I saw Dragan again, three months later. Michaela and another girlfriend, Ophelia, both very drunk, were trying to entice him into bed with them after a birthday party, using ambiguous terms in coarse Italian to keep him laughing. Neither had noticed that throughout the night, he had stayed by my side, and even got angry when I got up, and gave my place to them.

When the conversation between us lapsed, I just looked at Dragan; my eyes quiet on his.

His response was to utter, "You are so powerful."

            Near dawn Michaela and Ophelia followed Dragan down to his apartment for a pajama party of the Dear Penthouse letters sort. I stayed in my Michaelas bed, chaste and disturbed. I did not like the thought that he would be rejecting my girlfriends.

            That evening he called me, to tell me that he had fallen in love with me. I kept that knowledge to myself as long as I could, to prevent my friends from being hurt. But Dragan took care of that. He told them all that he was going to marry me, and honeymoon with me on an island near Paris.

            In the three years I had known Dragan, we had not gone past kissing. This made him very angry. He could not understand why I was so hesitant about being lovers. He knew it wasn't because I was unaffected. The air trembled with alternating current when he came close: a friction of amorous animosity.

Dragan had that effect on many. He was lean as a rebel rifle, taut as a bow. His eyes burned like the bon fires of a heretic. He was the handsome face on the two-headed coins of the Janissaries. His tight body had known the cadence of a horse for years on end, and the constant buoyancy of waves, which all his life he had listened to at his door. A man like Dragan had only to step out of the house to find women who would come to him. However, he only wanted the one who stayed away; the one who would not even come part way; or give half, as was his decree.

"Ava, you must stop being so unavailable," he ordered. "I want a relationship where the woman takes equal part of the responsibility. I don't like that I have to carry the weight all the time. You should do your share, too."

But I didn't. I waited like the princess at the top of the glass mountain. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting for the most able suitor to ride up the slippery sides and claim me.   

            Dragan was very aware of the other men who tried to secure my attention. He envied their time with me, and imagined their ranks to be in legions. Still, he believed I belonged to him like Trieste did to Yugoslavia.

He professed his love for me was so strong: it was like first love. He saw in me the power of this virgin spring that brought back the vitality and virility of his body when it was yet unencumbered by experience and pain.

"I love you like I was 14 again," he declared, awed.

He told me I was enduringly quartered in his heart, "For that is the deepest placement I can offer you."

I listened to his words and watched his actions; they were exemplary. But I never felt his love for me in his touch or his kisses that came to me after a while. To me, his caresses were a well-worked plentitude, a practiced art that I was fortune to.

"With this love, I will desire you, even after I have made love to you," he wrote to me in both English and Croatian.

His tributes came from a princely store. He gave me pink tulips, blue hydrangeas and red chrysanthemum in paper and ribbon twists, depending on the season. Took me for bike rides in gated communities for the views of the lawns. Rewired all my light switches so they could be dimmed. Imported techno records from England, before they got rare. Collected a guide on romantic getaways in Calabria (in case we went). And, composed with sausage and clams slightly opened, a risotto, that was to be suggestive and jocular.

He would give me the contents of his house and the proceeds of his labor, if only I would take him and only him completely.        

"Let me be the first one to tell you, today, I love you. "

I could not tell him, he had not even been the second.

I put my arm around him while we walked from an herb shop, and to him this was more than poignant than crying. He took pride when party hosts ask how we met, and mistook us for married. He liked grazing me with his curious camera, dye casting my expressions in frank black and white; the only photographs he could tolerate.

He was a European gentleman with manners deep bred, holding doors, and politely offering coffee whenever I dropped by. But he was also a Southern Slav with internecine discord imbedded deep in his tissue stores. So, just as strongly as he could love, he could hate. He hated his ex-wife. Hate like the deadly variance in Kosovo.     

These diametric passions made me uneasy around him. I was afraid to let down my guard even in our mellower moments when he pinched and petted me while listening to Near Eastern drumming. I was afraid to look at his hardened chest that was dark with Macedonian history.

 Consequently, when the dinners he made were over, and only candlelight was kept, I held my hands crossed over my blouse, and my knees tight on top of each other, hoping that he would only play with me as a fourteen year old would.

            It was because I was still looking to others for comfort and warmth. I was unallied, and purposefully maintained many satellites. So, when he tried to pry me open up with tongue and capable fingers, I fled into the night, passed the reach of his sea-strong arms, where I was sad days after.

It was Dragan's thumb in my mouth at the Thai New Years celebration. I knew he would not call me. I had humiliated him enough by my tacit refusal of him. All the times I was busy with other men had generated his ire.

"I don't like that you always deny me because you are already engaged, Ava."

So he stopped calling me.

