Date: Fri, 23 Jul 1999 13:53:57 EDT
From: Park517@aol.com
Subject: DIVINE NEGLECT

	[DISCLAIMER: The following completely fictional story, the sole
copyright for which belongs to the author and translator, contains explicit
depictions of sexual intercourse between men and should not, therefore, be
read by anyone under the legal age of consent in whatever jurisdiction or
by anyone offended by homoerotic and/or pornographic material.  It is
forbidden to post the text electronically or disseminate it in any manner
without permission of the copyright holders.  The author welcomes comments,
and, at his discretion, the translator -- park517@aol.com -- will forward
them.]


	Laughter?  Who could be laughing, I wondered.  At what?  In the
three months I'd been in Kosovo, I don't think I'd heard anyone laugh.
Curse, yes.  Shout, all the time.  But never that happy sound of human
beings at ease.  Yet, once the stuttering racket of my motorcycle engine
had died away, there was no denying the evidence of my ears.  Men were
laughing.  And they were doing it behind the abandoned two-story house my
undermanned recon squad had requisitioned on the outskirts of the sprawling
old town of P.

	Curious, I walked past the vegetable patch, under the blossoming
plum trees and into the muddy kitchen yard.  Three of my four charges -- a
Montenegrin, a lieutenant dragged into active duty from the reserve, would
never be trusted with a large command in the Yugoslav Army -- had stationed
themselves in a ragged line, their backs to me.  In front of them were
Sergeant Ilya Voinovic and what first appeared to be a large animal
tethered to a length of clothesline.

	"Fetch, boy," yelled happy-go-lucky Pfc. Petya Stankovic as he
tossed a large stick off to the left.  Voinovic, savagely applying a
wire-mesh fly-swatter to the crouching beast's rump, goaded it to run.

	"Go get it, good dog," shouted Dragoljub Makaveyev, a certifiable
cretin who had miraculously achieved the rank of private and aspired to
nothing higher in life.  Corporal Mirko Komaretcki, a university graduate
and usually a decent fellow, was clapping his hands and giggling until,
turning his head, he caught sight of me.

	"Attention!"  he bellowed, a command that had little effect until I
pushed my way past him to confront Voinovic.

	"Sergeant," it was my turn to yell, "what the fuck are you doing?
Where did this mongrel come from?"  I took off my grit-covered goggles and
looked at him and then at the grimy, collared animal cowering behind him.
But it wasn't an animal.  It was a human being, naked, gasping for breath,
hands tied behind its back, bleeding from the nose and from dozens of small
cuts on the buttocks.  In its drooling mouth was the stick Drazha Makaveyev
had thrown.

	"We were just having a little fun," Voinovic whined.

	"A little fun, SIR!" I bawled at him.

	"Yes, sir.  Sorry, sir.  A little fun, sir.  We caught this
terrorist hiding in that kennel a while ago," he pointed to a large
doghouse behind him.  "He's a Shqiptar. [In Serbian usage, a derogatory
term for Albanians - Trans.]  They're all dogs, so we thought we'd give him
some exercise before ... well, before," he nodded toward the partly tilled
field that stretched behind the house to a small stream.

	"Were you planning to execute the terrorist, sergeant?"

	"Yes, sir.  We'll take care of that right now.  Sir."  He yanked
sharply on the clothesline.

	"Stand up, you.  Fun's over."

	I looked at the panting creature the sergeant had jerked upright.
It was a man, no, a boy, about 170 centimeters or more tall, [about 5'8" -
Trans.] and filthy from head to foot.  Gently I took the stick from his
mouth and was startled by the terror in his equally startling, deep set
gray eyes.  "What's your name?"

	"Rifat, your honor," he gasped.  "Rifat Ilo."

	"How old are you?"

	"Sixteen, your grace.  I'll be 17 in July."

	"Don't count on it," Voinovic muttered.
  
	"Sergeant," I wheeled furiously on the cunning, heavy-set sadist I
had despised since our first meeting, "there will be no more killing.
There's been enough killing.  There's a cease-fire in effect.  Or maybe you
hadn't noticed?"

	"Yes, sir." Voinovic stood his ground.  "But this man's a
terrorist, sir.  KLA.  I can tell."

	"This man is a boy," I screamed.  "A kid.  A civilian.  Where are
his papers?  Where are his clothes?  We'll turn him over to the monitors
when they come.  Let them decide what he is. Until then..."

	Voinovic didn't let me finish.  "He's a man, sir. Look at his
schlong."  He pointed into the youth's crotch.

	I looked.  The boy's genitals were indeed fully and definitely
well-developed and surrounded by a matted growth of pubic hair.

	"So what, sergeant?  Do you want to kill him because he has a
normal penis?  Or is it too big?  Perhaps you're jealous.  This is
nonsense.  Get him his clothes and let me see his ID."

	"It's not normal, sir.  It's cut.  There's no foreskin."

	"I don't believe you, Voinovic," I grabbed the man by the shoulders
and shook him. "Are you going to kill every male who's circumcised?  That
was Hitler's policy.  Are you a Serb or Ustashi, [World War II Croatian
Nazis - Trans.] after all?"

	"No, sir.  Sorry, sir."  It was a grudging apology.  "About the
clothes, see, we had to burn them.  They were covered in shit.  And he
didn't have no papers."

	"Any papers."

	"Yes, sir.  No papers."

	I let go of him, thinking how very close I had come to a court
martial for striking an enlisted man.  "All right, sergeant.  Find him some
clothes.  Is the water on yet in the house?"

	"No, sir.  Sorry, sir.  We've been using the hand pump by that
shed."

	I turned away.  "Mirko?"

	"Yes, Lieutenant.  At your orders."  He snapped to his version of
attention.

	"At ease.  Corporal, go into the house.  Get the strongest soap you
can find.  Shampoo, too.  A cloth or a sponge.  Towels.  Bring them to me
at the pump."

	"Yes, sir.  Right away, sir."

	I swiveled back to Voinovic.

	"Hand over the prisoner, sergeant."

	He passed me the clothesline, and I led the boy over to the
standpipe that presumably tapped into an old well.

	"Duck your head under the spigot," I told him.  "The water's going
to be cold.  Sorry."

	The boy looked at me almost uncomprehending.  "You're not going to
kill me?" he asked.

	"No, son, that's over."  I tried to be reassuring.  "Finished.  No
more bombs.  No more murdering.  The politicos are still haggling over the
fine print, but it's just a matter of days.  And then you can go home.  Do
you live near here?"

	Enormous tears welled up in his eyes.  "No, your honor."  He tried
to compose himself. "I'm from up north.  But I can't go home.  They burned
our house.  They killed my dad and Alif, my big brother.  And my
sister. They ... they."  He broke down sobbing.  I could imagine why.  I
didn't want to hear.

	I put a hand on his arm.  "You're safe here.  I'll look out for
you.  And my name is Mitya or Lieutenant Njegos, not `your honor.'  Do you
have any other family?  We'll find them."

	"I came here looking for my aunt and uncle, my mother's brother.
But they're gone."  He choked back his whimpers, and his words came in a
rush.  "And their house.  It's burned, too.  I was hungry, and I saw people
here, but then I saw the uniforms, your honor, and I snuck into the
doghouse.  Your men must have seen me.  They shot at me.  And I was so
scared, I messed in my pants."  He was sobbing again.

	"Please, boy, call me Mitya."  I resisted a nearly overwhelming
urge to hug him to me and to cry with him for what madmen had done to his
life and his home and to my naive belief that I inhabited a rational world.
"You're going to live through this.  And maybe your relatives are safe
somewhere.  Lots of people have gone away to Macedonia and Albania until
this is over.  (A white lie.  It was hard to imagine Albanians ever
returning to live peacefully next to Serbs in Kosovo, but I wanted to boost
the boy's spirits somehow.)  We'll see about finding them for you.  I'll
help, but you have to be strong.  And first of all you have to be clean."

	"You'll help me?"  He gave me an unbelieving look.  Hope flickered
for a moment in those extraordinary eyes.

	"I'll try, Rifat.  I can't really promise anything, but I'll try."
I turned him around and began working on undoing the fiendish web Voinovic
had spun to immbilize his hands.  As I was cursing and getting nowhere,
Mirko appeared carrying the things I had asked for and a pair of rubber
sandals besides.  "So he can keep the mud off his feet," the corporal
explained with a shy smile.

	I thanked him and asked him to try his luck with the ropes while I
removed the dog collar.  Mirko, though, made no more progress than I had,
and Voinovic, the architect of the multiple knots, was nowhere to be seen.
"We'll wash the kid ourselves," I told Mirko.  "You start from the top,
with his hair.  Rifat, squat down under the pump."  I took off my shirt to
keep it dry and began jerking the handle up and down.

	Soon the boy was squealing, first from the shock of the cold water
and then from the rough scrubbing we gave him with a scratchy loofah Mirko
had found.  Mirko worked above the waist, I below.  As a third-year medical
student, familiar with the human body, I should not have reacted to his
nudity, but holding one leg while I scrubbed the other and especially when
I parted his firm buttocks to clean between them, I felt a stirring in my
loins.  It intensified when I swapped the loofah for a cloth to soap his
genitals.  It also seemed to me that his penis, shriveled by the cold
water, began to grow under my touch.

	"Please, sir," he said as I began working on his scrotum, "you
don't have to do that.  I will.  When I'm untied."

	"Am I hurting you?"  I asked.

	"No, your honor.  It's not that.  It's just that nobody has washed
me down there since my mother a long time ago.  It's embarrassing, sir.  As
if I were a little kid again."

	"You don't have anything to be embarrassed about, Rifat.  The
sergeant was right.  You're a man, a normal young man."  I turned him so I
could check the lacerations from Voinovic's nasty whippings on his backside
and also inspected him for signs of lice or other parasites.  The cuts on
the taut globes of his ass turned out to be mostly deep scratches, and
except for a drowned flea or two in his pubic hair, Rifat was bug free.
When he stood up, shivering but glowing after a final frigid rinse, I saw
that he was also very fit.

	"Football?" I asked as I toweled his muscular legs.

	"Center forward, sir, on the town team," he actually grinned down
at me.  "And farm work."

	That accounted for his broad chest and the prominent biceps and the
darkened skin on his neck and forearms.  I stepped in front of him and went
to work with a pocket comb on the rats nests in his sandy hair.  My efforts
were bringing tears of pain to his eyes when Voinovic gave a hawking cough
behind me.

	"Begging pardon, lieutenant, this here is all there is that's his
size."

	He held out a flowered skirt and blouse in one hand and a black
shift in the other.  "There was only women lived here, looks like, but one
of them was pretty big around.  These," he combined his offerings in one
rough-skinned fist, dug into a pocket and pulled out a pair of gray cotton
panties, "oughtta cover him up."

	I knew he wasn't lying.  He was clever but not that clever.  This
added humiliation for the boy had just fallen into Voinovic's hands.  I
took the skirt and blouse, leaving the black dress with the sergeant.
Rifat was too young for widow's weeds.

	"Sergeant, untie his hands.  Those are your knots.  Undo them."

	"Do you think that's safe, lieutenant, sir?  He's one of them, a
terrorist.  I don't trust him."

	"I don't either, sergeant.  But you can put a hobble on his legs so
he won't run, and as you can see," I nodded at the naked youth, "he doesn't
have any weapons except the one between his legs you were so concerned
about."

	Voinovic gave me a look of pure hatred, but he followed orders,
waiting for Rifat to pull on the women's underwear before his ankles were
fettered.  I dropped the skirt over the boy's head, and he buttoned on the
blouse himself.

	"I'm sorry, youngster," I told him.  "It's the best we can do for
now.  And you can't go around naked.  Your prick gets the sergeant all
upset."

	Rifat gave an abrupt laugh.  "It's all right, your honor.  It's
wonderful just to be clean.  Thank you for washing me.  And I don't mind
the dress.  I once wore girls' clothes in a school play.  Also, I promise
not to molest the sergeant."  He winked at me, and the huge grin that lit
up his face made me notice for the first time the spray of freckles over
the bridge of his nose.

	Suddenly, I knew why I felt drawn to this kid.  He was my Ivo, as
Ivo had been at that age when we were best friends and soul brothers and
lovers.  But Ivo -- mischievous, daring, open-hearted Ivo -- had emigrated
to Canada, taking my childhood with him.  Before memory betrayed me, I
turned away and pumped icy water over my head and hands to wash away some
of the day's dirt and to cool down a sudden, only partly nostalgic surge of
lust.

	Rifat proved to have more than just charm and resilience.  He
volunteered that his mother, dead of cancer three years ago, had taught him
to cook.  She had been a good teacher.  He turned the two scrawny chickens
that Petya had liberated from a nearby coop into a tasty stew with
dumplings.  He also suggested that we look under the house for a root
cellar, and the trove of preserves that the marveling city boys brought to
the surface turned our supper into a banquet.

	Drazha bestowed the ultimate compliment.  "Kid," he said after a
hearty belch, "maybe you'd like to come home with me.  You sure cook better
than my old woman."

	"Are you proposing to him?" Mirko laughed.

	"He does look cute in that outfit," Petya followed up.  "And the
nice thing about fucking a boy," he chortled, "is you don't have to worry
about knocking him up."

	"I bet you've fucked lots of boys, haven't you, Petya?"  Voinovic
was his instinctively hateful self.  "For a couple of dinars, [Yugoslav
currency - Trans.] you can probably get a piece of that Shqiptar's smelly
ass, but God knows," he crossed himself with ostentatious piety, "what crud
you'd pick up along with it."

	Petya jumped up, his face red.  "Take that back, Sergeant," he
shouted.  "Or, I'll.I'll."  He looked across the kitchen to the corner
where our AK-47s had been stacked.

	Rifat rose, too, grabbed a dish towel, turned it into a kerchief
and, simpering up to Drazha, took his hand.  "Thank you, private," he said
in a comic falsetto, "I would be honored to go home with you.  But I
cannot.  I love another."  He flipped the front of his skirt up and gave
his bulging crotch a lewd thrust.  "And I am carrying his child."  Then he
dropped to the floor next to Sgt. Voinovic, laid his head on the beefy
Serb's knee and looked up at him adoringly.

