"As Flies to Wanton Boys," the story that follows in multiple episodes, appeared exactly ten years ago today as my first submission to the Nifty Archive. Its 46 pages are still there: /nifty/gay/adult-youth/divine-neglect under the title "Divine Neglect" for readers who want to consume the whole thing in one sitting. That 1999 version, slightly edited and revised, will now appear in shorter takes and, because several readers were unhappy about the way things ended, new chapters follow.
[DISCLAIMER: The following completely fictional story, the sole copyright for which belongs to the author and translator, contains explicit depictions of sex 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 which the translator, -- park517@aol.com -- will forward at his discretion.]
DIVINE NEGLECT Chapter One
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 immobilize 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.
End Chapter One