Although this story can stand alone, it is also a continuation of the first one I posted, "Divine Neglect," (/nifty/gay/adult-youth/divine-neglect) recently revised and posted in gay/beginnings under the title, "As Flies to Wanton Boys." It may help, but it is not necessary to read one or the other version. I welcome comments.
[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 holder.]
Doctor of the Heart Chapter Three
Back at my house Tommy was awake and in unusually good spirits. "Heather called," he announced. "Did you know she was doing something backstage at Shakespeare in the Park?" I shook my head. "Well, she is and she's holding prime blanket space for us and some others tonight. I said we'd come."
"Who are the others?" I asked warily. Heather has a wide range of friends, heavy on skinheads and dykes in overalls. I didn't want Mitya to be appalled and repelled.
"Don't worry, Yves. Not the usual suspects, at least not many of them. And she said Leonard had promised to come. Mitya, you like Shakespeare I hope?"
He nodded. "Ah-ha," I crowed. "The plot thins. Mitya, the main attraction is not the Bard. It's a beard, worn by a certain Leonard Reifel, a pretentious and not very successful scriptwriter who does look like a Norse god. I'll give him that. Tommy wants to run his fingers through Leonard's beard - for starters. And then across his manly chest and into... into his keyboard. Tommy's in love."
"I am not. He's not pretentious. He's ... he's thoughtful and lively. I'd like to talk to him about Fritz Lang."
"Right. And Fay Wray and Victor Mature and Myra Breckinridge. You are just so transparent, Tommy, it's cute."
"You are a pain." He turned to Mitya. "We have time for some chess. Would you like to play?"
"I promised to the twins to let them show me roller-blading. Is that the right word? But we can to do that tomorrow. I will telephone them, and chess would be very pleasant. Thank you. By the way, what is the play tonight?"
Tommy looked shame-faced. "I was afraid you'd ask that. Either Heather didn't say or I wasn't paying attention. I don't know, but they usually do the standards. No Titus Andronicus or King John, just sound, reliable, Canadian-style Shakespeare with sound, reliable, Canadian actors. You won't be offended."
He was wrong there, but as I sketched the two of them in blind concentration over the chessboard and then assembled a picnic for us, I was looking forward to the evening. Heather is fun, sometimes outrageous but a really warm, thoughtful friend. And an alfresco evening of good theater, I thought, was as likely as any other ordinary activity to undo the knots in Mitya's soul. From his behavior with the Salvation Army's blue jeans, it was obvious that something recent and terrible had happened to him, that he could not exorcise it and that living with it was taking a terrible toll. I wanted him to love me and to make love to me, but until his demon could be driven out, he was a prisoner of other emotions. And I hadn't a clue about how to set him free.
"The play's the thing..." Of course, that's Hamlet, and it turned out that we were to see King Lear, abridged, thank God. But Shakespeare got to Mitya in ways I had not anticipated. Not that he or most others in the audience laughed knowingly, as our little group did, when the Fool declaimed: "He's mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse's health, a boy's love or a whore's oath." That sally came near the end of Act Three, but it was a few scenes and a few minutes later that Mitya actually cried out in pain and stumbled to his feet and off into the darkness.
"What happened?" I asked Tommy in a whisper.
"No idea. Whatever it was, it came right after Gloucester's lament. You know, 'As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.'"
"Not all that original a thought," I mused. "I think I should go after him."
"No, you shouldn't. He has beautiful manners. Even if he's in agony, he won't dump us without explaining. Leave him alone."
Tommy was right, but I couldn't pay attention to the rest of play or accept Heather's proposal that we all go dancing after it. Tommy was sulking, too. Leonard had come with a toothsome poet prodigy, Matt Something-or-Other, and was all over him like a hot sauce. I didn't care. All I wanted was to find Mitya, to have him explain and to shield him from more pain. As Tommy predicted, he was waiting for us at the car. He apologized but more with his gestures than words. His eyes were rimmed with red, and his posture, as he curled into the back seat, was eloquent with misery.
"You'd like to go home, wouldn't you?" I asked unnecessarily.
"Please. I am sorry."
