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.