Adam Thirlwell - Politics

His clumsiness annoyed him. He suddenly felt vulnerable, kneeling there between Nana’s legs, his right arm aloft. He did not feel tyrannic. He did not feel Sultanic. He only felt like Moshe.

In the flat upstairs, a toddler fell over. It crashed and cried.

This made Moshe even more self-conscious.

Poor Moshe. He was a nervous sadist, a shy sodomite. He had not had the practice. That was his worry. Another worry was how much practice Nana had ever had. The two worries were inextricable.

Out of character, Moshe hit Nana. He hit her very hard. Nana made an uninterpretable noise.

3

Then, on his knees, Moshe readied himself. He dabbed two fingers into her cunt while his thumb pushed at her arse- hole. His fingers formed the configuration more commonly used to grip a bowling ball. Then he wetted his penis and pushed it where he hoped her arsehole was, angling his penis down with his right hand.

Nana asked him to stop. She said it hurt too much.

That was Moshe’s cue to persevere.

Every shiksa likes being fucked by a Jewboy, replied Moshe, hamming it up.

What noble perseverance! A little unsure, Moshe was still continuing with his fantasy. And I think this perseverance is admirable, I really do. Some people might be sneering. Some people might be commenting that, when it comes to sex, only skill is important — but I think that’s wrong. Persevering is also noble. Moshe was being noble.

Balancing on his left hand, the other girlishly guiding the head of his penis while a thin first finger located her arse- hole, he tried to push it in. But this arrangement presented a conundrum. His left arm, unable, wobbling, wasn’t strong enough. And it was, after all, thought Moshe, quite difficult — fucking the arse of a motionless girl. He toyed with saying, ‘Sex doll! Can you lift yourself up a little?’ But Nana could not help. He knew that. He knew she could not raise her docile expectant arsehole. The thrill was not to be seen to be thrilled.

It made him pause. Nana, her face squashed, noted the pause. If she squinted she could read the Dunlopillo lettering on the mattress’s label, faint beneath the sheet.

But there are moments of inspiration and this was one of them.

Moshe reached and stretched and grabbed at some hand cream — Ren Tahitian Vanilla Hand and Body Milk — by the bed. He flicked it open with his thumb and first finger and then, exhausted, just wiped it straight on to the head of his cock, the glans, the fraenum, his complete erection. Then he left the tube above Nana’s blonde and feathered hair. It stayed there throughout.

The cream made his cock glowy stingy. He pushed at her again and felt an odd warm tightness so he stopped there. Waves of relief washed over Moshe. He allowed himself a smug moment. And who would not? Let us not get hypocritical here. He was fucking his little girl’s arse. He waited inside her, feeling himself drift slippy, slowly, further in.

This was the highpoint of Moshe’s evening.

He moved his penis back a bit, back a bit, before embarking further, and it slipped out and down and past. And panicking, dismayed, ashamed, he tried to shove it quickly, back to its unnatural home, but only finished up in Nana’s surprised vagina.

Optimistically, for a moment he fucked Nana anyway. He persuaded himself that sex from behind was almost the same as sodomy. He twisted. He dipped. He angled.

But no.

This was not anal sex. Moshe knew that. This was the opposite of anal sex. It was straight heterosexual vaginal intercourse.

He relaxed on top of Nana and mused on Israel.

Now, this should have been the lowpoint of Moshe’s evening. But it was not. It got worse. He lay there, quiet, and started to think. As he thought, he became mildly hysterical. Yes, free to do anything he liked, Moshe became hysterical.

This, thought Moshe, must be the most nervous sex scene. It must be the most nervous scene in the history of sex. He wondered in a general way about the other couples, the worldwide satiated couples. In every other bedroom, girls and boys, in twos and threes and — who knows? — fours, were crying out in ecstasy. They were prancing, thought solid and motionless Moshe. They were ecstatic. He was sure of it.

I am going to expand a little on Moshe’s problem. It is a universal problem. It is the universal insecurity that one is not universal.

In his book called Love, the famous French novelist Stendhal explains his theory of why we like reading. It is this. ‘Just as a man has almost no physiological self-knowledge except by studying comparative anatomy, so vanity and various other causes of illusion prevent us from having a clear picture of our own passions except by studying the weaknesses of others. If this essay of mine happens to serve any useful purpose, it will be in training the mind to make this sort of comparison.’

Let me explain. Just as you don’t know what your own stomach looks like, you don’t know what your own feelings look like either. You don’t know what your stomach looks like because of your skin. You don’t know what your feelings look like because of vanity and other causes of illusion. To get over the problem of skin, we have anatomy textbooks. To get over the problem of vanity and other causes of illusion, we have novels.

Compare this to Moshe’s magnified worry as he lay on Nana’s back. He was worried that everyone else had better sex than he did. He was suffering from pique. Now, the cure for pique is to compare yourself honestly and calmly to other people. When you do this, then you realise that everyone, at some point, is equally clumsy. Only a select few succeed at anal sex, every time. You recover a sense of proportion.

Moshe needed a novel. (He needed this novel.) Moshe was suffering from the absence of the novel. This novel, for example, is one huge act of miniaturisation. Everything is the right size. If Moshe had read this novel, then I think he would have been happy.

It is a universal problem. Compare this to you. Perhaps, for instance, your first reaction to Moshe’s little worry just now was to dismiss it. You thought that he seemed unre- alistically weak. You simply could not imagine a boy who was neurotic about sex like Moshe. Maybe you even thought that the writing was also obscene. Well, that’s what you might have thought at first. Your vanity and other causes of illusion might have made you think that. But actually, I do not think you are really upset. My idea is that you are like this too. Maybe, just maybe, you are not. But I reckon that, at some point in your life, something almost identical to this has happened to you.

Of course it has! This book is meant to be reassuring. This book is universal. It is a comparative study. The last thing I want is for this to be just me.

Because it is universal, there should be no local difficulties in this book. For instance, perhaps Moshe’s name is difficult. It is a very Jewish name. That is because it was the one concession Moshe’s father made to his Jewish family, after marrying a non-Jewish woman. Perhaps you do not know how this name should be pronounced. Possibly, you have not had a Jewish upbringing. Well, I will tell you. Moshe is pronounced ‘Moisha’. That is how you pronounce it. You see? I don’t want this to be private at all.

5

As for Nana, she was feeling a little uncomfortable. Her wrists had chafed on the metal handcuffs while she pretended to be trapped. Also, one of Moshe’s ragged fingernails had scratched her.

She said to him, ‘Le mgo.’

Moshe leaned forward, untwisted the loose pink rope, then rolled over on to his back and watched his penis sadden, shorten, stop. Nana stroked her wrists. As she stroked, she noticed a meek silence. So she twisted on to her back to check on Moshe. She was worried he was sad. She was worried he might be mournful. But the way not to be mournful is to talk, she reasoned, reasonably.