	The rest of us exploded in laughter.  Voinovic furiously pushed the
boy away and stormed outside.  "Oh, sergeant, my love, my only," Rifat's
voice followed him, filled with mock grief and longing.  "Don't I mean
anything to you any more?  How can you deny our passion?  I will always be
yours.  I and your abandoned child."

	"That's enough, boy," I said, holding my sides and trying not to
break up completely. Collecting myself, I barked a volley of domestic
commands.  "Drazha, a big pan.  Get some water from the pump.  Rifat, you
wash the dishes.  Mirko, you dry.  Petya, come with me."

	Stankovic and I quickly found the aggrieved sergeant and slowly
talked him around.  "He's a kid, Ilya," I cajoled him.  "You teased him.
He was just teasing you.  If you like, I'll make him apologize."

	Voinovic grunted.  "No," he finally said.  "I guess I asked for it.
But Shqiptars," he spat, "they're scum.  I don't understand why you want to
keep him around."

	"We're not here to kill civilians, Ilya.  That would dishonor the
Yugoslav Army.  I'll hand him over to someone in authority tomorrow."

	If I'd been honest, I would have admitted my real reason for
protecting Rifat: the weepy, bubbly, bright, handsome youngster intrigued
me; on top of that, he aroused feelings that went beyond sympathy into the
realm of longing.  With an arm around Voinovic's shoulder and a reminder of
the unopened bottle of plum brandy inside, I drew the sergeant back into
the kitchen.  There we listened together to a BBC news broadcast on my
transistor radio confirming the glacial pace of the peace talks.
Afterwards Rifat beat Mirko at chess.  Then he beat me.  Twice.  And then I
declared lights out.

	"I'll put the kid in the cellar," Voinovic volunteered.  "We can
lock the door from the outside."

	Rifat gave me a look of anguish.  "Lieutenant, sir, I won't run
away.  I haven't got any place to run."  His head dropped in misery.  "You
can tie me up here in the kitchen.  Just not underground.  Please."

	"Sergeant, I'll be responsible for him," I declared.  "There's a
cot in the bedroom upstairs and a lock on that door.  I think he's suffered
more than enough."

	Voinovic shrugged.  He, Stankovic and Makaveyev, who had put their
bedrolls in the main downstairs room, went off together.  Mirko and I took
the bedrooms above, allotting Rifat a daybed in the larger of the two,
which also happened to be my room.  After I locked the door and secured the
metal shutters over the window, I untied his ankles for the night and gave
him a quilt for covering.  I stripped off my camouflage fatigues and put
the door key and my pistol together under the pillow of my comfortably wide
bed.  Exhausted, I was asleep within minutes.

	I don't know when the screaming began, only that it jolted me awake
and disoriented until I remembered where I was and realized that the
fearsome noise was coming from Rifat.  Groping for my flashlight but
without taking the time to turn it on, I stumbled across the room to the
boy's bed and got a terrific blow to my chest from his flailing arms.  For
a second or two I thought he meant to attack me but as his
incomprehensible, high-decibel keening went on, I realized he was deep in a
nightmare.  Extending my arms, I grabbed his and started to shake them.

	"Wake up, Rifat.  Wake up for god's sake!" I yelled.  "You're all
right.  You're all right."

	The screams stopped.  The boy sat bolt upright.  "Momma," he said.
"Momma."  And then something in Albanian.

	"Rifat," I let go of his arms and crouched down.  "It's me.  Mitya.
You were dreaming.  A nightmare.  Are you awake?  Are you okay?"  I managed
to turn the flashlight on and saw that his torso was glistening with sweat
and his face with tears.

	"Oh, Mitya," he reached for my neck and wound his arms around it.
"It was awful.  They were killing my dad and my brother, and I was hiding
in the rafters of the barn and I couldn't move.  I was frozen with fear.  I
was a coward."

	"No, boy.  No." I loosened his grip on me.  "You were a witness,
and you are a survivor.  Sometimes, that can be worse.  I'm not going to
lie to you.  But over time, Rifat, those memories will get less awful, less
precise."

	I was going to mouth more platitudes, but someone started pounding
at the door.  "Lieutenant, lieutenant, sir are you all right?  What's all
that noise?  Did he try to kill you?"

	It was Voinovic, and I went to the door to reassure him and to
compliment him for being so alert.  "Thank you, sergeant," I said.  "The
boy had a nightmare.  I can handle it.  Go back to sleep, please."

	"Yes, sir."  I listened till I heard his heavy steps on the stairs.

	Returning to Rifat's bed, I found him toweling himself with his
quilt.  He seemed calmer.  "Rifat," I asked, "do you think you can go back
to sleep?"

	"I'll try."  A small voice.

	"All right, then.  Good night.  Tomorrow we'll see what we can find
out about your aunt and uncle."

	"Thank you."  A pause.  "Your honor?  I mean, Mitya.  At home I
always slept with Alif, my brother.  I'm not used to being alone.  Could
I.?  Would you mind?"

	I hesitated.  My bed was big, but the last male I had shared a
mattress with was Ivo, and we didn't use it much for sleeping.  I
temporized.  "Do you think it will keep the nightmares away?" I asked in
the dark.
	
	"It should help.  I hope so, sir.  Mitya.  Maybe."

	"All right," I said.  "Bring your quilt and stay on your side of
the bed.  And no farting."

	He giggled and hopped up.  A flashlight beam showed him a path to
the bed, and soon we were stretched out side by side.

	"Thank you, Mitya."  His hand groped for mine in the dark, found
it, grasped it and released me.

	"Sleep well, Rifat.  Shake me if I snore."

	Another giggle and we were both quiet.  I found it hard, though, to
surrender myself again to unconsciousness.  I wanted terribly to touch this
appealing boy next to me and not just touch him on the hand.  I wanted his
arms around my neck again, but in passion, not in desolation.  I wanted the
warmth of his young body pressed against mine.  I wanted his love.  To
quench my desire and put me back to sleep, I started silently reciting the
Latin names for all the bones in the human skeleton, terms I had memorized
for a long-ago examination.  After perhaps ten minutes of very mixed
results, I became aware of snuffling sounds from my bedmate.  He was
sobbing but trying to muffle the noise under his quilt.  I didn't hesitate
as I had when he cried in the yard.  This time, I simply reached for him
and pulled him tightly to me.

	"You poor, poor kid," I whispered into his ear.  "Go ahead.  Cry.
It isn't a cure, but it is a release."

	At that, he started wailing in earnest.  "Oh, Mitya," he gasped,
"why didn't you just let them kill me?  I don't want to live.  I don't have
anyone any more."

	"You have us, Rifat.  You have me.  I'll take care of you."

	"But I loved my dad and my brother and my sister.  I don't have
anyone left to love."

	That's when I went over the cliff.  "Could you love me, Rifat?  I
could love you."

	Silence.  Chilling silence.  But the sobbing stopped.  Two strong
arms went around me and a pair of lips flicked over my own.  "Do you mean
that, Mitya?"  It was the softest whisper.  "Do you really want to love
me?"

	"Yes," I said.  "I do.  God help me, I do."  I let one hand go
exploring down his back to his rump.  He had shed the panties.  He was
naked in my arms just as I had wanted him.  I clasped him to me so that our
crotches met.  His cock was hard.  So was mine, making its blind,
single-minded way out through the fly of my Army-issue drawers.  I tried to
pull back a bit, but his arms and his grip on me were powerful.  His lips
came to mine again, and our tongues jousted and locked.  My erection and my
spirits both soared.

	Rifat was the first to break the kiss, but only so he could move
the soft warmth of his mouth to my ear and then my neck and onto my chest.
He stopped in the patch of hair between my nipples and began tugging at it
gently.  At the same time, one of his hands went into the crawl space below
our waists and took hold of my straining, rigid organ.
	
	"Allah Akbar," he exclaimed with a laugh.  "Your honor, are all
Montenegrins so, so big?"

	"You are to call me Mitya, you randy Albanian pup, but at home my
nickname is Pee-wee.  Does that answer your question?"

	"May I take your pants off, Pee-wee?"  The laugh was a guffaw.  "At
home, my nickname was Big Mouth.  Let me show you why."

	I rolled away from him and sat up.  He followed suit, releasing my
cock just when I wanted the heat and pressure of his fingers to intensify.

	"Mitya," he said, suddenly serious.  "You feel sorry for me, don't
you."

	"Of course."

	"And you're horny."

	"So it would seem."

	"But, Mitya, that's not love.  It's all right.  Sex is fine, but we
shouldn't fool each other."

	"Rifat, when I looked into your incredible eyes for the first time
this afternoon, I started to fall in love.  When I washed your body, I had
to work hard to hold back my desire.  And when I held you while you cried,
I knew I wanted you to belong to me.  I loved a boy like you once when I
was a boy, too.  We grew up.  He went away.  You bring him back to me.  I
call that love.

	"What about you?"  I turned the tables.  "Why would you love me?
One of the oppressors.  A uniformed killer."

	"You're a doctor.  Mirko told me.  Not a killer.  And you saved my
life.  Your hands washing my body nearly set me on fire.  You are
beautiful.  You are strong.  You are smart. You are loving.  I can beat you
at chess.  Why shouldn't I love you?"

	"I'm not a doctor, just a medical student.  I'm only 25.  I was
concentrating on you, not the game.  And you don't love me.  Not deeply,
you can't.  Not yet."

	Moving his body so close that our hips touched, he put an arm
around my waist and the other behind my shoulder.  His face came to within
a few centimeters of mine.  "You're right.  Not yet," he said, "but what I
feel for you and you feel for me can grow.  It's like a field of
sunflowers.  They need fertilizer and weeding and time to become tall and
strong and beautiful like that big pole of yours.  I can't see it in the
dark, but it is beautiful, Mitya, like the rest of you, isn't it?"

	His hand dropped from my shoulder into my groin and imprisoned me
again.  Then his head followed and moist, warm lips gathered in the head of
my cock.  I shuddered.  "Rifat, Rifat, lover, be careful.  I am horny.  Go
slow."

	He raised his head.  "Please, your honor.  Unless it's against your
religious beliefs, Big Mouth would like you to be naked.  I still want to
take off your underpants."

	"I will have to get a wartime dispensation from the
Metropolitan,"[bishop - Trans.] I chuckled and paused, "after the fact."  I
raised my hips and tugged at the waistband of the shorts.  Rifat took hold
of the pants legs, guided them over my ankles and then, his hands pale
birds of prey in the darkness of the room, waved the garment like a
captured flag.  He tossed it away, pushed me flat onto the bed and
stretched himself on top of me flattening my aroused member and his side by
side into our bellies.  The pressure was a little bit painful and very
exciting.

	"Careful, you impetuous puppy," I warned.  "You could bring me off
like this."

	He seemed to consider the danger.  "I wouldn't want to do that," he
decided, rolling off me onto his side.  He laid his head on my chest and,
avoiding the upright shaft of my penis, began to caress the inside of my
thighs.  "Mitya," he took a deep breath. "Lieutenant, sir, would you like
to fuck?"

	I reached for his hand and stilled its exploration of my crotch.
"I'm happy just to hold you," I said.  I kissed his forehead.  "I don't
want to hurt you.  I can love you without doing that."

	"But I want you to love me the way men love.  And I don't think
you'll hurt me that much. I have been with someone else before," Rifat
swallowed noisily.  His voice was choked, but he went on. "Maybe he wasn't
quite as big as you, but he taught me about making love.  I liked it when
he put himself into me.  A lot.  I'd like to feel you in me, too.  Please."

	"A school friend?" I asked.

	"No.  He was older."  He stopped.  His fingers encircled me and
lightly stroked me.  "Mitya?"  Again that gulping sound.  "Promise not to
hate me?"

	"I've just begun to love you.  Of course, I won't hate you."

	"Mitya, this sounds awful, but it wasn't.  It was natural.  My
friend... no, my lover... was my brother, Alif.  He was beautiful, but not
as beautiful as you.  And he didn't force me or bully me.  We both wanted
it.  We loved each other."  He sobbed a few times and then collected
himself.  "Can you still care for me," he asked, "now that you know about
me?"

	For answer I kissed his mouth and ran a hand down his firm, smooth
chest and belly until I found his cock.  Holding it, I bent my head over
his crotch and put out my tongue to lap at the mushroom cap that thin
streams of bitter fluid had made slick.  My lips pulled the tip into my
mouth and then rode down the pulsing column of heated flesh until they
brushed his silky pubic hair.

	Rifat gave a little squeal.  "Pee-wee, I'm horny, too."  His hands
clasped the sides of my head.  "Don't make me come."

	I lifted off him, giving a parting swipe of my tongue to the
underside of his glans.  Pulling him into a sitting position, I then
plunged my tongue into his mouth and kissed him with all the passion I held
and all the joy I was feeling from having another man's warm, fit, naked
body in my arms again.

	"Who is who's prisoner, here?" I asked, relaxing our embrace.

	His lips stopped nibbling on my neck.  "I am yours.  I belong to
you."

	"And do you know the Geneva Convention?"

	"No, your honor."  An anticipatory little giggle.  Enchanting.

	"It explicitly provides that prisoners who are going to be raped in
the ass have the right to a blow job first so that they will be more
relaxed when they are penetrated.  Do you wish to exercise that right?"

	"I shouldn't violate the Geneva Convention, should I?  Not if the
big old Convention," he found my penis and squeezed it, "is going to
violate me."
 
	It was my turn to giggle.  "Rifat, Rifat, you're so like Ivo."  I
hugged the boy hard.  "That was his name.  He taught me how to suck a cock
and how to laugh about sex.  Please, let me bring you off in my mouth.
I've never tasted a Muslim boy."

	"I have.  It's a good taste if you love the boy."

	"I do."  I pushed his shoulders back onto the bed, raised his hips
and spread his legs apart.  I put two of my fingers into his mouth and
waited while, at first surprised, he realized what I wanted and coated them
with his spit.  Once they were slick, I felt behind his testicles for his
anus and, finding it, cautiously pushed a wetted finger in.  Rifat gave an
involuntary twitch, but of pleasure, not pain.

	"That's nice," he whispered.  "Do you treat all your prisoners this
way?"

