Larnaca, Cyprus
Friday evening, 16 July 1982
Nabil was panting in anticipation, bent over on his belly on the yard wide and deep pillow-top rattan ottoman. Strong hands pinning his upper arms to the ottoman, Nabil was facing out over the small balcony and onto the European-style Larnaca esplanade, featuring a wide swath of outdoor café tables running out from the building to a cedar tree-lined promenade avenue and then onto a semicircular sandy beach, an old harbor castle to the right and a marina to the left, down to the harbor and the Mediterranean sea. With very little effort, he could imagine he was looking out over the Beirut esplanade before the destruction of the civil war and Israeli siege.
He exclaimed an “Al-lanah!—Oh, Fuck!” and panted hard as Andreas, hunched over him from in back and on top, moved his hands to gripping Nabil’s waist to hold him captive while the big Greek Cypriot drilled the smaller Lebanese man’s hole, penetrated him with a thick cock, and worked his way in deep. Nabil writhed under the man in pain-pleasure as Andreas pinned him to the ottoman with his cock.
“Parte to! Pare me!—Take it! Take my shaft!” Andreas growled, as he encircled the chest of the tall and slim, dark and sultry Lebanese young man with one arm and buried the fingers of his other hand into Nabil’s black wavy hair and arched the young man up into his muscular, workman’s chest. As he arched Nabil’s torso back, he thrust up inside him, and Nabil gasped and yelped at the thickness and length of the older Greek sailor. As Andreas pulled back, he let Nabil dip forward, only to growl, “Xana!—Again,” and to thrust up as he pulled the slimmer, lighter young man’s buttocks up into his crotch. “Again,” rang out and then another “Again,” a third and sixth time, and with a cry, Nabil, who had been fisting and stroking himself, arced cum out over the edge of the ottoman, splashing on the glass door to the balcony. Andreas grunted, “Again,” and “Again” and then he too pulled quickly out of Nabil, jerked the condom off, and creamed the Lebanese young man’s buttocks with his cum.
“Aeto etheles—That’s what you want,” Andreas growled, as he stood up from the ottoman and walked over to a table and a half-full whiskey bottle. “That’s what you’ve been nosing around me to get.”
Nabil, sprawled out on the ottoman and panting heavily, couldn’t say Andreas was wrong.
Twenty minutes later, the two men, Nabil tall, slim, dark, handsome, a man of the city and the shops, and Andreas, muscular, solid, also dark haired, but blue-eyed, and rougher of demeanor, a man of the countryside and sea, stood side by side, in their briefs as they clearly could be seen by the bustling crowd at the cafés below, on the small balcony, watching the sun sink behind the fourteenth-century, squat stone fortress of Larnaca Castle at the western end of the seafront. They were smoking cigarettes and drinking Keo beer. Nabil took in this view of the Larnaca seafront whenever he could, as it had so much in common with the esplanade of Beirut, his own city.
“I should go upstairs,” Nabil murmured, making the statement sound more like a question, as if he were seeking a follow-up session from the sturdy Cypriot sailor.
“Όchi Akoma—Not yet,” Andreas commanded. His command was Nabil’s duty. What he commanded was Nabil’s weakness. Andreas took Nabil by the wrist and pulled him into the flat. They fucked on the ottoman again, but this time it was with Andreas sitting on the stool, with Nabil sitting in his lap, facing him, and rising and falling on the Cypriot Greek sailor’s cock, as Andreas encircled Nabil with his arms and worried the young man’s nipples with his tongue and teeth. They held there, panting lightly and Nabil arched back, arms dangling from his shoulders, when Andreas had come again. “That was a good one,” Andreas said at length.
“Yes,” Nabil answered.
“You are learning to ride to my rhythm.”
“Yes.”
“You will want to ride it again.” It wasn’t a question.
Nabil hesitated, but then he said, “Yes.”
“You will be here this weekend? You can get away? Either here or on my boat?” Andreas asked?
“I have to go to Beirut. I have to check on my family’s store,” Nabil said. “My father worries about it.”
“Ah. Be careful there. I sail off Sunday night. I have to pick up tourists in Rhodes and bring them back here. I will be back on Wednesday.” Andreas ran a tourist boat service out of the marina in the harbor.
“I will be here then.”
“Again, then.”
“Yes,” Nabil answered, giving a little smile and shiver, remembering Andreas crying out “Again” over and over as he fucked him the first time, Nabil’s eyes watering and his mouth yawning wide in a silent scream of passion and possession as the thick cock thrust up inside him. “But now I must go upstairs. Leyla will want me to greet the children before she puts them to bed and serves our dinner. We are eating early, as I must be off by 8:00.”
“Ah, yes, the beautiful Leyla. You will be there tonight, then,” Andreas said, “in Beirut—and you will come back to Cyprus tomorrow?”
“I won’t return until Sunday,” Nabil said, as he, reluctantly, pulled off the thick cock that had gone flaccid inside him and reached for the clothes strewn on the floor by the ottoman. “Just one night in Beirut is hardly worth the sail.”
“Or the risk,” Andreas said.
“It’s always worth the risk. Beirut is home. Beirut will be Beirut for as long as it has the spirit.”
* * * *
Leyla Alwaiti closed the copy of that week’s glossy society magazine, the Beirut Monday Morning, and put it aside on the counter as she heard her husband, Nabil, enter the flat.
“We’re in here,” she called out, trying her best to turn her look of concern to a welcoming smile. She had thought they were beyond all of that. Apparently not. And there had been the added shock. She felt numb as she heard Nabil rummage around in the living room. She struggled to put on a welcoming face.
