John Davis - The Year of Dangerous Loving

‘The way you tell a story!’

He was a scream, apparently. Hargreave knew he could tell a good tale when he felt like it, when he was in the mood, but it seemed a very long time since he had felt like that; he had forgotten how entertaining he could be. Now he was happy, and it was lovely to be in lust with somebody who laughs a lot and thinks you’re very amusing, it was delightful to laugh at his own jokes again. She was a good story-teller too. She was a natural mimic, her imitation of the English and American accents was very good. She was a born actress, and told a story with her hands and eyes and face and body-language. He was delighted to find out that Russians and English laughed at the same things, that many of his jokes had Russian versions which were often funnier.

‘Darling, Russians tell lots of jokes because they drink so much because that is all there is to do, jokes and drink is all we have to laugh about.’

And it was fascinating, exotic, that she was Russian; from behind that Iron Curtain, suddenly let loose in the big wide world. He wanted to know all about her life in Russia, about her parents, her home, her schooling, her work, her friends. He built up a long series of images of her, hoeing the collective fields in the spring, harvesting in summer, the sweat running off her, her lovely girl-thighs steamy, dust and grit in her flaxen hair, her sexy hands coarsened; he imagined her bleak schoolhouse, hot in summer, cold in winter, smelling of unwashed bodies and chalk and books.

‘I always sat at the very back of the class so I could cheat easier – everybody cheats all the time in Russia, darling, it is the only way to get anything –’

He imagined her swimming with her friends in the muddy river in her underwear.

‘– and sometimes we swam naked, when there were no boys, that was great fun, oh that made us want to be free, to run away from Russia, swim in the lovely blue sea in the sunshine with palm trees on the beach, and Coca-Cola and icecream, and then dance and fuck like crazy, like the Americans do –’

The image of a dozen Russian schoolgirls romping naked in the river was erotic, even if it was muddy. ‘What made you think Americans did that? Did you have access to American books and magazines?’

‘Of course, they were forbidden, but somebody always had some old magazine that had been smuggled, or from the black market, and of course we were taught at school that Americans were terrible people who only thought about eating food that makes them fat, and making money and making war – and that they fuck like crazy. Anyway, we studied the magazines and saw the fashions and the beautiful girls and the beautiful cars and the beautiful food and the white beaches with the palms and the Coca-Colas and the icecream and beef-steak, and the blue sea, and it looked pretty good to us.’

He grinned: ‘And did you? Fuck like crazy?’ He was not sure he wanted to hear the answer.

She shrugged. ‘That’s all there is to do in Russia, darling. But we were only schoolgirls, we didn’t have much experience yet.’

Her candour was endearing, almost. She was a very honest soul. ‘So how old were you when you first went to bed with a man?’

‘Man, or a boy? I made love to my first boy when I was fourteen. Not too bad, huh? I’d had big breasts for two years. I was driving a tractor. I was having an orgasm, because the tractor seat was vibrating between my legs. This boy saw me and he said, “Come here and I’ll give you a better one”’

‘And he did?’

‘He did.’ She looked at him, her eyes sparkling with mischief, then she laughed and hugged him to her breasts. ‘Oh darling – the look on your face! Do I make you jealous?’

‘Yes.’ Hargreave grinned sheepishly. It was almost true.

‘I’m so glad!’ She rocked him, then collapsed back and stroked her fingertip across his eyebrow. ‘Oh, you’re such a nice man. Such a nice English gentleman. I think I love you …’

It seemed that his heart turned over. It felt as if he loved her too.

And his mind formed images of her working out in her school gymnasium, leaping off springboards, flying through the air, doing somersaults, cavorting on the parallel bars.

‘Can you really do all that stuff?’

‘Oh, yes, I was in competitions. I was quite good, but not good enough to be famous, my breasts were too big, even when I was fifteen. But I won some prizes. Shall I show you how I can walk on my hands?’

‘With all that wine inside you?’

‘No problem.’ She got off the bed, did a cartwheel across the room, then sprang on to her hands. She balanced there a moment, her body straight, her legs rigid, her toes pointed, her hair sweeping the floor: then she bent her knees and walked across the carpet on her hands. ‘Yes?’ she grinned at him, upside-down.

‘ Very good.’

‘And now …’ She stopped, straightened her legs again, then parted them into a Y; then she dramatically raised one hand. She lifted her arm out sideways, her fingertips pointed. ‘Yes?’

‘Amazing!’

She carefully replaced her hand on the floor, brought her legs together, and did a nimble spring. She landed on her feet in a flash of golden locks, her face flushed. ‘You want to make love like that?’

‘I can’t wait!’

‘Here I come!’ She ran across the room and took a flying dive on to the bed, laughing.

‘ Oh …’ He looked at her lying there beside him in the elegant room, her hair awry across the crumpled pillow, the China night out there, and it was hard to imagine her in a sexless smock toiling in an aluminium factory in the winter making pots and pans, living in a tiny grey apartment in a vast, smog-bound, joyless city: she was an exotic creature of the sun and sea and glittering nightlife, how could such beauty be caged in a factory?

‘I could not live like that any more. And that is why I decided to fuck my way to freedom.’

Fuck her way? He had not heard this last weekend.

‘What other way is there for a girl in the aluminium works? Everybody was fucking everybody anyway, what else was there to do? But I did not fuck my shift-boss and my floor manager like the other girls just to get a little more overtime on my ticket, not even the factory manager, although he begged me many times. No, I fucked the Party Secretary, because I wanted him to help me get to school to study to be a vet. That is how everything works in Russia – you must know somebody in the Party who knows somebody in veterinary school. And that is how the KGB man got to hear of me, saying he was from Mosfilm.’

‘Did you have to go to bed with him too?’

‘Of course. It was all a trick. But I thought I was going to be a movie star.’ She fluttered her eyelashes. ‘And here I am, darling, in bed with you. What secrets have you got to tell me?’

It was even exotic that she was a courtesan, a woman of the flesh, doubtless one of the most beautiful of her trade in the world, that she came from that earthy, sultry other-world, that she possessed a wealth of carnal expertise. What she was giving him would be the envy of any red-blooded man, and it did not even seem that he was paying for it. It did not spoil the atmosphere a jot when there was a knock on the door on the first morning and there stood Vladimir, looking annoyed.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, darling,’ Olga said to Hargreave, ‘I forgot – the money.’ They had just finished making love and she was dressing for breakfast, screwing an earring into her lobe. She delved into her weekend bag and produced a credit-card machine. ‘I was supposed to leave the credit-slip downstairs last night for Vladimir, but I got –’ she made her eyes sparkle – ‘excited.’

Hargreave was not embarrassed but he did not like Vladimir standing there in the doorway like a hood.