	"Just the sexy ones," I answered.  "The ones I plan to keep
prisoner for ever."  I inserted a second finger, and the boy gave a long,
deep sigh.

	"What a lucky prisoner I am," he said.  "Did they teach you this in
medical school?"

	"As a matter of fact, yes.  But not this."  I lay down more or less
perpendicular to Rifat's body and, holding his throbbing penis at its base,
I brought my mouth down on the head of the sturdy organ.  It swelled
between my lips and, driven by the boy's rising hips, its turgid length
went seeking my throat, almost cutting off my breath.  Trying to control
the straining youth, I put my thumb and forefinger around the top of his
scrotum and attempted to pull the heavy sac downward and away from the
fleshy tower it was trying to hug.

	For a blissful interlude, my strategy worked.  I was able to engulf
him, free him, lash his cap with my tongue and draw him back deeply into my
mouth.  But all good things have to end. "I'm not going to last much
longer," he moaned.  "Not long at all."  The last word was dragged out, and
as the sound died away, he began to thrash around noiselessly in my grip.
His balls escaped from between my fingers, and his cock nearly escaped from
my lips as it began to jet his blistering seed in burst after burst into my
mouth.  I agitated my fingers in his ass, stroking his prostate and making
him gasp and writhe through multiple climaxes.  One of his hands fell on my
neck and combed up through the hair along the back of my head until he
reached my forehead and gently levered my face out of his groin.

	"Doctor lieutenant, sir," he was whispering.  "That was amazing,
wonderful.  I do love you.  I love you.  Please, love me."

	I swallowed as much of his seed as I could, but he had given me so
much that some dribbled out of my mouth.  "Rifat," I murmured back, ranging
my body alongside his and slipping an arm under him, "You were right about
the taste of a Muslim boy.  I love you the way I have not loved in years.
I wasn't even sure I could love anyone again, but I do.  I do."  I kissed
his chest and finding an erect nipple, I sucked on it.  He lifted my face
to his and kissed me, tasting himself on my lips and then using his tongue
like a cat's to clean my chin and neck.

	We lay peaceably, full of contentment, in each other's arms for
minutes on end.  My erection subsided, and I simply basked in the joy of
being with a handsome, ardent, responsive male.  That we had found each
other was a small wonder.  That we had found each other's love in the midst
of war and death was a miracle.  I stroked his haunch, delighting in its
firm curve, and put a tentative hand on the spent sex organ that, even
soft, had impressed Sgt. Voinovic.

	"Are you just going to play with the prisoner's helpless body, your
worship, sir," I could hear the grin that I could not see, "or are you
going to fuck him?"  One beat, two beats.  "Please, Mitya, please take me.
I want to be yours."

	"I want you, too, Rifat.  You can't know how much I want you, but I
don't want to hurt you.  Let me see if I can find something to make it
easier."  I patted the sheet until I found my flashlight and switched it
on.

	"What do you need that for?" the teenager asked as I started to
swing off the bed.

	"To see if our absent hostess used skin lotion.  Or anything else
that would grease you and me up a little."

	"Mitya, Pee-wee," his hand caught my arm, "we don't need anything
but spit and each other.  Your fingers already opened me and you're right
about how to relax a prisoner.  Don't leave me."  His hand slid into my
crotch. "Let me show you how Muslim boys do it."

	"Let me guess.  First, you bow to Mecca.  Then you put my cock in
your mouth."

	"And soak it for a long time in my juices before putting it in a
pre-heated oven.  That's my bottom.  And it's hot now."

	"So I gather."  I extinguished the light and swung back into his
arms. "Rifat, will you promise to tell me to stop if you feel pain?  We
have lots of time for loving ahead of us.  We don't have to rush things."

	"I promise, your eminence."  His lips locked onto mine and his wet
tongue invaded my mouth.  At the same time, he gently pressed my body down
into the bed and put a delicate hand on my balls.  "Mmm," his mouth
released mine.  "Everything about you is big.  Well, I like challenges."
He lowered his head over my groin, and as my penis stiffened, he seized its
base with his fingers and its head with his lips.  My foreskin retracted
under the pressure, and his tongue began a wet dance over and under my
exposed tip.

	I nearly surrendered to that moist massage.  My semen began to
mount in a hot tide out of my testicles toward release.  My balls tightened
against my rod, and as I was on the edge of explosion, Rifat bit me.  The
bastard actually bit my cock, not hard enough to draw blood, but hard
enough to make me yelp and to send "reverse course" signals flashing
through my entire, pre-liftoff circuitry.

	I grabbed a clump of his hair and pulled his head abruptly up, away
from my rigid, injured dick.  "You juvenile pervert," I hissed at him.
"What did you do that for?"

	"To keep you from going off.  It's what Muslim boys do. I didn't
really hurt you, did I?"

	"You surprised the hell out of me.  But I guess you were right.  I
was ready."

	"I am ready, too."  He knelt on the bed and pulled at his buttocks
to open them.  "All Shqiptars are dogs.  So says Sgt. Voinovic, and most
Serbs agree.  Will you please fuck me now like a dog?"

	I got to my knees behind him and bent him forward so that he rested
on his elbows.  After spitting on my fingers and rubbing their moisture on
the outside of his anus, I pushed one finger in to the knuckle and began
swirling it in the passage he presented to me.  "All right?" I asked.

	"Nice," he moaned.  "But the real thing would be nicer.  Plug me,
Mitya, please, please.  Plant that great knobby spear of yours in my gut."

	I didn't need to be persuaded.  Using my free hand, I guided my
cock head to the hole my finger had breached and pressed against it.  "Push
out, Rifat," I said.  "Advice from medical school."  He obeyed.  I put more
weight against him, and suddenly I was in, sliding slowly but steadily past
the clutching ring of muscle into a slippery corridor of tropical heat.  It
was bliss.  I folded myself over his bent body and clasped him around the
waist with one arm.  My other hand felt beneath him for his dangling penis,
caught its solid softness and began to stroke him.

	"You don't have to do that, Mitya, sir, lover," Rifat gasped.
"Just fuck me.  Just the way you're doing it.  You're so strong and so
gentle and," he said a few words in Albanian, "so big."

	"I'm not hurting you, tearing you?"

	"Not now.  Now you are really taking me prisoner.  And I will never
want to run away."

	Reassured, I quickened the pace of my thrusts, but I tried not to
mount up him too far.  I am big.  Ivo called me "pony boy."  My penis is
both long and thick, and I am self-conscious about its size and potential
to damage my partner.

	Rifat, though, responded to me with passion, not pain.  His
sphincter clamped around my shaft with each drive and relaxed for each
withdrawal.  As I moved into him, his buttocks drove back into my groin and
his whole lower body shimmied around my pole.  In my hand, his cock grew
rapidly hard and urgent, and both of us began to moan our gratification in
chorus.

	Such intense pleasure cannot be sustained for long.  Before I
wanted to, I began to spew, my organ jerking and flailing as it discharged
salvo after salvo into the boy's velvety innards.  His member, a club of
aroused flesh sheathed in my fingers, also erupted, depositing hot gobs of
his seed on his belly and my hand.

I began to withdraw, but he pressed his ass tightly to my crotch.  "Don't
leave me Mitya," he pleaded.  "Stay in me.  You are so magnificent in me.
You fuck like a god."  With great care, I helped him straighten his legs
and turn, with me still clamped to his back, so that we ended up side by
side, his body fitted snugly into mine.  I took my hand out of his groin,
wiped up the come that had landed on him, put those fingers into my mouth
and cleaned them so I could have a second, sweet taste of his youth.

	"Prisoner," I said.  "Now you are mine.  If you follow all the
rules of your captivity, I will treat you well.  Plenty of bread and water
and healthy exercise."

	"I like the exercise part.  What are the rules, your reverence?"

	"Love me.  That is the first rule and the last."

	"I do.  I will.  And will you screw me at least once a month?"

	"At least.  Oh, Rifat, sweetheart, I can't give you your old life
back, but we can make a new one.  Starting now."

	He twisted his head far enough around so that he could kiss my ear.
Then he snuggled against me, wiggled his behind just enough to resurrect my
flaccid cock and instantly went to sleep.  Holding him to me, I followed
him into a deep slumber.

	Thunder woke me.  Or artillery fire.  Or a tank rumbling past.
Actually, it was none of those, just insistent knocking.  I stumbled out of
bed and made my cautious way in darkness to the door.

	"Who's there?" I asked.  "What do you want?"

	"It's just me, Lieutenant.  Mirko.  It's six thirty.  I have hot
water so you can shave.  Can I come in?"

	"The door's locked.  I have to get the key."  I groped my way back
to the bed, felt around where my pillow had been, found the key and managed
to get the door open.  Smiling broadly and holding a pan in both hands, the
corporal walked into the room.  With the light from the hallway guiding
him, he found a dresser, set his gift down and turned to me.  "Good news,
sir.  We're going home.  The radio says an accord will be signed at midday.
And," he strode to the wall by the door and pressed a switch, "the
electricity is back."

	Horrible fluorescent tubes in the ceiling sizzled into life.
Bright light illuminated the room, my nudity and the bed on which Rifat
lay, his charming rump naked and slightly raised.  Mirko took in the scene
in a flash.  An expressive eyebrow arched.

	"The boy had nightmares," I said in answer to the unasked question.
"Didn't you hear his screams?  Voinovic thought he was trying to kill me."

	"I could sleep through the Second Coming."  Mirko gave me an
appraising look, taking in not just my unclothed state but the partial
erection with which I started most days.  "May I ask a personal question,
sir?"

	"What?"

	"Are you hung like that because you're an officer, or are you an
officer because you're hung like that?"

	"Both."  I made a pretense of laughing.  "Get out now, Komaretcki.
Thanks for the hot water.  And the news.  I'll get the boy up."

	"It looks like he already is," Mirko gave a sardonic smile and
pointed at the bed.  Rifat had rolled over.  His arms were flung out to his
sides, and his penis pointed skyward.

	"Ah, youth," I said, trying to make a joke.

	"Wasted on the young," Mirko replied as he went toward the door.
Before he reached it, he bent down and picked something off the floor.  My
underwear.  He held the shorts out to me, and now his grin was lascivious,
all-knowing.  "Yours, sir?" he asked.  "Would you like me to put them where
you can find them?  Later?"

	"Thank you, corporal."  I strove for a dignity that was hopelessly
lost.  "I'll put them on now.  It got hot last night."

	"Yes, sir," he smirked.  "It must have been very hot."  He left,
closing the door gently behind him and taking my reputation downstairs to
be shredded.

	I put on the baggy drawers, pushed open the metal shutters on a
glorious spring dawn and turned off the ghastly overhead light.  Then I
went to the bed and shook Rifat's shoulder.

	"Wake up, boy.  Peace is breaking out."

	"I'm awake," he answered, his eyes still shut.  "I heard.  Do you
think he'll tell the others?"

	"No," I lied.  "He's a nice guy.  He probably has his eye on you
himself."

	"Or on you.  He certainly was interested in your big officer's
insignia."

	"Ridiculous," I bent to kiss his belly button and trail my tongue
down into his pubic hair and around the base of his rigid cock.  "Enlisted
men are not allowed to have sex with officers.  Against the rules."

	"And leaving a weapon in reach of a terrorist Shqiptar?  What rules
does that break?"

	I looked up.  Rifat held my gun casually in his right hand.  He was
smiling but not laughing.

	"Give me that, please."  I straightened up, nervous but not truly
fearful.  I held out my hand.  "It's dangerous.  I don't want you to be
hurt."

	"You can have it in a minute.  But first take off those ugly
pants."

	"Don't play around.  We've got to get dressed."

	"Strip, your honor.  I am armed and dangerous and I want to see you
naked."  He put the gun hand behind his back.  "I mean it."

	I looked at him, shrugged and pulled off my shorts.

	"Come closer," he gestured to the side of the bed, and I stepped up
next to it.  With his free hand he began to fondle my penis.  It
immediately stood straight out from my groin.  The boy gave a low whistle.
Then he moved his fingers to my testicles, tugging them down, cupping each
one and then returning to my cock, stroking it and squeezing a bit of fluid
from the tip.

	"And to think I had that in me," he beamed at me.  "I bet nobody
ever called you Pee-wee.  You made that up to tease me."

	"I did.  I'm sorry.  Please, Rifat, stop toying with me. We don't
have time for games."

	"I'll be quick.  Turn around."  I did.  "Oh, what a pretty, woolly
ass your reverence has, like two lovely, ripe melons covered in fuzz.  Bend
over."  As I did, he got out of bed and moved behind me.  His hand went
into the cleft between my buttocks.  The tip of one finger rubbed gently
against my anus.

	"Did you let your Ivo make love to you, Mitya, the way you made
love to me?  Please tell me the truth."

	"Yes, Rifat.  I did.  He did."

	"Will you let me?"

	"Of course, but not now.  We'll have plenty of time later.  Are you
finished humiliating me?"

	"I guess so.  You don't seem to like being a prisoner as much as I
do. "  His arm came under my chest and raised it till I stood upright.  He
moved in front of me and we stood so close together that my chin rested on
his head.

	"Here is your gun."  He handed me the pistol.  I checked the safety
and tossed it onto the bed.  "And here is mine."  He took my penis in both
his hands, knelt swiftly and guided my cock into the hot cavern of his
mouth.  But having swallowed only a little more than half the length, he
choked for an instant, shook his head and released me.

	"I do not have much practice.  Actually, nobody ever called me Big
Mouth, either.  I am sorry for teasing you," he said, looking up at me.
"Mitya, you are the most magnificent man I have ever seen, even if your
dick belongs on a donkey.  I love you and I want to see what a Montenegrin
man tastes like.  Can I just suck the tip of you and pump the rest?"

	"Will that make you happy?  Will you get dressed right away
afterwards?"

	"Yes and yes.  But if you really loved me, we would never need
clothes.  We would go to the South Seas and be naked and turn brown.  And I
would teach you how to play chess."  He grinned.

	"I do really love you.  We will go to Tahiti or Bali or somewhere.
And I will teach you respect.  Also, always to finish what you start."  I
put my hands on either side of his head and pressed his lips to my
erection.  "Suck me, Rifat," I urged him.  "Pump me.  Unlike you, I really
will be quick."