“There you are,” she said cheerfully, as Nabil entered the kitchen. Their children, Jasmine, five, and Issa, three, were sitting at the table, finishing their dinner. The older girl and younger boy always ate at seven. Nabil and Leyla usually didn’t eat until 10:00, but Nabil wanted to be off by 8:00, so they would eat now, before the children were finished and Leyla put them to bed. They had to be on a tight schedule here in Larnaca, in what they hoped was only a temporary home. Their house in Beirut was so much larger, and they had servants there. It just wasn’t safe to be there in the summer of 1982, during the Israeli siege and bombardment, but the flat in Larnaca, where Nabil’s father had a jewelry store seemed so impermanent. Leyla felt like a refugee here. She’d never known a home other than Beirut before. Beirut offered it all; there was no reason to be anywhere else until hell had descended on the city. Nabil said she’d would no longer recognize the city now—that she may never want to go back there again now.
Leyla couldn’t imagine ever wanting to be anywhere other than the Lebanese capital.
At least there were other displaced Lebanese families on the southern Cypriot coast, including many in their own social set, to console each other. And at least Nabil got to go back and forth, watching out for his family business in Beirut.
Nabil came into the kitchen and saddled up close behind her, putting his hand on her full belly and kissing her in the hollow of her throat. It was about as demonstrative toward her that Nabil got, coming at odd times. He was kind to her, though, and she knew he was trying hard.
“Has the little one been kicking today?” he asked.
“No. It’s quiet. I wish you didn’t have to go this weekend,” she said. “I think it’s getting more dangerous in Beirut. I hear the night shellings have picked up.”
“There’s that tall bank of flats between our store and the Israeli positions to the west, across the water,” Nabil answered. “I think the store will be safe. This can’t go on very much longer.”
“It will go on as long as it goes on,” Leyla said, with a sigh. Nabil was too much of a dreamer—not enough of a realist, she thought. Luckily, both families were wealthy enough to weather this civil war topped by the Israeli invasion. It was also fortunate that they had enough financial interests here in Cyprus to sustain them. It had been an arranged marriage between two families of wealth and position in Lebanese, and, despite those other rumors that did concern Leyla—more now from what she’d seen in Monday Morning—the marriage had been a good one—better than she had expected. With a bit of guilt, Leyla thought that the troubles in Beirut had something to do with that. It had forced a change. Leyla’s life centered on children, and she had been given children. Another one would arrive early in the new year.
“What are we having for dinner?” Nabil asked, turning his attention to the stovetop.
“Baba ghanoush, kafta, and znoud el sit for dessert.”
“You spoil me, Leyla. I don’t think I deserve you.” He remembered then why it was imperative that he go tonight. They had left Beirut in such a rush that he hadn’t retrieved the present he’d had made for Leyla. There was a necklace in the store safe he’d had made of her favorite stones, sapphires, and was set in gold. His family were jewelers. He could think of no better way to express his appreciation for Leyla and what she had agreed to than to shower her with gems. He needed to go tonight to retrieve that necklace lest he never could go there again.
Right at this moment Leyla didn’t think he deserved her either, but now wasn’t the time to discuss it. It must be discussed, though, before he slipped back into his ways—and in the worst of all ways. It wasn’t something that they could take to their families—neither his nor hers.
“Perhaps we could eat on the balcony,” he continued. “I’ll like to watch the sunset. And then I must leave.”
Forty minutes later, having settled the children with coloring books, Leyla stood on the balcony of the flat, the offending Monday Morning in hand, and watched Nabil motor out of the marina below—into the sunset, toward their beloved, wounded Beirut.
* * * *
Beirut, Lebanon
Saturday morning, 1:00 a.m., 17 July 1982
Nabil made a fast trip across the Mediterranean from Larnaca to Beirut in his thirty-seven-foot speed cruiser, completing the calm-water trip in under five hours and arriving outside Beirut harbor slightly before 1:00 a.m. Although he had to remain aware of the needs of navigation as he skimmed the quiet waves, he couldn’t help but think upon his circumstance and the precarious double life he was leading, which was only complicated by the Lebanese civil war, a war more controlled by outside forces than by the generally life-loving Lebanese.
Did he really have to come to Beirut this weekend to check on the family jewelry and leather goods store? Did it really matter what happened to the store for now with all of Lebanon imploding? Hadn’t the more expensive goods been locked away, business being almost nonexistent in wartime conditions anyway? He did it for his father, who would surely die if anything happened to the store and who was “that close” to having a stroke anyway. But did he really do it for that? No, he did it mainly from guilt—from the need to retrieve that necklace for Leyla and assuage his uncontrolled cravings guilt toward her. He had a perfect life with Leyla and the children, and the family had transferred enough of the goods to the Larnaca store and had enough funds in reserve to lose everything they had in Lebanon and still manage—not with the luxury they had enjoyed before, of course, but they could build again.
If Beirut only survived this attempt to wipe it off the face of the earth and return to being a paradise on earth.
He would do just what was needed. He’d only go to the store and that was just to check it. That would satisfy his father. And he could go to retrieve the sapphire necklace for Leyla. He hoped that would please her. Then, he’d return to Larnaca. He’d be on the sea all night, but he could be back in Larnaca before the children woke. What a surprise that would be for them. He wouldn’t even go to the Cedars Nightclub. And he wouldn’t stop at the harbormasters to meet with the Syrian commander there to obtain safe passage to the store on the Route du Liban. It wasn’t that far from the port. He could manage that on his own. Meeting with the major would only make him sink deeper into the temptation he wanted to escape.
