Maria Genova: Communism, Sex and Lies

That was also how it went with Ivan, one of the best tennis players of my generation. From the moment we first met I found him attractive, intriguing and a little bit dangerous. He looked smug and did not even try to hide the fact that he wanted to get me into bed as soon as possible. When he knocked on the door of my hotel room after a game, ten alarm bells went off in my head, but I could not resist his tender and assertive approach. As an experienced lover, he soon had me undressed. Ivan then lifted me up and placed me naked in front of the mirror, following which he slid his hands along my body like a professional sculptor. I smiled at his reflection. It was both romantic and arousing at the same time how he admired my body.

Ivan seemed to be the full embodiment of my desires. His nimble fingers tenderly touched the contours of my breasts. His lips followed the path his fingers had mapped. ‘I’m still a virgin and I would like to be one for a while longer,’ I softly said.

‘Don’t worry, Mer. I won’t go inside you if you don’t want me to,’ he assured me.

Yet he still tried to convince me to do so a while later and used every moment of bodily weakness. Only when we landed on the floor frolicking, did he realize that you could not simply penetrate an athletic and unwilling woman. We landed in an impasse, which was far from boring because of the still uncertain ending. His lips enclosed my fingers and he became tender again. Even though I was angry with him, he made me shiver with excitement again.

‘Mer, I want to taste you,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘Millimetre for millimetre.’

‘Are you sure? I’m over one meter and 70 centimetres tall and that could last until morning,’ I teased him.

A while later I felt something come from afar like the thunderous roar of a heavy storm. My first orgasm. An almost simultaneous climax. The groan from Ivan still echoed in my ear when I showed him to the door. My gesture did not seem to register with him completely.

‘I want you to leave now. I can’t forgive you that you tried to force me, ‘ I clarified. ‘I didn’t feel safe in your hands and I don’t like that’.

It surprised me that Ivan did not protest. He wished me goodnight and left the room. I felt relieved, because I knew this meant the end of our intimacy. I never went to bed with the same boy twice, because I did not want anyone to think I was their girlfriend. A steady relationship seemed a nightmare. It was stupid to settle for just one handsome boy. That is why I protected my independence like a weak candlelight against a strong wind. I thought it was strange that people entered into steady relationships at a young age then to separate because they were not mature enough. That would never happen to me, to squander a valuable relationship. I toyed with promising candidates until I was truly ready for more stability.

In the meantime, I rushed to find out if boys were special enough and instead of being sad that they were not, my hart looked forward to the next romantic adventure. I was not obsessed by the male gender, but with looking for the differences between them. From the way they expressed their passion, to their reaction at my inevitable rejection. My courting was very much like my reading. First, I would look at the book cover and if I found that attractive I would begin to read. People are just like books: it’s all about the inside, but everyone sees the outside first.

Sometime I would continue to read in the hope that the content would excite me after all. With some boys, I already knew that it was time to close the book on our relationship after just a few pages. This meant I read many boring texts, but I had no choice. If I stopped reading, then I would never get to see a masterpiece.

Since I was fourteen years old I was asking myself what the meaning of life was and to discover that I devoured philosophical books that I found in my parents’ large bookcases. If I did not understand something I would ask my father. Dad was intelligent enough to explain it at my level of understanding. He called me ‘ant’, probably because I tried to gather all the information as carefully as I could or perhaps because in his eyes I was still his little girl.

Yet his little girl had matured both physically and mentally at an early age. She wrote in her diary without hesitation:

‘ At the time, I read the word hedonist in a philosophical dictionary I knew it referred to me. My adventurism is sometimes dangerous, but I enjoy it. The adrenaline rushes through my veins when I get to test myself in risky situations. It feels special to be the eye of the tornado, to experience things that other people are afraid of. I have more dreams than words. That doesn’t matter, because I do not want to dream. I want to live. On the presumption that they both exist, I love the Devil more than God. The Devil is more exciting. I am not afraid of his temptation. I have agreed with myself not to regret the mistakes I make. My existence is exciting because of this. And because of my search for true love. Perhaps that is too difficult to achieve, but I love fairy tales. Love is like a fata morgana, you can never be completely sure that it exists or that it suddenly disappears.

The fata morgana’s make my life more exciting than it is, although I sometimes hate my shallowness. You could say that an intelligent girl can’t be superficial, but I am superficiality itself. I jump from boy to boy without getting to know them better. As if I only have a few months to live and am afraid to miss out on any interesting people. I have always been this agitated. No patience to stand still in one spot.

I am driven by my sexuality and ambitions and I don’t even know which of the two is stronger. Perhaps my growing ambitions are connected to my growing sexuality, which has the aim of getting more men under my control. I am a control freak. If I don’t have something under control, then I am overcome by a sense of self-pity. I even try to dose my life’s adventures so that boring periods do not follow each other.

I often feel both powerful and powerless at the same time. My brains are aware of everything that can be gotten through money, ambition, charm and intellect and that is such a massive amount that they sometimes become stressed with the amount of choice and they cannot choose. I don’t even know what type of man I like. Perhaps older boys. The younger ones are so obsessed with my appearance, that I get the feeling that the rest is not important to them. Sometimes a decent looking painting in a beautiful frame is seen as something wonderful. The adornments distract from the essence. That is the problem with all young men: their inexperience makes them look no farther than the frame. Only mature men also value your personality and become interested in the artwork itself. Not that I consider myself a beautiful work of art, but I have come to realize that one way or the other I can manipulate the stronger sex. I don’t just fancy men in general, only men who admire me. Perhaps I fall for their admiration more than for the men themselves ’.

I never opened my diary to look back. I was too young to have meaningful thoughts about life and the meaning of life. I hoped to find these in the literature.

‘Young people imagine that money is everything and when they become older, they know for sure,’ I read in an Oscar Wilde book. Was life really about gaining more wealth and power?

After many years, I still had not found the right answer. Here in Las Vegas it all seemed plausible, in this glitter world of neon full of expensive obsessions and human weakness. Or was it about looking for beauty? Even that seemed plausible. The mega hotels had risen like a fata morgana out of the dry desert and radiated with their excessive architecture a beauty that I had not experienced so intensely anywhere in the world. Maybe it was simpler than that and the meaning of life was just to enjoy it to the full? This was the most satisfying answer for the 14-year-old girl. For a woman with a past behind her, that was the question.