Escape to Constantinople

To "help" the Greeks and Armenians leave, "someone" started fires in the Greek and Armenian quarters of Smyrna and started brutally herding women and young children and very old men to the inner harbor waterfront—and taking any male who could possibly take up arms out of the city, over the hill, and into mass graves.

When the fires started, Theo Maneates, a Greek, and Pyotr Apraksin, who quite easily could be mistaken for an Apollo-visaged Greek in the midst of chaos, were in Theo Maneates's residence above his offices and shop five blocks from the Smyrna inner harbor docks.

* * * *

Prior to these events, Pyotr found Smyrna in the early summer of 1922 even more inviting than he'd found Constantinople with its fast-paced life. He had always found it easy to pick up languages, having been in a household in St. Petersburg that spoke English and French fluently as well as Russian and where he'd even encountered German-speaking relatives on occasion. He'd studied both Latin and Greek in his childhood and exposure to Theo Maneates was honing his Greek and adding modern idioms to his vocabulary. He had also endeavored to pick up Turkish since he'd arrived in Constantinople, and here, in Smyrna, in the slower-paced environment, he was spending time in the back garden of Theo's townhouse improving his Turkish while watching the lithe, young Turkish gardener, Arief, bare-chested, sculpting a garden that had gone to the wild since Theo had last visited. As Arief worked, he and Pyotr bantered about in Turkish, with Pyotr's facility with the language improving daily. Theo was quite particular about having all of his properties kept trimmed, so Arief was working virtually full time during the day tending to the garden. Many of the evenings Arief was spending in Theo's bed on the third story of the small stone townhouse wedged in between other larger ones on a narrow street in the Greek quarter leading down to the Smyrna waterfront.

It was not that Theo was off Pyotr but, rather, that he liked variety and that the willowy, somewhat effeminate, dark Turk, Arief, was particularly arousing for a particular taste. Theo said that Arief, when swathed in veils and the candlelight of the night, reminded him of his wife when she was much younger and much less plump. Theo enjoyed fucking a young man dressed as a woman.

Pyotr also found Arief attractive—when he was working stripped down to his loin cloth in the garden—and Arief obviously was aroused by Pyotr, but Pyotr was not quite as much enticed with Theo's invitation to join the other two in the bedroom on the third floor. When Theo asked why this was so, wondering if it was the effeminate nature of Arief and the costumes of the night, Pyotr said that this wasn't the problem. He searched his brain for a reason even though he said he was unable to give Theo an explanation and decided that, indeed, he was not unaroused by the thought of fucking a transvestite. It was more that, when Pyotr observed the couplings, Arief played his role as an unwilling victim in these costume nights with Theo. It seemed to enhance Theo's ardor to play a game of taking Arief by force, with Arief playing the game because he was trying to please Theo. However, for some reason, this brought to Pyotr's mind how Mikhail had been passed around among the cadets in the academy barracks. Pyotr had had no particular trouble fucking Mikhail when the young man had begged for it—but he didn't find the group using Mikhail by right and without consultation arousing.

Pyotr assured Theo that he didn't find Arief unattracting, and it wasn't long before he proved that.

It was a sunny day in the back garden the afternoon that Pyotr fucked Arief. Much of the attraction of the small, dark-haired Turk was that he looked much like Pyotr recalled that Katya looked in the ways that attracted him so. Perhaps it was in the way he moved as he worked in the garden.

Pyotr was laying on his back, only in shorts, on a grassy patch beside a summer house hidden from view of the townhouse by tall bushes, and Arief, covered only by a loin cloth, was working on reweaving the vines of a rose bush on the trellising around the summer house. Arief was looking particularly provocative to Pyotr, whose shorts were tenting up and who was groaning inwardly at the effort not to give himself relief. As he worked Arief was drilling Pyotr on Turkish idioms.

Not being able to help himself and almost not realizing he had done so, Pyotr had moved a hand to his crotch and his voice, in responding to Arief's questions, had become thick and low. Arief stopped tugging at the vine and turned and looked at Pyotr.

"Why is it you stay away when old master invites you when I'm there in the night?" he asked. Pyotr could discern a bit of hurt in the young Turk's voice. He called Theo old master and Pyotr young master. "Do you not know I would wish you to be inside me too? Do you not know how I ache for you? Do you not find me attracting?"