He resolved himself on that intent to honor his family, to change his life entirely, as he anchored off the harbor. The thought of his family brought a concern to his mind about his dinner with this family that evening. Something was concerning about that—something he’d seen or heard, or maybe only sensed?—but he couldn’t think what it could be, finally deciding that it was just the feeling of guilt of having been in a flat downstairs with the Greek Cypriot, Andreas Tsialis, just before he had come upstairs.
He was so weak. Here he was thinking of having chosen the family life when he’d gone in a different direction as recently as that that evening. He was too weak, and he couldn’t get enough of it.
But he would just look in at the store tonight and retrieve Leyla’s necklace; he wouldn’t go to the nightclub. Despite this mental struggle and resolve, he went below; stripped off the sea-water-soaked clothes he’d been wearing; pulled on the tight jeans, black mesh muscle shirt, and sockless open-toed sandals he liked to party in; lowered the dingy; and, as quietly as possible, with the motor on its lowest speed, turned the prow toward the harbor pier. As he motored in, he watched the night sky. The near-nightly shelling by the sieging Israelis of the uneasy occupation of the city by both the Lebanese and Syrian armies and also by the Palestinian Liberation Army fighters, each dancing around the other as the Israelis trapped them in the city, had already begun. The sky was intermittently lit up by the exploding shells, bringing daylight to the harbor area.
Nabil didn’t have a chance of not being detected by the Syrian army harbor patrol, the Syrians having taken control of the waterfront. The harbor patrol saw him in the light from the bursting of the shells before he hit the pier and were moving toward him. As he resigned himself to having been seen, Nabil’s thoughts went to the commander of the Syrian harbor guard. With his new resolve to get into the city quickly, check the store, and be out again quickly crumbling, he felt the old desires flowing into him. Well, it wasn’t his choice now. This was just the procedure already set up for him to navigate Beirut safely at night.
“Major Idris said you would come tonight,” said the soldier who helped Nabil climb up to the stone pier as another soldier tied up the dingy. “Taal mai—Come with me.”
The Syrian major was sitting at a desk in the customs house when Nabil was brought in. He was a burley, heavyset, hirsute man in his forties. “Kent amel an tati al-lilah—I was hoping you would come tonight,” he said, swiveling his chair around, as Nabil was brought in. “I have the itch and need to relieve the tension. The Israelis are active tonight. They seem to want us out of the city. Strip off those clothes.” And, when Nabil had and stood naked before the Syrian officer, Idris sucked in his breath and said, “You have a beautiful body. Perfect, like Lebanon itself, and as desirable to be subjugated and possessed. I love violating that perfection. You will want an escort to the Cedars club afterward?” He slouched forward in his chair, and unzipped his trousers.
“Just to the Route du Liban tonight, and only for a short time. Perhaps your soldier can wait for me and bring me back.”
“Perhaps . . . if you please me.”
Nabil went down on his knees between the Syrian major’s thighs, pulled the man’s fat erection out of his fly, and pleased him with his mouth. When Major Idris wanted him more fully, he pulled Nabil up and laid him down on his back on the desktop, positioned himself between Nabil’s spread and raised thighs, penetrated him, and fucked him slowly and methodically, neither man speaking, to his ejaculation.
The man didn’t arouse Nabil deeply, but he was a man and he had a cock that could achieve and maintain an erection. He was thick, but not long. He wheezed and grunted as he worked hard to plow the young man, and he didn’t last long—not long enough to make Nabil come. But this was just a means to a desired end for Nabil, and having any man’s cock inside him was better than none. The major was not less tolerable than Nabil’s English professor—the man who had initiated him—had been at Al Jamaa, the American University of Beirut, and who Nabil had let fuck him for good grades. Little had Nabil known what path of desire that was to take him on.
Nabil lay there, his head turned to the window, watching the nightly fireworks over the city, thanks to the Israelis, and tried to pretend that he didn’t enjoy having a man’s cock moving inside him, even if the man was old, ugly, and fat. But the truth he was tortured trying to escape was that he did. The man had a cock and he could get it erect. Idris lasted long enough for Nabil’s concentration to focus on the shaft inside him and for Nabil to dig the heels of his feet into the edge of the desk, raise his tail to improve the angle of penetration, and to move his hips to the rhythm of the fuck. Major Idris laughed, knowing that the young Lebanese was now a full partner in the copulation.
The Syrian officer had won out through the wanton desire of the Lebanese youth just as Syria was in the process of overwhelming and fucking hedonist Lebanon—the Syrian man and nation each having its way in ruining the beauty of Lebanese sensuality.
It was enough for Nabil that the man had desired him, had wanted to possess him. Nabil had been raised in a position of underachievement behind an older, athletic brother his parents had adored. The best attribute Nabil had been accorded was that he was “pretty.” He had merely embraced that. All a man needed to debase Nabil was to pay homage to his beauty.
Unfortunately for Nabil’s resolve, the Cedars Nightclub, an edgy gay dance bar in what had been the subbasement wine cellar of a mansion on the Route El Arz, was located between the port and his intended goal, the family jewelry and leather goods store on Route du Liban. Nibal and his escort of two Syrian soldiers slipped along in the darker shadows of the streets leading from the port. The Syrians were in ascendance in this sector, but they never knew when the Lebanese army or the PLO fighters would choose to encroach. There always, as well, was the threat of the Israelis picking any given time to make a ground assault on the city center. They continually probed the edges anyway.
His escort probably would avoid a firefight with other Syrian patrols or even with roaming Lebanese arm and PLO units, but Nabil was a Lebanese civilian and should not be on the streets at night. They could take him from his escort and, if they found what he was useful for, what Nabil had sought and been sought for, as Beirut decomposed, he could have quite a night in their “care”—very probably a terminal experience in the “use, abuse, and discard” atmosphere in the war-torn city.
