The Meaning of Words

 

Russians are turning up everywhere in my town. Some of them are actually Poles and it’s not good to confuse the two. Whichever they may be, they have become ubiquitous, from medieval French: ubiquité—to turn up everywhere.

This doesn’t really matter to me. They don’t turn up by my desk, demanding to know the etymology of a word. Nobody does.

Still, on days when I work late, walking home at dusk, I see them. Blonde women with harsh faces and bodies that make bargains with the night. Blond men with distant eyes and an expectation of trouble ahead. And I see the one who has got under my skin.

Stanislav. Stash, they call him. He works as a bouncer. Before Stash, there never used to be early queues outside the local nightclub, but there are now—women, all wanting the same thing. They come prepared too. As they giggle and flirt with him, they moved their eyes meaningfully to the point where they have hidden their weapon: cleavage, thigh, back pocket. And Stanislav—I cannot think of him as Stash—so tall, so blond, so serious, runs his big hands over their bodies and recovers the steel tail-combs and disposable razors they have hidden for him. Nothing really dangerous, because then he’d have to call the police, but nothing that simply wastes his time, because then he might ban the woman and she’d never feel his fingers roaming over her again. It is a charade, from the Provencal French: charrada—a long talk, or chatter.

Stanislav means Glory. I cannot think of him as “Stash” a verb meaning to conceal or hide, dating from 1797, criminal argot, possibly an amalgam of stow and cache. It’s an etymologist’s habit, this dissection of words, examination of meanings unknown to the bearer or user of the word. And Stanislav never looks at me, the mousy woman from the university English department. He doesn’t even know I exist.

But he will.

The letters went out this week, to every Slavic name on the electoral roll, inviting them to take part in a survey into name distribution. I can’t guess which of them is Stanislav, he may not even be on the roll, but if he doesn’t turn up as a result of getting a letter I’ll have an excuse to go and talk to him, push through those squawking perfumed women and invite him to contribute to my research.

As the reply slips arrive, I sort them into piles. Families and married men don’t really interest me. I know Stanislav is single because the women tease him about his non-existent girlfriend. Each single man who replies is given an appointment time with a family or couple on either side. That way, if one of them turns out to be Stanislav, I can extend his time, cutting short the subsequent interview.

In the first week, none of the men is Stanislav. In the second week, none of the men is Stanislav. By that Thursday, I am preparing myself to approach him, but I decide to give it until the following Tuesday, when the nightclub is at its quietest, before asking him to take part. And on the Friday afternoon, at four o’clock, Stanislav appears.

There are two reasons I’m surprised. The first is that he’s not in the black bouncer uniform I’m used to. Instead he wears pointy-toed snakeskin boots, faded jeans and a brown leather jacket buttoned to the neck. He looks like Moscow Mafia. The second reason is that the name on my list is Isidor Maslov. He sits. I stare. He shifts in his seat, releasing a wave of aromas—cigarette smoke, rye bread, masculinity—that free me from my stupor, by tipping me into lust. It manifests, from the Latin: manifestus—clearly revealed, caught in the act, plainly apprehensible, clear, evident, as a wave of heat from between my thighs to the hollow of my neck, where it burns as a blush, a rosy fire around my throat that makes my voice crackle like a flame when I ask his name.

“Isidor Stanislav Maslov.”

“Interesting,” I say, ignoring the urge to lean across my desk and unbutton his jacket. His hair is longer than that of many Russians, and flops into his eyes. I want to push my fingers into it and guide his head to my breasts. “People must try to give you things all the time.”

He blinks, a sudden constellation of white lashes, and then frowns.

“Excuse?”

I’m thrilled even further by his inarticulate nature. We don’t share a language—anything we do together will be pure, instinctive, unsullied by the transactions of grammar or any lingua franca. Or perhaps I’m fooling myself.

“Your names, they combine to mean ‘the one who is offered many gifts,’” I say, smiling at him. It’s not true. I’ve no idea what his names mean, but I’ve always known what I would say at this moment, if it should ever come.

Just thinking that word “come” makes me shiver, the fire increasing its temperature to furnace proportions—licking up my neck and caressing the underside of my jaw with fiery insinuations.

“Of course you don’t take them, the things you’re offered.” He’s still looking confused as I stand up, walk to the door and turn the key. “You always refuse.”

I’ve watched. I’ve seen how those women push their breasts and buttocks into his hands, and how he never slows, or hesitates, staring into the middle distance even when what’s in front of him is a barely restrained cleavage, vibrating with lust as its owner tries to entice him.