	I was.  The boy's tongue made barely four delicious circuits, wet
and tingling at the same time, over and under my glans, and his tight
fingers accomplished no more than the same number of trips up and down my
straining shaft when I groaned and ejaculated.  My whole body shook.  My
knees quaked.  Rifat's lips refused to let me go until I was completely
drained.  Swallowing, he stood up and wrapped his arms around me.

	"You taste just like a nice Muslim boy," he said.  "Except for the
plum brandy.  The Koran forbids believers to drink."

	"And are you a believer?"

	"Of course."

	"Then how do you know what brandy tastes like?"

	The boy squeezed me.  "I'm a believer, but I'm a sinner, too.  Oh,
Mitya, your worship, I love you so much.  And you do love me, don't you?"

	"More than I thought I could ever love anyone."

	He tilted his head up.  I bent mine down.  As we kissed, his hands
took hold of my buttocks, and mine cupped his.  Our bellies pressed
together.  Feeling the stiffness of his organ, I also felt my own coming
back to life.

	"Rifat," I pulled away from him.  "We have to stop this.  Right
now.  Among other things, my shaving water is getting cool."

	"But you're getting hot."  He grabbed playfully for my groin but I
eluded him.

	"You seem to have that effect on me.  You promised to dress.
Please put your clothes on now.  We'll get naked again in the South
Pacific."

	"Promise?"

	"I promise."

	And I meant it.  More than anything at the start of that day, the
last of war, the first of peace, I wanted to walk away with him, away from
Kosovo, away from Yugoslavia and all its venomous history of hate and
madness, away to some new land where Rifat and I, even if we had to wear
clothes, could love each other and even, as the Bible enjoined, love our
neighbors.  As I shaved, I daydreamed about that future, and the vision
made me so happy that I started to hum and then to sing.

	"What is that language, Mitya, sir?"  In his incongruous flowered
blouse and skirt, the boy was beside me, holding a bit of towel to dry my
face.

	"German.  Don't you recognize it?"

	"No.  I'm sorry.  But you sing so nicely it doesn't matter."

	"Schiller's `Ode to Joy.'  Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.  I can't do
it justice.  It needs a full choir.  If you'd ever heard it, you'd
remember."

	"Then I guess I never heard it.  Do you like Janet Jackson?
Menudo?  Ricky Martin?"  He had retrieved my shirt, helped me into it and
was now buttoning it up.  His upturned face was full of serious inquiry.

	"No, Rifat.  I don't know them.  The truth is I don't know popular
music."

	"That's all right. It will give me something else to teach you."
He held out my pants and I sat on the bed to pull them on.  He knelt to put
on my socks and then my boots.

	"What big feet you have, grandmother."  He stood up smiling and
pushed his way between my legs.  "But I don't mind."  He stroked my cheek
and bent, I thought, to kiss me.  Instead, he rubbed his nose against mine.
"On our way to the South Seas, your very largeness, can we stop off with
the Eskimos?  That's the way they kiss.  With their noses.  I'd like to
watch."

	"It's very cold where the Eskimos live.  We couldn't go naked."  I
stood up and hugged him and kissed him properly and then improperly.  "But
we can go wherever you want and do whatever you like, as long as we go
together and do it together.  I love you, Rifat, your medium- sizedness.  I
love you, but I want a large, hot cup of strong tea.  Come on, let's go
downstairs."

	I moved toward the door and he followed, but at the threshold he
grabbed my hand.  "Mitya, I love you, too, but I worry about you.  Haven't
you forgotten something?"

	"This?" I asked and pinched his bottom.

	"No," he jumped away from me and pointed at the bed.  "The pistol.
You might still need it."

	I blushed with embarrassment and retrieved the weapon, tucking it
into my belt.  "Thank you, dearest one, my savior," I said.  "Voinovic
would have savaged me if I'd showed up without it."

	The sergeant, in fact, was in an exceptionally cheerful mood.  From
the way he and the others grouped together in the main room greeted us,
casually acknowledging our arrival and immediately turning back to the
television news and the pictures of bleary-eyed, rumpled, hand- shaking
diplomats and generals, I deduced that Mirko had held his tongue.  I
touched him on the shoulder and thanked him in a whisper for "being
discreet."  He just smiled, happily this time, not lasciviously.

	Rifat brought me a cup of tea.  "I put lots of sugar in it," he
chuckled.  "To keep up your strength, sir."

	"Thank you, waitress," I answered, resisting the urge to pull his
hand into my groin so that he could feel that my strength was, in fact, on
the rise.  I drank the brew, went out to the yard to piss and deflate my
reviving erection and then called my warriors to a council of peace.
Voinovic agreed to lead a reconnaissance patrol, in fact a foraging
expedition, through and beyond the neighborhood.  I assigned myself a trip
to headquarters in the town and, if possible, to buy clothes for Rifat.
Mirko promised to keep an eye on our captive, and Rifat promised to teach
him chess, cooking and botany.  The wild plants in the area could put some
roughage in our diet.

	At company headquarters, I learned next to nothing.  Rumors were as
thick as porridge, but reliable information was nonexistent.  We would be
withdrawn early.  No, our unit would be among the last to leave.  There was
no gas for transport.  We would have to walk home.  NATO was going to fly
in diesel fuel.  The KLA had accepted the peace terms.  The KLA had
rejected them.  At the battalion offices, certainty was just as scarce, but
when the exec officer spotted me, his news threw me into gloom.

	"You speak German, don't you, Lt. Njegos?"  he asked.

	I was not quick enough to lie, but I insisted, more or less
accurately, that my command of the language was rusty.

	"It doesn't matter," the major declared.  "The army is going to
need liaison officers for the fucking monitoring teams.  Which would you
prefer if we decide to volunteer your services: Nazis or Austrians?"

	I begged him not to volunteer me.  I was a reservist.  I had to get
back to my studies.  Montenegro -- no, all of Yugoslavia -- needed doctors.
My pleas got me nowhere.  "Come back around five today," he ordered me.
"You're a good boy.  I'll see if I can get you hooked up with the Huns.
They're hateful, but at least they're not fat-assed neutrals."

	The few plans for the immediate future I had dared to make while I
shaved that morning went up in the black, oily smoke of my motorcycle's
exhaust.  I could not keep Rifat with me.  I would lose him.  I despaired
and almost didn't notice the dusty clothing store just off the town square.
What caught my eye was the freshly painted sign in the window: "Under New
Menagement."  That meant it had been owned by an Albanian, departed
voluntarily or otherwise, and was now in the hands of a Serb who didn't
know how to spell.  Maybe he wouldn't know how to bargain.

	My guess was right.  The paunchy, whiskered proprietor, having paid
nothing for his inventory, didn't mind letting it go fairly cheap.  I found
socks, briefs, t-shirts and a couple of dress shirts in Rifat's size, a
pair of sneakers and, in place of jeans, a blue Adidas track suit with an
acid green stripe down the sleeves and pants legs.  Almost next door,
moreover, I bought two large, round loaves of fresh bread, a half kilo of
goat cheese, half a comb of honey and a jar of instant coffee.  A final,
special purchase in a pharmacy really lifted my spirits.

	They sank again when I entered the kitchen and found Mirko, alone,
slowly stirring a simmering pan of something over a propane-fueled fire.
"Where's Rifat?" I shouted.  "You didn't let him run away?"

	"No, no lieutenant.  The boy's upstairs.  He has a surprise for
you, and look what we found."  He pointed at the pot.  All I could see was
a froth on the bubbling surface.

	"What is it?"

	"One of the greatest treats of the season."  The corporal beamed.
"Nettles.  We're going to have nettle soup.  That kid is a wonder."  He
paused.  "You know that he's in love with you?  And not just puppy love.
You're very lucky."

	"I know," I grinned at him.  "About being lucky I mean.  Twice
lucky.  Thank you for not telling the others."

	"They don't need to know.  Lieutenant, even so, it won't be easy.
I have a brother who ... well, he's gay.  Smart.  Good-looking.  Nice.  But
he used to get beaten up a lot, so he left.  To Australia.  It broke my
mother's heart.  I miss him, too.  I don't care what people do in bed, but,
Mitya, sir, there are lots of people who do care.  You have to be very
careful."

	"Or go to Australia," I said.  I gave him a quick hug and the
provisions I'd bought.  Then I took the stairs two at a time to find Rifat
and give him his new wardrobe.  He wasn't in our bedroom, where I put my
packages, or in the one Mirko had used, but a door I had not noticed at the
end of the corridor stood open and beyond it gleamed a bathroom where Rifat
stood, naked except for the panties, in the middle of an array of pots,
kettles, pans and cauldrons full of water he had heated downstairs.

	As I entered, he rushed at me, jumped, wrapped his legs around my
waist and ran his hands through my hair.  "You're back," he exulted between
kisses.  "I missed you so.  I worried.  But you're in time.  Get undressed.
Quickly."

	He clambered off me and started to unbuckle my belt then knelt to
unlace my boots.  "Hurry, please, your splendidness," he urged me with an
upward glance.  "A lot of the water is still hot, and I'm going to give you
a wonderful bath."

	"You don't have to do that," I protested.

	"But I want to, and it won't hurt you to get clean.  In fact, it
will improve you."

	"Am I so dirty?"

	He grinned as he tugged my second boot off and pulled a sock after
it.  "Do you want to smell this, excellency, or will you take my word for
it?"

	Soon I was squatting naked in the shower stall with my hands
loosely tied behind my back -- "That's the way men wash men in Kosovo,"
Rifat insisted -- and he was ladling cupsful of deliciously warm water over
me.  Then I was lathered all over, scrubbed, shampooed and rinsed.

	"Stand up, please," the boy said. "Best for last."  Respectfully,
he soaped my genitals and pubic hair and, vigorously, my ass crack.
Finally, he rinsed my crotch and cleft by filling his mouth with water and
repeatedly spurting it out to wash away the suds.  For the last such shower
he had me bend over as he fired directly at my anus and followed up the
water by plugging his lips hard to the opening.

	"Don't, Rifat," I protested sternly.  "Please.  Advice from medical
school."

	"But I love you, all of you," he pouted.  "And before I make love
to you that way and make you my sex toy, I wanted to show the proper
respect."

	He started to towel me.  "Forgive me?" he whispered.

	I looked at him.  There was a tear in each of those spellbinding
gray eyes.  "Untie me, and I'll forgive you.  I want to hug you.  I want to
kiss you.  All over.  Even the way you just kissed me."

	"Only when you're dry, your worship."  He was grinning.  "And since
you're so furry," he ran his fingers through my pubic hair and pretended to
be looking there for insects, "that may be a while.  Are all Montenegrins
as horribly hairy as you?"

	"Just the ones like me who are descended from wolves and bears," I
growled at him.  Having managed, as we joked, to free my hands, I grabbed
him and shook him.  "Give me that towel, you hairless ninny, and get ready
to be kissed."

	"I can't," he shrilled.  "Let me go.  I don't believe the wolves
and bears business.  A gorilla, maybe.  But it doesn't matter."  He handed
me the towel and slipped away.  "I'm too busy for love-making with a
two-legged fleece, anyway.  I have to wash your dirty clothes."  He
gathered them up from the bathroom floor and fled.

	I stood there, lost at first in adoration and then perplexed.  He
had left me nothing to put on except the fairly small towel.  Trying to
make it cover strategic terrain, I went to our bedroom and lay down.  And
even though it was just a little past noon, I went to sleep.

	I woke to find Rifat sitting in a straight chair next to the bed,
holding a mug and a plate with slices of bread, some goat cheese and a
mound of fruit preserves, looking directly at me and crying in complete
silence.  I sat up sharply and reached for him.  "Oh, God, sweet boy,
what's the matter now?"

	"Your coffee's cold," he sobbed.

	"I like it cold.  No, it's something else.  Tell me.  Why are you
crying like that?  Let me help."

	He set the cup down, handed me the plate and moved to the bed to
sit beside me.  He buried his face in my neck as I stroked his back and for
at least a minute he said nothing.  "Mitya, I've been sitting there looking
at you.  You are not too hairy.  You are supremely beautiful, and I can't
understand why your Ivo ever left you."

	"That's nothing to cry about.  It turned out all right for me.  I
found you."

	"I was crying because I didn't tell you the truth this morning."

	"About what?"

	"I said I am a believer.  I'm not, not anymore."  I started to
interrupt him and say how unimportant that was.  "No, I have to tell you.
Watching your face, so calm and handsome, and your body, so ... so perfect,
I started to think of Alif.  And how beautiful he was and how they killed
him."  The sobbing returned.

	"And how you will die," the boy plunged on through his tears, "and
I will die and how, even if we live to get old, we will never again be as
beautiful for each other as we are now.  I don't know, maybe your hair will
fall out.  Or you'll get a tic.  Or I'll grow a belly.  And anyway, we'll
die.  So it doesn't make any sense to believe in a God who lets all of that
happen.  And I don't believe.  I don't," he wailed and gave himself over
completely to a terrible existential grief.

	I was stunned.  I held him as tightly to me as I could and pushed
up the back of his blouse so my hand could go under it and caress his warm,
naked back while my mind searched for a way to calm him, to reassure him,
to overcome the horrors he had witnessed and the specter of the inevitable
that, like Medusa's head, could turn him to stone.  Kisses wouldn't drive
the vision away.  Love might hold it at bay.  In addition, I wanted to try
philosophy.

	"Rifat, will you let me talk to you?"  I asked when I thought his
laments were ebbing.

	"It won't do any good," he moaned.

	"But let me try, sweetheart," I beseeched him.  "I can't let you be
so sad all by yourself when I love you the way I do."

	"How do you love me?"

	"Enough to hope you do grow a belly so that you won't be too
perfect and make the world jealous of you."

	"I'm not perfect."

	"You are for me.  I even love your zig-zaggy little appendix scar."

	"You do?"  He lifted his head from my shoulder and gave a flicker
of a smile.  "Do you know what I call it?"

	"No.  What?"

	"Zeus' footprint.  Did you know that we Albanians worshipped Zeus
when we were Illyrians and the masters of ancient Greece?"

	"No.  Before my time.  Look how much you have to teach me."

