that she reck his rod (not wreck his rod), rock his godhead, toss his rocks off.

  Let observation with extended view survey mankind . . . and what you’ll see is the gaping gawp of somebody’s integrated, semi-conducted craving for ecstasy. Go ahead. Try for something of real value! Feeling, perhaps, that guide who takes the tour party into terrain he’s unfamiliar with, burgeoning through your skull? We don’t have to watch him grow. We can choose another pupil to waken and give us pleasure. Yet the ingredients are stirred as we are. Our dough rises, puffed up with the sheer force of air, the atomic cloud mushrooming over the mountaintop. A door slams shut. And we’re on our own again. Gerti’s jolly husband, who is forever dangling his hose with a nonchalant air, as if his waters sprang from some precious source, isn’t here right now to reach out his hand to his wife or torment his offspring on the rack of music. The woman laughs out loud at the thought. The young man is ramming his piston forcefully home, every stroke an attempt to get a little locomotion going, stoke her engine, can’t you hear that whistle blow? He is taking a lively interest at present. Well aware of the changes even the least likely of women can undergo at the hands of a red-hot fresh and scented wad of male sex. Sex is the downtown of our lives, shopping precinct and leisure centre and red light district all in one, but it isn’t where we live. We prefer a little elbow room, a bigger living room, with appliances we can turn on and off. Within her, this woman has already done an about-turn and is heading straight back for her own familiar allotment where she can pick the fruits of sensuality from her private plot herself and do the job with her own hands. Even alcohol becomes volatile at a certain point. But still, almost blubbing with joy at the changes he has wished upon himself, the young man is rummaging about the cosy taxi. He even looks under the seat. He opens Gerti, and then snaps her shut again. Nothing there!

  Of course we can don hygienic caps if we like, to avoid the risk of disease. Otherwise, we have everything we need. And though the lordsandmasters cock their legs and slash their waters into their women, they can’t remain but must hurry on, restless, to the next tree, where they waggle their genital worms till someone takes an interest. Pain flashes like lightning into women, but it does no permanent damage, no need to cry over charred furniture or molten appliances. And out it dribbles once again. Your partner will be willing to forgo anything but your feelings. After all, she likes to cook up feelings too. Poor people’s food. I’d even say she’s specialized in economy cooking, she’s out to have men’s hearts in a preserve jar at last. The poor prefer to turn away without being shoo’d about by tour guides. Their pricks even lay them down to rest before they do. And the source from which their waters spring is the heart. They leave the sheet unstained, and off we go.

  At any rate, there are glasses that contain nothing of any greater sense than the wine. The Direktor likes looking into the glass: when it’s raised to his lips he can see the bottom, and similarly he wants to drain his own immense tank, right into Gerti. The moment he sees her he exposes himself. His rain comes pouring from the cloudburst before she has a chance to run for shelter. His member is big and heavy and would fill the pan if you added his eggs. In the old days he used to invite many a woman to breakfast, they gobbled him up, slipped down a treat, but now he no longer calls in the hungry folk to eat at his table. Deformed by the opulence of leisure, humanity reclines in its deckchairs, resting its sex, or else strolls the gravel paths, sex in its pockets, hands in its pockets. Work restores humankind and all its attributes to the savage animal condition that was its original intended state. Thanks to one of Nature’s whims, men’s members are usually too small by the time they’ve got the knack of handling them. And there they go, leafing through the catalogues of exotic women, high-performance models that are more economical to run and need less fuel. The dipsticks plunge their dipsticks in the sump they know best, which happens to be their wives. Whom they wouldn’t trust as far as they could throw them. So they stay home to keep a watch on them. Then their gaze pans across to the factory in the mist. Though, if they applied themselves a little more patiently, they could take a holiday as far afield as the Adriatic. Where they could dip their sticks in other waters. Their gangling danglers, carefully packed in their elasticated bathing trunks. Their wives wear sawn-off swimsuits. Their breasts are close friends, but they also like making new acquaintances, how do you do, a firm grip, perhaps too firm, uncouthly dragging them from the recliners where they were lounging, lazy and tender, tearing them out, crumpling them in careless fingers and tossing them into the nearest wastepaper basket.