Now he nods slowly. “This is true,” he says.

“My name is Isabelle Anne Verland.” I walk towards him, until I am standing over him as he twists uncomfortably on the too small chair.

I lean over him and smell leather, tea, cigarettes and, underneath it all, the smell of male flesh washed in cold water and plain soap. Stanislav stares up at me.

“I offer you no gift,” I say, slipping off my blazer and dropping it to the floor. “Instead I set you a challenge.”

His eyes are round and surprised but his mouth has quirked to one side. Stanislav likes a challenge, a proper challenge, not the silly game of hide and seek that the women outside the nightclub play.

“I challenge you to make me come.” I wonder if he will understand my colloquialism, but I needn’t have worried; it seems he’s familiar with the phraseology and no wonder—who knows what those women whisper to him as he pats them down?

“And do you give me a gift if I do?” His voice is remote, as if carried from his icy northern home.

I nod. “I give you the gift of setting me a challenge.”

He thinks it over, slowly. Stanislav is not the type to rush into things. Finally he nods, stands, takes off his jacket, lays it over the back of the chair, smoothing its shoulders out as though it’s one of the women he must search. He picks me up by the waist, as easily as I would lift a vase of flowers, and sits me on the edge of my desk. The heat runs through me like fire, pouring down my arms and into the palms of my hands so when I press them against his flat chest I expect to see steam rise from his shirt. I expect him to separate my legs, but instead he takes my ankles in one of his big hands and lifts them so that I tip up, and back, up and back… until I am lying on my back, with my ankles high above my head, which is hanging down so that my neatly-pinned bun is brushing the seat of my chair, on the other side of the desk.

I feel the index finger of his free hand hooking itself into the crotch of my knickers and then, with a short grunt, he rips my underwear right off my body. It stings! The snapping of the cotton cloth on each hip is like a rope burn. I gasp and Stanislav leans over to peer at me. His eyes, so pale, so distant, have a tiny icy gleam to them—he wants to savour my reaction.

Then his fingers move to my skirt and I realise that he’s quite prepared to rip that apart too and start wriggling my way out of it. I don’t get such a fantastic salary that I can afford to have my suits torn off me, even by Stanislav. I kick the skirt to the floor and pull the pins and bands from my hair. He almost smiles as he lifts its coppery length between his fingers.

“Warm,” he says. I don’t know if he means the colour or that my hair is hot, although if it’s half as warm as my skin, it’s probably burning his fingers.

I don’t know what I am to expect. My mind has developed every possible scenario that nature would allow me and Stanislav to explore, from oral sex to exhibitionism, but I don’t really know what Stanislav is capable of, or interested in. Perhaps he’s just a pump-and-jump-ship kind of guy, or maybe he can only perform when he’s being beaten with birch twigs—it’s possible that he’s a masochist, although I think that’s unlikely—or perhaps he has a fetish about rubber, or rhubarb, or rum. It turns out that Stanislav is simply a quiet, competent man. A large, quiet, competent man. A large, quiet, competent man who doesn’t like to lose a challenge.

He continues as he has begun, now that he has got my full attention. He spreads my hair out across the desk, then spreads me out too, parting my legs, pushing my knees up and out so that I am as exposed as a impaled butterfly, impaled from the Latin where in = in and pallus = pole, which is a good omen, although, as yet, I am not impaled on anything.

Stanislav smiles. He presses down on me, lowering his clothed body onto my semi-naked one, so I feel his weight pressing me into the desk. My bones are crushed between him and its old oak surface. When I inhale, I am breathing him in, when I exhale I am breathing him out. I hear something close to my ear. It is Stanislav laughing gently.

“Are you ready?” he asks.

Only then do I understand that, for him, this has all been simply preparation. While I feel stripped, splayed, already invaded, Stanislav has not even begun on the challenge I set him. And, now that it is too late, I wonder if I am equal to the challenge myself.

But Stanislav has stopped laughing and steps away for a second, removing his clothes with the economy of a man used to dressing and undressing in the dark. The next thing I know is a change in the quality of the light and he has moved to stand behind me, between the desk and the small second-floor window that lights it. There is a strange coolness on my wrists and when I tilt my head to see why, Stanislav has already bound my hands to the corner of the desk with sticky tape. I’m impressed by his resourcefulness, but frightened by my situation. What have I done?

