A Delicate Subject

As it happened, I learned sensual physical pleasure at a very early age - at the age of four. In kindergarten, my friends Sasha Maximov and Seryozha Dzyuin and I competed in agility - who could climb the Swedish wall, jump over a tire buried in the ground, run to the fence.

Next to our veranda there was a decorative structure in the shape of a flower - a thin metal tube, on the top of which swung a cup with bent rods - petals - yellow, blue, red, a kind of iron flower.

We decided to climb it.

I was the first to go up. I wrapped my legs around the "trunk" and began to climb up as if on a rope, and suddenly, almost at the top of the flower, I accidentally felt a slight tingling sensation between my legs, from which a pleasant sweetness immediately spread through my body.

I had never experienced anything like that before, not even when I played "doctor" with the children in kindergarten - we would undress naked in a secluded corner, or just pull down our panties and shyly touch each other's "forbidden" places.

- Hey, why are you stuck down there? - My friends rushed me.

But I didn't care about them. I clung to the "trunk" with unearthly pleasure and froze. And when I rolled down, I didn't want to do anything - neither to run nor to jump, but only to sleep, although I was never a fan of quiet hours.

- What's wrong with you? - The boys asked me. - Are you hurt?

I waved them off, but they wouldn't let up. So I had to tell them everything. The boys immediately ran to the "flower" and began to climb it one by one, panting and huffing. They came back happy and flushed. The "flower tickle" became our secret.

Where do children come from?

When I was in the first grade, Ira Vershinina told me the secret of the birth of children.

- If a naked boy lies on a naked girl, they will have a child. But it is necessary that no one sees them! - Ira warned. - Otherwise it won't work.

I immediately understood what my friend meant. My parents often kicked me and my sister out of the room or sent us to the yard because they wanted to "lie" together.

They didn't have any more children, but that was probably my and Tanya's fault, because sometimes we would peek through the door even though we couldn't see anything definite.

To be honest, I had little idea where babies came from. I thought they were brought by storks, or found in the cabbage, or maybe bought in the store, but I never noticed squeaky bundles there. That meant it was indeed a stork.

And I ran to my best friend Zhenya to discuss the matter seriously. We've been planning to get married for a long time.

Zhenya agreed. The only thing holding us back was our mothers. They worked the second shift and were home until noon - you couldn't "lie" naked in front of them, could you?

For New Year's Eve, the housing department had built a big wooden slide on the boulevard, covered with plywood. I climbed inside, looked around, and decided it was the right place.

But Zhenya was suddenly afraid, what if the Black Hand lived there? Besides, it's freezing outside, maybe we should wait until summer?

I got angry, called him a fool, and went home, proudly turning up my nose.

But at home, after I had cooled down, I thought - maybe it's good that our idea didn't work out.

What do I need a baby for? It will cry, squeak, and I have school, lessons, all sorts of other activities.

And besides, what would my mother say if she found out about the baby? No, stork, fly away!

Take the hose

My classmate Katya Borisova explained to me that babies are not brought by a stork. She said that babies are taken out of the mother's womb. But she didn't explain how they get there and how exactly they are taken out. I didn't ask. As for sex education, I was a very naive child, although I "tickled" myself almost every day, but without the "flower" - I used ordinary doors for that purpose.

I will leave out the details.

Suffice it to say that my arm muscles were unusually developed from this extracurricular "physical training".

In the sixth grade I accidentally came across a book with pictures called "To Young Married People" by Khodakov. The pictures were interesting, but no matter how much I read the text, I could not understand what was there, where and how. Katya came to help me again.

- What's not clear here? - she was surprised. - You take a hose and put it in there.

Everything was more or less clear to me with the "hose", the question was - how to put it there?

I tried to find out with the help of a pocket mirror, but in my opinion this task was technically impossible. The thermometer or a pencil would work, but a hose?! Maybe there's something wrong with me?

Lie down on the battlefield

In the summer, Katya returned from pioneer camp with a new "trick". She held up her index and middle fingers in the letter V and loudly shouted the word "sEx".

No one in the courtyard knew what the word meant.

- Village people! - Katya laughed at us. - Did you hear that? "Peach, peach, I'm a carrot, the docking begins"?

We frowned in silence, really feeling like backward peasants, but Katya, one of the best pupils in our school, went on, cleverly singing new-fangled camp songs: "Lie down on the battlefield, hold on to my tits, and stick your carrot in the cave a bit!"

And how does this mean girl know everything?! Even though I was friends with boys and didn't know half the things Katya did. For example, condoms. What is that?

When I saw the word "condo" in the story "Intergirl" that Katya told me to read, I was ashamed to think that this was it - it sounded similar!

