The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “A girl should have a doll like that before she gets too old . . . don’t you think?”

  He slowly reached for the door knob. “Too old?”

  “Yeah, like . . . before she’s . . . say, eighteen . . . don’t you think?”

  He opened the door and a crack of light lay on the floor between him and the bed. “I . . . guess so.” Then he went out and closed the door.

  She lay back on the bed with a suddenly thudding pulse, but not the same thing as the earlier neon lightning bolt of adrenalin. The wave of almost nauseous weakness passed, and she thought about the symptoms Dale described, then she got off the bed. Her clothes were folded on the sofa in the living room with exactly $100 in cash placed on top, a fifty, two twenties, a five and five ones. Maybe he’d forgotten about the two fifties he’d already given her at the start of the session.

  December was a slow time for both student photographers and sickos. Leala got her hair cut into a pixie style and used some of her savings for white jeans, a white jean jacket, and several new tank tops. She had her ears pierced and wore just the two pearl studs which came with the piercing. She let Dale pay for the piercing and call it her Christmas present, but he also bought her a corduroy skirt and jacket set that was one size too big, so she exchanged it for a denim mini and peasant-style top with sequins, both from the girls department. Dale said she looked like a baby pop star in Teen Beat magazine.

  “That’ll work,” she answered. “Maybe I’ll get some cheap jewelry from a teeny-bopper accessory store.”

  “Whadda you mean?”

  “Oh . . . I don’t know . . . If I want to start a real modeling career, I hafta have an angle, you know? My own shtick.”

  “You can’t start a real modeling career just because you get a few new clothes and say you want to be a model.”

  “You don’t know anything about it, Dale. I’ve had some gigs. How many gigs have you had lately?”

  Dale stared fixedly at the TV screen. It wasn’t even on. He still had hair down to his collar, except where he didn’t have hair at all, and it looked wet even when it wasn’t. The flattened cushions in the chair that had come with the furnished apartment had stains now where his head rested. Sometimes he still tapped a drumstick on the coffee table while he sat there. It seemed the drumstick appeared and disappeared by magic, but she’d found it once, by accident, stashed under the seat cushion.

  Leala loaded some celery sticks with peanut butter, wrapped them in a paper towel and placed them on Dale’s lap on her way to the sofa. “Listen, Dale, this is really important.”

  “What, that I’m a failure?”

  “No, but we are. You know? It’s only been, what, three and a half years. We could just call it one of those things. We’re both young, we could . . . you know, still be like our ages.”

  “Instead of old married farts?”

  “Speak for yourself, but I guess that’s the general idea.”

  The drumstick appeared, but he didn’t start tapping. He held it up and placed the tip against his lips like a long finger saying Shhhh. “No.”

  “No? That’s it, just wo?”

  He took a bite of celery then replaced the tip of the drumstick against his mouth while he chewed. It sounded like a horse chewing corn. It sounded kind of nice.

  “Dale, it wouldn’t be like we hate each other’s guts and go to court to fight over the car and stereo. And it doesn’t have to be now, we could do it when we’re both ready, when we can both afford it, you know?”

  “We can barely afford this shit together.”

  “I know, but I’m working on a plan.”

  “You mean becoming a famous cover girl by next week?”

  “There’s lots of types of modelling, Dale, and I may’ve found my niche, and I can even capitalize on it, expand the potential.”

  “Now you sound like a yuppie businessman.” He swallowed what looked like a hard lump.

  “I’m just saying I’ve discovered a way to make what I do more lucrative, and when I make enough of a stash, how about I share it with you and we, you know, go our separate ways?”

  “What if I want to stay with you?”

  He was just sitting there looking down into his lap like an imbecile who watches himself pee, holding a celery stick with globs of peanut butter in one hand and the drumstick in the other.

  Leala stayed on the sofa for only a few seconds longer, then went into the bathroom, shook her short hair and watched it all fall into place. For the first time in her life she was glad for the strip of freckles across her nose. She wondered how much colored contact lenses would cost, because some pure green eyes would really complete the package.

