I heard my mother's voice: Andras, have you remembered to pee? I left the house on Aunt Alice's arm, swearing never to return. Even the comforting words of my fair girlfriend struck me as terribly condescending, and I wondered, walking down the stairs with her, how I could restore the balance of our relationship just before going out into the street, I pinched her buttocks. She pretended not to notice, but she blushed. So I decided to marry Aunt Alice when I grew up because she understood me. However, I would not want to give a dramatic image of my childhood by presenting it as the story of my incestuous passion for this superb woman. Test with the Franciscan Fathers and during my mother's weekly small receptions I was the happiest when I saw all her friends gathered together and could watch them and listen to them talk about fashion, the war, their families, weddings, and things I didn't understand. The great silent cathedral, and our living room resounding with the joyful voices of these women, impregnated with their perfume, illuminated by their looks - these are the strongest and most vivid images of my childhood. I wonder what my life would have been like later if, as a child, I hadn't benefited from these little receptions from my mother. Maybe that's why I never thought of women as my enemies, as territories to be conquered, but always as allies and friends - which is why, I believe, they have always, they, too, showed affection. I have never met these furies that we hear about:

Still on the subject of my tender inclinations - for women in particular, it must be concluded that my perfect happiness during my mother's weekly teas denoted in me a precocious and very marked taste for sex .opposite. A taste which, obviously, is not foreign to my good fortune with women thereafter. My memories, I hope, will be instructive reading, but that does not mean that women will have more attraction for you than you have for them. If, deep down inside, you kiss them, if you only dream of humiliating them, if you like to impose your law on them, you will have every chance of receiving the change in your coin. They will desire you and love you only to the extent that you desire and love them yourselves - and praise by their generosity. Until the age of ten, I was allowed to forget that I was born in the year of Hitler's rise to power.

In this war-torn Europe, our city seemed to me like the capital of a fairy kingdom: tiny, like a toy, and yet ancient and majestic, like certain old districts of Paris. I lived there like a happy young prince, in the best of all possible worlds, surrounded by a large and protective family: my mother, this quiet and pensive woman who followed me with her serene gaze; my aunts, her friends, noisy and lively, but elegant; and the good Franciscan monks, my benevolent fathers. It was given to me to grow in a cocoon full of love and to absorb this love in all the cells of my being. But - and maybe that's not so bad - after learning to love the world, I came to know it. From a carefree child who dreamed of the priesthood and of a blessed martyrdom, I became a pimp and a black-market fabricator. At the end of the war - after two nightmarish years, before I even reached the age of twelve - I pimped Parisian prostitutes in an American army camp near Bordeaux, the city which, in other respects was so similar to mine.

The change came in the summer of 1943, as the waves of war finally reached western France. Our peaceful town turned into a garrison, and at night the American bombers added new rubble to the ancient ruins. Our apartment was requisitioned for the Wehrmacht officers, and it was high time: some two weeks after our departure, the house was directly hit. To escape the aerial bombardments, we took refuge with my grandparents, further west, in a remote village, and in the fall, my mother sent me to the prytanée of a small town near the Belgian border. . I would be safe and well fed there, she said, and they would teach me Latin.

The colonel who commanded the establishment summed up the spirit in his welcoming speech to the new first-year students: "Here you will learn what discipline is!" At all times of the day, we were shouted in our ears, in the classroom, in the courtyard and in the dormitory. Every afternoon, from four to five, we had to survey the park, which was vast, heavily wooded and surrounded by high walls. We were ordered, in pain of severe corporal punishment, to walk briskly and never stop for a second, and sergeants watched for us - leaning against the trees - to make sure we were following the rules. But we, the new ones, also had to obey the orders of the old ones, who had duly instituted authority over us I found myself very embarrassed from the first day when an elder walking behind me shouted at me to stop and stand at attention. He was a scrawny redhead, with a crew cut, puny bearing, and hardly imposing—in fact, he looked younger than me. I was afraid of disobeying him, but I was even more afraid of disobeying the sergeant who continued to advance at a brisk pace, and he had to run to catch up with me. When he reached me, he was sweating and out of breath. Say hello! he demanded in a small, quivering voice. Say hello! I gave him a bow and went on my way, overcome with disgust. I was convinced that I had been thrown among a bunch of berserk fools. It was a shock from which I never fully recovered. My year and a half of exercises at the Royal Hungarian Officers' Training College almost made me an anarchist. millionaires, senior executives or their companies. Incidentally, this is an attitude that seems to fascinate most women - perhaps because they are less impressed than the majority of men by the perfection of the established world order. by men.

The elders were particularly concerned with how we made our beds. You must make your bed square and without a crease! shouted our room manager, throwing my blankets and my sheets to the four corners of the dormitory. “You lack training” Even after Russian troops entered Hungary, after Admiral Horthy announced that it was useless to resist any longer, that most of the Hungarian army had perished - more than t a million men, more than ten percent of our population and that there would never be a Hungarian army again even then, this obsession with wrinkle-free blankets did not leave our room manager. When he ransacked my bed, I had to do it again in three minutes; and if I wasn't fast enough, which never failed to happen, he would undo it again, and so on until he gets tired. This little game lasted until the moment when the Russian troops arrived in the suburbs of the city. 