"I find you particularly attracting, Arief. But I normally lay with Theo as you do with him. That is why I am here—why Theo keeps me with him." This, in fact, was part of the reason Pyotr had not joined in a threesome, but he didn't want to tell Arief the main reason. He didn't want to spoil Theo's arousal in the arrangement that both he and Arief appeared to accept as satisfactory.

"But you don't always go with a lover that way, do you?"

"No . . . not always." Pyotr was thinking of Mikhail, and despite himself, he was being aroused. He encased his hard cock through the material of his shorts—he could not help himself from doing so.

"Please, let me do that." The voice was barely a whisper, but it came from very near. Pyotr opened his eyes to find Arief kneeling beside him. Arief laid a hand on Pyotr's belly. "Please," he repeated, almost plaintively.

Pyotr didn't answer, but he removed his hand from his crotch, and placed his arm around the kneeling Arief. His hand went to the small of Arief's back, just above where the crevice started, and he sighed and stroked Arief there as Arief's hand glided under his waistband and pushed Pyotr's shorts down to his knees. As Arief's mouth opened and slid down Pyotr's shaft, Pyotr groaned, dug his heels into the grass, and raised his pelvis, groaning again as the sensual fingers of Arief's hand wove into Pyotr's ball sack, separating and pulling the young Russian's testicles apart and gently rolling them with his fingers. Pyotr knew now why Theo groaned for Arief in the dark of the night in that other bedroom in ways that he didn't for Pyotr when he was giving the Greek suck.

Arief too groaned as Pyotr moved his hand across Arief's exposed buttocks cheeks where the loin cloth did not cover them and found and entered the young Turk's passage with his finger, searching for and finding the young man's prostate.

"Take me into the summer house, please. Now," Arief moaned when he pulled off the cock that had been stroking up into his mouth cavity from the leverage Pyotr was using off the heels of his feet in the grass.

Arief was begging for it, just as Mikhail had done. This was different from the role playing Theo and Arief engaged in in the night. For this, Pyotr was in high arousal.

Arief was bent over the rail at the back of the summer house on his belly, as Pyotr covered him close from behind, nibbled on his ear, and fucked him slowly and deep. Pyotr was mumbling as he fucked. Arief, lost in a world he had dreamed about ever since Pyotr had arrived in Smyrna, didn't pay attention to what Pyotr was mumbling beyond the occasional catch of a phrase referring to beauty and softness. If he had been listening, he most likely would have been curious why Pyotr was repeating the name "Katya."

After that, sometimes Theo fucked Arief in the night, before Arief went off to his own home somewhere in the Turkish sector of the city, and Pyotr fucked him during the day in the back garden. And more than once Pyotr responded to Theo's invitation to join Arief and him in Theo's chamber and Theo would watch Pyotr fucking Arief while Arief was expertly sucking Theo hard, whereupon Theo would come behind Pyotr and fuck him from behind, while Pyotr was fucking Arief.

To his shame, Pyotr found that, increasingly, he was able to become lost in the world of taking an unwilling, female Arief with as much lust as Theo did.

Theo occasionally mentioned the possibility of Pyotr and him fucking Arief together—and Arief showed no reluctance to doing this. But the occasion never arrived. This arousing threesome, satisfactory to them all, was short lived.

For several days after the results of the battle at Eskishehir reached the ears of those in Smyrna and loud praises to Allah were being almost continuously sung from the minarets in the Turkish section, there was no apparent change in the city. The surreptitious departure in the night of most of the Greek government officials and the movement into the streets of the Turkish soldiers that had been encamped nearby went largely unnoted by the populace, although what didn't go unnoticed was the subtle failure of some of the Greek and Armenian shops and cafés to open on expected mornings when they should be opened.

Theo Maneates, largely a stranger to the city, didn't notice the subtle differences occurring. Wholly unaccustomed to the ways of Turkish, Greek, and Armenian balancing in life, Pyotr made no note of it either. If the two were curious why Arief simply did not appear for two days, they said nothing to each other, and both were so sexually exhausted from their most recent threesome that they each welcomed the respite. Theo might have noticed the paucity of business in his office downstairs and the absence of several of his Greek employees and nervous whisperings among the rest, but he was preoccupied with planning his near-term return to Constantinople.

Thus it was with some surprise that Pyotr ran across his former cadet friend, Mikhail Shevemetev, and his Turkish army captain sitting at a café table on the quay of the Smyrna waterfront. Pyotr knew that Mikhail and the Turk were somewhere about Smyrna, but the last Pyotr knew, the Turkish army was encamped outside the city and not permitted to enter it. Thus, he was surprised to see them.