  Three more jobs popped up right away in January. The first just wanted her feet – feet walking, feet splashing puddles, feet showing over the side of a pick-up truck, feet on gas pedals, feet kicking a ball, feet in high heels. He said he’d done sessions with guys and older people and little kids, and some animals. When he took her out for lunch after the session, she touched his leg with her bare toes under the table, but nothing happened, so the Feet! exhibit he said he was working on must’ve been real. The second wanted her to hang laundry on a line – just white sheets and towels – on a very windy day, wearing a light cotton dress and bare feet, but the photographer was a woman and, as a matter of fact, almost didn’t want Leala at all when she saw her short hair. The third worked out a little better because he said from the start he wanted a nude, but he also made her sign a form promising she was over eighteen. Still, he liked her newly shaved pussy and fucked her afterwards, but only gave her $20 for cab fare when she asked, although she was parked around the corner from his house.

  EMILIA COMES IN MY DREAMS

  Jindrich Styrsky

  Translated by Iris Irwin

  EMILIA IS FADING from my days, my evenings and my dreams. Even her white dress has darkened in my memory. I no longer blush as I recall the mysterious marks of teeth I glimpsed one night below her little belly. The last traces of dissimulation impeding the emotion I was ready to feel have disappeared. That troupe of girls is lost forever, smiling uncertainly and with indifference as they remember how their hearts were torn by passion and by half-treacherous humility. Even her face has been exorcised at last, the face I modelled in snow as a child, the face of a woman whose compliant cunt had consumed her utterly.

  I think of Emilia as a bronze statue. Marble bodies, too, are not bothered by fleas. Her heart-shaped upper lip recalls an old-world coronation; the lower lip demanding to be sucked arouses visions of harlotry. I was moving slowly beneath her, my head in the hem of her skirt. I had a close-up view of the hairs on her calves, flattened in all directions under her lace stockings, and I tried to imagine what kind of a comb would be needed to smooth them back into place. I fell in love with the fragrance of her crotch, a wash-house smell mingled with that of a nest of mice, a pine-needle lying forgotten in a bed of lilies-of-the-valley.

  I began to suffer from optical illusions; when I looked at Clara her body merged into the outline of Emilia’s with the tiny heel. When Emilia felt like sinning, her cunt gave off the aroma of spice in a hayrick. Clara’s fragrance was herbal. My hands are wandering under her skirt, touching the top of a stocking, suspender knobs, her inner thigh – hot, damp and beguiling. Emilia brings me a cup of tea, wearing blue mules. I can never again be completely happy, tormented as I am by women’s sighs, by their eyes rolling in the convulsions of orgasm.

  Emilia never tried to penetrate the world of my poetry. She looked at my garden from over the fence, so that everyday fruit and ordinary berries seemed the awesome apples of some pre-historic paradise, while I moved foolishly along the paths, like a half-wit, like a useless dog with its nose in the grass tracking down death and fleeing its own destiny. I was crazy, seeking to find again that moment when shadows fell across a paved square somewhere in the south. Leaning on the fence, Emilia sped on through life. I can see her so clearly: getting up in the morning with her long hair
loose, going to the lavatory to piss, sometimes to shit, and then washing with tar soap. Her crotch made fragrant, she hurried to mingle with the living, to rid herself of the feeling that she was at a fork in the road.

  Emilia’s smile was a wonderful thing to watch. Her mouth seemed a dried-out hollow, but as you drew near to this upper lode of pleasure you could hear something trembling down inside her, and as she parted her lips for you, a knob of red flesh burst from between her teeth. Age fondles time lovingly. Morality is only safe at home in the arms of abandonment. Her eyes that never closed at the height of her pleasure would take on a gleam of heavenly delight, and looked ashamed of what her lips were doing.