Nabil hadn’t known a night in Beirut to be this bad before. His beloved city, once known as the Paris of Middle East, with what had once featured wide, tree-lined avenues; classic European architecture; a world-class seaside esplanade; and unparalleled nightlife, was descending into a bleak hell of devastation. In spite of it all, the city maintained resilience. It was losing the battle of being a beautiful and serene European-flavor city in the Middle East, but it was refusing to give up its nightlife—the spirit of pleasure in which it had long dwelled.
While the Israelis tightened their siege and bombarded the city, the armies of three entities, uncomfortable with each other, were trapped inside and roamed the city, feeding on the captive populace. Brief tense interactions between the separate-power patrols were inevitable. Nabil and the two Syrian soldiers escorting him came across no other patrols, though. And as they approached what had been a lovely stone mansion, now a pile of rocks with an entrance at the side into the underground, on the Route El Arz, Nabil saw Samir Garfeh moving down the alley beside the collapse building over the Cedars Nightclub.
“Antzaroa ya ragal—Hold up men,” Nabil said. “I have changed my mind. I will need you to take me no further. And you need not wait for me.”
The soldiers needed no more permission to leave him than that, although one of them gave him a sneer and popped his tongue in his cheek, as if he would like to spend some time with Nabil. Nabil, a handsome young man of the erotic and hedonist Levantine, had now established himself in this nearly lawless city as someone who would give men so inclined what they, in their desperation and need, wanted. The soldier could have dragged Nabil into an alley and taken what he wanted—Beirut by night was ruled by the strongest of the moment—and the soldiers of the occupying Syrian army were not shy about taking their pleasures as they were able, but he obviously had been warned off of the major’s personal property, and he melted into the night in the wake of the other soldier.
The truth of the matter was that, despite himself and having returned to the city with its devil-may-care sense of dangers and tensions, Nabil would not have resisted. The soldier would not have had to drag Nabil into an alley. Every nerve in Nabil’s body was tingling with danger and need and desire. The Syrian was big, strong, and ugly in a thuggish primitive arousing and attracting way. Nabil would have gone into the alley with him willingly. He would have hooked his knees on the soldier’s hips as he was pressed up against the wall, taken the thick shaft inside him, and ridden it with pleasure. He even would have moaned with pleasure if the soldier had been rough with him, slapped him a around a bit, and taken him hard. Nabil wanted the pleasure, but he wanted to assuage that with being punished for wanting it.
Hating himself, but not being able to help himself, Nabil followed Samir Garfeh into the club. It was a surprise to find the other young man here. When they had met here the previous weekend, Samir, who had joined the PLO as a fighter, said he was in a unit that would try to break out of the city and get to the PLO stronghold at Baalbek, in the Eastern Mountains, that week. Nabil had worried all week that he might never see the man again. With Samir, it had been a matter or living each moment to its fullest as possibly being the last. Being a PLO fighter in Beirut at this time was being on the last gasp of the endangered species list.
He had told himself repeatedly in the water crossing that he was coming to please his father—to check on the family business. And beyond that he told himself it was to retrieve the necklace to please Leyla. But immediately upon seeing Samir Garfeh at the entrance to the Cedars Nightclub, he knew he’d coming for the chance to see Samir and to writhe under Samir again.
* * * *
“I didn’t know if you would come tonight. Conditions here are getting worse.”
Nabil caught up with Samir on the landing from the bombed-out mansion’s English basement down into the subbasement from which the sounds of a rock band and boisterous conversation were coming. The two men stood between a hell above and a heaven below as they embraced and kissed.
“I thought you would have been gone from Beirut by now,” Nabil responded. “I almost didn’t come.” He neglected to say whether he meant Beirut or the nightclub by that statement. He was coming to Beirut this night anyway—he had just struggled with himself about not coming to the nightclub—to steal himself and ultimately choose family and normalcy, as much as being a refugee from his city of birth could be—over the pleasures of the flesh. He had been equally afraid of coming to the nightclub and finding that Samir wasn’t here.
“The possibilities of breaking through the Israeli’s lines have deteriorated. I’m told we slip through tomorrow and head for Baalbek and the mountains, or we take a final stand here. Did you know that the Israelis have expanded their artillery? They’ve brought it around to the south now as well as the west.”
“I thought it was expanding—and becoming more intense,” Nabil said. “Will we ever survive this? Will our story have a happy ending?”
“Are you speaking of the civil war and Israeli invasion, of you and me—or of Leyla and you?” Samir asked, looking pointedly at Nabil. When Nabil didn’t answer immediately, though, Samir, a handsome devil, as all Lebanese men tended to be, and more muscular and masculine than Nabil was, pulled the slightly younger man into his embrace again and kissed him passionately.
When they came out of the kiss, Nabil murmured. “Don’t make me choose, Samir. Not tonight, at least. Let us have tonight. One night in Beirut before you go to the mountains and I go back to the sea.” He could not bear to admit that he had chosen earlier and his being here now had belied that choice. His indecision and fickleness would be the death of him, he feared. He felt so much as Beirut of this night—so much turmoil at the surface, with the desire to dance and party wantonly at the base, with no safety in either element.
“No need to answer that tonight. But some day,” Samir whispered. “Someday soon. We can’t go on like this. It’s not fair to Leyla—or to either of us. But come, I heard the music. The music and the party await us below. Beirut is still alive in the night.”