Of course, when we were kids, my sister and I would find rubbers at home, and we would vaguely guess what they were for, but the adults called these balloons something else.

I would hardly dare say this word out loud because there was a taboo in our family against "dirty" and bad words. Motherfucker and Goddamn - that's all Dad could afford to say in front of his daughters, and only if he accidentally hit himself on the finger with a hammer, but otherwise - no way.

One day at the hospital, the older girls asked me if I knew how to say Pinocchio in German. I didn't. "Pussydicklaus!" - they solemnly informed me.

Not that I believed them, but I found the word terribly funny.

"Ha ha, Pussydicklaus and the Golden Key!" - I laughed. And the mean girls snitched to the head nurse that I was cursing.

"Well, repeat what you said!" - She demanded.

She began to shame me and called my parents to teach me a lesson.

I sniffled my nose and justified that I had never cursed in my life. And no matter how much the nurse pressed on me, no matter how much she questioned me, trying to find out what this "bad" word was, I could not repeat it, and I remained as silent as a fish until the end.

Girls with pigtails

When I was a kid, we often went with our parents to visit and celebrate different holidays. There were always lots of people there - mom and dad's co-workers, friends with their kids.

The children were given a room, a separate table was set, and we drank tea with cake, played blind man's buff, and had fun. I and a seven-year-old neighbor boy, Andrew, were the elders in this company, the rest of us were just little ones. I was in charge, of course.

- Let's go to the balcony! - I command.

We went out to the balcony, and down in the street the big pioneer girls were playing hopscotch.

Andrew and I consulted each other and screamed:

- Girls with pigtails and skirts and a, pair of boobs!

Our whole company burst out laughing. We crouched down and looked through the slit to see what the pioneer girls were doing? They turned their heads to see who was teasing them. They waited a while and then started their hopscotch again.

Andrew and I stuck our heads out and continued to tease the girls. It was fun!

Five minutes later the bell rang in the hallway. Standing on the threshold, red as a boiled cancer, was a girl in a pioneer scarf, scolding the adults for not watching the kids.

- You know what bad words they call us?!

- What kind of words? - asked someone's mother.

The girl with the pigtail blushed even more, but she repeated our teasing. The parents didn't know whether to cry or laugh. As for me I just wondered: How did this pioneer girl find us?

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Red Film

In the sixth grade, Pasha Kharitonov brought a camera to a school party and started taking pictures of girls. They liked posing for him, until someone said that the camera was loaded with "red film" - there was such a scarecrow in the 90s, allegedly all those who were filmed on this "X-ray" film turned out to be naked in the pictures.

What started here! Girls, screaming, covering their shameful places, hiding wherever they could. I was the only one who didn't run away. I didn't believe in red film. My father was an amateur photographer, and if miracle film really existed, he would have had it. Although...

One day, while digging through a bag of old negatives, I came across a very curious one - a black and white Svema film, but for 12 frames instead of 36 - a thin rod, cut with scissors.

I unrolled it, held it up to the light and marveled - the negative was of a group of men on the riverbank, and everything would be fine, but they had no clothes on - not even underwear!

Of course, I couldn't see the details, but the fact itself impressed me, a twelve-year-old schoolgirl. Where else would I have seen a naked man, and not just one, but a dozen, we had not even heard of the Internet.

Interesting, I thought, I'll have to print out this film when I have the chance.

Dad had been taking pictures with a SLR camera since he was sixteen, developing the film and printing the pictures himself. He even won a photo enlarger in a lottery, which served him well for many years. He started teaching me photography when I was in the fourth grade.

It was a Kiev SLR. But if I could more or less adjust the shutter speed and push the button, I could not insert and remove the cartridges, fiddle with the reagents, fill the tanks with film. My dad did all the dirty work for me.

But I knew how to print pictures. And I loved it. It was a real mystery, an enchanting process that I prepared myself for well in advance.

I used the bathroom as a darkroom by covering the windows to the kitchen and toilet with an old coat or jacket. I also always unscrewed a light bulb in the bathroom to prevent family members from accidentally turning on the light. Just in case, my father told me to hide the photo paper envelopes under the towel so they wouldn't get spoiled by the light, because sometimes I would leave the bathroom to rest or, on the contrary, someone would come to visit me.

My dog, Lala, was especially fond of visiting me; she would always scratch at the door, then leave a minute or two later, and so on many times during the evening.

From the ceiling of the darkroom hung a drying film and a red lantern that filled the room with a mysterious ruby light.

In the bathtub itself there were three stools in a row, one of which was occupied by the very photographic enlarger my father had won, and the others were occupied by tubs - cuvettes, with developer, fixer, and clean water, in which I took turns dipping the developed photographs.