Mikhail seemed even more surprised to see Pyotr here, because they had last met in Constantinople in circumstances that made Pyotr's presence in Smyrna highly unlikely. Still, it was Mikhail who saw and hailed Pyotr first. But Pyotr noted that his friend seemed somewhat disconcerted when Pyotr came over, greeting them, and asked if he could join them.

After a bit of "what brings you here?" chitchat in Turkish, Pyotr slowly started throwing in phrases in Russian until he'd been able to work up to a question in Russian that he wanted to ask Mikhail without Edom Yilmaz, the Turkish captain, understanding it. The Turk, other than looking hard at Pyotr from time to time, had had little to say, and Mikhail's reticence had not decreased. In fact, he increasingly looked like a scared rabbit. A wounded rabbit, as Pyotr could see some bruising on his small friend's face and at his neck.

"Is something wrong?" Pyotr asked in Russian, using a tone that would suggest that he wasn't saying anything serious. "You seemed scared—not completely happy to see me. While I can assure you that I'm very happy to see you again and to see that you are . . ." He almost said "all right," but he swallowed the end of that sentence, because Mikhail didn't really look all right. He was bruised and had lost weight. He looked gaunt.

"I had never expected to see you again," Mikhail whispered after a brief pause. "I'm sorry. I thought never to encounter you again."

"What is it?" Pyotr pressed.

"It's the captain," Mikhail said, obviously avoiding repeating the man's name. "He fancied you when he saw you in at the restaurant in Constantinople. He knew the waiters and waitresses were available. And he pressed me until I admitted that you and I had made love—and that you laid with the professor and let him have his way with you—that he took you rather than the other way around. The captain is only interested in taking."

"Yes, and?"

"He wants to fuck you too. He made me promise to arrange it if we ever met again."

They sat and looked into each other's eyes for a few moments. Pyotr could see the distress and fear—and genuine regret and concern—in Mikhail's eyes.

"Is it he who beat you?"

A pause and then, "Yes. It was not bad at first. Not when the Greeks had the upper hand here. But now that the Turks are taking over again, he has become more aggressive. And more cruel. I'm . . . I'm afraid that one day he will kill me. And there will be no one in authority here who cares if he does."

"Would it help you if I slept with him?"

Mikhail didn't answer at first. He just looked away, toward the gathering naval ships of the Allied nations on the horizon out to sea. But that, of course, was an answer to the question.

"Will it help?" Pyotr repeated.

"I can't ask you to do that. He is a cruel lover. He would bind you and use you roughly. I think he is obsessed with you. He has mentioned often that he wants to have you."

"I have known cruelty and rough taking," Pyotr answered in a low voice. He cleared his throat and turned his face toward the stony-aspected Turkish officer. "Mikhail tells me that you fancy me, Captain Yilmaz. Even before he said that, I was telling him what a handsome man you are, that I envied Mikhail, and that I wished I had someone handsome and virile like you to fuck me. And he told me that you are built like a stallion and might be interested. I know I am."

The captain inclined his head, gave a little grunt, and Pyotr could see a smile that was as much a sneer as a smile forming on his lips. He obviously was pleased by the flattery.

Mikhail broke in with a strangled voice. "But I don't think—"

"Mikhail tells me you like to fuck rough, a giving no quarter and taking-no-prisoners approach. I like that in a man," Pyotr said. "I want a man to show me he's a man. I want a man who will break me and use me to exhaustion. I think you might be that man. I think Turkish men dominate the best. I want to see you naked, to feel your teeth on my skin." Mikhail collapsed into his chair with a deep sigh of resignation, and Pyotr could see Yilmaz's eyes light up like a forest fire. A low growl was rising up from inside the Turkish soldier. Pyotr could see the man trembling, fighting hard to control himself from slamming Pyotr down on the café table top and having him right there.

How much worse could it be than it was with Nikolai, Pyotr wondered. He soon was to find out.

Pyotr was surprised to find out that Yilmaz had quarters right here in the city. He had assumed they would go to a hotel near the harbor—and that there would be a limited capability for bondage under such a situation. It wasn't until just now that Pyotr realized fully that the center of power in Smyrna had already changed. And as soon as they entered Yilmaz's bed chamber, Pyotr immediately understood the extent of the Turk's fetishes. Whips and chains were openly displayed on the chamber walls.