  In the corners where I seek my lost youth I come upon golden curls carefully laid away. Life is one long waste of time. Every day death nibbles away at what we call life, and life constantly consumes our longing for trivialities. The idea of the kiss dies before ever the lips meet, and every portrait pales before we can look at it. In the end worms will eat through this woman’s heart, too, and grin in her entrails. Who could swear, then, that you had ever existed? I saw you with a lovely naked girl of astonishing whiteness. She lifted her hands and the palms were black with soot. She pressed one hand between your breasts and placed the other over my eyes so that I was looking at you as through torn lace. You were naked under an unbuttoned coat. That single moment revealed your life to me in its entirety: you were a plant, swelling and budding. Two stems rising from the ground grew together and from that juncture you began to wilt, but your body was already taking shape, with a belly, two breasts and a head where two entrancing pink weals swelled up. At that moment, though, the lower part of your body began to wither, and collapsed. And I grovelled before you, grunting with love such as I had never known. I do not know whose shadow it was. I called it Emilia. We are bound together for ever, irrevocably, but we are back to back.

  This woman is my coffin, and as she walks I am hidden in her image. And so as I curse her I damn myself and yet love her, falling asleep with a cast of her hand on my cock.

  On the first of May you’ll go to the cemetery and there in Section Ten you will find a woman sitting on a gravestone. She will be waiting for you, to tell your fortune from the cards. You will leave her and look for explanations on the walls of boarding establishments for young ladies, but the girls’ faces in the windows will turn into budding buttocks and tulip arses, and will quiver as a lorry drives past. You will be crazed with fear they’re going to fall down into the street, fear that is close to the pleasure you felt at your first boyish erection and close to the terror you felt when your sister taught you to masturbate with a hand of alabaster.

  Who do you think can console you now? Emilia is fragmented, torn scraps of her likeness have been borne away by the wind to places beyond your knowledge, and that is why you cannot call on her to be the medium of your calming, and anyway you have long ago learned not to mourn moments of farewell.

  The sky slumbers and somewhere behind the bushes a woman moulded of raw flesh is waiting for you. Will you feed her on ice?

  Clara always sat on the couch, wearing little, and expecting to be undressed. One day she took my revolver from a drawer, took aim, and fired at a picture. The cardinal’s hand went to his chest and he fell to the ground. I felt sorry for him and later on whenever I visited brothels on the outskirts of the city, and paid the whores for their skills, I was always aware that I was purchasing a moment of eternity. Any man who once tasted the salt of Cecilia’s cunt would sell his rings, his friends, his morals and all the rest, just to feed the insatiable monster hidden beneath her pink skirt. Oh, why do we never distinguish the first moments when women treat us as playthings, from the time when we drive them to despair? I woke up one night in the early hours, at the time flowers drop their petals and birds begin to sing. Martha was lying by my side, a treasure-house of all ways of making love, a hyena of Corinth, lying with her cunt spread open to the dawn. She caught the disgust in my eyes and surely wanted nothing better than to see me nauseated by the filth of her. I watched her sex swelling and pouring out of her cunt, over the bed and on to the floor, filling the room like a stream of lava. I got out of bed and fled madly from the house, not stopping till I reached the middle of the deserted town square. As I looked back I saw Martha’s sex squeezing out of the window like a monstrous tear of unnatural colour. A bird flew down to peck at my seed and I threw a stone to drive it away. “You will be lucky, you will repeat yourself over and over again,” a passer-by spoke to me and added: “your wife is just giving birth to a son.”

  Two little sparrows kept rendez-vous every noon behind the pale blue corsage of Our Lady of Lourdes: I was innocent when I entered the catacombs. The row of square boxes naturally aroused my curiosity. There were a few boys hanging by their bound feet from the tops of the olive trees, flames roasting their curly young heads. In the next room I found a bunch of lovely naked girls entwined in a single monstrous living creature like something from the Apocalypse. Their cunts were opening and closing mechanically, some empty, some swallowing their own slime. One in particular caught my eye, the lips moving as though trying to speak, or like a man whose tongue has turned to stone trying to crow like a cock. Another was a smiling rosebud that I’d recognize among a hundred specimens, to this day. It was my dead Clara’s cunt, dead and buried, with nobody to wash her body with the mint-scented lotion she loved. Sadly I brought out my cock and stuck it aimlessly into the writhing mass, uncaring and indifferent, telling myself death always brings debauchery and misfortune together.

