Stremnitza by Aris Roussinos

(Like The Tumescent Golem of Prague and The Secret Museum, Stremnitza was originally written for a now-defunct literary porn magazine called Tea With Bernard. Please do not read it as an insight into my psyche...)

STREMNITZA

In the village of Stremnitza, somewhere between the Danube and the Sea of Crete, and some time between Carlowitz and San Stefano, the headscarved women in their black shawls trudged like crows through the sleety mud to the coffee house, where the men were huddled on divans around the stove, smoking and panicking. The pasha was coming. The outriders of his caravan had been seen the day before, in the valley below, winding their way along the pebbled bed of the Stremna, back to the citadel after his year-long stay in The City. The road passed through Stremnitza; the village agha had already called in his serfs' wives to clean his house, to sweep the goose shit from the courtyard and break the ice on the fountain. Sheep were slaughtered in the square, their legs flailing in the mud, and sweet cakes baked in the dim stone houses. As everyone knew, the pasha had a voracious appetite.

The pasha was older, and fatter, than anyone in Stremnitza. When he was a young man, it was said, he had been a great spahi, sitting upright and slender on his war horse with his jewelled sabre gripped firm in his hand. He had fought the Russians in the Danubian provinces, taken bandits' heads in the high passes and put down countless uprisings nearer to home. He had watched villages burn and seen the women taken off in chains to the market, still wailing for their husbands and their children spread like crumpled blankets in the snow. But his fighting days were long past, and none were alive to remember them. Bald, grotesquely fat, the pasha was carried to his citadel and back on a palanquin, reclining on cushions and wrapped in fur and silk. He always kept his blind eye open, cloudy like a white opal, while he dozed with his good eye shut. But when the caravan passed through the Christian villages, his good eye would open with a wet click, bulging like an egg from a hen, as he scanned the muddy streets for a souvenir.
In Marko's coffee house, warm and hazy with wood and tobacco smoke, the men huddled, drinking and making empty threats against the pasha. Whenever he passed through Stremnitza, the villagers were made to line up in their finery and prostrate themselves in the summer dust or winter snow as his gilded palanquin slowly wobbled past. The villagers would stare at their feet as he scanned their ranks- an insolent look would have them whipped- and the comeliest of the village maidens would be beckoned forth and examined by the pasha's firm hand as would an uncut diamond by a city Jew. One would be chosen- and as the other girls were dismissed back to their parents, their small feet scuttling fearfully beneath their skirts, by his offhand languid wave, she would be instructed to wash herself carefully; to wear her finest dress; and to appear at his quarters in the agha's house that night.
The small room smelt sour with raki and slivovitz and fear, and the reek of damp wool drying. Men whose daughters were all married observed the scene smugly, glad that their time to fear was past. Petro the cobbler, though troubled at other times by his daughter's unweddable ugliness, stood another round and grinned. "Brothers," he said, "you needn't all panic, surely? The pasha, devil that he is, is a man of taste and refinement. He will not take all our daughters to his bed, will he? Think: he is not a mere glutton. When the agha prepares the pasha's feast, does he slaughter all his sheep? No- he selects the finest ewe, with the fattest haunches. And it is the same with our daughters, we know this. Every time it is the same. Now, my Anna, though fit enough a wife for any man in Stremnitza, will not tempt him. I just give thanks that God did not curse me with a beauty for a daughter, to suffer his Turkish hands to crawl all over her."
"Shame on you, Petro," said old Teodor the priest- after he had downed the proffered raki- "Just because your woman rears an ugly litter, it does not give you the right to mock poor Alexei like this."
Everyone glanced at Alexei. He looked up defiantly.
"Yes, it is true, it will be my daughter. My Eleni- you need not pretend it will be otherwise. It is a curse, a curse indeed, to have such a beauty for a daughter. I swat away the village oafs like horseflies, and then this Turk comes to ruin her. I should have converted years ago- yes, priest, yes- and found her a fine young agha's son for a husband. Better than this, the shame and the horror of it."
"You should not have scorned my Pavlo when he came asking for her," added Petro, swivelling his head slowly and grinning at the crowd, "It is your pride that has led to this. Remember that, when you send her to the pasha's bed."