I wonder whether to resist when I feel his hands on my ankles, but the tape around my wrists is unbreakable. Even if I stop him from binding my legs, I can’t free myself and I discover, to my surprise, that I think I would rather die at Stanislav’s hands than be discovered like this by one of my colleagues. Either my vanity, from the Old French, vanité around 1320, meaning that which is vain, futile, or worthless, from vanus = empty, is stronger than my self-preservation, or my instincts still believe that Stanislav will not harm me.

So I allow him to fix my ankles to the corners of my desk, using my own sticky tape dispenser.

At last, he stands where I can see him, and I gaze up at his glacial body. He has widely spaced nipples, small and pale, and a long, light torso as sinuous as the white belly of an eel. His shoulders are like snowy cliffs, high and broad above me, and finally I let my eyes drop to the tangle of light hair at his groin, from which his cock is standing, patiently waiting for me to notice it.

His shaft is long and wide and pale. I cannot help thinking of the milk popsicles I ate as a child, because it gives the same impression of creamy coolness. I wonder if it will feel cold when it enters me, wherever and however it does.

But before I can find out, I must endure whatever Stanislav has in mind for me. His face is calm, maybe even stern, and he nods once or twice, as if confirming that he is happy with his work so far.

I cannot see the door. Stanislav stands between it and my view, and once I have looked at him I cannot look away. Such a body he has, from the Latin corpus, meaning body of a person. An animal, in that sense, has a carcass, not a corpus. Anyway, Stanislav’s flesh, so dense and white, like marble or snow, has frozen me with desire. On it, the scant lines of hair are faint as shadows.

Stanislav uses the palms of his hands on me, planing them over my flesh like a machine completing some ordered task. I try to be silent, listening for another knock at the door, but my body is lifting to his hands, back arching, thighs straining, and the effort makes me breathe strenuously, as though something tremendous has happened, although it hasn’t yet.

When I am smoothed to his mechanical satisfaction, he stands between my wide-spread legs again, puts one knee on the desk and prepares to mount me. In this moment of pause, we both hear the footsteps coming down the corridor. Heavy, measured steps—the next appointment, not content with the locked door, has fetched a security guard. Russians are such sticklers for the rules!

Stanislav smiles grimly and enters me, timing each thrust to the feet that are slowly, but inexorably, getting louder. Because I am so ready he slips in and out with frictionless ease. It seems to surprise him and he gives a faint hiss of shock or approval and when I look up, his face, hanging over me, is grinning. Perhaps he’s just happy to know how close he is to meeting my challenge.

I have sucked my lower lip into my mouth and am biting down as hard as I can to stop myself from crying out. The footsteps are outside now. They stop. Stanislav does not. I taste the hot metal of blood on my tongue as my body flows out around his. It is as if every part of me is opening and flowing. I come.

I hear the door handle rattle. Does this security guard have a master key? Did I leave my own key in the lock? What will he see if I didn’t and he bends and puts his eye to the keyhole?

And then something happens that has never happened before. Although I have already come, I come again, or perhaps I come for the first time ever, properly. It’s a feeling like other orgasms, but longer, deeper, stronger, slower.

My body lifts, leaving the desk and curving up into the air, carrying Stanislav with it. We are tethered only by the tape around my wrists and ankles, both of us arching like dolphins.

A tiny corner of my mind is focused on the footsteps, which are receding away from my office door—the heavy steps of the guard and the lighter ones of the Russian family. But most of me is concentrating on Stanislav—his broad chest covering mine like a great slab of white stone, his hips moving metronomically, his planed face still above mine but his ice-blue eyes now closed as he hisses once, twice, and I feel him come.

My body subsides, my spine reversing its ultimate arc to rest back on the wood beneath me. Stanislav looks down on me, then lifts one hand to my hair, gathering it up and pressing it to his lips. He rises and dresses before turning his attention to me—slicing through my bonds with my own antique paper knife. Then, before I understand what he is about to do, the blade flashes across my face, a sound like scissors through silk, and Stash, for now I feel I can call him that, holds up a lock of my red hair.

“Next week,” he says. “Same time. You will give me an English lesson.”

I nod, and he walks away, turning the key in the door to let himself out.

Even after he is gone, I stay for a moment, risking discovery, to savour my challenge. English, after all, is my forte, from fort, French, meaning the strongest point of a blade. But my Greek and Latin are strong too. I think of all the words I can share with Stash—fellatio, hand job, tribadism, fetish.

He will be fluent by the time I finish with him.