The only way he would accept me now was with my hands bound before me, or rolled up in a Persian carpet, to be unfolded before him like a captive slave.

            Dragan had gained a girlfriend since. She was a simpering sort, who kissed my cheek in greeting, even knowing how he still wanted me. She was smart, not giving him any reason to revolt or question their arrangement. He was true to her in form, but not in spirit. That was still with me.

            He had heard about Johannes through the grapevine, and had asked me about him at the Thai festival.

            "Johannes is gone," I admitted. "I haven't seen him in months."

            "Then it's my turn," Dragan pronounced triumphantly.

            I did not know Dragan's ways. He had gestures I misinterpreted. For instance, when I left his side to be with my girlfriends, he would stick his tongue out at me. At first I was offended, thinking he was being crude. Then he clarified the motion as a flirtatious action, one to beckon me back to him.  His pinching also caused discomfiture. Once again, it was a sign of my appeal. I had skin so juicy; it was delectable like a baby's that he had to squeeze frequently between three fingers tightly.

            But the thumb in my mouth had no cultural credentials. It was his own raw expression. A game of master and servant.

 I called him up, and asked if I could come over. He was expecting my call, but he asked me why I wanted to see him.

            "It's been a while," I answered simply.

            He greeted me warmly, taking me in his arms and kissing me on the cheek. He welcomed me into his home, and complimented me on how beautiful I looked.

            At once, I felt something form and decay in a particle second. I flashed on the picture of us at the rave, a true snapshot that described our constant relativity. He was the inverse of a mountain, a tunnel to hide in. 

He had burned incense for me, to cover the smell of cigarette smoke. He had taken up that habit again, and was exercising it like a Turk, which was so strange since he was usually meticulous about other habits concerning his physical and mental well-being. 

            He offered me all kinds of things to drink and any seat I wanted. I settled upon tea and his couch.

            I looked around. Nothing much had changed, but there were more instruments on their stands, and his book and CD collection had grown. The curtains were closed; candles glowed. It was the dark lair of a hermit.

I had heard from my friends that he had done portraits of me. One interpretation was that I looked very young. Maybe he was envisioning me at the age when I was still pure, before I was touched by other men.  

Then I turned and saw myself finally. He had made a public display of our relationship in the living room, on the wall opposite from where I sat. The summation of how we parted was there, occupying space like a clinging vine or a panther in a cage.

            "I think they reflect how I felt about you at the time," he expounded for me.

            He used charcoal on white paper. His strong strike marks shadowed my face like Van Gogh did in his self-portraiture during his maddest times. I was the face of agony, of premature widowhood; every feature smudged with unkempt pain.

            Dragan had captured what I felt, before I would actually know the oppression of complete yearning. I discovered that favor not returned is a hideous sight. In my portraits, I was his contemplation of an intractable love turned ugly. The dark alleys of agony. Magdalena repudiating Christ.  The hell with everyone telling me I was beautiful. I was those wretched things on the wall.

            There were no pictures of Michaela, his dearest female friend, or even his clever girlfriend, who was model material. I had not been there in a year, and yet no new picture, except mine, had been added to his gallery. A year in suspension.

No one could look at my portraits and not feel for the artist. His feelings were shaped into my bitter lips and haunted eyes. I had caused him to work in paroxysm and poison. In every angry stroke, he wanted me to die. Go away and DIE. 

Dragan could not look into my face now, and not remember how long he had waited; the other men all in a row that took his place; how I had put him off, and played games. He looked at me with the stoniness of the Montenegrin highlands. All his tender words were gone, all his compliments diminished. I did not expect blossoms and bubbly this time.

At the Thai temple, his thumb in my mouth had smelled of burnt carnation. Incense, candle, gold leaf, flower and holy water; we had applied the same elements in our sorcery. We had invoked equivalent gods.

By sketching my face, and staring at it night after night, he had drawn me back to him. A drawn-out year.

Now his face had a waxworks smile of a satisfied Buddha.

My effigies cringed as the black magic roiled. 

After we caught up, I drew Dragan to me on the couch. His scent was of warmed shampoo and liquid soap; laundry detergent; fabric softener; and the mens' cologne he judiciously applied. 

"Tell me about Johannes," he requested.

"How do you know about him in the first place?" I asked.

"You gave his pictures to Michaela last December, didn't you?"

"Yes. You saw his picture? What did you think when you first saw them?"

"My first reaction was that I was jealous." He shifted nervously.

"This is what I like to do: interpret a person by body language," he warned.

I uncrossed my legs, and placed my arms to the side.

"He is very tall," he said, looking up towards the memory of the picture. "He is very comfortable where he is. Was that your house?"