"Not to worry." We drove in dreary silence, and once we were inside my house, Mitya tried to thank us for taking him to the play and said he would go straight to bed.
I took a deep breath. "No you won't." Now or never. I put my arms around his waist. "Mitya, I did not tell you the truth when we had Peter Rabbit's tea this morning. I have, as you said, fallen into love with you. Fallen very far. And I cannot bear to see you suffer like this. Please tell me and Tommy - he loves you, too - what has happened that is so awful. Maybe we can help."
"Nobody can be help." He bent his head and put his lips on my forehead for an instant. "You are a wonderful person, Yves, but you must not to love me. I am a murderer. Not a thief, but a murderer."
"I don't believe that." I stepped back.
"It is the truth. In Kosovo only a few months ago, I saved a boy's life. An Albanian boy. Everyone else in his family had been killed. He was alone. He was frightened. I protected him. I loved him." His voice cracked, and tears started in his eyes. "He loved me. For less than two days were we together. It was of magic. And then I sent him to his death. I did not pull the trigger myself, but I might as well have done that."
Now his whole body was shaking with sobs. "And all because of King Lear. Until tonight I had not remembered, but that is how it started. 'As flies to wanton boys..." He slumped to the floor, wailing.
I knelt next to him and tried to put my arms around him, but he shook me off. I looked up at Tommy. "Brandy," I whispered. "And coffee, please." Tommy headed over into the kitchen and I stayed on my knees, waiting for Mitya to leave his nightmare memories and return to me and Montreal. Sitting with his back to the long bench, he had drawn his knees up to his chest and pressed his head down onto his raised legs. I got behind him on the bench and tried to knead the muscles in his neck, but they were so taut I couldn't make headway.
Tommy came back with brandy, squatted and, by pushing the glass into the space below Mitya's legs, succeeded in getting his attention. He raised his head, took the glass, swallowed the liquor in a single gulp and tried to smile. He reached a hand behind his head to take one of mine and put his other hand out to Tommy. "Why do you suppose I only cry in front of Canadians?" he asked, trying to grin. "And only in front of gay Canadians at that? There must to be simple explanation."
"There is," I said, trying to be light. "Our own lives are gray and dull and even and reliable, and we need drama so badly that we are like vampires, sucking real life out of innocent foreigners."
Tommy acted impressed. "Yves, you have more imagination than I thought. No, Mitya, that's not it. I think the real reason is that your story is so wrenching, such a terrible wound in your heart, that you can't expose it to people you know and love. Only to strangers, like us. Please, though, if you can, tell us about the boy and how you saved his life and how the two of you fell in love. Then maybe you can tell us, too, how it ended. And we can help you decide if you were at all responsible for... for his dying."
"It is a long story," Mitya bowed his head again. "Even though we had so little time." He choked on a sob again. "Tommy, could I to have another brandy, please? I think I must to be drunk to do this. I was drunk the only other time I told anybody. His name was Herb, a war crimes detective I worked with. He is the one who arranged for me to come to McGill. He wanted to sleep with me, and he was nice, but I could not do it. Maybe I am only drawn to boys. I do not know. I did not plan on falling in love with a boy in Kosovo."
"What was his name?" I asked. "How old was he?"
"Rifat," Mitya swallowed hard. "His name was Rifat Ilo, and he was almost to be 18. Oh, God!" He bent his head again and pounded the floor with his fists. "That bastard sergeant who wanted to shoot him as a terrorist was right. When Rifat told us that he had a birthday in July, Voinovich said he should not count on reaching it. It was such a vicious thing to say. I nearly hit him. But he was right."
I got up from the bench and, standing in front of Mitya, I grabbed his hands and pulled. "Stand up, Mitya, please. Come over to the couch and sit with us there. We'll all have brandy. We'll drink to love and to grief and to you and to Rifat. Please. If he was such a special person for you, Tommy and I would like to know him, too. So that we can know you. So that perhaps we can help."
"Yves, Mitya's right." Coming back with more brandy, Tommy chimed in. "Nobody can really help. Still, I think it's true that for most of us the only way to tolerate a terrible loss is to share it." He put the glass on the bench and crouched down next to Mitya. "Please, Mitya," he said, "let us share this with you. You seem very strong, but nobody is so strong that he should refuse friendship."
