The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

imperiously, like a girl who had the price of admission.

The rig began to slow down almost immediately, and the screech of brakes in that cloud of swirling dust on the shoulder added to my self-confidence. I didn’t sprint the few meters to the cab as usual. I picked my pack up out of the ditch deliberately and approached with the slow step of a queen of the highway. I caught sight of a face reflected in the side mirror. The driver backed up right to my feet, jumped out, and ran around to open the door for me.

And since I’d noticed a little D next to the truck’s license plate, I cleared my throat and said: “Fahrst du nach Pressburg?”

I didn’t add bitte or anything like that – I chose the informal du over Sie without even being at all sure how old he was.

It made no difference anyway.

He smiled (pleased I spoke German), nodded, and, when I added a regal danke after he lifted my pack up into the cab, he observed cheerfully, “Aber du sprichst Deutsch sehr gut! ”

And that was the beginning of the long period, maybe too long, when I decided to become what almost every cop already assumed I was.

I had decided to get Patrik that wheelchair.

After twenty kilometers of small talk I was pleasantly surprised at my long-untested German. I smoked Marlboros (somehow convinced that without a cigarette clasped between my delicately outstretched fingers – even though they were still smeared with dirt – the impression wouldn’t be complete) and, with a few successfully composed complex sentences, brought the conversation around to the difficulty of life in a socialist state. Kurt (we’d long ago exchanged names) steered with the barest touch of his left hand and, with his face turned toward me, nodded attentively. He was taking the bait. I don’t know if he was listening, probably not, but he still kept saying how much he admired my German: God knows how few of these highway girls knew anything more than bunsen, the German word for fuck. He doesn’t look unsympathetic, and I could do worse for my first time, I thought to myself. I babbled on cheerfully – and contemplated what would probably happen. This was not like an adventure that comes to you. This was not the work of my old friend Serendipity. I still wasn’t used to my role – and I knew that I was going to have to take matters into my own hands.

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 moglich?”

Everything is moglich, 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