Date: Thu, 23 Jul 2009 19:39:37 EDT
From: Park517@aol.com
Subject: As Flies to Wanton Boys

"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