Then I would let them float in the bathtub, which was also filled to one-third with cold water, and the wet, glossy pictures would circulate like fallen leaves until morning...

This was done to wash off all the chemicals, otherwise there would be yellow stains. About once an hour, the bathtub had to be partially emptied and refilled with fresh water, so that the printing of photos was always accompanied by a measured gurgling of water from the faucet.

The mystery itself was this: you placed an album sheet on the enlarger's platform, flipped a toggle switch, and the faces of your relatives and friends began to flicker in front of you as if on a screen. You select the particular frame, turn off the backlight, place the photo paper over the album sheet, and then flip the switch again. One, two, three. Done! Now grab a 9x12 white rectangle with tweezers and dip it into one cuvette, then another. Isn't it a miracle when familiar outlines and landscapes appear before your eyes out of nowhere - a moment ago there was a blank sheet of paper and now there is a photograph. You look at it and remember the summer - dacha, fishing, cycling, swimming in the river, badminton, Tagil...

Time flies in this fascinating activity. The clock reads five in the morning. It's time to go to bed. During the day, the pictures have to be carefully fished out of the bathtub and dried - for this purpose I had a glosser - an electric appliance with a pair of mirrored metal plates. You put two or three photos on each of them, shirt up, then you put a newspaper on top, press it with a roller, then you remove the soaked newspaper, cover the photos with a tarpaulin, fasten it, and plug the glosser into an outlet. That's all.

As for the film with the naked strangers, I kept expecting to print it out. I carried my treasure in my pocket for a year, never showing it to anyone or telling anyone about it - it was my secret. I really wanted to know who and what was on it, but that's what stopped me - because I knew very well that the film probably belonged to my father - how else could it be in his photo archive at home? They probably went to the country with a group of men, went swimming, sunbathed naked, and then decided to fool around. And am I going to stare at them? Although, maybe my dad wasn't in these photos at all, maybe he was just taking pictures...

Anyway, while I was wondering what to do, the film disappeared.

I remember going to bed and hearing something fall out of my jeans pocket. I was too lazy to turn on the light and look for it, so I thought, "Oh, I'll find it in the morning".

But in the morning I didn't find the film near the coat rack, but I didn't find it in my pocket either.

I think my dad picked it up - he was always up early for work.

I don't know if he guessed where it came from, but he didn't ask me anything. I hoped he would return it to the archives, but no - I searched the bag in vain for the lost photographic treasure, the negative was gone.

The mystery of the young Adams of the '70s faded into oblivion.

And you call yourself my friend?

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the magazine "Eroticon" - with pictures of half-naked beauties - began to arrive at our house by mail. My father subscribed to it.

There was nothing immoral in it, quite decent pictures of girls - models - they were nothing like the photocopies of pornographic playing cards that my classmates got somewhere and secretly showed each other under the desk.

I brought the magazine to school to show the boys.

But "Eroticon" saw my teacher and shouted that I had no shame, no conscience, that I was a moll and had probably been sneaking around in basements with boys for a long time, doing the hell with them. And in general, she was convinced that I would be the first in our 7 "b" class to get pregnant.

Although there was no truth in the teacher's words, they hurt me. No one ever accused me of being promiscuous. Maybe only Sasha Utkin.

I remember that in the fourth grade we decided to go to the beach with him, but Sasha was late and I went to the river with another classmate, Dima Deina.

Utkin was offended and in the heat of the moment called me a bitch. And he called himself my friend!

Well, when we made up, it turned out that he had nothing against me and that he did not even understand the meaning of the swear word.

"Oh, you went to the beach with Dima? - Sasha thought. - Well, it's all clear with you - you're a bitch!"

Be yourself

Until I was ten years old, I was quite happy with the way I looked. My appearance suited me until 1989, when I went to the Yuri Gagarin sanatorium, where I spent two months.

Almost all the girls in our class were beautiful. From them I learned that I look different from everyone else. My legs are not very straight, my eyebrows are thicker than they should be, and there is no waist, instead I had abdominal muscles.

"She looks like a man!" - they said about me.

Even my breasts were wrong. I had them and the other girls didn't. And that, too, caused envy and ridicule.

I was embarrassed to go to the shower, and in the group photo I carefully pulled down my T-shirt with my hands, trying to hide my little girlish bulges to look like a boy.

Yes, it's hard to live when you're surrounded by beauty queens. Willingly or not, you start comparing yourself to them, and if the comparison is not in your favor, all is lost!

When I was 12-15 years old, I did a lot of things to become "normal" like "everybody else.

I bleached my freckles with hydrogen peroxide, tied my legs together with a rope at night, thinking it would make them straighter. I also tried to straighten my naturally frizzy hair with a curling iron. I doused myself with water charged by healer Alan Chumak to grow a little.