  Then I put an aquarium on my window-sill. I had a golden-haired vulva, in it, a magnificent specimen of a penis with a blue eye and delicate veins on its temples. As time went on I threw everything I had ever loved into it: broken cups, hairpins, Barbara’s slippers, burnt-out bulbs, shadows, cigarette ends, sardine tins, all my letters and used condoms. Many strange creatures were born in that world. I felt myself to be a Creator, and I had every right to think so. When I had the aquarium sealed up I gazed contentedly at my mouldering dreams, until there was no seeing through the mildew on the glass. Yet I was sure that everything I loved in the world was there, inside.

  I still need fodder for my eyes. They gulp down all they get greedily and roughly. At night, asleep, they digest it. Emilia scattered her shocked scorn generously, arousing desire in all she met, provoking visions of that hairy maw.

  I still remember something that happened when I was a boy. I’d just been expelled from high school and nobody would have anything to do with me. Except my sister. I would go to her secretly, in the night. Lying in each other’s arms, legs entwined, we slowly dreamed ourselves into the dulled state of all those who lie on the knife-edge of shame. One night we heard soft footsteps and my sister nudged me to hide behind the armchair. Our father came into the room, shutting the door quietly behind him, and climbed into her bed without a word. That was when, at last, I saw how one makes love.

  Emilia’s beauty was not meant to fade, but to rot.

  A MAP OF THE PAIN

  Maxim Jakubowski

  IT ALL BEGINS in Blackheath, in South East London. They are in the kitchen, chatting aimlessly while preparing the evening meal. He drones on about the cutbacks at the BBC and his fears for his job. She isn’t really listening to him. Her mind is miles away, in a bed with another man who touches her in all the right places, in all the right ways, another man who has betrayed her so badly.

  He moves over to the fridge. Opens it, searches inside.

  The heat is oppressive. London has not seen the likes of it for years. And he still wears his tie.

  “I don’t think we have enough tomatoes for the salad,” he says.

  Her husband the vegetarian.

  She fails to answer.

  “I said we’re low on tomatoes.”

  The information registers through a haze of mental confusion.

  “I’ll pop over to the 7-Eleven on the High Street,” she volunteers. “They’re still op
en. I should have bought more stuff over lunch at the Goodge Street Tesco. It won’t take me long,” she says.

  “I’ll come along,” her husband says. “Keep you company.”

  “No, it’s all right,” she answers. “You can prepare the dressing.”

  He’s always been good that way, willing to cook and do things in the kitchen. She picks up her shoulder bag, with her purse and the manuscript she’s working on and walks out onto the mews.

  The night air is stale and sticky. She is wearing her white jeans and an old promotional tee-shirt.

  She walks at her usual jaunty pace past the Common. Toward the shops. And breezes past the convenience store where a few spotty youths are squabbling by the ice-cream counter, and a couple of drab, middle-aged men are leafing through the top shelf girlie magazines. She heads on to the railway station. Network South East. The next train to Charing Cross is in five minutes. She uses her monthly Travelcard.

  At the London station, she calmly collects her thoughts. Smiles impishly at the imagined face of her husband, waiting all this time for the final ingredients for the salad, back at their house. She catches the tube to Victoria and connects with the last train departure to Brighton.

  Once, with her lover, she had gone there for a weekend, yeah a dirty week-end, she supposes. It was on the eve of a political party conference and the seaside resort had been full of grim-faced politicians and swarms of television journalists. She’d spent most of her time outside the hotel room where they had fucked more times than she had thought possible in the space of thirty-six hours, absolutely terrified of venturing across her spouse, or some colleagues of his who might be familiar with her, even though he worked on the business and economics side and she well knew he could not be in Brighton right then.

  Katherine spent the night ambling up and down the seafront, enjoying the coolness of the marine breeze and sea air after the Turkish bath of her London suburbs and the publisher’s offices where she worked. It was wonderfully quiet; no drunks to accost her, just alone with her thoughts, the memories, the scars of lust, the mess that her life now was.