But nothing connected — it was only a feint. Still, I hit my jaw on the bed’s iron rim.
When I opened my eyes, the tall one grinned and said: “Ha-ha!“— then shook one finger, in a slow warning. Still holding my wrist with one hand, he moved to the right, grabbed my leg just above the knee, and yanked it aside.
The one on top got himself in, then. Holding both my shoulders, he pushed, mumbling in Greek.
The tall one moved back to take my free wrist again and squatted there, his face very close. He kind of smiled, curious. His breath smelled like Sen-sen. Or chewing gum. He had very black hair (his white cap was still on), hazel eyes, and tawny skin. (By his knee, the other’s cap had fallen on the rug.) Cajolingly, he began to say, now in Greek, now in English: “You like…! You like…! Su aresi…! Good boy…! Su aresi…! You like…!”
I grunted. “I don’t like! It hurts, you asshole…!”
This pharmacologist, who’d first fucked me, told me that if I pushed out as if I were taking a shit, it wouldn’t sting.
But not this time.
The one on me bit my shouder and, panting, came. The one kneeling glanced up at him, then sighed too, let go, stood, and grunted down at me, as if to say, “See, it wasn’t that bad…?”
The one behind got off the bed and stood, pushing himself back into his uniform. Once he said to me, in English: “Good! See? You like!” like the tall one had. He picked up his cap from the floor — and (he’d missed two buttons on his lap) pulled it carefully over his head, then pushed one side back up to get the right angle.
I sucked my teeth at him and tried to look disgusted. Frankly, though, I was scared to death.
In Greek the squat one said: You want him now? I’ll hold him for you —
The tall one said: You jerk-off! Let’s just get out of here!
The squat one bent down again, picked up my jeans, and began to finger through the pockets.
Then the tall one drew back his hand with the same feint he’d used on me: Come on! Forget that, jerk-off! Let’s get out of here, I told you!
The squat one threw my jeans back down, and they went through the kitchen hanging. There was a back door, but I don’t remember if I heard it or not.
I lay on the bed a minute, without moving, propped up on one elbow. Then I reached back between my buttocks. When I looked at my fingers, there were little pads of blood on two fingertips. I got up and went to the stall toilet in the corner —
Urine covered the stone floor. On DeLys’s blue rug, it had darkened an area three times the size of someone’s head. John must have sent one of them in to use the toilet while I was still sleeping — before the first guy woke me.
I reached inside, holding the jamb with one hand, and got some paper from the almost empty roll. Still standing, I wiped myself, but with a blotting motion. It hurt too much to rub. When I looked at the yellow paper, there was a red smear, with some drops running from it, and slime on one side. My rectum stung like hell.
I felt like I had to take a crap in the worst way; but the other thing the pharmacologist had said was to wait at least half an hour before you did that.
When I went back to the bed, I saw the light in the kitchen had been turned out. As I sat down, gingerly, on the edge, on one cheek more than the other, from the dark behind the hanging, John asked: “Are you all right in there?” He sounded plaintive. For a moment I wondered if he was tied up or something.
I called back: “I think so.” Then: “Yeah, I’m okay.”
A moment later: “Did they take anything from you?”
I pulled my jeans back across the floor toward the bed with my foot. Then I looked at the bookshelf. Between fat volumes by Mann and Michener was a much read Dell paperback of Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, a quarto hardcover of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visitors, a chapbook of poems by Joyce Johnson, and Heidi’s copy of L’Ecume de jour, which every few hours I’d taken out to struggle through another paragraph of Vian’s playful French.
“No,” I said. “My wallet’s safe.”
At the very end were the paperbacks of my own few novels — and the typewritten sheaf of my wife’s poems, sticking up between two of them. Wherever I stayed, I’d always put them on a shelf so I could see them, to make me feel better. They were the books I’d stuck my wallet behind.
“Good,” John said. Twenty seconds later, he said: “I don’t think they’ll come back.” And, a few seconds on: “Goodnight.”
After a minute, I got up again, went to the kitchen door, and switched off the lamp. I didn’t look behind the hanging. (The big light, still out, you had to stand in the middle of the room to reach up and turn on.) But John wasn’t asking for help. So I went back and lay down.
I tried to think of all the reasons I hadn’t called out. They might have beat me up, or hurt me more than they had. What would neighbors — or the police — have thought, coming in and finding me like that? Or thought of John? I might have gotten DeLys in trouble with Costas, from whom she rented the house. Or I might have gotten Costas in trouble with the police: he was a nice guy — a Greek law student at Harvard, home for spring break, who probably wasn’t supposed to be renting his house out to foreigners anyway. But, lying there, I couldn’t really be sure if any of those thoughts had been in my mind while it had been happening.
Again, I pushed out like I was trying to shit.
The stinging was just as painful. Then a muscle in back of my left thigh cramped sharply enough to make me cry out.
III
Oh, man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he thinks; and when inspiration is gone, he stands, like a worthless son whom his father has driven out of the house, and stares at the miserable pense that pity has given him for the road.
At five-thirty, since neither of us was asleep, John got up to make coffee. The sun came sideways through the shutters. Birds chirped. John kept touching a bruise on his cheek with three fingers pressed together. “Now they were not nice boys at all!” In his light blue robe with the navy piping, he shook out yellow papers of grounds, of sugar, into the long-handled pot on the Petrogaz ring. “Why I brought home two, I’ll never know! You’d think I hadn’t done this before. But when I first met them, they were both so sweet.” He turned on the water in the gray stone sink. “One of them hit me.” He turned it off again. From the shelf he took down a jar of marmalade, examined the green and gold label, shook his head, then put it back. Again he touched his cheek. “Scared me to death! Once he hit me, though, I decided I’d just let the two of them do anything they wanted.” He fingered his bruise again. “He took money from me, too,” he said, confidingly. “I don’t like it when a boy takes money from me. I don’t mind giving a boy a few drachma, a few lira, especially if he’s in the army — or the navy. Nobody could be expected to live off what they pay you there. That’s why the entire Greek army hustles.” He touched the bruise again. “You know, you really didn’t have to clean the piss up off the toilet floor this morning.” The near corner of the bed with its ivory crocheted cover, the ancient refrigerator with the circular cooling unit on top, and the blue table with the three blue chairs with flowers decaled on their backs made a kind of crowded triangle on the red tile. “I would have done it myself if you’d left it. That was just rudeness. Believe me, they weren’t that drunk! You know?” Moving about on bony feet, he pulled out first one chair, then the other. “I really thought, because you were colored, they weren’t going to bother you and isn’t that — ” he went on, as though it were the same sentence — “the dumbest thing I could possibly have said this morning! But that’s what I thought. Come, sit down now. And have some coffee.”