Though Alexei stank of raki when he returned home, he was not drunk. A plan had come to him as he stumbled along the frozen muddy track, the image of his eldest daughter's face shining before him. Eleni was seventeen, and tall for a village girl. She had taken her height from his side- it was said that the family were of noble stock, before the Turks came- and her beauty from her mother. Her skin was white, an almost unhealthy waxy pallor rare in a peasant girl; her eyebrows dark and thick, though well-shaped. Though she was slimmer, and flatter-chested, than the village ideal, still every boy and youth lusted after her at the saints' festivals. No, not lusted exactly- they pined after her melancholy beauty, making even soft-cheeked lads feel that their lives were over, wasted, as they would never have a chance to lie with her. She had the wide, black, sorrowful eyes of a figure in an ikon; her dark hair seemed aglow with red sparks in the firelight. How could the pasha not want her, when he saw her? But Alexei had a plan; a plan and a sharp knife.
The next morning, when the pasha's procession arrived, and the villagers assembled in the square, marshalled by a hussar, all eyes gawked at Alexei's family. They had lost a daughter, it seemed, and gained a son. A tall, handsome soft-cheeked lad with sad dark eyes beneath his fez, that sat squarely on a head shaved to the bone. Some gasped, others tittered. Petro opened his ugly frog's mouth to make a remark, and was silenced by Alexei's cold glare.
"Silence, dogs, the Pasha comes!" barked the hussar, trotting back and forth along the square and flexing his whip at the muttering rayahs. "Eyes on the floor, damn you!"
The pasha's palanquin swayed forward, its gilded poles and drapes rocking back and forth like a silken spider crawling along its web. An escort of horsemen, with long mustachios and tall turbans atop their heads, trotted slowly alongside with sabres bared.
The pasha was bored and cold, and his one good eye kept drooping shut as he examined the grovelling ranks of Christians. After a year in The City, and the pleasures of its bathhouses, these peasant girls looked like dogs and pigs to him, unwashed and ragged in their faded ugly dresses. He hated this country, and its savage people, and hated the Sultan for sending him back into frozen exile. He was an old man now, he knew it, and wanted nothing but to pass his last years with his harem in his fine house in the capital, with its fountains and the soft song of nightingales amongst his cherry trees. His bulging eye flickered critically over every girl he passed- she was pretty, but with a moustache; she needed feeding to fatten up her tits- and he dreaded the thought of spending the night alone in a vast cold bed as the wolves howled outside. He blinked slowly, and wiped away a tear- how cold it was!- and when his eye slid back into focus he saw a lad that made his chest ache with the pain of lost youth. A tall lad, and pale, skinny in his baggy breeches, moping bashfully at the floor. The pasha smiled sadly, and beckoned the boy forward.
Eleni walked forward with her eyes on the floor, as the crowd gasped. When she reached the palanquin, the pasha tenderly stroked her cheek, then raised her chin with his fat hand until her eyes met his.
"You blush, lad, like a maiden," he said. "What is your name?"
"Dmitri, Lord, son of Alexei," she said in as deep a voice as she could manage.
"You are a fine lad. I looked like you once, you know, long ago. You are wasted in this sty. Come to the agha's house tomorrow morning, washed and dressed well. Are these your finest clothes, boy?"
"Yes, Lord."
"No matter. I will spoil you."
Then he let her chin go and motioned to his bearers to move on, as he swaddled himself back in his furs. When his caravan had passed, the villagers fell upon Alexei's family like crows on a battlefield.
While the pasha picked at his goose pilaf with disdain, Alexei's family ate nothing; they could not eat, for fear; and with tears, and shouts, and judicious use of his strong hand, Alexei ordered his wife and youngest children off to the monastery on the mountainside behind, trudging lampless through the snow to the relative safety of the mountains. I need not tell you how Eleni's mother kissed her hair, and forehead, and cheeks with a face wet with tears; how frightened the younger children, uncomprehending, were of this raw emotion, and the sombre farewell given by their father. No, all this you know, or can guess. What you will not guess is the entrance of old Anna, the village wise-woman, whose feeble rapping at the hovel door made Alexei's heart flap in his breast like a landed fish.