They descended into another world, the world of Beirut before the civil war and the Israeli, Syrian, and PLO invasions—before the world descended on the Paris of the Middle East to try, so far unsuccessfully, to strip it totally and forever of its “everything goes” party spirit. So far it had succeeded in doing this in the light of day—not yet in the underground of the night.
They drank and they danced, embracing close during the slow dances, and fondled and kissed, oblivious to everyone else around them, everyone, like they were doing, squeezing every once of pleasure out of Beirut at night that they could while hell rained down on them from above. This was a gay bar, although it was open to all who wanted to party and to live hedonistically on the edge of chaos. Men were dancing with woman; women were dancing with women; men were dancing with men; those lost and alone danced by themselves, in a trance of protecting false glee. And they were all decked out in eveningwear as they would have done in London or Paris or New York nightclubs. Their houses may be bombed out above their heads, but they all had closets of party clothes still tucked away somewhere to help them cling to the remnants of the life they’d once enjoyed and to stave off the reality of the present hell.
A light flashed in Nabil’s face and he drew back from Samir and said, “What was that?”
“Monday Morning,” Samir answered, with a laugh. “Cameras. They found us last weekend and have returned to the party.” The Beirut Monday Morning was the glossy society photo magazine that the unrepentant resistance Beirut of yesterday put out every Monday morning to report the nightclub parties of the previous weekend. It was Beirut’s clarion call to the world: You have not brought us to our knees yet.
“Monday Morning is covering this club?” Nabil asked, shocked that the paper had dipped this far into the defiant decadence of Beirut at night.
“Yes, didn’t you see the coverage from last week. We’re stars, you and I. Didn’t you see us? Here, let me show you.” Samir pulled Nabil over to a table near the dance floor where copies of the glossy magazine were stacked for anyone who wanted to see them. Samir was the only one of the two families who rebelled at the separation from Nabil and circumstance in which it was done. He didn’t openly defy the families in declaring himself and being linked with Nabil, but he didn’t really give a shit if the truth came out in some other way. Samir lived in the today; he had no faith in tomorrow.
Nabil’s heart sank as he looked at the cover page and he now knew what had suddenly concerned him earlier in the evening when he’d returned to his family’s flat in Larnaca. Yes, he’d known Monday Morning had been at the Cedars Nightclub the previous weekend and had taken photos. He’d just put it out of his mind. But when he’d entered the flat, he’d seen Leyla had that week’s edition and had quickly hidden it—it seemed that had been her gesture—on the kitchen counter when he entered the room. The cause and effect just hadn’t clicked in with him.
She’d seen a photo of him dancing with Samir.
Samir opened the magazine to show a near-full page photo of the two of them—Nabil and Sami—in an embrace and dancing. It was worse than Nabil thought. The two men were doing more than just dancing. Their hands were in forbidden territory. Their relationship was clearly revealed to the camera.
“Al-haraa!—Shit!” he exclaimed although the exclamation went unheard by Samir in the noisy room.
“Let’s party like there’s no tomorrow,” Samir called out, bringing his face down to Nabil’s so that the younger man could hear him. “As they say, ‘Drink, dance, and be merry, for tomorrow—’”
“No, don’t say it,” Nabil exclaimed, moving his fingers to Samir’s lips to cut him off. That having succeeded, he exchanged his fingers for his lips and they kissed greedily and Samir groped Nabil’s crotch as the flash of a camera went off very near to them.
After that they danced and drank and otherwise cavorted with abandon.
It was 2:30 a.m., with the crowd beginning to thin out to start the treacherous journey back through the rubble of the city to wherever they had chosen to hide themselves by day, that Nabil sobered up enough to say, “I have to leave. I have to check the family store and then start the sail back to Cyprus.”
“You’re not staying until Sunday?” Samir asked.
“You are leaving the city with your unit of fighters in the morning, aren’t you?”
“We’re going to try—try or die—yes,” Samir said.
“Then there is nothing left for me here in the city,” Nabil answered. The unavoidable realization hit him again like a jolt of the blue. He didn’t come to Beirut at night like this to check on the store. He didn’t do it to please his father. He didn’t come for baubles for his wife to assuage his guilt. He did it to couple with Samir. It wasn’t Beirut that was tempting him back into the jaws of chaos and danger; it was Samir. If Samir wasn’t here . . .
“So, you won’t be coming back again?” Samir queried.
“To Beirut? Not until it is free and vibrant—not just at night in the underground, but during the day, as well. No, I don’t think so. And not until you are here again.”
“So, you have decided—if I make it back to Beirut?”
“Don’t ask me that now,” Nabil said. “I can’t say yet. The world is in too much turmoil—at least our corner of the world is.”
“Let me walk you to your store.”
Nabil didn’t demur. He was too tired, weary—and still too conflicted despite the revelations bombarding him—to say no. He knew what Samir really was asking.
* * * *
It was less than a quarter of a mile to the jewelry and leather goods shop on Route du Liban, but Nabil felt safer in Samir’s care now than he had been with the two Syrian soldiers who had brought him to the club from the port. Samir took the dominant role when they were together and he had the physique and sense of command, not to mention the confidence and arrogance, that went with a PLO fighter. He also had an Uzi machine gun, which Nabil was sure the man knew how to use.
Still, as they worked their way into the town, crouching whenever they heard the scream of a shell, now coming from the south as well as the west, they kept to the shadows as much as possible. Once they heard the boots of men assertively striking the pavement and they faded into an alley—but not before they were detected.
“Min jedhab elly hanak? Tarf ali nevski!—Who goes there? Identify yourself!” a gruff, no-nonsense voice rang out.