The colonel then fled with his family and all his belongings, in the trucks intended for the evacuation of the student officers, almost all the other officers disappeared, and it was a battalion commander, our history teacher, who drove our march west through Austria. 

I was not to see a bed of any kind again for several months. We were about four hundred to join the disorderly horde of refugees who, fleeing the war, always found themselves in its center, because it was constantly on the move, caught between the German army and the Russian army. In this crossing of the plains and mountains of Austria between the front lines, we learned to sleep while walking, to pass by bodies mutilated, inanimate, or still moving, and I finally understood that the Cross does not only represent sacrifice and forgiveness but also the crucifixion. Eleven and a half years old at the time, I was marked for life by the demented cruelty of man and the fragility of the human body. They say that religious education instils in us the guilt of the flesh, but since those weeks when I experienced the horror, hunger and exhaustion, the only forms of weakness I refuse are hatred and violence. It was probably at this time that I acquired my libertine sensitivity: seeing too many corpses, you tend to lose your inhibitions in front of living bodies. Driving through blackout Vienna, I lost my companions and from then on I was on my own. I lived on what I could steal in the fields beside the roads. Other refugees had to do the same thing before me, because the peasants guarded their plots with machine guns, and I often had my skin burned before I could cook a potato. In mid-May 1945, when a US Army jeep picked me up on the way, alone and half-starved, I was ready for anything. By saying that I became a pimp for the United States Army before I reached my twelfth birthday, I would not want to give the impression that the soldiers treated me without mercy or without regard for my young age. I was undoubtedly much happier in the American army than in the prytaneum. And if I got busy with occupations that weren't my age, it was because I wanted to support myself - and perhaps above all to learn more about sex. The two soldiers who picked me up took me to the camp and saw to it that I was fed, showered, medically examined and presented to the commander of the place. The doctor's report on my state of physical exhaustion and the obvious effects of my nightmarish experiences must have aroused his pity, and he decided to keep me in the camp. I was given a bed in one of the long brick buildings of the barracks (originally built for the Hitler Youth), a uniform adjusted to my size, a ration of GI cigarettes, chewing gum, breath mints, and a bowl; and it was with a deep sense of well-being that I joined the file of soldiers to receive a hearty meal. For the next few days, I spent most of my time walking around the barracks trying to befriend them. They had little else to do but look at pictures, shave, maintain their uniform and weapon, and teach English words to a lost kid were the first words I learned, roughly in this order. But after two weeks, I had already mastered the language well enough to talk about the war, Hungary, the United States and of our respective families. One evening I happened to be around while a young Parisian and one of the soldiers were discussing the price, and I offered my services as mediator and interpreter. Five packets of cigarettes, a box of powdered milk, twenty-four packets of chewing gum and a small box of corned beef were the main currency. It turned out that most of the women who came to the camp at night - the military police closed their eyes - were Hungarians from the neighbouring refugee camp; so that I quickly became a translator, broker and pimp. The first lesson I learned from this audacious activity was that all the moralizing talk about sex had absolutely no basis in reality. It was also a revelation for all those good, astonished, respectable, sometimes even rather snobbish little bourgeois women that I went to look for in the overcrowded and miserable Hungarian camp to bring them to the barracks. At the end of the war, when the Austrians themselves were in dire need, the hundreds of thousands of refugees were barely able to subsist - and their situation was all the more pitiful as most of them were accustomed to the comfort of a bourgeois way of life. Pride and virtue, which were so important to these women in their former surroundings, no longer had any meaning in the refugee camp. They asked me - blushing, but often in the presence of their mute husbands and their children - if the soldiers had venereal diseases and what they had to offer. I fondly remember a beautiful, well-born lady who took it with extraordinary dignity. She was a tall, dark-haired woman, with large throbbing breasts and a bony face beaming with pride, in her late forties, I would say. Her husband was a count, head of one of the oldest and most distinguished families in Hungary. His name and rank in the army, were it Admiral Horthy's defeated army, still carried enough weight to assure them