"What want you, hag?" he growled, to mask his pallid, fearstruck face.
"I come to help you, ingrate, hobbling to your door on a night of snow and wind like this. Have you no wine to heat for an old woman, nor raki? I come to save your daughter from the Turk."
"I have no need of your witchcraft," he said, though he poured her a cup of raki and beckoned her to the stool nevertheless.
"And your daughter is so proud as well, Alexei? That she would rather a Turk took her, and her father's head, than use the wisdom of her mothers?"
"Speak fast, crone, before I throw you out. The priest has placed an anathema on your ways, and we are good Christians in this house."
Old Anna spat on the floor. "For all the good that has done you and yours, Alexei, eh? But I will speak fast, as this must be done soon. Here is an ointment, made for such a use. My own mother used such on my sister when the Pasha came, long before you were born. Yes, it's true, do not look at me so- but none in this village of fools remember such wise ways. I need you to cut the pizzle from your strongest pig, and bring it to me still warm. I shall rub your daughter's parts with this ointment and speak the charm in the old language while you wait outside. You understand? The pizzle will grow on your daughter's parts, and for three days you will have a son. But three days only, you understand? If the pizzle stays attached for longer, then it will take root, and she will be your son until she dies."
"Nonsense, hag," said Alexei aghast. But he stared at Eleni's horrified face for a while, then grabbed his knife and went into the yard.
The next morning, the pasha sat propped on his divan of soft cushions and furs, sipping his thick coffee and wearily picking his way through a tray of baklava and kadaif. The agha's son sang to him, out of tune, until the pasha could bear no more and sent him away in disgust. The tobacco in his chibouk was stale, and the wine in his cup not fit to dress a salad with.
"What entertainment have you for me next, agha?" he rasped, "have I displeased the Sultan so, that you must torture me with such barbarities? Come, agha, show me the hospitality fitting to my rank or I must take it from your harem, and have my outrider carry your head on his lance as a warning to the next village."
"Great lord," said the agha kneeling and bowing his head to the pasha's slippered feet, "we are a poor village high in these mountains amongst the rayah, and what little we have we place before you with joy. But your boy is come- your village lad, washed and dressed in my son's finery- and I pray that he will please you."
"Pray, agha, pray well. And send him in."
Eleni walked in slowly, her eyes bashfully averted to the ground before her feet. When she neared the divan, she prostrated herself, waiting until the pasha commanded her to stand.
"Rise, lad. Dmitri, was it? You are too fine a lad for this village of swine and curs. Come close- a handsome face, is it not, agha?- your skin as white as a Circassian prince, your eyes as dark as a houri. Have you held a sword, lad? Can you shoot straight?"
"My Lord," said the agha hurriedly, "we do not let the rayah bear arms in our village, according to the Prophet's law."
"I did not ask you, agha. But you are right. I forgot that a lad as fine as this could be a mere Christian. If I am to have him in my household, we must make a Muslim of him. Pull out your member, boy. Agha, bring the imam, and a knife."
Eleni fumbled in her silken breeches, pulling out the pizzle. It was not quite erect, nor flaccid, but poked out stiffly like red gristle.
"Wait, agha," said the pasha, his eye bulging. "It has been done? Speak, lad."
"My father cut me last night, Lord," said Eleni softly, "that I might be worthy of you."
"Is it tender, lad? Come close. It looks sore to me."
The pasha rubbed the pizzle from base to tip, though more towards the tip.
"How does that feel, lad?"
"As my Lord wishes," said Eleni, though her face flushed and her breath came in short gusts.
"You are a brave boy, Dmitri. Put your piece away. Tonight you may rest, so come sit beside me on the divan. We will watch the agha's idiot son dance. Can you dance, lad? No, don't tell me what village savagery you have been a part of. I bet you have made many a maiden quiver here, eh lad? You blush, ha ha! Wait until I take you to the citadel, and give you a fine harem of your own! You like that, my boy?"
"I have not words to thank you, pasha."
And so the day, and night passed.