Samir, who had raised the Uzi to ready, relaxed, recognizing the voice. “Eneh ana Samir Garfeh. Fakt akhth nazha lile.—It is I, Samir Garfeh. Just taking my nightly stroll,” Samir called out. “I’ve just been to see your sister, Emil.”
“And I’m just coming from your mother’s house,” Emil answered.
Samir joined in the laughter that met their responses. This was far into the Syrian territory for a PLO patrol to penetrate, but this was the best of the possibilities for Samir and Nabil. “What are you doing in this area?” Samir asked.
“Do you hear the gunfire?” the PLO fighter asked. “The Israelis are making a foray into the city. We are backing up our Lebanese brothers to drive the Jews back. Who is that you have with you? I see another in the shadows.”
“Never you mind my business,” Samir answered. “If the Israelis are making a move, are we still on for the breakout tomorrow?”
“Yes, Allah preserve us, we’re still on,” the soldier answered, his voice more grave now, and then he and those with him melted back into the darkness.
When Samir came back into the alley, Nabil prepared to leave, but Samir didn’t let him. He embraced Nabil, kissed him, and pressed him up against the wall, fumbling with Nabil’s belt buckle while he kissed him.
“No, Samir. Not here. We are almost to the shop. It’s too dangerous here.”
“It’s too dangerous anywhere in Beirut tonight,” Samir growled. “Yes, here, who knows what might befall us the next step we take out onto the street?” As if to punctuate that, a shell exploded nearby, imploding a beautifully designed small villa across the street in the next block.
That the beauty of Beirut—of life—was being cruelly obliterated was not lost on Nabil.
“That had to come in from the west, over the water,” Nabil exclaimed. “Then, yes, Hurry. Be good to me,” he whispered, as he pushed his trousers and briefs to the ground and reached in between them, unzipping Samir and pulling out his erect cock. They each handed the cock of the other and stroked each other hard as they kissed.
“I’m always good to you,” Samir said, with a low laugh, coming out of a passionate, consuming kiss. He gathered Nabil’s legs up, hooking the young man’s knees on his hips. Nabil, panting, gave no resistance.
“No, don’t be good to me, Samir,” Nabil exclaimed in almost a sob as another shell landed nearby. “Be cruel to me. Make me feel it. Punish me.”
“Khed delk. Khed gudeibi—Take it. Take my cock,” Samir growled.
Nabil encircled Samir’s neck with his arms and arched his head back in pain and passion, gasping and muttering, “Nim, Nim. Al-lanah ali.—Yes, yes. Fuck me,” grimacing as Samir, positioning the bulb of his shaft, worked to breach Nabil’s sphincter in an impromptu dry fuck. Nabil cried out as, once establishing his bulb inside the entrance, Samir thrust cruelly up into his passage. As he sank up inside Nabil and set up a steady rhythm of the thrusts, the young man nuzzled his face into the hollow of Samir’s throat, and murmured, “Nim. Nim. Ana melkek.—Yes, yes. I am yours. Take what you want. Take it all. Leave nothing for tomorrow.”
“Anna semat delik.—I heard that,” Samir growled as he got into the rhythm of the thrusts and Nabil started to move his hips, meeting the rhythm. Becoming more insistent and primeval, more cruel and demanding, Samir gripped Nabil by the throat with one fist, slamming the young man’s head against the stone wall, while the other hand went between them, grasping Nabil’s balls, lacing his fingers through them, distending them, and squeezing them as he slammed his long, thick cock up, deep inside, Nabil’s passage in a furious, most-intense-ever fuck. Nabil’s eyes watered and he was trembling and sobbing. But still he cried out “Nim! Nim!—Yes! Yes! Take it! Take it all! Punish me!” as Samir fully possessed and brutally fucked him against the wall.
After reaching the safety of the shop on Route Du Liban without incident and Nabil had retrieved Leyla’s necklace from the bank safe in the basement, they fucked on a tiger-skin rug on the floor between counters behind the cash register. The shop was still stocked, but not with the most expensive goods. They had been locked away in store’s safe for several months. Foreign tourist hadn’t shown up in the slowly dying city for a year and the locals didn’t have their minds on buying jewelry or leather purses during the siege. They still partied at night, but they did so with the luxuries they already had and were hoarding.
Nabil steadied himself on all fours as Samir crouched over him, mounted him, thrust up into him, and fucked him in the doggy position. There was a desperation in their coupling. Before he had come, but not before Nabil had, Samir turned Nabil on his back, grabbed him by the ankles, raised and spread the young man’s legs, knelt between his thighs, thrust inside him, and fucked him in a missionary. When Samir let loose of Nabil’s legs, the young man placed his feet flat on the ground and raised his hips to an angle where Samir was slamming up inside him in long strokes, reaching deeper than he ever had been before. Nabil dug his fingernails into Samir’s biceps and counterthrust against Samir’s assault with the rocking of his hips. At the point of ejaculation, an explosion hit very near them, and they embraced closely, both panting hard and their hearts racing in unison.
“Where was—?” Samir blurted out.
“The bank of flats behind the store, to the west. Not a threat to us. It blocks us from the trajectory of the Israeli guns.” Nabil explained.
“We’re all going to hell. This is the night of the total destruction.” Samir exclaimed.
“If so, fuck me through it,” Nabil cried out.
“So, you are mine?”
“Yes, I am yours.”
“You will be in Beirut when I return?”
