It’s hard for me to describe the methods they employed, and it embarrasses me, Madam Magister. The whole affair… both my explanations and the conclusions I draw from them… is embarrassing, ludicrous, anything but manly, the way I ought to be. And death is near. Oh, I find these things obscene, but I must try to explain them. I must, I say. And my hope is that the method, if it was one, will seem less obscene to you than the tone of my explanation. In other words, the obscene thing is not what I’m explaining, the obscene thing is how I explain it… I’m telling you this, Madam Magister, in order to stay in your good graces… so in many ways the manner of my account is identical with its moral. Moral, admittedly, is a rather old-fashioned word, not very popular nowadays… at most one speaks of the morale of soldiers or workers… but the latest version of the word, the sense in which I’m using it, goes back to the period I’m starting in; even then the word was the flag under which I was castrated. I grew up within walls that resounded with the din of this word’s two vowels, within walls where, as in any ordinary madhouse, my prick was regarded as dangerous. As you know, the mission of psychopathology is to kill all natural urges. I grew up under the rule of psychopathologists who declared the sex drive to be abnormal… and sex to be capitalistic; the very word was practically banned for sounding too American. I’m not exaggerating, the documents are still available, and you know all this yourself anyway, you’re only a little bit younger than I am, you’re about as old as my mother, and no doubt you collaborated on those sorts of communiqués back then… in short, even then science was holding a shielding hand over me. They had a dim premonition of the calamity arising from the pricks of my generation; they didn’t have enough money back then to buy up the young people’s sexual interests; the state threatened to collapse if they couldn’t keep the pricks down. Perhaps they could have explained this to me in scientific terms, but even then, it seems, there was only limited access to the academic departments that kept the sexological ledgers. Though I belonged to the class for whom the products of Enlightenment thought were intended, they were not revealed to us in their pure form; instead, they were instantly translated into action. And so—it was a very enlightened method—they began to sever me from the consciousness of my prick, the Enlightenment took charge of that consciousness itself, for the cleanliness of my feelings had to be preserved. Oh, they compared me to a starfish, and lectured me in its reproductive methods. In fact, the word clean usually played the chief role in speaking of interpersonal relationships; the term seemed obligatory in that context. That gave me pause, for I knew that my prick pissed and dangled near my anus, Madam Magister. — It was smut—I’m inserting a little anecdote so you don’t get bored—it was filthy smut, I learned during my first police interrogation, which happened in sixth—I think, unless it was earlier—sixth grade, after they’d confiscated some female nudes from us in the schoolyard—where are the rest of the naked ladies, a police officer bellowed at me, frightening me out of my wits—nudes drawn in exercise books, drawn in a manner that did not obfuscate the existence of genitalia. Incidentally it wasn’t me, I have to say in my defense; I was arrested merely for sneering at the drawings’ poor quality, which probably raised suspicions that I dabbled in that kind of artwork myself. That wasn’t the case, but I have to admit that the little drawings had lodged so firmly in my mind that four or five years later I myself became a pornographer… and probably to this day I can’t see the females because there’s nothing to be found anywhere that compares with those pictures… I became a pornographer myself, albeit in prose, effusions that probably all landed in the trash, which is why it’s no blasphemy if the depths of a trash can remind me of a gaping pelvis. My home was duly searched, but nothing was found; he’s probably hid that smut where no one can find it, was the conclusion the officers conveyed to my teachers, who stood frozen in attitudes of revulsion. Thus nothing, not even my innocence, was proven, all that was proven was the necessity of making a note for the files branding me as a highly problematic prospect for any kind of higher education. Thus, Madam Magister, academia remained closed to me, and I became a worker; I desire to remain one, in a factory of my choice, and that is the reason for my speech.
But I’m not finished yet, Madam Magister: I shall proceed with increasingly obscene expositions. Even then, you see, it was clear that the country would have to be divided, the ends of this undertaking were sacred, and required means that had little to do with reform. — I must have been crazy even back then, perhaps even crazier than now; I suddenly imagined the country’s partition first being performed through the waists of the females, so delicately that they’d never even notice… the females’ lower bodies, their perfumed refinement—or so I gathered from the polemical stew my brain was fed—belonged on the other side of the wall in the reactionary camp, where they’d be stuffed with money. Naturally that had to repel me. Some of the lower bodies did in fact stay here, allocated to the academics studying how the situation would develop—specifically, those lower bodies whose prospects for education were less problematic than mine, and which, at that time, seemed to comprise more female lower bodies than male. To my alarm I realized that my prick—which had been provoking me for some time—aimed over this wall, that is, at the females’ lower bodies, but my head still wished to remain here… Oh, I realized that the females’ upper bodies also remained here as well, buttoned-up torsos dressed in gray or blue, with muscular arms longing to embrace the rebuilding of the country—that’s a quote, though I wish I’d forgotten both the quote and the source. And the heads of the females remained here as well, heads filled with clean thoughts, heads that would reward me with brotherly love if I managed to do my part to rebuild. But a leaden prick dangled in front of my accomplishments… the ache in this tiny organ was leaden… and whenever I began to feel some obscene pride in it, I learned that this pride by no means resonated with the females. You see, from the literature that wasn’t prohibited, that I was allowed to trust, I thought I’d learned that in fact the females detested my prick—once again I’m simplifying things rather crudely,