	This time it was a full grin.  I'd forgotten how fast an
adolescent's moods could swing.  "Have you been eating my honey?" I asked.

	"Guilty, your honor.  It's very good.  Can you smell it on my
breath?"

	"No.  But I can see a piece of the comb stuck between your teeth."
I put a finger into his mouth and dislodged the bit of wax.  He closed his
lips on my finger and pulled it far enough in so that his tongue could wash
it.  I had an instant erection and betrayed myself with a moan.

	He released my digit, looked into my lap and actually giggled.
"What do you call that, your manliness, Zeus' thunderbolt?"

	"No," I replied.  "Rifat's flying buttress.  My love, can we be
serious, please?  About God.  About believing.  About love and life."

	"I can't think about all that when I see you naked.  Put on your
clothes first.  They're all clean and dry. "  He pointed to a neat stack at
the foot of the bed.  "And then you can eat the food I brought you and
drink the fresh cup of coffee I'm going to make you."

	He got up and retrieved the mug from the floor, but as he bent to
get it, he put his lips on the tip of my penis and kissed it.  "I don't
know what a flying buttress is," he said, "but if that's mine, it's an
example to all the other buttresses in the world."

	"Don't go, Rifat, please.  I can drink the coffee cold.  And I can
talk while I dress."

	"It's instant coffee," he answered.  "The water's hot.  I'll just
be gone an instant, and the way you are," he stroked my cock, "you won't be
able to dress very fast anyway."  Then he was out the door.  I tried to
prove him wrong by setting a speed record for dressing, but although he had
done a wonderful job with the laundry, he had used a lot of starch.  There
was a knife-edge crease not only to my trousers, but also to my
undershorts.  Their stiffness reminded me of the one time I had seen my
father put on a tailcoat and white tie and had watched him struggle,
wincing and cursing, into his boiled shirt and prickly collar.  As I was
trying to arrange my testicles so that the unbending fabric of the drawers
did not make me a eunuch, Rifat reappeared with a steaming cup.

	"Those are mine," he slapped my hand lightly away from my groin.
"They are indispensable parts of my buttress, and you may not play with
them without my permission."

	"Yes, your worship."  I took the drink from him and sipped it.  It
was as sugary as the morning's tea.  Sometime soon I would have to tell him
I didn't really care for sugar.  But not yet.  He had my socks in his hand
and, pushing me to sit on the bed, he stretched them over my feet.  Then
the undershirt went over my bent head, the trousers up my legs and the
shirt onto my torso.  As he buttoned it and tucked it under my waistband,
he kissed me.

	"What's that for?" I asked.

	"For holding me whenever I cry.  I'm sorry.  I cry a lot.  I'll get
tougher."

	"Don't."  I kissed him back.

	"What's that for?"

	"I've never kissed a laundress before, and it may be a long time
before I get to do it again.  Thank you, Rifat.  You're a wonder worker.  I
feel almost presentable."  I stood up.  "How do I look?"

	"Like Alexander the Great in camouflage.  He was an Illyrian, too."

	"You do have a lot to teach me."  I handed him the cup, pulled a
second chair close to his by the side of the bed and sat down opposite him
so that our knees touched.  I spread cheese and preserves on a slice of
bread and offered it to him.

	He shook his head.  "I've eaten.  This is for you."

	I chewed and swallowed, prepared another portion, drank some more
coffee and tried to fathom the intelligence, the fears and, I was sure, the
love in his amazing, storm-cloud eyes.  "Rifat, about God.  I am a
believer.  I believe we wouldn't exist without a creating spirit of some
sort, but I also believe that since the creation, that spirit hasn't
bothered to pay us much attention.  That's why we do such awful things to
each other.  God is there but he or she or it is looking the other way."

	He gazed thoughtfully back at me.  "Mitya, do you know `King Lear'
by Shakespeare?"

	"Yes.  Not well."

	"We were reading it in literature class.  We have a teacher who
treats us like grown-ups.  I didn't understand it all, but I remember some
of the lines.  There's one place where a noble who has had his eyes put out
says, `As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.  They kill us for their
sport.' I'm sorry, but I think that's really the way things are."

	My mouth dropped open in astonishment and admiration.  The boy had
spoken the lines in perfect English and clearly understood them just as
perfectly.  He misunderstood my reaction.

	"Did I say it wrong?"

	I shook my head.  "No, Rifat," I took one of his hands.  "You just
amazed me that's all.  I never studied `King Lear' in high school."

	"I go. I went to a special school.  Our people organized them so we
could study in Albanian.  We don't have enough books or desks, but we have
some very good teachers."  He paused.  He took his hand away and wiped at
his eyes.  "Had.  Had some very good teachers.  They shot the man who
taught English.  In front of his door.  I saw the body when I ran away.

	"`Wanton boys.'"  He used the English words.  "I can't believe in
gods who kill for sport."

	"You don't have to," I reached for his hand again.  "You shouldn't.
I don't think belief has much to do with dying and nothing to do with
killing.  Mine only helps me to make sense, sometimes, of living."

	"Your god isn't interested in the way we live or whether we live,"
the boy came back at me.  "Not paying attention.  That's what you just
said."

	"But what if I was able to do something that did catch the god's
eye?  Or the deity happened to take a passing look and noticed me.  Either
way, I would want to be doing something good, something fine, something
that might get that god to take a healthy, helpful interest in me and in
human beings in general."

	"Lots of people have tried to live that way, and it hasn't done any
good that I can see."

	"But someday it might.  You never know.  It just seems to me better
somehow to act as if good could come of it."  I spread another hunk of
cheese on my bread.  Rifat watched me, but said nothing.  I imagined that
he was trying to phrase a rebuttal.

	"Dearest one," I said.  "Have you ever heard of Andrei Sakharov?"

	"No.  Who is he?"

	"Was.  A great physicist.  A Russian.  He invented their hydrogen
bomb, but then he became an opponent of the Communists, a peaceful,
powerful opponent and a great moral thinker."

	"Did he become religious, a believer?"

	"I don't think so.  When he won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Soviets
wouldn't let him go to receive it.  But he sent his lecture to Norway, and
his wife read it for him.  He ended it by speculating that the universe
could easily be full of other, better civilizations than ours but that even
so, even with lives as short as ours, we had to do our very best."

	I groped in my memory for the exact words, and they came.  "`We
must make good the demands of reason,' he said, `and create a life worthy
of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive.'"

	"That's wonderful," the boy breathed.  "But very hard."

	"Yes.  Very hard, especially in the middle of madness."

	"What about the demands of love?"

	"Maybe even harder.  I can't bring myself to love the sergeant."

	Rifat snorted.  "Not even god could do that."  We heard loud voices
downstairs.  "Speak of the Serb devil," the boy said.  "I'll go give him a
kiss."

	"Not yet," I answered.  "First," I got up, "why don't you see if
these fit?" I handed him the parcel of clothes.  "I'd like to see you
dressed as a man for a change."

	He hefted the package and smiled broadly.  "How about undressed as
a man?"  Rifat stepped out of the skirt and put my hand on the mound in his
panties.  "Can I give you a kiss, your munificence?"  He tilted his face up
and I kissed him.

	"One kiss now.  Lots later," I said.  "I love you, my love.  We're
going to have all our lives for kissing."

	Voinovic and the two others had had a very successful outing.
Their knapsacks bulged with provisions found, they said, in abandoned
houses, and Drazha had charge of a bleating young goat "just wandering
around lost, lieutenant, and tame as a kitten."  The sergeant, however, had
something of which he was even more proud.  "Where's the boy?"  he asked
with an eager smile.  "I have a present I think he'll like."

	Just then Rifat appeared at the door to the kitchen.  He wore
shoes, socks and one of the shirts I'd bought but still had the flowered
skirt around his waist.  He seemed pale and terribly unhappy.

	"Didn't the track suit fit?"  I went straight to him and kept my
voice low as the others chattered.

	"I don't know, sir.  I didn't try it on.  Thank you, anyway.  I can
get along like this."

	"Rifat, Rifat, tell me what the matter is.  What's wrong with the
suit?"

	"Nothing.  It's very nice.  But I can't wear it."  Tears dripped
down his cheeks.  "It's just...," he stammered, "just like the one my
brother had on when they shot him.  It's what I buried him in.  I'm sorry,"
he clutched my arm fiercely.  "I can't.  It would bring bad luck."

	"Of course, you can't."  I put my other arm over his shoulder and
leaned down to whisper in his ear.  "I love you.  I'll find better clothes
in another store.  I'm so sorry, Rifat.  I didn't know.  I didn't guess."

	"Excuse me, sir." Voinovic was behind me.  "Can I show something to
the kid?"

	I moved so that Rifat stood in front of me and held him by the
shoulders, worried that the crude sergeant was about to taunt him in some
way.  But Voinovic was beaming and holding up a pair of jeans for the
youngster to examine.  To my eye, they were badly, irregularly faded.
Also, there was a tear over one knee.

	Rifat loved them.  "For me?" he squealed.  "Can I try them on?"
His skirt was instantly on the floor, and the cherry red briefs I'd bought
him were his only concession to modesty until he had pulled on the denim
pants, zipped up the fly and snapped the waist closed.

	"They fit," he exulted.  "They're wonderful.  Sergeant, you are
wonderful.  Thank you," he kissed a startled Voinovic on both cheeks.
"Thank you.  You're too nice."

	"Least I could do," his benefactor muttered.  "Gotta keep the cook
happy, after all.  They weren't doing anybody any good on a clothesline."

	The jeans were, in fact, fairly snug, faded in suggestive places
and ripped just below one back pocket.  The boy's red underwear flashed
through, but after I pointed out the defect and he wiggled a finger in the
opening, his smile was broader than ever.  "I love them," he declared.
"It's great to be in pants again."

	"You don't mind showing your underclothes off to the world?"

	"No.  I might even catch the eye of another god."  He squeezed my
hand, laughing, happy, young and carefree, and again I marveled at his
ability to bounce from despair into joy.

	Voinovic showed him the little goat, and Rifat agreed to cook it.
"I'll even skin it," he said, "but somebody else has to cut its throat and
drain off the blood.  I don't like the sight of blood."

	Arrangements were made.  The menu was discussed, and nobody noticed
as I walked out to my motorcycle and headed away into town.  There the
major confirmed my orders: report with our unit to Pristina, attach myself
to the German advance team, be useful but not too useful.  "And you should
look like you've been out in the field, lieutenant," he scolded.  "Your
uniform is too clean and too neat.  Go roll in something nasty."

	The next morning, he added, we were all to report to company HQ and
board buses for Pristina.  There would be 15-day leave passes for all the
men and onward transportation from the Kosovo capital back to Serbia.  I
told him my squad had acquired a mascot whom we had to take as far as
Pristina.  He would need a laissez-passer as well because his papers had
been lost.  The major blustered at first but then gave in.

	When I gave him Rifat's name, though, he looked at me suspiciously.
"A Shqiptar?"  he asked.

	"A Kosovar.  A citizen of Yugoslavia.  Sir, he's a kid, a teenager.
He's been very helpful to my men, and if we can get him as far as Pristina,
he can straighten out the documents problems and find his missing
relatives."

	"Only if he's got divine help," the major replied.  "I don't think
Eve could find Adam in this mess."  He looked at me hard.  "I'll give you
the pass, lieutenant, but you're responsible.  Keep the boy out of trouble,
out of sight."

	"Yes, sir." I saluted.  "I will.  Thank you very much, sir."

	The news, especially the prospect of two weeks leave, heightened
the merriment that had already gripped my squad as they prepared the
evening meal.  The nettle soup, Rifat's braised goat, platters of onions
and cabbage, a garnish of pickled watermelon rind, the repast was
pronounced a triumph.  Wine washed it down.  Brandy topped it off, and
after we'd eaten, Petya announced that he'd located a Euroshow music
festival on the television set in the main room.  Since the sofa and chairs
were quickly occupied, Rifat settled himself on the floor to watch, resting
his shoulders on Voinovic's knees, and the sergeant, I saw, occasionally
leaned forward and ruffled the boy's hair.

	The programming was not my taste, and after a while I excused
myself to read in my room.  "I may be asleep when you come up," I told
Rifat, "so please tiptoe."  With a wink, he gave his promise.  In fact, it
was less than 30 minutes later when he quietly pushed open the door and
found me stretched out with my book under the glare of the ceiling lights.
He promptly turned them off.

	"How can I read without light?" I protested.

	"This is not the time for reading, your learnedness," he grinned.
"And for light," he went to the window and pushed open the heavy metal
shutters, "we have the moon."

	He was right.  The room filled with a silver shimmer, and the night
air carried a breath of sweetness from nearby flowering trees and shrubs.
This fertile land, as indifferent to hateful, homicidal men as the
indifferent god I conceived, was renewing its riches and beauty and would
soon be lush again.  No wonder Serbs coveted it, I thought.  No wonder they
massacred to take it, even without intending ever to occupy it.

	As I mused, I felt Rifat's hand on my arm, stroking me lightly,
fondly.  "Mitya," he asked, "would you like to undress me?  These jeans do
have holes," he giggled, "but they're not in the right places."

	I sat up on the edge of the bed and hugged him to me.  I wiggled a
finger through the rip on his backside and poked the springy flesh of his
rump.  "I could just widen this opening," I suggested.  "Then you wouldn't
have to take off these things you like so much."

	"You would have to make the hole very wide if you are going to put
my flying buttress into it," he fingered the object in question through the
fly of my drawers, "and then your soldiers would laugh at me tomorrow.  And
maybe at you."

	"It's strange, Rifat, I think they already know.  About us, I mean.
And they don't make fun of us."

	"They respect you too much."

	"No, I think they love you, too.  Yesterday they were ready to kill
you, and today they want to adopt you."

	"They just like my cooking."

	"No, they see the same thing in you that I do."

	"My buttress?"

	"Don't joke.  They see your youth, your warmth, your spirit and
your suffering.  Didn't I see Voinovic playing with your hair in front of
the TV set."

	"And he kissed me good night.  On the cheeks.  You won't be
jealous?"

	"Not if you let me kiss you on these cheeks."  I fondled his
behind.