  There are signposts along the roads, pointing the way to the towns. Only this woman has to go messing about where children are trying to get their first bearings in life. Calm down and carry on! Hereabouts it is distinctly frosty and foresty. There’s a smell of hay. Of straw. Strewn for us, for the animal within. The dog in the manger. How often we’ve taken the mangy creature walkies! How many before us – who would gladly have buried their wives if they could harvest a goodly crop of women from the place – have splashed and sprayed here! Like winning a motor race! Or like giving it all away: someone, for instance, has thrown a condom away before turning homeward once again. Most men have no idea what you can perform on that keyboard, the clitoris. But they’ve all read the magazines that prove there’s more to women than anyone ever imagined. A millimetre or so more, to be exact.

  The student crushes the woman to him. The hissing that escapes from his pent valve can be stopped by the merest touch, he can do it himself. He doesn’t want to squirt off yet, nor does he want the wait to have been in vain. As she reclines there in his upholstered crate, he clumsily paws and pinches the most unseemly parts of the woman’s anatomy, so that she has to spread her legs further apart. He rummages in her slumbering sex, squeezes it into a pout and smacks it abruptly apart again. Oughtn’t he to excuse himself, given that he’s treating her worse than the furniture? He slaps her derriere and heaves her onto her back once more. He’ll sleep well tonight, that’s for sure, like anyone who’s done an honest day’s work and then taken his innocent rest and recreation.

  His hands clawed tight in her hair, the student quickly fucks the woman shitless, it messes the car seats but what the fuck. As he services her, he does not look out at the world, where only the beautiful come in for care and maintenance, a major service every few thousand miles. He looks at her, trying to read something in that face which has been rendered indecipherable by her husband. Men are capable of detaching themselves from the world for as long as they want. Only to take a tighter grip on their own tour group afterwards. They have the option. Everyone who has any idea about men knows who we mean: that male world, a couple of thousand people involved in s
port, politics, the economy, the arts. Where the rest come a cropper. And who will love them all, that crop of puffed-up flatulent bigmouths? What does the student see, beyond his own body’s unctions and functions? The woman’s mouth, a source from which streams well up, and the floor, from where her image laughs at him. They don’t bother with any rubber protection. The man half turns away in order to watch his rigid member entering and exiting. The woman’s socket gapes wide. The piggy bank squeaks, it’s designed for paying in, only to pay everything promptly out again. Both transactions are of equal importance in this business, but you try telling that to any modern businessman, he’ll raise his eyebrows in alarm, he’ll raise the alarm, he’ll lift his kids up so high so that they don’t step in their inferiors’ anger.

  Gradually the spasms the man has set going in the woman calm and subside. She’s had hers and perhaps she’ll even get a second helping. Quiet! Now only the senses are doing the talking. But we don’t understand what they’re saying, because under the seat they’ve changed into something incomprehensible.

  The student spills his packetful into the animals’ cratch, fills his packet into the animal’s snatch. Now it is deepest night. Clad in deepest black. Elsewhere, people are turning over, thinking of other more finely built specimens they’ve seen in magazines before they dock their bodies alongside for love. When Michael unbuckled his skis, he didn’t pause to consider that sport, that eternal constant of our world, which hath its dwelling place in the TV set, doesn’t simply stop when you’ve shot down your slope. The whole of life is sport. Sports dress enlivens our existence. All our relatives under the age of eighty wear tracksuits and T-shirts. Tomorrow’s eggs are on sale today so you can count your chickens before they’re hatched. There are others who are better-looking or cleverer than we are, for it is written. But what will become of those of whom no mention at all is made? And their inactive unattractive penises: where shall they channel their little rivers? Where is the bed for them to flow and lay their heads to rest? On this earth they are forever worrying about their wretched little organs, but where oh where shall they spray the antifreeze to afford protection in the winter to come, so their engines don’t refuse to start? Will they negotiate union, or negotiate with a union? What ridges and ranges of perfumed flesh strew the path of dalliance, all the way till the stock feel the knife on the throat and the family feel the ramrod and lash? For those who are attractive, and who generally tend to be the most active too, are not mere decor in our lives. They want to plug their members into other people’s sockets, and will do. Always bear in mind that, in their attempt to get what they want, people will hide away far inside each other, inseparable. So the atom doesn’t split them.