“Our comrade’s views are mine, I am with him,” Voldomir declared.
“So am I,” said Tergowitz.
“Very well then,” I resumed, “let’s be up and away for the frontier of this infamous clime. Though bayonets guard it, let us try to slip across the line: once we are free, the lives and riches of others will amply compensate us for the losses occasioned us by the perfidious cruelty of the imperial whore who keeps us captive here.”
We drank a few bottles of vodka to our projects, and were about to seal our vows with the solemnities of some sodomite fuckshed when a lad of fifteen appeared at the door. He came with a request from his father, who wished to borrow a few skins from Voldomir and who would return them in a day or two.
“Who is this child?” I asked my friends.
“The son of a great Russian nobleman,” Voldomir replied, “like us exiled for having displeased Catherine; he dwells a hundred versts from here.” Then, taking me aside, he continued in a lower voice: “Since we are soon to leave, and shall be far away before his father hears about the thing, we might, if you like, amuse ourselves with the boy….”
“Yes, by God,” I replied, already laying heavy hands upon our young visitor and jerking his breeches down to his knees, “we’ll fuck him first, then eat him afterward: this is tastier flesh than the martens and weasels that make up our daily fare.”
I embugger first while my comrades hold the child still: Tergowitz’s turn comes next; Voldomir because of his massiveness of member goes in last; we begin again. And when we have had enough of our little darling, we roast him alive on the spit and eat him with relish.
“Oh, how mistaken they are,” the Hungarian observed, “to disdain this meat, there’s nothing more delicate nor better flavored in all the world, as the wise savages understand who have such a predilection for it.”
“That,” said Voldomir, “is simply another of your European absurdities: after having erected murder into a crime you cut off your nose to spite your face and banished these dainties from your table; and the same overweening pride brought you to suppose that there was no wrong in butchering a pig for food, while there was nothing worse than performing the same operation upon a human being. Such are the sinister effects of this civilization I abhor and which causes me to regard this degenerated portion of mankind as a race of contemptible fools.”
Our excellent repast concluded, we all three climbed into the Pole’s bed and, at sunrise, armed to the teeth, we set off with the firm resolve to follow no calling other than that of brigand and murderer, to heed nothing except our pleasures and self-interest.
Unsure of the road we were to take, our first plan was to make for the Chinese border since we wished to avoid Muscovy and all the other adjoining provinces over which the Empress ruled, where we were almost certain to be arrested. But the way to China was far, and instead we chose to cross the deserts to the Caspian shore; after several months of travel we came to Astrakhan, without anyone having sought to hinder our flight.
From Astrakhan we moved toward Tiflis, killing, pillaging, fucking, ravaging all that crossed our path, and entered this second city after laying waste a fair part of the countryside. In us none the less was the desire, grown powerful after years spent in the wilderness, for a civil and quiet place to abide, where less tumultuous passions can at once be satisfied more luxuriously, more agreeably, and more conveniently. In this regard, the libertinage, the beauty, of the Georgians looked to promise us all we could ask for.
Tiflis lies at the foot of a mountain on the banks of the River Kur, which traverses Georgia; it contains some rather handsome palaces. Having robbed a sufficient number of travelers along the way to have accumulated two or three thousand rubles apiece, we immediately took sumptuous lodgings. We bought pretty serving girls; but the Pole, who refused to have anything female even come near him, chose a strapping Georgian escorted by two young Greek slaves, and we refreshed ourselves a little after the rigors of the long and monotonous journey we had just completed. Commerce at Tiflis is chiefly in women. There they are publicly sold for the harems of Asia and Constantinople, like cattle in a market; anyone has the right to go and examine and handle them in the sheds where specimens ranging from lately weaned infants up to girls the age of sixteen are kept on exhibit. Nowhere will you find greater beauty than in the creatures this country produces, nowhere will you find more elegant figures, more attractive features. But if one cannot look upon them without desiring them, seldom does one desire them without having them. Nowhere is whoredom so well established in the world as here.