Dragan had never been there. "Yes, in my library. Go on. This is interesting."

He nodded in agreement. "He is intelligent. Intelligent like you."

"Oh, I'd bet hed like to hear that."

"And," Dragan said sadly, "he more than likes you."

I was elated that he had read so much into the picture. I had wanted to show Michaela what Johannes looked like, so I brought her the pictures.

"If you like him that much, you must not keep them," she advised urgently.

"Why not?" I demanded.

"It's a superstition. My friend Celia says that in Argentina they feel the same way, too. It's bad luck. Later when he marries you, you can take family pictures and put them in the album. But since you dont have him, let me keep the pictures."

"No," I protested.

"You have the negatives. Really Ava, don't keep his picture until he is yours, or else you'll never have him."

 "So what happened to Johannes?" Dragan posed.

"Gone," I answered succinctly.

I asked to see his slides of his vacation. He set up the projector and we viewed them on the wall. He had mostly taken pictures of the streets and buildings, the seawalls and town plaza of the Slovenian shore. I could feel the dry summer breezes on the Adriatic Littoral; the subtropical climate that brought tourists to a coast that was not useful but beautiful.

"This is one of my two bars," he pointed out.

The whitewashed structure was where he went to drink the fine wine and liqueurs from the regions, especially plum brandy, which was popular with men who had known him since he was a kid, chasing geese across the square.

"This is the house I grew up in."

On the bottom floor was a workshop for woolens, and on the fourth was where his family once lived. From his boyhood bedroom, he could see the mountains that blocked the wind on the north side, where terraces of vineyards and orchards made their way up the slopes until it was too cold.

He showed me boats in the water, in the coves and the inlets, the picturesque fractures in the mountains that stopped at the shore. He had little interest in the sea, though on clear days he could look at Venice floating in the distance like a hazy sailors dream.

Dragan's mother was Slovenian, a blonde woman from whom he inherited his light wavy hair; a stock from Hungary was the family's guess. His father came from Croatia, to fight against Italy, one generation away from continuing the livelihood of a shepherd and a peasant. Tired of the violent weather changes in the Julians, the outrunners of the Alps, and the isolation of the valleys that kept out time, but yielded to invaders, Dragans father married a girl whose skin was warm with clear summer sun, and stayed to live where had he rested between battles.

When Dragan was born, he was given the name of the Montenegrin doctor who assisted at his difficult birth: a name he was always defending.

Dragan thought of himself as touched by all the republics, even after the successions; he was a Yugoslavian of the old federation, if asked.

The town was roofed with terra cotta, and could have been any sleepy village in the Mediterranean, but instead it took its cues from industrious Austria, foregoing siestas.  However, in Dragans pictures, the people were gone, the flocks on the road disappeared, life without life. He took pictures of hotels and stores, banks and civic structures, neglecting the familiar faces of those who had greeted him twice a day all his life.

I saw my face on the wall, reflecting the cruel history of the Balkans.

"May I change my seat, Dragan?"

"Anywhere. You can take anything in my house," he said with legendary Montenegrin hospitality.

The slide shown was a church on a hill. I sat on his lap, and leaned against his chest.

"Catholic?"

"Ava, take a seat." He got up, and I slid off. He pulled forward a chair for me.

"Anywhere? Anything, Dragan?"

He disregarded what I implied. I sat where he requested.

"When old Marshal Josip Boz died, and it was all over, and we had our independence, they lit up this church. I can't remember it lit before. All the Catholic churches were once again lit from their steeples. From hill to hill. I am Catholic but without my first communion."

I was miserable in my chair. I squirmed around deploring his atheism.

"Did you take pictures of the towns you visited when you were on the road?"

When Dragan was a child, he was the Ping-Pong champion of Slovenia. His father took him up the winding mountain roads, through dense forest and along the river passage of the Danube, up the Dalmatian Coast, to compete with other young boys who did it for the glory of communist youth. Then when he was older, he caught the tail end of the heavy metal movement, and played for teenagers who didn't care if they were dancing next to a Serb, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Herzegovinian, Croat, Slovenian, Albanian, Hungarian, Austrian, Bosnian, Dalmatian, Magyar, Bulgarian, Greek, Turk, Spanish-speaking Jew, German, Italian or Gypsy. Okay maybe, Gypsy. This was during that short period of time when the Southern Slavs were united.

"Tell me about Split again," I implored, asking about the antique city on the coast.

"My father had taken me there to see the Illyrian ruins of the Caesar Diocletians fortress-palace when I was eight," he repeated for me. "I played between the stone pillars and the great stone steps that were barely worn."

"Have I lived too late to see it?" I asked, for I had always wanted to see those remnants of the old empire.