"All right." The concession was a groan. With very little help from me, Mitya pulled himself up. "I only hope that we will still to be friends when I have told you what happened." He knocked back the second brandy and went to the sink to splash water on his tear-streaked face. Tommy went to the stove to make coffee, and I moved to the big couch, the one really comfortable piece of furniture that I own. Mitya came and sat down by me and slowly collected himself. The coffee helped. But as he told Tommy and me about falling in love with Rifat and losing him, he cried several more times and downed several more brandies and poured out a grief that was deeper and darker than any sorrow I had even imagined.
It was a beautiful story, sometimes even funny. Rifat loved to joke. Once he claimed to have discovered that one of Mitya's soldiers had a third testicle "for feast days." Another time he said he was a prisoner of war being violated by the "Geneva Convention," his lover's sex organ. Ultimately, though, the story was dreadful. It ended in a killing, a death for which Mitya stubbornly blamed himself. "It is because I pretended to know how life should be lived whether there is a god or gods or nothingness," Mitya lamented. "And he was so young. I filled his head with nonsense, and it killed him. That is how I am a murderer."
His fatal, unforgivable mistake, he said, was to try to comfort Rifat with philosophy when the boy, in tears, said he had lost faith in Islam. Having seen his family massacred, he had come to believe, like Shakespeare's Gloucester, that the gods "kill us for their sport." In hindsight, Mitya felt he should have simply taken Rifat in his arms and held him tight and hoped that the evidence of human love would make up for the absence of a loving deity.
"Instead I showed off to him with my philo..., my thinking that a kind of god had created human life but had become not so much interested in us afterwards. And I made it to be worse by saying that we should act as though, maybe by an accident, the god could be watching someday and with some noble action we might catch his eye," Mitya moaned in agonized recollection. "This is what I believe, but I should never have said it."
"Why not?" Tommy asked, coolly but also with concern. "It's as good an explanation as any and better than a lot of conventional religious piety. It gives you an ethical foundation and, I imagine, some hope that by doing the right thing, you can make a difference. Rifat needed something to hold on to. You gave him that. At least, that's how it sounds to me."
"But he was just a little boy, Tommy, a little boy. His world had been collapsed. He loved me because I seemed to him like an adult. He would have eaten up any nonsense I fed him, and what I fed him was of a poison."
"I obviously don't know the whole story, so I don't understand," Tommy answered. "But I don't think your philosophy is poison. It is a very fair balance of the rational and the romantic. From what little I've read about Islam and what I know about Western religions with their crazy insistence that suffering is the path to salvation, I think that Njegosism is a lot more attractive."
"Do you think ideas are worth dying for?"
"In extreme situations, maybe." Tommy sat up very straight the way he does when he wants to focus all his mental energy on something important. "If you have to choose between dying or renouncing something you deeply believe, like your personal faith or honour, I can see why you might decide that death was better. Personally, I'd probably be like Galileo and pretend to deny my work, but I can see where fanatics like the early Christian martyrs or Joan of Arc or the Iranian Shi'ites would think that duty to God required them to die."
"Presumably, though, that would be a decision of some kind of reason, not an impulse without the thought."
"Probably. Impulses make heroes, and a lot of them die. Heroically. But the ones we know about most often do something heroic out of love or loyalty, like a soldier trying to rescue a wounded friend."
"Tommy's father was a hero," I put in.
"Hush, Yves. Mitya's not interested in that."
"Yes, I am. Please, tell me."
Tommy slumped back into the couch, silent. If he wouldn't tell the story, I would. "It happened 12 years ago in the winter." I said. "There was a fire in a house across the street from Tommy's, and his father saw it. He was coming home late from work."
"And from the pub," Tommy interjected.
"He banged on the door and woke up the family," I went on, "and everybody got out except for an old lady who lived behind the kitchen where the fire had started. Tommy's father went in after her because the firemen hadn't come. And the smoke must have gotten to him. He didn't come back out."
"No," Tommy said bitterly. "He didn't. He died a hero. Trying to rescue a stranger when his family needed him, too."