Independence is unknown to the Georgians. The tyranny their overlords exert upon them is not mild; and as this aristocracy is exceedingly libertine, there is no need for me to insist upon the fact that in this part of the world too, despotism expresses itself in lewd terms: they vex their slaves, beat them, whip them, and all that in the spirit of cruel lubricity, whose effects, as you are so fully aware, lead to crimes of all sorts. But what a contradiction! These nobles, who treat their vassals as slaves, themselves grovel before the prince to obtain money and place; and to ensure success, to him they prostitute their children of either sex and starting at the tenderest age.
Tergowitz, naturally adroit and seductive, soon contrived to introduce himself and then to lodge the three of us in the house of one of the foremost lords of the land who, along with very considerable wealth, owned three daughters and as many sons, all of the most excellent beauty. As this gentleman had traveled widely, Tergowitz affirmed that he had seen him in Russia, in Sweden, in Denmark, and the worthy fellow believed it all. It had been a long time since we had been shown such courtesy and such generous treatment, and doubtless still longer since a benefactor had found himself rewarded quite as we paid that one back. We began by a general assault upon his children: inside a fortnight, all of them, boys and girls alike, had been fucked in every manner. Pointing out to us that there was nothing left to fuck under the good man’s roof, Voldomir asked how we were going to take our leave. “By robbing him,” I replied. “I cannot believe his gold is less worth having than the cunts and assholes of his offspring.”
“And when we’ve robbed him?” Tergowitz wondered.
“Why,” said I, “we shall kill him. There are only a few domestics in the house; we are strong enough to take them personally in hand, and I feel my prick already twittering at the prospect of murdering his pretty children.”
“But hospitality, my friends, have we not been given hospitality?” said Voldomir.
“Indeed we have,” I admitted, “and therefor we should be grateful. Just behavior on our part demands that we do well by someone who has acted kindly toward us. Has not this animal our host told us a hundred times over that as a good Christian11 he is certain he will go straight to heaven? His hypothesis accepted, will he not be a thousand times happier there than on earth?”
“Assuredly.”
“Then we must render him this supreme service.”
“To be sure,” said Voldomir, “but you have my consent to all these deaths only if it is understood that they be frightful. For too long have our stealing and killing been done out of need; the moment has come to steal and kill from wickedness, from taste; the world must shudder upon learning of the crime we have committed…. Men must be made to blush from shame at belonging to the same species as we. More, I insist that a monument be raised to this crime, relating it and reminding others of it forever, and that with our own hands we cut our names upon this granite memorial.”
“Go on, villain, you have our sympathy, speak your mind.”
“He himself must be made to roast his children, to join us in dining on them; and while he feeds he must be embuggered by us; after which, the remnants of the feast must be sewn to his body; bound and helpless in his cellar, he must be left thus to die when he feels ready.”
The scheme is adopted unanimously; unfortunately, however, owing to thoughtlessness on our part the discussion was overheard by the youngest o
f the man’s daughters, upon whom we had already vented our desires and who was lame from the prodigious abuse she had sustained. Voldomir, with his gigantic prick, had left her anus a shambles, and to calm her we had been giving her little presents for several days. Quaking with terror at what she had just found out, there was no preventing her from rushing off and letting the cat out of the bag. Hearing the slut’s story, the father promptly brought a garrison into the house, the police instructing these men to keep an eye on us. But the god who protects crime always leads virtue into its power; of this there ceased long ago to be a shadow of a doubt.
The four soldiers the gentleman led home, and whom he meant to billet in his house without explaining to us his reasons for doing so, were immediately recognized by us as former comrades who had also managed to escape from Siberia; they, as you may easily imagine, preferred our cause to the Georgian Christian’s, and the poor man, instead of three enemies under his roof, shortly had seven. The proposal to share in the booty and in the enjoyment of all those children was so warmly welcomed by our reinforcements that we fell to work at once. We tied our benefactor to a pillar in his dining hall and forthwith regaled him first with five hundred whipstrokes applied to every square inch of his behind, then to the pleasure of seeing his six darlings fucked before his eyes. Once they had been, we attached them in a circle around him and flogged those six asses until the room was awash with their blood; next, we lay them upon their backs in the gore and, hoisting their legs into the air, we flailed them with martinets and transformed their anterior parts into hash. After that, we tried to induce the father to taste a little pleasure with his woebegone children, but all efforts to rouse his prick were in vain, and so we castrated and unmembered him and constrained his progeny to eat his testicles and his pizzle; this accomplished, we sliced off the breasts of his daughters and now fed him forcibly upon the still warm and quivering flesh he had himself created.