	"If you undress me first.  I don't want you to dirty your lips on
my jeans that you don't like so much.  Please, Mitya, let's make love.
Without clothes.  Here in the moonlight.  And you can teach me what a
buttress is and how it flies."

	I nodded my agreement because the lump of desire in my throat
suddenly made it hard for me to speak.  One by one I undid the buttons on
his shirt and, when his chest was uncovered, I licked it from his throat to
his navel, tweaking his nipples lightly and tonguing them till they stood
almost painfully erect.  As he shivered a little from the contact, I
dropped to the floor and stripped off his shoes and socks, crouching to
kiss his feet and ankles.  Next came the jeans, easily opened at the waist
and the fly but tight enough on him so that I had to tug a little before he
could step out of them and present himself to me in just the clinging red
briefs that his erection strained against.

	But as I pressed my mouth eagerly to the cloth and the tumescence
it covered, Rifat pulled my head away.  "Last night," he said, "I was your
prisoner, and it was very nice.  Tonight, you will be my prisoner, and it
will be just as nice.  Do you agree, your insignificance?"

	"I have been your prisoner almost since I first saw you," I
answered.  I crouched to kiss his feet again.  "I belong to you
completely."

	"Then you belong naked."  He pulled my undershirt over my head.
"Take off those silly drawers.  Somebody put too much starch in them.  They
must be very uncomfortable."

	"It is not easy these days to find good help in Kosovo," I said as
I rose and got out of my shorts.  "There," I exclaimed, "I am naked.  Do I
suit the warden?"

	"Come over to the window," Rifat took my arm, "and let me make
sure."  He ran his hands over my chest and then turned me to knead the
flesh of my buttocks and turned me again to lift my testicles in both his
cupped hands and press them gently against my penis, now rigid and
thrusting toward him.

	Letting go of my balls, he ran his finger tips the length of my
shaft, pausing short of the tip and pressing down here and there as though
feeling for some irregularity.  "Prisoner," he asked, "has someone been
biting your manliness?"

	"Love bites," I answered.  "They didn't hurt.  I hardly felt them
at the time."

	"I'm glad to hear that.  But it seems to me that this," he gripped
my cock hard, "is extremely large for a prisoner to carry around.  A little
nibbling might make it more suitable."

	"As a former medical student, I would advise against nibbling.
Heat and moisture might shrink it more effectively."  We were both
giggling.  His grin was so adorable that I bent and caught his lips in mine
for a long, happy kiss.

	"You are very undisciplined for a prisoner, but your ideas are
interesting," Rifat said when we broke apart.  "Why don't you kneel down
and try your theories on me.  You're the one who says people should always
finish what they start."

	Instantly back on my knees, I drew his underwear down and caught
his cock in my lips as it sprang from the crotch-hugging briefs.  Rifat's
body quivered gently as I wrapped my tongue around the swollen head of his
penis and swabbed its especially sensitive underside.  Tightening my lips
on the shaft, I rode up and down it for several strokes pausing at the end
of each to give the organ an instant or two of freedom before I repossessed
it in a curl of my tongue.

	"Prisoner," Rifat's voice was husky with sexual excitement, "I
think your experiment should stop."  He stepped away from me.  "Your theory
about heat and moisture does not seem to work in practice.  I am definitely
not shrinking.  And if you go on like this, I am likely to burst."

	"Would that be so bad?  You burst last night, and it was
delicious."

	"But I have other plans for my deliciousness tonight," he laughed.
Then his tone changed.  "Mitya," he crouched down in front of me.
"Shouldn't sex be very serious?  Why do we make a game of something most
people think is disgusting and sinful?"

	"Maybe most people are wrong.  For a long time most people thought
the earth was flat and a goddess was in charge of the moon.  Even if you
and I were the only people who made love-making fun and funny, we could
still be right and everybody else wrong."

	"But love isn't funny.  What I feel for you actually makes me hurt.
It's so strong that I ache when I look at you naked and I suffer when I
can't look at you at all."  He put his arms around my neck and whispered in
my ear.  "I adore you.  I adore you, Mitya, and I want you to swallow me up
so that I can always be with you."

	"I was trying to swallow you, my adoring, adorable love, and you
stopped me," I answered.  "Rifat," I put my arms tight around him.  "My
love for you doesn't hurt me.  It redeems me.  When I look at you or think
of you, I feel that I have a purpose in life and that life has a purpose
and that you are its center.  And I want you inside me, too, but if you
won't let me swallow you with my mouth, you'll just have to come in another
way."

	"Do you really want me to do that?"

	"I am your prisoner.  I want you to treat me the way I treat my
prisoners."

	"Prisoners?  Have you had many?  I thought there was just Ivo."

	"And a beautiful Muslim boy."

	"Women?"

	"Yes."

	"Many?"

	"No."

	"This interrogation could last a very long time if the prisoner
holds things back.  And," he dropped his hands from my neck to my crotch
and locked them around my scrotum, "we have ways of making people talk."

	"I will tell you everything you want to know, your fiendishness, if
you will let me stand up.  My knees hurt."

	"You may not stand up for long.  I will allow you to lie down,
though, on the bed, on your back, and I will sit on you and pinch you in
various painful places if I think you are not being honest."

	And that's what he did.  He arranged me with my arms by my side in
the middle of the bed and climbed up on me so that his knees were on either
side of my hips.  He bent down and kissed me -- "because your mouth amuses
me," he giggled -- and then took my penis in his hand and gave it a tug.
"You are to begin, prisoner.  Confess, and I will see that your punishment
is not too severe."

	He wanted to know about my sex life, and I told him.  I had had
fumbling teenage romances with a couple of girls but no real love-making
until Ivo.  And after Ivo went away, I met a girl at the university who
took me to her bed and taught me that perfumed, cushioned, yielding, female
bodies could also be supremely exciting to hold and lick and penetrate.

	"What part of her was most exciting?"

	"Under her breasts and the insides of her thighs."

	"And where you put my buttress?"

	"She made me wear condoms.  There were some wonderful sensations,
but I wasn't in love with her.  It was not like making love last night to
you."

	"Was she very beautiful?"

	"Demi Moore. Julia Roberts."

	He pinched my left nipple hard.  "The truth."

	"Her body was young, her hair was beautiful, but she had one
squinty eye and a suggestion of a mustache."

	"I have a suggestion of a mustache."

	"You have no such thing."  I ran a finger along his upper lip.  "A
little soap and water and no more suggestion."

	He laughed and stretched out on my chest.  "Will you stop loving me
when I do grow a big mustache?"

	I put my hands under his rump and stroked his buttocks.  "I already
told you, I will love you when you grow a belly.  I will love you if you
snore.  I will love you even if you grow hair in your ears."  I kissed him
hard and released his behind so that I could hold his head still as I
pushed my tongue into his mouth.  He squirmed with pleasure, and I felt the
hot cylinder of his erection poking against my leg.  I went on.

	"Rifat, there have been other girls.  Some were very nice.  I lived
with one for almost half a year, and we are still good friends."

	"Then why do you fuck boys?"

	"I don't fuck boys.  You are only the second, and I love you.
That's why I have sex with you.  But I would even love you if we didn't
make love."

	"Would you love me if I had sex with girls?  I would like to, but
not if it would make you angry."

	"Haven't you already?"

	"No."  A bit sheepish.  "Our town was small, and all the girls had
brothers and fathers."

	"Well, you should try.  I would not be upset unless you fell in
love with someone else.  Sex with girls is like tennis or sailing.  It's a
sport.  Unless it becomes serious."

	"What about sex with other men?  Just for sport.  Would that be all
right?"

	"My love, you are so beautiful that I'm sure other men will want to
go to bed with you.  You are the only one who can decide if it's right to
have sex with them.  If you can love me while you are in the arms of
another man, then you should be free to do it.  I couldn't.  I love you too
much to share myself with anybody else."

	"Oh."  He was silent for a while, and his erection dwindled.  He
lifted himself off me and lay down beside me, crooking one arm to support
his head while he looked in my eyes.  "Mitya, that is the way I love you,
too.  My questions were not serious.  They were silly."

	He pressed his mouth to my throat and with his free hand toyed with
the patch of hair on my chest.  "I am an inexperienced boy.  I have never
played tennis or gone sailing," he said.  "And as long as you will love me,
I will never need anything or anybody else."

	I rolled onto my side so that our bodies faced one another and I
reached into his crotch.  "Now I know how to shrink you." I said, finding
his penis lying limp on his balls.  "No nibbling.  No heat.  No moisture.
Just talk.  Shall we see if I can make you grow big again in total
silence."

	"That might be interesting."  He grasped my equally relaxed member.
"It's hard to tell," he chuckled, "but you seem to have shrunk some.  Will
you let me give you the silent treatment, too?"

	We ended up with my head pressed between his thighs and his between
mine, each holding the other's cock, licking it, warming the slippery tip
with gusts of breath, pulling it between our lips into the heated hollows
of our mouths.  I bathed his testicles as well, pressing his rigid penis up
against his flat belly and, at one point, managing to get his entire sac
into my mouth.  I raised one of his legs and kissed and licked the skin
along his thighs, just as satin smooth as a girl's and, judging by the way
he twisted in my grip, just as sensitive.

	"The prisoner is trying to avoid his punishment," he gasped.
"Aren't you?"

	"Am I?"

	"Yes, you want to make me burst before I buttress you."

	"Is that to be my punishment?"

	"And my pleasure."

	"Then, it will be mine too.  But Rifat, I am not as brave as you.
I bought something in town today that is better than saliva."

	"Lady's skin lotion?"

	"No, just petroleum jelly.  The jar is on the table by the bed."

	He reached across me and opened the small container I'd been so
pleased to find in the local pharmacy.  He scooped out a gob and scooted to
the foot of the bed.  "Lie back, prisoner, and raise your legs," he
ordered.  "Higher and wider.  That's good."

	His hand went into the cleft between my spread buttocks and his
fingers started to smear the jelly around, then on and then into my anus.
The invasion was abrupt, and I flinched as he penetrated me.  "Am I hurting
you, Mitya?  I am so clumsy," he apologized.  He pulled out, and I winced
again.

	"No, dear love, you are gentle and wonderful.  Only no one has
touched me there in a long time.  Please, don't stop.  I want you inside
me, all of you, all the way inside."

	With greater caution, he resumed his exploration and soon had two
fingers in my rectum and the tip of one against my prostate.  "Oh, oh," I
exclaimed, "Rifat, you are doing wonderful things to me."  I groped for the
jar and found it and coated my own fingers.  "Let me put some more of this
on you and then come into me."

	He guided my hand to his cock and waited while I greased its stiff,
anxious length.  Then, as I held my legs high and far apart he braced
himself on his arms, leaned over and into my body and slowly, lovingly,
masterfully pushed his way in.  I was so delighted to have him possess me
that I ignored the pain of his entry, concentrating only on the joy of
belonging to him, of having him invade and fill me.

	"This is better than dog style," he said when he was so completely
lodged in my ass that I could feel his pubic hair.  "If you raise your head
and I lower mine, we can kiss."  We did, long and deeply while his cock
seemed to grow even bigger inside me.  As our lips separated, he began to
pump up and down with short, leisurely strokes at first, then longer ones
and at a slowly accelerating pace that soon became urgent and then fierce.

	There is a moment in the sex act when however much a man cares for
his partner, he passes from tenderness to pure, self-centered, animal lust.
Panting on top of me, the boy I loved, the boy who loved me, gave himself
over to that furious appetite.  I became just the human sheath for his cock
and the receptacle for the explosive release of his seed.  "Yes!" he
exulted as he came the first time.  "Yes, yes!  Incredible!"  He gave a
final thrust and then lowered his face to mine again.  "Mitya, thank you.
You are wonderful to fuck.  You are wonderful to love.  I release you from
prison," he raised himself so that his wilted penis rested on me but no
longer in me, "if you promise never to run away."

	I lowered my legs to wrap them around his waist and hugged him to
me.  "I promise.  Rifat, you are wonderful to love, too.  I will never run
away because I am your prisoner forever."

	"I am so happy," the boy breathed into my ear, "I want to make you
happy, too.  But Mitya, I am also a little sore in my rear end.  Could I
just nibble on you instead?"

	"I did hurt you last night!  Damn! I wish you had told me then.  I
could have stopped.  I asked you to tell me.  And, of course, you can do
anything to me that you want."

	"Then I want you to stand up and I will kneel down in front of you
between your very hairy legs and I will nibble you and heat you and
moisturize you till you burst."

	I did and he did.  He kissed his way up my legs and washed my balls
with an ingenious tongue and reinserted a finger in my ass and ran his lips
along and around my cock until I was quivering and holding onto his head to
steady myself.  "Rifat," I managed to say, "either you should bite me again
or let me into your mouth and hold me there.  I am going to burst very
soon."

	Without answering, he parted his lips over the tip of my penis and
vacuumed it into his mouth.  There, his tongue circled it, slapped it and
warmed it.  His hand pumped me hard, and my hips pumped my manhood back and
forth through his slick fingers until I exploded deep into his throat.
Just as he had done to me a few minutes earlier in the grip of passion, I
forgot that I was using the mouth of a boy I loved to gain gratification
and release.  I pushed my cock too hard and too far and suddenly Rifat was
gagging noisily and clutching violently at my legs.  I pulled back, free of
his lips but still ejaculating, and hoisted him upright, pounding his back
to help him either swallow or expel the overload of my come.

	"My darling boy," I said.  "I'm sorry.  I'm so sorry.  Can you
breathe?  I'm so thoughtless, so selfish."

	Voiceless, he jerked his head up and down, then sideways.  Finally,
he clutched my shoulders and gasped, "Not selfish.  No.  Very strong.  Very
full.  Wonderful.  Like a god."

	He pushed me to the bed.  "Lie down, my very strong god," he said.
"I should clean myself.  I'll be right back."  And he disappeared into the
hallway as I sprawled there, joyous and fulfilled.  And tired.  I must have
dozed, because the next thing I recall is feeling Rifat slide his body next
to mine and rest his head in the hollow of my shoulder.

	"Hello, your sleepiness," he whispered.  "I love you.  Did you miss
me?"

	"Every minute.  Every second."

	"I'm sorry I took so long.  I had to help Mirko."