Mitya put an arm around Tommy's waist and pulled him close. "How old were you?"
"Almost 11."
"Do you think you will ever forgive him for leaving you?"
"And my mother. And the child she miscarried a week later."
"He was a good man, Tommy," I said. "And a very brave one. You would do the same thing in his place."
"I wouldn't have been in his place. My father was trying to prove that he was brave. To make his father proud, even though his father treated him like dirt because he ran away to Canada so he wouldn't have to fight in Vietnam. My father should have been proud that he didn't kill, but he was ashamed and so he ran into a burning house and never came out again. No, Mitya, I don't think I will forgive him."
"That is up to you, of course," Mitya said sadly. He released Tommy and tried to smile. "You know, it is a strangeness. My father did not want me to serve in Kosovo. He said I should run away and hide. But I did not accept his thoughts. I knew that he had already lost his position as dekan of the university because of politics and I was afraid that if I refused to put on the uniform, he would be punished even more. He loves to teach. He is a very fine history teacher. Everybody says so. Rifat wanted to learn history, and I hoped he would study with my father." Mitya choked up. "I miss him very much."
Tommy put his hand on Mitya's knee. "Me, too," he said, and he had trouble speaking. "I miss my father, too. Even if I can't forgive him for being a hero."
I had never heard Tommy admit how much he still felt the loss of his father. I leaned across Mitya and took Tommy's head in my hands and gave him a quick kiss. "You're so strong, my always love," I said. "He would have been proud of you and the way you've taken care of your mother."
"And you." Tommy hates to show emotion, so he jokes. "You've been the real burden, and now you've got us talking about fathers when I want to hear about Rifat. Mitya, did he really give his life for your ideas?"
"I was not there, but yes, that is the way it seems. I should have been with him, but I was not." Tears had welled up again in his eyes. "I only know what a woman told me who was on the bus with him and with my corporal, Mirko, the one who maybe had three balls."
After less than 48 hours together, Mitya said he and Rifat had been forced apart by the end of the war. Mitya had been assigned to work with the NATO forces and was refused permission to take the boy with him. "That is when I should have deserted," he said. He sobbed miserably and struggled to go on with the story. Instead of disobeying orders, he arranged that Mirko would travel with the boy to Montenegro, to see him safely into the care of Mitya's parents. At their parting, Mitya gave Rifat a letter to his mother and father as well as a cross on a gold chain to wear as a good luck charm. He also gave the corporal his pistol, "just in case."
Just before it reached Montenegro, the bus was boarded by armed men wearing Kosovo Liberation Army insignia. They demanded that Rifat's companion and two other uniformed Yugoslav soldiers leave with them. Rifat tried to protect Mirko. The KLA commander saw the cross at the boy's neck, called him a traitor, spat on him and pushed him to the floor. Rifat got up, grabbed the pistol from a bag where it had been hidden and raced out of the bus yelling at the guerillas to stop. "He said that a god could be watching them," Mitya wailed. "A god. The god I gave him." The Albanian commander turned, saw Rifat's pistol and fired. Rifat fell and lay still. The terrified bus driver stepped on the gas and sped away.
"So you see," Mitya's tears were now a flood. "You see, I am responsible. I should have stayed with Rifat and protected him myself. I was responsible for him. I loved him. I had no higher duty. But see what I did. I gave Rifat the cross that my mother had given me to keep me safe. I gave Mirko my pistol. And most of all I made the boy's mind rotten with my stupid idea about god and the meaning of life. It was all my fault. I killed him. I loved him," he wailed, "and I murdered him."
I was stunned, in tears and speechless. Thank God for Tommy. He grabbed Mitya's hands and squeezed them hard. "You're not making sense, friend," he said. "You're in agony, and you can't possibly make sense. And Yves and I are in agony with you." I nodded and wiped the back of my wrist across my face.
"Rifat must have been wonderful," Tommy's voice quavered but then gathered strength. "You were so lucky to have loved him and to have had him love you. But your time together was so short and so intense that it was magic. That is what you said. And magic can't be analyzed or pulled apart to find the fault that broke the spell. You have to embrace magic and let yourself be amazed by it and... and, I don't know, maybe glory in it.
