Christos Tsiolkas - Merciless Gods

The only thing that saved him from being bored senseless over the interminable creep of the hour was the freedom he had to examine his fellow students. The margins of Ghassan’s notebook were filled with quick sketches of the faces and bodies of the young women and men who sat around him in the lecture theatre. For the most part, the sketches were of the young blonde girls with their shamelessly exposed breasts. Tits filled the margins of his notes. His friends would lean over to look at his sketches and then giggled conspiratorially. They’d take turns guessing which girl he had sketched. They’d surreptitiously point to a young woman and ask in Urdu, Is it that slut there? Ghassan would smile and never confirm or deny their queries.

For him, sketching those interchangeable European women was a smokescreen for his real purpose. If any of his friends had taken the time to really study his drawings, if they had properly paid attention to his work over the year, they would have noticed that two portraits kept reappearing. They would have also noticed that these portraits were never mere caricatures, unlike Ghassan’s sketches of the European women, which were always crude and often insulting, their expressions either those of imbeciles or showing a trace of animal cunning. But it was different with the two recurring portraits of the men. The first portrait was that of the elegant, lean and dignified Omar. Ghassan’s love for his best friend was pure, a love beyond the degrading treacheries of lust and desire. Omar was untouchable, incorruptible. In every sketch Ghassan drew of him, he was unsmiling and straight-backed. He floated in the white margins of Ghassan’s notebook, separate from the vulgar sketches around him. The other recurring portrait was that of the young European man with the broad sloping shoulders who always took that seat two rows in front of Ghassan and his friends. Whenever Ghassan sketched this portrait, he would drop his free hand to his crotch. He did not dare do more than feel the bulk of his cock through the cheap fabric of his trousers. His love for Omar was pure. The European he wanted to fuck.

And now it was happening. The man was on his stomach, his jeans around his ankles, naked and vulnerable. Ghassan was shocked by the amount of hair that covered the man’s plump arse. It was unexpected. Ghassan realised at that moment that in his masturbatory imaginings of Europeans he had really always dreamt of youth, of boys between childhood and manhood. These were the degenerate fantasies that fed his lust. He had assumed that a European man would be hairless, smooth, that to touch white skin would always mean touching feminine skin. As with the sexless lecturer who had bored him all year, he had never thought of virility being something that European men could possess.

He could hear the man’s slow heavy breathing. His face, now hidden from Ghassan’s view, pressed against the filthy black vinyl of the couch, was most likely tensed, grimacing, anticipating Ghassan’s first thrust. The man had tried to kiss him but Ghassan had quickly turned him over. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to kiss him — in fact, there was no act between men that Ghassan preferred to kissing. Sometimes after their final evening prayers, Omar would hold Ghassan, they would stroke each other’s hair, and they would kiss, as Omar specified, as brothers, as friends, as comrades. Skin never touched skin. Omar’s purity was such that his passions were never inflamed.

Only afterwards, alone on his own mattress, did Ghassan give himself over to the corruption of his imaginings. And now the sight of the man’s naked body was making him swoon with an intoxication that was humiliating. He had expected a boy and he had to confront a man. A man like himself but viewed in a false and diabolical mirror. The dark thistles of hair on the man’s chest, the masculine abundance of the belly, the thickness and solidity of the man’s cock, so much like his own except for the serpentine hood covering the head. Yes, he had swooned. He had wanted to fall to his knees and take the man into his mouth. Instead, unable to bear the unfamiliar beauty of the sight, he had savagely turned him around so he was facing away from him. The man had resisted for a moment, and Ghassan had thought that they would struggle, that they both could only legitimise their passion through violence. He had pushed harder on the back of the man’s head. The man resisted, then allowed his body to go limp. It was the moment of submission. Ghassan had loosened his grip and the man had tumbled forward, unresisting, onto the stained black vinyl couch. Ghassan unzipped.

They had not spoken a word to each other all year. Ghassan could not now recall when he had first become aware of the handsome European. He had no recollection of a defining moment, the way there was when he thought back to his first meeting with Omar. That memory was as distinct as the material world created by God that was always before his eyes. He and Saleem were waiting for the 5.15 train to Epping. Saleem had greeted a lonely figure waiting on the crowded platform with a small black bag between his feet. Omar’s greeting had been warm, his eyes piercing. Ghassan had fallen into those eyes and had swum in them ever since. He knew those eyes better, more profoundly, than he knew himself. They were shaped like almonds; they were the colour of the darkest, most luscious honey.

He had no idea of the colour of the European stranger’s eyes. Yet at some point this man had indeed begun to seep into his consciousness; he’d realised this when he was flicking back through his notebook and registered the recurring portrait. In lectures, Ghassan found himself searching for the man’s freckled pale neck, enjoying how the glare of the bright fluorescent lights in the lecture hall made the fine blond hairs glisten on the man’s arms. Dew on snow. He did fancy that there were moments when the man turned and searched for him. But in those moments, Ghassan would avert his gaze and focus instead on the glacial movements of the lecturer.

The European youth only existed within the lecture theatre. Ghassan never saw him around campus, never in the cafeteria or the libraries, never in other lectures or tutorials. He was only ever there on Tuesday mornings at ten o’clock, always sitting two rows ahead of Ghassan and his friends. His fair hair was always kept neat and cut short. His clothes were simple and unadorned, masculine, eschewing vanity. Ghassan desperately wanted to believe in the European’s moral rectitude. He could not imagine him drinking or being intoxicated, could not imagine him surrendering to vileness or perversion. Ghassan wanted with all his will to believe that the emotions stirred inside him by this stranger could also be divine in their essence, as pure and unsullied as his love for Omar. It was the European man’s unfamiliarity, the exotic pornographic danger of his skin, that was threatening. Omar represented all that was worth celebrating in a man — strength, dignity, keen intelligence and resolute faith. Was it possible that this stranger too could embody all these virtues? Was it possible that the young man was a mirror, one that reflected back to Ghassan an image of himself in white skin? Could the European truly be such a man, stripped of degeneracy, decadence, sloth, lust and greed? Maybe one day it could be possible. This was how much he had come to love the stranger.

‘Fuck me.’

The coarse, ugly English words. He had become detached from the savage animal act in which they were engaged. His cock was still erect, he was mechanically thrusting into the man, but his mind had been elsewhere, inside the warm, timeless cocoon of the lecture theatre. The obscene, brutal words brought him back to earth. Fuck me . He increased the speed of his thrusts as he became conscious of the electronic music that was piped through the cubicle, the groans, expletives and screams coming from the frantic couplings in the cubicles on either side of theirs, or from the porn playing on the monitors in the corridor outside. He could no longer block out sound, or sight; he resigned himself to looking at the blood-like stains of the semen marks on the bare walls. He was wrenched back to the body he was sodomising by its smell, a chemical, unnatural stench, but also earthy and nauseating. That smell of offal again.