We were about to move on to the next exercise when discord loomed up in our midst. Among the four soldiers was a splendid young Russian whose beauty was causing Voldomir to stiffen almost as hard as I. I would not, I could not take it upon myself to quit the young man’s breeches, from which the Pole, now very dark of brow, had several times sought to evict me. When at last I was lodged in the youth’s asshole, out of the corner of my eye I spied Voldomir coming up to me, dagger in hand; I unsheathed my own knife that instant and without stirring from the soldier’s fundament, where I was readying to deposit my seed, I stabbed my blade into Voldomir’s left side, he fell to the floor, blood gushing from the wound.
“Fuck!” exclaimed Tergowitz, then sodomizing one of the other soldiers, “there’s a vigorous deed for you. I must tell you, Borchamps, that I’m not at all sorry you’ve rid us of that bugger: he’d soon have done the same to us, be sure of it.”
I pull out my knife, wipe it dry, and I discharge: never has a murder checked an ejaculation, to the contrary. Then, lighting my pipe, “Go on, my friend,” I say to Tergowitz, “I’d never have treated our comrade that way had I not long ago detected in him all the vices that are ruinous to a society such as ours. Let’s you and I now swear an oath of everlasting fidelity to each other, and, you’ll see, we shall be able to get along very nicely without him.”
We terminated our operation. Everything had been carried out according to plan. We sacked the house, the spoils were considerable; well paid, our allies left us very content; but I was loath to be separated from mine: I suggested to Carleson that he remain with me, and he agreed. Two mules transported our baggage; for mounts we had three fine horses; and so we went forth from Tiflis and, skirting the edge of the Black Sea, we came by and by to Constantinople.
It was simply in the capacity of a valet we had Carleson with us; fond of him though I was, I sensed full well that a dozen or fifteen discharges inside his magnificent ass would appease my passion, and I was wary of putting him on an equal footing with us, lest in so doing I create a potentially dangerous rival.
Some highway robberies, a few rapes, as many murders—the obvious and easy line of action to take in a country where neither justice nor security exists: that fairly sums up our adventures in Asia Minor, and we arrived as serenely and surely in the Grand Turk’s capital as if we did not merit a hundred times over to appear nowhere there but on the gallows.
Foreigners do not reside in Constantinople itself, they establish themselves at Pera a suburb. We repaired thither with a view to taking a few days of rest before returning to our trade, which, plied with some success up until now, had put Tergowitz and me in possession of two hundred thousand francs each.
However, after consultation with my partner, I wrote to my sister, asking her to have funds and letters of recommendation for Constantinople sent to me, and also for Italy, whither we intended to go after leaving the Ottoman provinces; and before two months were out I received everything I could want to facilitate our enterprises. Straightway introducing myself to the banker with whom a credit had been opened for me, I shortly became the admirer of the sixteen-year-old girl he prized above all else in this world, and was raising as though she were his own child rather than an adopted one. Philogone was fair-haired, candid in her manner, and naïve, had the loveliest possible eyes, in a word, the whole effect was eminently winning. But here something very odd occurred. Through some strange caprice, not uncommon among true libertines and only comprehensible to them, although Philogone was attractive in the extreme, although the feelings she inspired in me were properly overpowering, I was moved, as I gazed upon her, by no desire other than to have her fucked by Tergowitz; that idea alone filled out my prick, I frigged it, dwelling upon nothing else. I took the Hungarian to the house of Philogone’s protector, Calni was his name; afterward, as we were walking home, I revealed my designs to my friend, who seemed much pleased by them.
“In all this I toil for your benefit, comrade, only for yours.”