"Mitya, you had a fabulous experience with Rifat. But it was an accident. It wouldn't have happened at all if he had been killed along with his family or if the Serbs had never killed his family or if your soldiers had shot him or if you had come back too late to save him from being executed. That's four 'ifs' that you couldn't control anymore than you could have kept the guerrillas from stopping that particular bus. You said that Rifat had a nightmare about failing to protect his father and brother and sister. When he ran out to try to protect your corporal, don't you think he could have been trying to overcome his own sense of guilt? Like my father, in a way? A kind of hero?"
Mitya didn't answer right away. He just stared at Tommy and then sat up and embraced him. Then he kissed him, on the cheeks, not the forehead. "You are so kind, Tommy," he said, "and so smart, and I am so much drunken that I do not have the strength to argue with you, especially because I know you are right. At one level, you are right. But when you have a magic love and it ends and you are alone, then you blame yourself. And I do. Maybe it is not so much reasonable, but still it is real."
He stopped and bent forward, bracing his hands on his knees. "Please," he said, "do not to be disgusted with me because I am drunken and full of ugly self-disliking. If I can stand up, I will go to bed now. I will be better when I wake up." He lurched up and sat down heavily again. Tommy and I stood and put our hands under his arms and helped him to his feet.
"I can walk," Mitya smiled. "Thank you. Or I can crawl upstairs, but I will be all right. Golden dreams. That is what we say in my family instead of to say good night." He wobbled to the stairs. "It is what I said to Rifat the last time we slept together."
I could see his body shake with the sobs I could not hear, but as I started toward him, Tommy held me back. "No, Yves, no," he said intently as Mitya stumbled up and out of sight. "He has gone through enough for now. He knows how you feel. You mustn't try to take the load of his memories off him any faster than he can set it down."
"But, Tommy, we have to help him." I was crying freely. "He is so sad and so alone. I can't bear for people I love to be sad. You know that."
"I do, but this is one of those times when there isn't anything right to do. At least, we got him to tell us the story. It isn't locked up inside any more eating him away. Next, we have to get him to look at what happened realistically. To accept it somehow and to find some new reason to live. That's really Mitya's problem, don't you think? He thinks he should have died instead of Rifat."
"You don't think he's suicidal?"
"No, but he sees no deep reason to go on living. He doesn't love anyone and he thinks he should never love anyone again. That he's not worthy. I guess that's your challenge, Yves."
"I don't have the faintest idea what I should do," I said. "Now that I know what he's been through, I may be even more drawn to him than before. But I'm not sure that love is strong enough to help him. Tommy, I've never really lost anyone or anything that matters to me. I'm so spoiled..."
"Or lucky."
"Or lucky. Mostly, my life is wonderful. How can Mitya relate to that? To me? Tommy, what am I going to do?"
"Right now, you're going to drive me home. It's late, even for me. Then you're going to come back here and be the talented, devastating, cheerful Yves Sinclair I've known all my life. Be yourself. See what happens. Trust your instincts. Mitya needs love, and you have it on offer. That's a pretty good formula."
"Tommy," I hesitated. "I don't want to be alone tonight. Would you...? I mean could you stay here with me? We don't have to go to bed. We could play backgammon or listen to music. I have a new Penderecki I don't think you've heard. It's just, I can't get the picture of Rifat dead on the ground out of my mind. And it makes me so sad. Please, Tommy, let me be a burden to you for one more night."
He sat down on the couch and pulled me down beside him. "You're not a burden," he said. "I was being funny. And mean. I'm sorry. Yves, you're my best friend and if you need me, I'll always come running. Or stay. Tonight or any night."
I hugged him. Hard. And he hugged me and he ran his fingers through my hair and grinned at me. "You're my bright angel, cheri," he said, "and I would love to hear the Penderecki, but not now. I'm tired. I really want to sleep. It's been a long time since we shared a bed, but we used to sleep well together." He paused. Then he leaned in and kissed me behind the ear, our old, secret place. "Yves," he said, "I'm glad you asked me. I don't really want to be alone either."
End of Chapter Three