Coincidence or not, I grew six inches that summer.

When no one was looking, I examined my nose in profile; it seemed too upturned, but I wanted it straight. So I kept pressing the tip of my nose with my finger and pulling it toward my chin with a drugstore rubber band. But my nose stubbornly stuck up.

Taking my clothes off at the beach and wearing an open bathing suit was out of the question.

I hated my body so much that I avoided looking at myself in the mirror. There was a year when I did not go to the beach at all in the summer, I did not swim, I did not even tan, I hid my figure.

In the heat I wore pants and a shapeless hoodie. I even seriously thought about committing suicide. Why live? Who would want me so ugly?

It's funny to think about now, but it wasn't funny then. And it would be nothing if no one had really looked at me. But no! The most handsome guys always fell in love with me, who was considered a "female hobgoblin", "monkey" and "tomboy" by the girls. And for some reason, there were always two of them.

The girls resented me even more, gossiping that I knew some secret and trying to find out by any means. "Why does she have two boys and we have none?" the hotties in our class would sob.

I wish I knew! I had no idea what attracted the guys to me. Maybe "A little donkey is good because he looks like himself", I think it was sung in a famous Soviet cartoon.

Siskin and a Zip Gun

I started dating boys when I was eleven because I looked older than my years and my mother was very worried about me - as if I had not done something stupid.

She had burned her fingers in her youth and didn't want her daughter to repeat her mistakes.

If my mother had had her way, she would have handcuffed me to the radiator, not let me out of the house, not allowed me to make friends with all kinds of "bandits" in the yard.

But her daughter, as if on purpose, was attracted to the "bad guys" and hooligans. In each of them I could see my father - a great backslapper, a naughty boy, in short, the soul of the company.

In the evenings, the big guys would gather at our entrance. They would strum their guitars late into the night, and the girls and I would hang around trying to get their attention. I was crazy about a ninth-grader named Siskin. He had straight hair the color of copper, dark brown eyes, and a velvety baritone. When he sang "White Birch, I Love You" on the guitar, my heart was ready to jump out of my chest. I wish he would dedicate that song to me! But I'm nothing to Siskin, just a little girl.

It would be two years before he noticed me. By then he'd started sniffing glue, and every time we ran into each other, I wondered where that lingering chemical smell came from.

My mom didn't like Siskin at first sight. She didn't want to hear about my "unearthly love," and she cried that men like him needed only one thing from fools like me. I should know what that was.

I covered my ears and sobbed into my pillow. In my fantasies, the wedding march was already playing, and Siskin and I were rolling a stroller with a chubby baby down the spring boulevard.

One day Siskin invited me over to his house. His parents and younger brother were home, so I went without fear. We locked ourselves in the other room, talked, kissed.

Then Siskin picked up his guitar and sang "White Birch," not forgetting to mention that he was dedicating it to me.

The hands of the clock have long passed midnight, I should have been home three hours ago, but my "knight" would not let me go. To tell the truth, I was in no hurry to leave either.

- Would you like me to show you something? - Siskin asked in a mysterious tone.

I fidgeted uneasily on the couch - what if it was what I was thinking?

Noticing my frightened look, Siskin grinned, got up from the couch and walked to the closet, where he pulled out a perfectly crafted zip gun.

- A real one? - I blurted out involuntarily. - Do you have ammunition?

- You bet! - he grinned. - I made this zip gun myself. It shoots without misfiring. I tested it!

Siskin left me to look at the gun and walked out of the room.

When he came back, I could smell the faint smell of acetone coming from him.

Siskin took the zip gun, went to the window, and stood there for a long time, watching the snow fall.

Suddenly he turned. His eyes narrowed. He slowly pointed the steel muzzle at me, cocked the trigger, and said in a strange, mocking voice:

- What if I killed you and shot myself? You'd be mine or nobody's. It's my decision!

I was flattered, of course, though I didn't know if he was joking or serious. Is Siskin really capable of killing me? I don't think so. But what if it's true? And I began to swear to him fervently in love, assuring him that I needed no one but him.

Siskin reluctantly lowered the gun and told me to go home.

- Right now! Before I change my mind!

I rushed to the door. "He's crazy, he's a toxicomaniac!" - banged around in my head.

There was a scandal at home. The seventh-grade daughter came home in the middle of the night with a huge hickey on her neck. Mom was hysterical. She screamed and berated me, threatening to take me to the gynecologist at the women's clinic tomorrow and to report Siskin to the police.

I sobbed - from the fact that my dreams were crumbling, from resentment and humiliation - nothing had actually happened!

It is not known how our "romance" would have ended, but in the spring Siskin was drafted into the army.

To be continued