The next day, Eleni was allowed to sleep late, worn out with wine and singing, and more and finer food than she had ever had before. She dreamt of the village girls in their wedding finery, and the lads in their breeches with daggers stuck behind their red sashes, and of pigs and sows rutting vigorously in the muddy yard. When she woke, she found her member poking hardly against the silken sheet, red and furious looking.
This second day, the pasha was drunk, and incapable of love. He dozed happily in his bed of furs as Eleni sang to him, and gazed out of the glazed window at the snow-covered roof of her hovel, where her father knelt in prayer. One of the pasha's hussars leered at her, and rubbed his cock with his hairy hand, indicating the room next door with a tip of his head. Eleni looked away in disgust.
On the morning of the third day, the Pasha was depressed. He dandled Eleni on his knee while smoking his chibouk, and bade her sing mournful local songs. She did, in a high, fearful voice.
"Ah, Dmitri, my boy. Can you even begin to understand how lonely I feel, exiled to this cold, mountainous wilderness? How far I am from the City, from my wives and daughters? How it feels to be an old man, soon for the cold and silent grave? Come closer, lad, put your arm around my neck. Yes."
The pasha put his hand down Eleni's breeches, and stroked her thighs as if absent-mindedly. He continued,
"Ah, Dmitri, when I was your age I had already killed my first man in battle, and ridden back to the pasha with his head wrapped in the rayah's altar silk. The whole Empire was ready to kneel before me, so brave and beautiful was I, with my strong arms and my young beard soft as spider-silk."
The pasha's limp fingers drifted in hungry circles towards the pizzle.
"And now, lad- how hairy you have become!- your bristles scratch my hand. You must be shaved again before you come to my bed tonight, and scratch my face. You understand?"
"Yes, my Lord."
The pasha's fingers trailed along the length of the pig's pizzle, their tips stroking its growing length and brushing against its red tip. Eleni gasped- it was like a vast emptiness gnawing at her- and her hips shook as he grasped her. The hussars stared fixedly at nothing.
"I am old, lad," whispered the pasha into Eleni's ear. Her cheek felt wet, and she realised he was weeping. "I can no longer take you as you deserve. Go now, I can't bear to feel you like this, to excite you for no purpose. But you will come to my quarters tonight."
Eleni snorted her agreement as he let go. The pasha smelt, then licked, his fingers, closing his pale eye in ecstasy at the forbidden taste.
Outside, the wind howled like the wolves in the high passes as the snow piled up in white heaps like distant mountains against the small window panes. In the afternoon dusk, black plumes of hearth smoke rose against the darkening sky as peasants huddled round their cooking pots, exchanging speculation as to events in the agha's house. In the agha's courtyard, the hussars on sentry duty smoked sullenly, and stamped their feet against the cold. Geese squawked as they were chased along the frozen mud by headscarved housewomen, and were caught, and had their necks snapped with passionless peasant hands. In her bedroom- formerly the agha's son's- Eleni tossed in and out of her sheets as if caught in fever. She groaned to herself as if in pain, and grunted. Dreams shook her- she dreamed of catching young Mikhali, her cousin, and mounting him- and images of flesh and hair and tusk flashed before as she groaned, and twisted herself in the soft woollen sheets.
A hussar came to the room with a basin of cold water, and shook Eleni roughly till she woke with a grunt. His breath was sour with raki. "Wake up, young arsehole. The pasha calls for you, his bed is cold. Wash your cock and come."
"Get out, and I will wash. But get out first."
The hussar leered at her, grinning with yellow teeth. He shrugged and left, slamming the carved door behind him.
Eleni held the pizzle with growing fear, tugging it and the bristly ballsack below it till they hurt. Before, when she touched it, it had felt a thing apart from her. Now, when she stroked the tip or tickled its red shaft, she could not help shuddering, nor help the grunting, shuffling, rutting images flashing red behind her eyes as her hips shook. Her nose twitched with self-disgust as her hands smoothed down the new bristles on her legs, arms, belly. As she rose to leave the room, she fell over. Her toes had bunched themselves together beneath her feet like trotters. Eleni let out a squeal of fear.
It was dark outside now, and the pasha was drunk. Copper bowls of rose water glimmered in the candlelight, and incense fumed on the coals of the brass brazier in the centre of the room. The pasha lay sprawled and naked behind the pink and red drapes and curtains of the bed like a fat worm inside a rose.