“We will be in Beirut together. Fuck me.” Nabil pushed Samir onto his back, his head resting on the back of the tiger’s head, just where Nabil’s head had just been. Nabil straddled Samir’s hips, slowly descended on the thick, hard cock, and arched back, grabbing Samir’s ankles with his fists. Nabil fucked himself on Samir’s cock, rising and falling, churning, up down updown, picking up speed, taking Samir deep, crying out his passion.
The shell came down in the back corner of the room, blowing the windows out, throwing debris in every direction.
As Nabil had been told more than once, Israel had moved some of its artillery around to be able to shell the city from the south as well as the west.
* * * *
Larnaca, Cyprus
Saturday, 3:30 a.m., 17 July 1982
Leyla Alwaiti turned onto her side, switched on the lamp on her nightstand, and picked up the copy of this week’s Beirut Monday Morning glossy magazine she’d placed there. She had carried it around all evening, not wanting to let it out of her sight, while, simultaneously, not wanting it to exist at all.
The magazine was open to the photograph—to the photograph. It had been a double whammy when she’d first seen it that afternoon. It wasn’t just that Nabil had been dancing in one of the underground Beirut nightclubs the previous weekend. It wasn’t even that it obviously was a gay dance bar. The captions going with the photos made that clear. She’d heard of the Cedars Nightclub. She knew what sort of nightclub it was. And she wasn’t all that surprised that Nabil had been there. They had been working on that. That had been what had underlain the Alwaiti family’s rush to get Nabil married six years previously. She knew how hard he’d been working to make the marriage last. As far as she was concerned, it was lasting—even with a glitch here and there. Even with him going to the Cedars Nightclub to relieve the tension and danger of having to go in and out of wartime Beirut to please his father. No one could convince the old man how chaotic the situation in Beirut was.
But for his photo—dancing close to another man in a known homosexual club—in the premier society magazine of Beirut? This would be hard to push underground, along with the rest of the Beirut nightlife that flourished—in a “devil may care; tomorrow we die” atmosphere—in war-torn Beirut.
That wasn’t the worst of it, though. It was the man he was dancing with. Samir. Her own older brother, Samir Garfeh. Handsome, cocky, and rich, from a prominent Beirut family, he was known to all who read Monday Morning. Everyone in Lebanese society knew Leyla was Nabil’s wife and Samir’s sister.
There had been inklings of the two, of course, but nothing out in the open like this. The patriarchs of the two families had gotten together and had agreed to explain how often Samir and Nabil were seen together by saying Nabil was courting Leyla, Samir’s sister. After that, it was easier to push that to a marriage and a geographic separation of the two young men.
What was Samir doing in Beirut, Leyla mused. He was supposed to be in Amman, Jordan, safely with the rest of her family, which had evacuated south when the Israelis began shelling Beirut, while the Alwaiti family evacuated to Cyprus, where they already had residences and a business.
Samir was in Beirut? There were rumblings of his involvement with the PLO, but surely the family wouldn’t have let him go to—and be trapped in—Beirut with a PLO connection. That was a death sentence—and not only from the Israelis. The family hadn’t told her he had left Jordan. But perhaps the PLO wouldn’t let them tell anyone.
This photo. So many blows to her—and to the families and to her children—how many blows could she take with her whole world crumbling around her?
A muscular, hirsute arm raised over her naked chest from behind her in the bed and pulled her into an equally muscular and hirsute chest. He was naked too, and hard against the small of her back.
“What is wrong, little one?” Andreas Tsialis, the sailor from downstairs, asked. “You keep looking at the magazine and sighing. What is worrying you?”
“Nothing. Just family problems. The fighting in Beirut is ruining everything. Beirut is dying. The world as we have known it is dying.”
“Cyprus is not dying, though,” Andreas rejoined. “Cyprus is vibrant—robust, big, hard.”
He wasn’t really talking about Cyprus.
“Yes, I understand,” Leyla said. He was driving her mad. He had one arm under her, his hands playing with her full breasts—squeezing them and rubbing and teasing the nipples. He paid attention to her in ways that Nabil never didn’t—never seemed passionate enough about her to do. Andreas was a sexual animal. He worked her body before entering her. He gave pleasure as well as taking it. And there was nothing tentative or withheld in his fucking.
He’d once told her he’d fuck anything that moved. She believed him, although she didn’t take it as a compliment. He was so alive and robust, though, that she couldn’t deny him anything, even when he wanted to take her in primitive ways. He was all smiles and muscles, a big-cocked man. His other hand had been palming her belly, but it moved down, his fingers rubbing and spreading the folds—entering her and plunging deep.
He played with her there, holding her in close embrace, while she writhed and he finger fucked her. “Andreas, Andreas,” she murmured, as he worked her, relentlessly taking her to and beyond a climax. They rested, Andreas nibbling at her throat, his fingers never stopping, building again. Nabil never did this, never took her to and beyond multiple climaxes.
“Andreas, please,” she whispered.
“Please what?” he asked with a low laugh.
“You know what,” she said, wriggling her buttocks, lifting them, putting herself in position for him, feeling his thick, strong cock pressing between her thighs, already moving, in and out, in and out.
“You mean I am like Cyprus?” he asked. “Vibrant, robust, big, strong, hard.”
“Yes, all of that,” she moaned. “Fuck me, Andreas. Not just with your fingers.”
“You know what I like best.”
“Yes, yes. Do it.”
He moved his hand back to palm her belly. “Whose baby is this, Leyla?”
“You’ve asked me before. I said it could be either of you.”
“Just the two?”
“Yes,” she responded indignantly and with a bit of fire. “What do you take me for, a whore?”
“Yes, I take you as a whore, and that’s why you let me in your bed. It’s because your husband doesn’t take you like a whore. Whose baby is this inside you?”