The bed was a four poster, with lengths of roping and leather restraints hanging off each post and from the center of the headboard. While Mikhail watched with concern from a chair nearby, Pyotr, naked, sat on the end of the bed, with Edom, naked, standing between his spread thighs, and Pyotr sucking his cock hard.

When the captain was ready, he roughly pulled Pyotr up to his feet, punched him in the mouth with a fist, which sent Pyotr flopping onto his back on the bed, stunned. Before Pyotr had come out of his haze from the surprise blow, Edom had tied his wrists together to the lead from the headboard over his head and was working on spreading and raising his legs and restraining them high on the posts at the foot of the bed.

He briefly used a whip on Pyotr until red welts had been raised on his chest, belly, and thighs. This made Yilmaz hard as a rock and his face contorted in a mask of lust and cruelty. Grabbing Pyotr's buttocks in a painful grip, the Turk raised the Russians pelvis to his throbbing cock, thrust deep inside him in one long slide, and fucked him hard to a prodigious, three-jerk ejaculation while he slapped Pyotr's face, chewed on his nipples, and beat him with fists on the torso and thighs. Pyotr gave him the mixed noises of hurting but still wanting Edom Yilmaz pounding inside him that he knew the Turk would find arousing.

When Pyotr was released, he surprised the captain by pushing him back on the surface of the bed, mounting the cock Pyotr had brought back to hard with his mouth, and riding him hard, throwing his head back and begging Yilmaz for the cock between gaggings from the rhythmic chocking Yilmaz was giving his neck.

When it was done and Yilmaz acknowledged it was the best sex—at least the best willing sex—he'd had in a long time and that he wanted to see Pyotr again, Pyotr took the initiative to say that he didn't think that Mikhail could withstand the taking that he could, and perhaps if Yilmaz was more gentle in fucking Mikhail, Pyotr would return to him as he wished.

The next night, Pyotr was awakened by the sound of angry voices in the floor below the bedrooms. He realized that it was light as day in the chamber as he rose from his bed, and then he could see through his window that the Greek quarter was on fire.

He was half way down the stairs when he was accosted by armed and angry Turks coming up toward him. They grabbed him with holds on his arms, legs, and nightshirt and dragged him down the stairs.

At the foot of the stairs, he recognized the sound of Arief, the gardener's voice, in high, panicked pitch.

"Not Greek, not Greek," he was crying out to the men manhandling Pyotr. "He is Russian. A Russian diplomat. Visiting Smyrna and looking to buy goods. We must not. We must not. A friend. A buyer."

As quick as he had been seized, Pyotr was released and left in Theo's living room. All alone. Theo was nowhere to be found in the house. Arief was gone as well.

There was no sense of being in safety, however. Flames were dancing beyond every window. Pyotr raced upstairs to throw on some clothes and then down two stories and out into a narrow street clogged with screaming people running in every direction and being accosted here and there by bands of Turkish thugs.

* * * *

Pyotr stumbled down the smoke-filled street, headed toward the harbor. It seemed that that was where Arief had screamed at him to go, before the young gardener was swept out of Theo's house with the bloodthirsty band of Turkish vigilantes. He wondered if Theo had already gone there, although even while he thought about it, he'd realized that this wasn't the case. He'd heard Theo's screams. That had been what had awakened him. And he saw the blood on the living room carpet as he was struggling with the Turkish hoodlums. There was too much blood there.

This couldn't be happening. But it was happening. And it was happening all around him. Out of the swirls of smoke, Pyotr saw tragedy all around him. He moved as if in a separate, surreal world. No one had accosted him—yet—but he wasn't so delusional that he had any faith he'd ever make it to the harbor alive. Here there was a middle-aged man, clutching a canvas bag to his chest, protecting it, even as he was surrounded by Turkish youths—not more than boys, really—beating him to a pulp with clubs. On the other side of the street, even as Pyotr cleared by the first tableau, there were other Turks, with knives, who had cornered an elderly woman. Pyotr saw the gleam of the golden rings on her hands as she threw them up to block the look of horror on her face—and then, as he stumbled past, he saw the flash of a knife and her disembodied hand hit the cobblestones, as the Turks crouched down to retrieve the gold rings. Further on, a family was struggling down the road, and Pyotr heard the scream of one of their young daughters being snatched and pulled into an alley. A man stopped in his tracks and turned to the alley, with the rest of the family scurrying ahead. He didn't reach the opening to the alley before he disappeared under a pile of bodies slashing at him with clubs and knives.