	I was suddenly wide awake.  "Help Mirko what?" I asked with more
than a touch of jealous concern.

	"Wash.  He was washing."

	"Why did he need help?  Both his hands work, don't they?"

	"Because of his vow."

	"What vow?"

	"You know.  He has vowed not to wash these," Rifat fondled my penis
and testicles, "until he is back in Belgrade."

	"So you did it for him?"

	"He said that would not break the vow.  And he needed washing
there."

	"I can imagine."

	"Did you know he has three?"

	"Three what?"

	"Three balls.  He said the extra one is for feast days."

	There was something -- an undertone of suppressed laughter -- in
Rifat's voice that made me suspicious.  "Rifat," I asked, "are you trying
to tease me?"

	"Trying?  I thought I was doing very well."  The suppressed
laughter erupted into the open, and to stifle it, the boy pressed his mouth
against my side.  I swatted his rump.

	"Ouch," he squealed.  "Do you beat everyone who teases you, or just
poor, defenseless Muslim boys?"

	"Only Muslims," I pinched his haunch, "and only Muslim boys with
adorable behinds.  I am very particular."

	"You are very special," he kissed me under one ear, "and I am glad
you like my bottom.  Mitya?" he was suddenly serious.  "Are there schools
in the South Seas?"

	"Some, I imagine.  Why?  I thought we were going to go naked and
turn brown.  Most schools make you wear clothes."

	"We will go naked, but after a while, you might want to finish
studying and become a real doctor.  And I... well, I might like to study,
too."

	"Do you want to be a doctor?"

	"I want to study history."

	"There's a lot of it, and most of it is sad."

	"I know.  But I want to study my history, the history of the
Illyrians and of Kosovo.  Mitya, the thing is, I want to understand what
has happened here and why.  Maybe, I could find out what went wrong and
that would help to fix it."

	"It's very hard to fix the past, Rifat.  But that doesn't mean you
shouldn't try.  It does mean that we wouldn't go to the South Seas right
away."

	"Would you mind?"

	"No.  As long as I can be with you, I won't mind anything.  I mean
that.  Lying next to you, feeling the heat of your body and knowing that I
can pinch your sexy behind whenever I want, I am happier than I have ever
been."  I ruffled the hair on the back of his head and petted the curve of
his shoulder.  His hand slid up and down my thigh and his fingertips
brushed my scrotum, but for some time he was silent.

	"Mitya?"

	"Yes."

	"Mitya, about your god? The one who doesn't pay attention.  What if
he ...

	"Or she."

	"He, I hope.  What if he saw us doing what we do together? Naked
with each other?  Would he punish us?"

	"Because men should not do such things with other men?  Is that
what you mean?" I asked.

	"Well, should they?  Don't most people think it is very wrong?"

	"Rifat, sweetheart, remember all the people long ago who thought
the sun revolved around the earth.  They were wrong, and what most people
think now just doesn't matter to my love for you or, I hope, your love for
me.  As for my god, he or she or it has probably seen men making love to
men millions and millions of times without punishing them.  There hasn't
even been punishment when men raped other men or women or forced them
somehow to have sex in ways they didn't want.  Either no god was watching
or no god much cares what men do when they have sex."

	"So the men who ... who ... who hurt my sister and then killed
her," his voice was both angry and tearful, "you mean even they won't be
punished?"

	"Probably not by a god.  Maybe by other men.  Most likely by
themselves.  I don't think even the lowest, most brutish man can live with
himself after hurting a woman or any human being that way.  Eventually, he
will become completely an animal and his neighbors will kill him or he will
live with a memory that destroys him.  At least, I hope that's what
happens."

	"But I would like to be the one who kills him."

	"If you did, would you be any better than he is?"

	"I would be alive, and he would be dead."

	"Alive but full of blood guilt.  That's not a good way to be
alive."

	Rifat said nothing.  He snuggled closer to me.  I put my hands on
either side of his head and kissed his eyes.  They were wet.

	"My love," I said, "my wounded, lonely love, don't cry.  Last night
you asked if I wanted to love you just because I felt sorry for you and was
horny.  Do you remember?"

	"Yes."

	"I do feel sorry for you, terribly sorry, but I love you because
you are full of life, not of grief.  You love me because you have lost
everyone you loved and lost them in a terrible, horrible way.  But I hope
you also love me because you can tease me and teach me and laugh with me
and talk to me about gods and history and the future."

	"Those are good reasons why I love you.  So is this." He ran his
fingers along my penis.  "And I like all the furry hair you have
everywhere.  But most of all I love you because you love me.  Alif and I
loved each other from when we were little boys.  With you I have a grown-up
who cares for me, and I didn't think I would have such a person again.  I
am glad you saved my life, but I am alive because you let me love you.
Does that make sense?"

	I kissed his lips and stroked his back down to his buttocks.
"Rifat, it makes wonderful sense," I said.  "I forgot to say that another
reason I love you is that you are so intelligent.  You should study.  We'll
work something out."

	"You are very intelligent, too, your brilliance, but are you also
superstitious?  Why do you have a cross on a shiny chain around your neck
when you don't believe in the Christian God?"

	"My mother gave it to me.  She does believe, and she believes it
will protect me."

	"And it has, so maybe she is right.  My... my mother believed, too,
but in her god, and he didn't save her.  You know, Mitya, it has been three
years, and I still miss her.  She said I was her baby, her special love,
and then she left me."

	Real tears, now, turning to wracking sobs.  I hugged him with both
arms and pulled his body on top of mine, kissing his eyes and mouth and
ears and throat.  "Rifat," I murmured, "now you are my special love. It's
not the same, I know, but I will try as hard as I can to keep you safe and
help you to be happy.  Will you let me do that?  Let me hold you when you
have to cry and let me laugh with you the rest of the time?"

	He nodded, snuffled and pushed his face into my chest.  "Will you
hold me now while we go to sleep," he asked, "and let me hold you?"  He
wrapped his arms around me.  I tightened mine around him and turned in the
bed so that he slid onto his side facing me.

	"Sleep well, my beloved," I whispered into his ear.  "Golden
dreams."

	"Thank you, Mitya," he murmured.  "You are so beautiful.  I won't
need to dream. I will just feel our love all around me.  Good night."  He
kissed my collar bone and relaxed immediately into sleep.  I lay awake for
a few more minutes of silent rejoicing and then followed him.

	I did dream, a strange dream of being in a line of Eskimos.  They
wore furs.  I wore nothing and I was cold as the line wound up a hill to an
altar of some sort.  Passing the altar, each Eskimo bowed down and seemed
to move his head from side to side over something lying on the slab in
front of them.  When it was my turn, I bowed down too and started to move
my head as they had, but then I saw that Rifat, dressed in a blue track
suit, was lying on the altar and that the Eskimos had been rubbing his nose
even though he was dead.  Shivering with the cold, I did the same thing,
and the boy came alive.  His lips parted and he rubbed his nose against
mine.  I woke to find Rifat's grinning face above me and our noses touching
as they had in the dream.

	"Good morning, your nakedness," the boy beamed at me.  He was fully
dressed.  "I have a cup of hot tea for you and a bowl of hot shaving water
for your suggestion of a mustache."

	"What do you have for the chill in my bones?  And why is it
suddenly so cold?"

	"I have hugs," he said.  "Would you like a demonstration?  The
weather has changed.  It is drizzling and sad."

	"Demonstrate one of your hugs, please."  I raised my arms, and he
dropped into them, stretching himself the length of my body and wrapping
his arms around my waist.

	"This is one of the most popular hug models," he explained.  "It
comes with a kiss at no extra charge."

	"Demonstrate, please."  He shifted his position to put his hands
under my shoulders and lowered his lips to mine for a brief, fluttery
touch.

	"I can see why there's no charge for the kiss.  It hardly deserves
the name."

	Rifat pretended to pout.  "If you don't like my kissing, why is my
buttress trying to stand up and fly?"  He sat up with his knees on either
side of my legs and put his fingers around my stiffening cock.

	"Because I love the rest of you.  Good morning, my beloved," I slid
between his legs, sat up and hugged him to me.  "Do you always get up so
early?"

	"I'm a simple farm boy, your exaltedness.  We had a cow I had to
milk," he gave my penis a squeeze.  "For a while, Alif and I had a pony
that I had to groom."  He raked his fingers through my thatch of chest
hair. "And one of my jobs was to clean out the chicken coop and collect the
eggs."  His hand darted between my legs and gripped my balls.  "These are
fresh and warm," he grinned.  "A little small for a chicken, though, and
unusually fuzzy."

	He had me laughing, and I put my hands on his head so that I could
give him a deep, passionate kiss that would restore a proper, serious tone
to the proceedings. "Now, that," I declared, "is what a good-morning kiss
should be.  Get off me, farm boy, I have to dress."

	"And shave and have some tea," Rifat said, hopping off me and the
bed.  He helped me into my clothes and watched as I shaved, almost with the
wonder and envy of a little boy observing an older man performing a
mysterious adult ritual.  "You are very precise with your razor," he said.
"Are you planning to be a surgeon?"

	"Probably not.  I'd like to try being a pediatrician, keeping kids
healthy."

	"What about grown-ups who get sick?  They need help."

	"But children are better company.  And they usually do what the
doctor tells them and they get well faster."

	"Mitya, do you want children of your own?"

	"Do you?"

	"I asked you first."

	"It's a very hard question to answer, Rifat.  If I hadn't found
you, yes, I might have gone back to that girl I once lived with and asked
her to marry me and raise a family.  I think it's a basic human urge to
want children, to see your identity carried beyond your own life.  But many
people are happy to live just with the one person they love.  I could be
happy that way with you."

	"And I will be happy just with you," he put his arms around me and
pressed his cheek against my back, "but I would also like to have lots of
children, at least enough to name after my father and my mother and my
brother and sister.  If you were a pediatrician, maybe you could get
parents who had more children than they wanted to give some to us.  Or we
could find a girl to play tennis with and have babies that way.  Would you
like that?"

	I dried my face and cleaned the razor and detached his arms from my
body so I could turn and look directly at him.  "My love, you have
wonderful ideas, but they may not be completely practical -- unless, of
course, we did go live, naked and brown in the South Seas.  I've read that
attitudes about family and children are sometimes more relaxed there.
Anyway, we don't have to decide right now.  We are going to have all our
lives together to work things out.  Right now, I have to find a way to keep
you with me now.  And that won't be easy."

	I devised a plan as we trotted to company headquarters -- my
battered motorcycle wouldn't start -- and I rehearsed it as our overcrowded
bus crawled to Pristina along cratered roads through ghost-haunted, burned
villages and as I said good-bye to Voinovic, Stankovic and Makaveyev, all
of them headed home with the battalion. My idea was to persuade the Germans
that an Albanian-speaker who knew the countryside and some of what had
happened in it would be a genuine asset to their mission.  They agreed, or
rather Colonel Haffengot, the tall, blond, Prussian officer to whom I
reported, agreed.

	"It's a good idea, lieutenant," he said, "but you're not the first
to have it.  We have a full complement of bilingual Albanian refugees on
the roster already, and I'm sure you'll understand that the recommendation
of a Yugoslav Army officer is not likely to weigh heavily in our decisions
on matters of personnel."  He gave me a cold, blue-eyed stare of total
distrust, and I knew that it would be useless to protest.

	"Thank you, sir," I squared my shoulders and tried to look
military.  "I understand completely.  I am responsible for the young man
though and I need to arrange a place for him to stay.  His entire family
was killed and their home burned so he has nowhere to go.  If I could have
a few days free, I'll try to find someone here in Pristina to take him in
or escort him to my parents in Montenegro."

	The colonel looked at his wrist-watch and then at me.  "I can give
you two hours and fifteen minutes, lieutenant," he said.  "At 1830 hours
this headquarters will move to Djakovica.  By helicopter.  You are now part
of this command.  You will move with it.  Do I make myself clear?"

	"Yes, sir."  I saluted and, in near despair, hurried out to the
street where Rifat was waiting.  Mirko was with him.  The corporal had
decided to activate his 15-day pass in Kosovo and make his way home through
Montenegro where an old girl friend lived.  He was now my last hope.
	
	"Mirko," I ran up to him. "I can't do anything for Rifat here.
Could he travel with you?  My parents live in Cetinje.  I'm sure they'll
take him in."

	"What about you?" Rifat interjected.  "I want to be with you,
Mitya."

	"And I want to be with you, but in about two hours I'm being taken
to Djakovica, and there's no room in the helicopter for Albanians who have
friends in the Yugoslav military.  I'm sorry."  I clutched his arm.  "Hell,
that's not the word for it.  I'm devastated.  But, Rifat, my mother and
father will like you, and you'll like them.  My father taught history.  And
it's safe there.  This assignment won't last for ever.  I'll be with you
soon."

	"Rifat," Mirko weighed in.  "I'd be grateful for the company.  I'll
look out for you if you'll look out for me.  This part of Greater Serbia is
about to be a somewhat uncomfortable place for Serbs, especially in
uniform."

	The boy turned back to me, a look of total misery on his face.  "I
could get to Djakovica," he said.  "It isn't that far."
	
	"But where would you stay?" I asked. "I don't even know what I'll
be doing there or for how long.  Rifat, please, this is so hard.  Don't
make it harder.  I'll come to you as soon as I can, or I'll work something
out so that you can come to me.  Please."

	He bit his lip.  His eyes filled, but they didn't overflow.  And he
nodded.  I put my hands on his shoulders.  "It'll be all right," I
whispered to him.  "It won't be long.  I promise."

	Rifat knew the way to the bus station.  He had visited Pristina
with his mother on several futile trips to see cancer specialists.  And we
were able to buy tickets for him and Mirko to Pec where they would connect
to a bus to Montenegro.  Even though the tickets were for scheduled
service, the motherly clerk warned that the roads were in bad shape and the
vehicles overcrowded.

	"If you haven't got a sleeping bag," she said to Mirko, "you'd
better buy one.  Nothing's working the way it did in the old days."

	Mirko thanked her and gave Rifat a wink.  "I've got a sleeping bag,
kiddo," he said.  "Big enough for two at a pinch."

	"No pinching," I said, pretending to be jealous.  "No pawing.
Those are orders."