“It would appear to me,” Tergowitz replied, “that we might broaden our objectives. This moneychanger, they say, is one of the richest in Constantinople; while that girl is being attended to, could we not also rob her guardian? I expect that we might then be able to travel through Italy in greater style and comfort.”
“Doubtless,” said I, “but what you suggest there shall not be easy; force is not on our side here, we shall have to resort to ruse. Such being the case, let us start by sowing a hundred thousand crowns in order to reap two million; do you disapprove?”
“No.”
“Then leave everything to me.”
I began by renting a country house; the one I chose was superb, isolated, and at a good distance from the city. As soon as I had filled it with elegant furnishings and hired a flock of domestics, I arranged fashionable gatherings every evening, and Philogone and Calni were of course among my guests. Tergowitz passed for my brother; to create the most favorable conditions for his moves was my concern, and I thought to prepare the terrain by subtly hinting at projects for an alliance: I was ever more willingly listened to. Only one thing stood in the way of my desires: that wretched girl, against whom I was inwardly plotting the most atrocious horrors, had taken it into her head to fall in love with me.
“Surely, Sir, such designs are very flattering,” she told me after I had finished speaking of my brother’s ambition, “but since my guardian has left me free to choose, honesty compels me to say, and I say it frankly, that I would have preferred it had you made this proposal in your own behalf.”
“Lovely Philogone,” I declared, “such words are wonderfully sweet to a man’s pride and self-esteem; but I must answer you in the same forthright language. Certain regrettable tendencies, for which I am not responsible, render me absolutely indifferent to women; and, if you were to become mine, the obligation you would come under to ape the sex I prefer would not make you as happy as you deserve to be.”
Seeing that Philogone did not grasp my meaning, I called upon the resources of libertine expression to explain to her that th
e shrine in which women sacrifice to love was not the one where I was wont to repair, and in exchange for the elucidation she requested of me I earned myself a complete view and thorough handling of this beautiful girl’s charms, who, with the candor and innocence of her age, trustingly surrendered the whole of herself to me. Ye gods! what exquisite forms! what purity of line, of color! what graces! and, above all, what a delicious ass! When, opening its orifice, peeping inside, I was obliged, in pursuit of my demonstration, to tell Philogone that ’twas here the temple in which I offered my homage, “Little do I care,” was the charming creature’s answer; “oh, Borchamps, of such things I know nothing, but must not all my body be yours when you so firmly possess my heart?”
“No, siren, no!” I cried, fondling her peerless behind, “no, do what you will … love me, worship me, it will be to no avail, I shall not be melted, who for women can feel no pity nor any decent emotion; ’tis the promise of pleasures of no very delicate order which excites me as I toy with you; and my heart is as immune to love as to any other human virtue.” Then letting fall her skirts: “No, Philogone, I cannot marry you, I say; my brother can make you a happy woman, and he will.”
Thus did a year go by, and during it confidence was established. Establishing it did not, however, engross all my time; I busied myself with the loveliest Jewesses, the prettiest Greek girls, and the most handsome boys in Constantinople, and to make up for all I had lost during my long-enforced abstinence in Siberia, I conversed with better than three thousand individuals in the one sex and the other in the course of that year. For a thousand sequins, a Jew, who traded in precious stones and had Ahmed’s sultanas among his customers, permitted me to accompany him into the harem; and there, risking my life, I fucked six of the Grand Turk’s most beautiful wives. They were all habituated to sodomy, and ’twas of their own accord they proposed a route whereby they avoided pregnancies. Rarely did the Sultan, who always mixes them with his castrati, approach them otherwise than from the rear; preparatorily, they anoint this part with a certain essential oil which shrinks it to such narrowness that you cannot embugger them without bloodshed. My wishes went farther: I keenly desired to fuck a few of those famous eunuchs, in whose asses the Grand Turk is so prone to forget women; but since he keeps a much closer guard upon these personages than upon his sultanas, there is no possible way of obtaining access to them. Ahmed, I was informed, owned some who were twelve years old, in beauty surpassing anything to be encountered on earth. I asked for a description of his tastes.
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