“I don’t know. But it can only be you or my husband.” But it wasn’t true that she didn’t know. She knew whose baby it was. She remembered exactly when it had been planted, who had seeded her, how easily it had been planted—how it would have been planted the next day if not that night—by the same man—the man with the insatiable cock meeting her deep need. She knew how hard it was for Nabil to get it up for her, although he did try, and he had succeeded at least twice. No, three times. He actually could think this baby was his. When she was sure she was pregnant with Andreas’s baby, she had made sure Nabil lay with her totally to believe it could be his.
“If it’s mine, you could come to me,” Andreas whispered in her ear. “You know that, don’t you? You have enchanted me. I will be happy to take the other little ones too. You can leave Nabil and come to me.”
Did he dare tell her what he knew Nabil clearly preferred? Did she know it? She never disparaged her husband in front of him. She betrayed him, yes. She opened her legs to Andreas and took him inside her—willingly, wantonly. So, she betrayed her husband. But she did not disparage Nabil in speaking with Andreas—even though she had every reason to take on another man—a real man. Would he have to tell her how he knew what Nabil preferred? Could she take that? With Greek Cypriots like him, sex was sex was sex, and men like him couldn’t get enough of it. He would couple with anyone who aroused him—anyone with a beautiful body. Could Lebanese understand that?
Andreas had not stolen Leyla from Nabil. Nabil had not secured his own. Leyla had fallen into Andreas’s lap like luscious, ripe fruit. She had grasped and drawn him inside her that first time. He made sure that it was her choice.
“It’s more complicated than that. It’s a family affair. No more questions now, Andreas. Be good to me.”
“And I’ll ask you again and again whose baby this is,” he declared as he adjusted her and himself, positioning himself at her bung hole rather than her cunt, where he would take her as her pregnancy unfolded—not because she wanted it that way but because that’s where he preferred, if he could, take it from women and men alike.
“Oh, Andreas. Oh, Andreas! Nim! Nim!—Yes, yes,” she called out as he suddenly pulled her belly back, pulling her anal entrance to his bulb, and penetrated her, moving up the channel, spreading and stretching her. He continued to work her breasts with one hand and moved his other hand down from her belly to her folds, entering her with two fingers and pressing her clit with his thumb. His fingers were long and thick. They fucked her as deeply as Nabil did there, while his hard cock probed her other channel.
Bringing her hips into the rhythm of the fuck, Leyla grabbed up a pillow and pressed it to her face, taking the pillow casing into her mouth, trying her best not to cry out again, with her children just across the wall—a thin wall, not like the thick stone walls of the family villa outside Beirut, which Leyla had no idea whether it still stood. She moaned deeply as the thick cock lodged itself deep in her anal passage and began to move—in and out, in and out—and his thick fingers stretched and rubbed and moved inside her other channel, his thumb worrying her clit mercilessly.
Family. She had a family—scattered and shattered. It was comforting, though to imagine that, as her Beirut world collapsed, there may be another family, another place for her—pleasure for her than Nabil obviously never could give her.
She bucked and moaned and exploded and flowed for Andreas as he continued taking her out of the cruel present and into the heavens.
* * * *
Beirut, Lebanon
Saturday, 3:30 a.m., 17 July 1982
“Samir! Samir!” Nabil cried out, not being able to see for the smoke and dust the shell had raised. “Are you OK?” Nabil himself seemed whole other than a few bruises and scratches caused by flying debris, although he felt woozy from a bump on his head. A hole had opened up in the corner of the roof, and Nabil could see the sky alight with shooting stars. The barrage had become even more intense, the worst night yet, Nabil was sure. Was it being used to cover a wholesale invasion by the Israelis? He called out to Samir again. The blast had thrown him back against one of the counters.
But Samir didn’t answer, and Samir wasn’t OK? As the smoke cleared, Nabil looked down to see Samir staring at him with unblinking eyes, a look of surprise on his face. A shard of glass from the counter display unit was sticking out of his neck. The blood was still flowing, but it wasn’t doing Samir any good.
Before Nabil, in shock and both his mind and his ears buzzing, could do anything else, the gas oil drums in the back room of the store, there to provide winter heat to the store, exploded and flames shot up from the rear of the shop. Nabil only managed to stand, pull on his trousers and sandals, and make it out of the shattered glass front of the store before the building was fully engulfed in flames.
He stumbled out into the street, where hell had arrived. Buildings up and down both sides of the street were alight, bring wartime destruction and daylight into central Beirut’s night. Lurching south on Route du Liban, he turned south on Avenue Charles Malek, seeing an area clear of fire in that direction. As far as he could see down that road, he saw a young woman, moving crouched over and erratically, as he was. They were the only civilians he could see on the street. He was vaguely aware of a few bands of armed soldiers moving on the street. He had no idea who any of them represented—the Lebanese or Syrian armies, the PLO, or even the invading Israelis—and it hardly mattered.
In his addled mental state Nabil got into his mind that the woman was Leyla, his wife. His hand fingered her necklace in his pocket. He was overcome with the need to give her the necklace, to tell her in some way how much he loved her for the sacrifice she had made, how much he appreciated her loyalty, and how sorry he was that he could not give Samir up.
He moved, like a zombie, up the street to try to get to her and help her—to comfort her and seek her forgiveness. He wasn’t anywhere close to her, though, when she was accosted by a band of soldiers and dragged, screaming and kicking, into an alley.
He paused, looking around and seeing only flames and crumbling buildings. Then he renewed the effort to get to Layla, to help her. But then he was surrounded by his own band of soldiers, grabbing him, lifting him off the street, dragging him into another alley.
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