	"Yes, lieutenant, sir," Mirko snapped me a mock salute.

	Rifat gave a wan smile.  He was still desolate.  To distract him, I
gave him some money to buy food both for an immediate meal and for the
road.  At a kiosk I bought writing paper and an envelope and found a bench
in the bustling gloom of the station where I could compose a hasty letter
to my parents.  I told them my news, introduced Rifat as a war orphan I had
helped and asked them to take care of him until I could get home.  "He is
very bright and quick and has excellent manners," I wrote, "but he has just
lost all of his family, and his moods can cycle unpredictably from
adolescent high spirits to the depths of depression.  Please be patient
with him.  I will be with you as quickly as possible."

	I signed the letter and started to fold it.  Then I added two
sentences.  "P.S. If Petar has some free time, maybe he could teach Rifat
to play tennis.  He wants to learn."

	Petar, a cousin and a friend, was not only a very good tennis
player but a notorious Don Juan.  He might well help Rifat find a willing
girl.  I wanted to be sure that the boy I loved sampled other kinds of love
before he tied his fate to me I did not really doubt the outcome, but I did
not want him torn some day by regrets for experiences he had never had.

	I had finished the letter and put my parents' address and telephone
number on the envelope when Rifat and Mirko returned carrying greasy
cevapcici [spicy pork kebabs - Trans.], bottles of warm beer and a sack of
oranges.  "Don't sneer," Mirko warned me.  "These things cost an arm and a
leg.  Someone is getting very rich off this war, and it isn't me."

	We ate and drank in silence, Rifat with his eyes cast down, making
no response other than a shrug of his shoulders as Mirko teased him about
the sins he was committing by swallowing pork and alcohol.  "You two are
not exactly sparkling company," the corporal said as he finished and got
up.  "If you'll excuse me, I'll take a walk and give my digestive system a
chance to survive."

	Grateful for his tact, I gave him a look of thanks.  He gave me a
wink and disappeared.  Rifat turned to me and clutched both my hands in
his.

	"This is awful, Mitya, awful," he groaned.  "I can't do it.  I
can't leave you.  We've only had two days together.  Don't go.  Please,
don't go.  You're all I have in the world."  The color of burnished pewter,
his eyes filled again and this time overflowed.  He put his head down on my
knees and sobbed.

	I freed my hands and began to rub his neck and back.  "Sweetheart,
my beloved boy," I murmured, "every minute away from you is going to be an
hour of terrible pain and longing for me.  I can't believe that I could
become so close to someone in such a short time, but you are now my world
and my life.

	"But I can't disobey these orders.  I hope my father can use his
influence to get me released quickly.  But we can't count on that.  We have
to be realistic.  And once this is over, we'll never be apart again.  I
promise.  I want to see what you'll look like naked and brown with a big
mustache on that beautiful face of yours."

	Rifat raised his head and wiped his forearm over his tear-streaked
cheeks.  "You are my world, too, Mitya, and my life."  He tried to smile
but only grimaced.  "I know this is the only way, but I'm so scared.  I
told you last night that I love you because you love me.  You didn't just
save me from being killed.  You saved me from being alone.  Now, I will
have to be alone again, and I don't know how I can live like that.  With
the nightmares.  With the fear and the shame."

	He stopped abruptly and clutched me.  "I'm afraid, Mitya.  I'm a
coward."  His tears began again.

	I pulled away and gave him a quick, stinging slap on the cheek.
"Stop it," I said. "Stop right now, Rifat.  You're not a coward.  You're
not a baby.  You're the strong, wonderful, beautiful young man I adore.
You won't be alone.  There's Mirko.  And my parents.  And I've asked them
to introduce you to a cousin of mine, a tennis player.  You'll meet new
people.  You'll have fun.  Your ghosts won't go away, but you'll learn to
control them.  And I'll be in your thoughts all the time, just the way
you'll be in mine."

	He looked at me with hurt astonishment.  "Why did you hit me?"

	"Why did you bite me?"

	"So you wouldn't go off."  He thought for a moment and laughed.
"Oh, I love you so much, your brutishness.  Can I demonstrate one of my
hugs?"

	"Please do.  That would make me very happy."

	We wrapped our arms tight around each other and in silence laid our
heads on each other's shoulders.  Finally, Rifat spoke.  "This model hug
comes with a special kiss."  He brought his face to mine and rubbed our
noses together.

	"Thank you, Mitya," he said.  "Thank you for loving me enough to
hit me when I was being a fool.  I'll be all right now.  I'll be strong and
brave like a good Muslim boy."

	I looked at him and tried to believe him and to believe that I
could be strong and brave, too.  "My sweet Muslim love, can I give you
something to keep for me until we're together again?"  I reached behind my
neck and undid the chain my mother had given me.  "Would you wear this,
even with the cross?"

	He took it from me and put it around his neck.  His eyes grew
liquid again.  "I'm not going to cry," he said.  "I'm not."  He took a deep
breath.  "Mitya, I have nothing of my own to give you, but I did save
something to remind me of how we met."

	He dug into a shopping bag that held, I thought, only the few
clothes I'd bought for him the day before.  From it, though, he handed me a
grimy piece of studded leather.  It was the dog collar I'd taken off his
neck before washing him under the pump.  I shuddered slightly at the memory
it brought back.

	"You don't have to wear it," he tried to smile.  "But if you carry
it in your pocket, maybe you won't forget me right away."

	It was my turn to fight back tears.  "I won't forget you soon," I
stood up, "or ever.  I will be thinking of you every minute of every day
and I will probably be so inefficient that the Germans will send me away.
If I don't go to them, though, right now, they will have me shot for
desertion.  Goodbye, Rifat.  Be strong.  Be brave.  Be the boy I love."

	I bent to embrace him, but he stopped me.  He stood, took my right
hand and put it to his lips, then to his breast and finally, bowing
slightly, to his forehead.  He looked up at me.  "Goodbye, your honor," he
said.  "That is the way a good Muslim boy says farewell to someone he
respects and loves.  I will be waiting for you."

	I turned and hurried out of the station, almost running into Mirko
in the doorway.  "Take care of yourself, corporal," I said, "and of Rifat.
Damn, I nearly forgot."  I handed him the letter I'd written my parents and
then I had a last thought.  "Mirko, are you carrying a weapon?"

	"No.  When I went on leave, I turned in my gun.  Why?"

	"Because you never know."  I handed him the pistol I wore tucked in
my belt.  "Keep it out of sight. But keep it until you get to my parents'
home."

	"Sure.  Will do.  Don't worry.  And don't let the Krauts fuck you
over."  We shook hands, embraced and parted.  I made it to the Germans'
temporary headquarters with only five minutes to spare and, as punishment
for my unmilitary tardiness, was the only passenger on the helicopter to
Djakovica who was not given earphones to drown out the ferocious noise of
the engine.

	The next three days passed in total confusion that ended, at least
for me, when the German forces decided they could easily do without my
services.  Finding that I spoke better English than German, they
transferred me to the Canadian contingent investigating war crimes in the
region.  Policemen instead of soldiers, the businesslike Canadians actually
seemed glad to have my help in persuading both Serbs and Albanians to
recount and even to reconcile their wildly differing versions of events.
One uniformed young detective, Herb Inkvist, became genuinely cordial as we
worked together and allowed me on my second evening with the unit to use
its satellite communications gear to call home.

	My mother answered, cheerful, relieved to hear from me, anxious
about my health, full of family news and local gossip.  Finally, I managed
to interrupt her to ask after Rifat.

	"Who?" she asked.

	"The Albanian boy I sent to you.  Didn't he bring you my letter?"

	"Your father got a letter, but he said a young woman brought it.
Nobody else came.  He didn't mention a boy.  Your father's not here now,
but he said that if you telephoned, you should talk to the young woman.
Just a minute.  I have her name and number here someplace."  There was a
pause, long enough for a knot of fear to cramp my stomach.  Something had
happened.  Something had happened to Rifat.

	My mother picked up the receiver again.  "I found it, son.  Her
name is Katja.  She told your father that she knew you at school.  Do you
miss school, Mitya?  Are you going to have to take the whole year over?"

	"Please, Mama, the phone number," I begged.  "We'll talk about
school when I get home.  I'm not allowed to use this telephone for more
than a few minutes.  Please."

	Grudgingly, she gave me the number and, full of foreboding, I
dialed it.  For what seemed an eternity, it rang and rang.  Just as I was
about to give up, a woman answered, breathless, flustered.

	"May I speak to Katja, please?  This is Dmitrij Njegos.  I'm
calling long distance."

	"Dmitrij?  It's me.  Katja."  She gave her last name.  It rang no
bells.  "You don't remember me, do you?  It was in the sixth class, a long
time ago.  I had a long braid, and you and your friend, Ivo, used to tease
me that only pirates and Chinamen wore pigtails."

	I did remember.  Sort of, but not clearly.  I apologized for
forgetting.  She apologized for being out of breath.  She had just come in
when she heard the telephone ringing and dashed upstairs to answer it.
Then she delivered the blow.

	"I'm so sorry, Dmitrij.  About your friend, I mean.  He was such a
nice boy.  Did your father tell you?"

	Was!?  I began to scream, silently, inside.  "No, Katja," I said,
maintaining as calm a tone as I could.  "I don't know what you're talking
about.  I haven't talked to my father.  Thank you for delivering my letter,
but how did you happen to have it?"

	Returning from work as a translator for the United Nations in the
Macedonian refugee camps, she had been on the bus from Pec to Montenegro,
sitting across the aisle from Rifat.  They had struck up a conversation.
He asked her what he should do to find out if his aunt and uncle were in
Macedonia.  She found out that the rest of his family had been killed, but
that a Yugoslav officer, a Montenegrin, had saved his life.  When the bus
crawled through the beautiful gorge past the great monastery at Decani,
Katja told him about King Stephen buried there for nearly 700 years, a
ruler blinded by his father, who had killed his brother and been strangled
by his son, but who was considered a saint by the Serbs and worshipped by
Muslims as a healer of sick children.

	"We talked about religion, about belief," Katja told me, "and
Dmitrij, he was so thoughtful, so grown-up for such a young boy.  He said
he thought there had to have been a force that created the universe and
that is responsible for our existence.  He told me that someone he loved
very much had told him always to act as if that deity might be paying
attention.  And that's the way he did act, Dmitrij.  It's why he was shot."

	"What do you mean?" I screeched.  "Shot?  By whom?  How?  Oh God,
Katya, what happened?"

	About 15 kilometers east of the Montenegrin border, she said, the
bus had been stopped, as it had been repeatedly that afternoon, in a snarl
of cars and trucks all trying to negotiate a narrow path between shell
craters on the battered road.  Partially uniformed men in masks, carrying
machine guns, had pushed their way onto the bus and forced two Yugoslav
Army soldiers seated toward the front to get off.  The leader had come
toward the rear and, though Rifat's sleeping seatmate was wearing a blue
athletic jacket, had spotted the uniform under it, shook him awake and
ordered him out of the bus.

	"Rifat tried to protect him, Dmitrij.  I was with another woman who
spoke Albanian, and she heard the boy say that the soldier had saved his
life, that he was a good man.  The man with the gun was big and brutal, and
he just pushed the boy out of the way.  He grabbed a gold chain that Rifat
was wearing, looked at the cross on it and spat in Rifat's face.  He called
him a Serb-lover and a traitor.  And he knocked him down and pushed the
soldier down the aisle to the door."

	She stopped.  "Is that all, Katja?  Tell me what happened," I
pleaded in despair.

	 "The boy got up and he reached into a shopping bag in the rack
over his seat and brought some kind of pistol out of it.  He took a letter
out of his pocket and asked me to deliver it if he didn't come back.  Then
he raced down the aisle to the front door, shouting."

	"Shouting what?"

	"My friend said it was very strange.  He was yelling at the man in
the mask.  He said, `You mustn't hurt them.  You mustn't.  What if a god is
watching you?'

	"As he jumped off the bus, the man who had hit him turned around.
I guess he saw the pistol.  He fired his gun, and Rifat fell.  And our
driver panicked and closed the door and pulled the bus away.  My friend had
the window seat.  She said she was sure the boy was dead. That he had died
instantly."

	I could hear that Katja was in tears.  She paused.  I couldn't
speak.  After a few moments, she went on.  "I'm so sorry, Dmitrij.  He was
a fine young man.  He should have lived, but this is a crazy time.  So many
fine people have died.  So many.  I am planning to emigrate."

	I was still too shocked and despairing to say anything.
	
	"Dmitrij?" Katya asked.  "Are you still there?  Did you
understand?"

	"Yes, I'm here," I was able to answer.  "Katja, please, please,
don't leave before I get back.  You're the only person I know who knew
him."  Now I was in tears.  "I need to talk to you about him.  Will you
stay?"

	"Of course," she said.  "Emigrating isn't something you can do
overnight.  Call me, Dmitrij, when you get home.  I'll be waiting.
Good-bye."

	"Thank you, thank you," I sobbed.  "Thank you, Katja.  Good-bye.
Good-bye."

	I hung up and put my head on the desk.  I had killed Rifat.  I had
given him the chain, the gun, the crazy idea that a god might see him and
that he should behave nobly.  No god watches us.  There is no god.

	I bawled like a baby.  I was still wailing minutes later when I
felt a pair of hands on my shoulders.  Herb had come looking for me.  He
made me stand up and walk upstairs to his room and there he poured Canadian
whiskey into me while I poured my story out to him.  He got me so drunk I
couldn't stand on my feet, and he undressed me and put me in his bed and
held me, still sobbing, till I feel asleep.

	Herb is the one who has made me write down what happened.  He said
it would be good therapy and the best way to keep Rifat's memory alive.  I
know Herb wants to have sex with me, but he is truly decent and he doesn't
push it.  Someday, maybe we will.  He's nice looking and very caring.  I'm
sure he would be a good lover.

	But more importantly, his father is dean of a medical school in
Toronto, and Herb thinks he could get me admitted to finish my studies.  I
want to go.  I want to go anywhere away from here.  And if I can go to
Canada, maybe I can find Ivo.  Maybe I can find a reason to live again.

Copyright 1999 D.N. Djakovica
June 20, 1999