"Come lad," he said softly, "Do not be frightened of me."
Eleni sat on the edge of the bed. The skeletal hands of the plum tree outside rapped against the window glass, agitated by the snowy wind.
"I can no longer hurt you, lad, I am old and my body is tired. But I can give you pleasure greater than any village girl could. Take off your robe, lad, and stand before me."
Eleni did as she was told, staring at the painted ceiling as the pasha appraised her. She prayed that he would not notice the tiny bumps of her breasts, or her woman's nipples, erect in the cold room. The pasha's flabby fingers traced a serpent's trail down her flat belly, softly, and then grasped her hips. He turned her round, sharply, then began kneading her firm, trembling buttocks. He lifted a hand away, and Eleni could hear him sucking his finger slowly.
"You Christians are afraid of pleasure, Dmitri. I will show you things that this shitty village will never teach you."
So saying, his wet finger traced a circle around her arsehole.
"Lord," she stammered.
"Silence. Close your eyes."
The pasha pulled her closer, and began kissing her buttocks, gnawing now and then at the soft flesh. Grabbing her hips again, he turned her round, though she kept her eyes closed. He leant forward, and took the flaccid pizzle in his mouth, his long beard tickling her thighs. Eleni squirmed. As he sucked it, the pizzle grew, and red images, of mud and tusks and farmyard couplings, flashed behind Eleni's eyelids. The pasha sucked, his tongue flickering around the pizzle like a wet feather, and Eleni's body shook.
The pasha withdrew with a slurp, and his good eye glimmered at her as he looked up.
"You taste well, lad. It has been long since I have tasted a lad, and…"
He looked confused. "There is something different about you, something…"
Eleni trembled. She felt different, indeed. The room seemed blurry to her and her thoughts fragmentary and confused. She began to squeal, and the pasha backed away, fear blanching his fat face. Eleni's hands bunched together, and she locked her arms about the pasha's neck. Grunting, she shoved the pizzle back into the pasha's open mouth, and began thrusting rapidly, deeply. The pasha struggled, choking, shaking to get free, and his wide eye stared up at her with fear. Eleni rutted faster and deeper as the pasha shook in his death throes, and she grunted and squealed desperately like a sow in the slaughter yard as the pasha finally slumped forward, his eye glazing over like a lamp dimming.
When the hussars found Eleni, she was curled up in the corner of the room, snoring and whistling in her sleep, and covered, as were the walls, in her own shit. The pasha lay dead on the bed like a white queen bee smoked in the hive. The cadi was summoned, with the agha and the imam, and the abbot of the Christian monastery. The case was discussed. The cadi was a fair man, and a learned one, and there was no evidence that the lad had murdered the pasha. In the interest of order, the case would be closed; if the sultan learned, they might all be killed, and the pasha had brought this on himself, in any case. Eleni was led away on a leash and returned to her family. Crowds of villagers now flocked to Alexei's yard, where Eleni now lived in a stone outhouse, nuzzling round the sows and fighting for the scraps from the villagers' kitchens. The pizzle could not be removed. Old Anna was nowhere to be found.
When spring came, Eleni was no longer recognisable as a girl. Thick bristles disfigured her once-white skin, and tusks her face. Her fingers and toes had bunched themselves into trotters, upon which she rushed across the yard, fighting off the other boars for food and sows. Eventually, Alexei's family left for The City, leaving their house, their daughter, and the other livestock behind. One day, when the beech and plane trees were green in leaf and musical with birds, and the bees hummed on the wildflowers, Eleni was led up the mountain to the monastery, where she served as a visible warning from God to the young novices- and the older monks- to refrain from the Turkish sin. She sired a number of litters, and outlived the abbot. One hard winter, when the snows came early to Stremnitza, and even the water in the wells had turned to ice, and wolves prowled the hem of the village at night howling and whining in their hunger, Eleni went missing. Perhaps a wolf had taken her from the monastery, though the walls and gates were thick and high. Perhaps- as some said- the monks had roasted and eaten her in their hunger. But time passed, and everyone in Stremnitza forgot the story of the pasha and the girl who was a pig.