a wooden shack away from the other refugees. They had a daughter of about eighteen who had long hair and giggled silly whenever I entered their home to carry out these relatively infrequent assignments. Countess Nabilla. accepted the deal only with an officer, and only on condition of being paid two or three times the usual rate. The Count always turned his head away when he saw me. He still wore the bottom of his ceremonial uniform - black trousers with a wide gold stripe on the side, but over this, instead of the gold-fringed epaulette jacket, he wore an old, ragged sweater. His presence had a sinister effect on me, for I remembered the pages devoted to his family in our elementary school history textbooks, and photos of him as a great general reviewing his troops in the newspapers we were given to read at the prytaneum. He rarely responded to my greetings, and his wife always greeted me as an unpleasant surprise, you would never have believed that it was she herself who asked me to notify her whenever I had requests from well-appointed officers. own not having too many requirements. Him again ! she exclaimed in a chagrined and exasperated voice. Then she turned to her husband with a tragic gesture. “Do we absolutely need something today? Can't, for once, send this immoral kid to hell? Are we really so totally helpless? As a rule, the general did not answer, he contented himself with shrugging his shoulders indifferently; but all the same, he sometimes replied curtly: You who do the cooking, you should know what we need. If you had gone over to the side of the Russians with your troops, I wouldn't have been reduced to this defilement, to this mortal sin, so that we could eat! she cried one day in a sudden fit of hysteria. I am only translating their dialogue, but it is indeed in these obsolete and incongruous terms of "defilement, mortal sin, and "immoral child" (which I liked) that the countess expressed herself. Besides the vocabulary, she also had the demeanour of a wonderfully virtuous lady, and I almost felt sorry for her, guessing how much violence she must have done to herself to stoop to "defile herself." Still, I couldn't help but find that she was somewhat exaggerating her unhappiness, especially since she replayed the scene so faithfully that I thought I was hearing an actress in a play. The husband never took up the ritual challenge she threw at him, but, curiously, the daughter was quite ready to unburden her mother and ensure herself a share of the sacrifice for the family. Mother, my many vain efforts to stick around. After all, I was in no way remunerated for my services, and it seemed to me that the soldiers and their ladies might well grant me the opportunity of acquiring some first-hand notions of their activities. But, if they cared very little about the pernicious effects that the fact of arranging these meetings for them could have on me, they put the kibosh when their antics began and did not allow me to stay to watch. Sometimes, when I was too excited by the preliminary petting that took place in front of me, I became indignant at the injustice of the procedure. When you need me to fix you a date, I'm not a kid, but it's not the same when it comes to fucking! Of that too, I wanted my share. 

I kept translating sentences like that. Ask her if it's wide or narrow, I couldn't hear it all and see them caressing each other, so I was constantly erect. I rarely missed the opportunity to sneak into an officer's barracks when he had just come out with a woman. In the privates' quarters, there was always someone around, but in the officers' quarters, I sometimes managed to examine the place without being disturbed, I tried to understand certain things from the mess of the beds, the half-empty liquor bottles, butts smeared with lipstick, but mostly from the smells that still wafted through the room. Once even, I discovered white silk panties, which I eagerly put back on. The smell was peculiar but pleasant. I had no way of knowing, but I was sure it emanated from the woman's sex: I held the panties pressed against my nostrils and breathed like this for a long time. Once, however, I had the feeling that it was not so bad to remain a child. I looked at a soldier who had caught a venereal disease and who had just been given several injections in the penis. While the others sat in the bedroom laughing their heads off, he paced the space between the two rows of beds, doubled over in pain, his hands between his legs. Eyes full of tears, he yelled in a cavernous voice: "I'll never fuck anyone but my wife again!" I will never fuck a whore again in my life!

My thoughts revolved around the countess. No matter how much she called me an "immoral brat", she could only, it seemed to me, prefer me to this lieutenant, a fellow from the South with false teeth - whom she went to see sometimes. young and handsome captain, but I thought that after a night with the lieutenant, maybe I had my chances. One morning, seeing him leave in his car, I stayed prowling around his quarters until the lady got up. When I heard that she was running the shower, I entered very slowly. She didn't hear me. Discreetly half-opening the bathroom door, I saw her under the jet, naked - breathtaking!

At the barracks, I had seen many pictures of pinupson the walls, but it was the first time I had seen a naked woman in the flesh. Not only was it different, it was miraculous. She didn't notice me, and when she got out of the shower, I took her by surprise, kissed her breasts and pressed myself against her warm, wet body. Touching her, I fell into a state of blissful weakness and, despite my desire to look at her, I had to close my eyes. Perhaps it was because she couldn't fail to see the deep impression her body made on me that she waited a few moments before pushing me away in disgust. "Get out of here," she hissed, covering her nipples with her hands. Turn around. So I turned my back, offering to get him ten cans of powdered milk, five packets of powdered egg, and as many cans of meat as she wanted if she let me lie down next to her. But she threatened to scream for help if I didn't leave her alone. While, with my back turned, I imagined him putting on his clothes to cover his nakedness, I was seized with cramps so painful that I had to sit on the lieutenant's bed. Once dressed, she came and sat down next to me and, with a sudden gesture, made my face turn in front of her. She looked depressed. How old are you? I am tall. I wanted to invite her to judge for herself, but it was superfluous. Looking down at me, she nodded in despair. “Lord, this is what war does to us all! a For once, I had the feeling that she really meant what she said. “Here, they corrupt you, they lead you to perdition. You better go back to your mother. I think what depressed her was her own decline as much as mine: she had sunk so low that a simple kid could make advances to her. “The lieutenant went to town and he won't be home anytime soon. And, in fact, I have my entries in the kitchens, much more than him. The cooks like me. I can get you anything you want.