"At your risk," he declared, though there had been more than five years of peace.  He changed the slide. It was a street of cafes, set with outdoor tables and umbrellas. "What centuries could not do," I saw his jaws clench. "What do the Serbs want?"

The war in my face was destroying my picture.

The people in the chairs sat with their backs turned to us. I knew I had to change the subject. I had once asked him about the Croats slaughter of the Serbs, Jews and Gypsies during the Second World War. He said it was a lie.

"All propaganda."

"Did your family know any Germans repatriated back to Germany after they were forced to give up their farms?"

He looked at me with complete repugnance.

"How would you feel if someone came into your yard and stole your house?"

I did not answer his rhetorical challenge.

 "How long did your German neighbors live there? Ten years? Ten generations? How about the ones invited at the behest of eastern rulers who valued them for their skill as farmers? That was a peaceful migration for centuries. What about the traders from the Hanseatic League, those members of the shipping federation of Hamburg, who brought the merchandise and ideas from the West?"

I kept on interrogating him, although I could see his belligerent nature arising. "Time and absorption would surely make them just another immigrant group."

"What are you? A journalist? A lawyer? Or do you love Germans?"

I learned to not mention Serbs or Germans, unless I was ready to take their part and lose. Dragans tactics were more emotional than logical, and his Slavic rage often routed my appetite for insouciant debate.

"Did you take coffee there?" I said, returning to his street scene.

"Yes," he said, distracted. He changed the slide. "Lets stop now."

"No," I quickly commanded. "Keep that picture up." It was a view of the town from the old fort walls.

I went back to the couch where he sat. I sat very near, close to his nose, which was narrow and finely shaped.

"I have heard there are areas where the water has dissolved the limestone and some of the rock has been carried away." I rubbed his nose with mine.

"What are you doing Ava?" he whispered.

"These areas are honeycombed with underground channels and caverns. Some of the caverns have their roofs caved in, forming sinkholes in the surface of the land."

"Yes," he concurred slowly, not rubbing my nose back, but not pulling away either. "Occasionally, more resistant rock will remain, and a natural bridge may be seen where the surrounding rock has---What are you doing, Ava?"

"Taking a tour of the former Republic of Yugoslavia, Dragan." I breathed into his ear. I have so many questions about your natural wonders.

He jerked me by the shoulders.

The pictures on the wall grimaced openly.

"Lets not do this," he said, loosening his grip.

"Tell me about the river that flows under the sea."

I put my hand through his blond hair that was fragrant as clover. He murmured from the pleasure of it.

"The river Lika in the east, follows a submarine channel that leads to the island Rab," he recited, as if reading from my European geography text, the one that had the letters er added to Hamburg to make Hamburger.

The slide projector hummed, the instruments tuned up for the overture. All his books and CDs began to play.

Dragan grabbed my hand, brought it to his mouth and kissed my palm where three lines converged.

"I have a girlfriend. I can't do this to her."

I took the hand with the recent kiss, and placed it along his cheek.

"Do this to me."

"Let this just be for tonight." He held my hand close to his face, searching for the salt-scent of the sea. "And what about tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow," I said huskily," we renegotiate."

The pictures on the wall slid down so they didnt have to watch.

He kissed me with lips that were hard, stretched wide, flat against his teeth. This pressure forced my mouth to open, and I gasped, searching for air. He took his tongue and searched the walls on the opposite side of my cheeks, roughly scouring them, knocking aside my tongue, which had given up its defensiveness before his superior force.

I knew from prior experience, my hand intercepting his, or a slight slant in my face, would cause him to loose interest in sexual sport. How many times had he asked me, "Do you want to ice me down, Ava? Because I will stop. I will not allow you to make me force you to do anything."

I nuzzled his neck, breathing in the wines of his skin, brushing my lips against the indention beneath his ear, and tasting the flavors that had been sun-baked into his darkness. He brought his hand up to my hair and let the tendrils slip through his fingers. I saw his blond hair glistening in contrast to his deep color, the bands of muscles in his arms flex and relax as he moved along my head to my cheek, which he stroked with fingers deeply callused from guitar strings.

I was holding my breath. I had stopped intellectualizing my situation. I was there with Dragan by the precept of the karmic deities and the will of the artist to see his work re- animate. After all that I had been through, and all that I had failed to experience, letting go would be easiest thing, to give into demands that were as strong as mine, and face unfinished business, or love laid waiting.

"I'll go and get myself another cup of tea, Dragan," I said, and got up and walked to the kitchen.

My pictures could not look at me here. I poured slowly, the liquid loud in the room. Dragan came and stood behind me. As both of us faced forward, he lightly caressed my body, using a touch that was electric. I poured and poured, into the tea cup, over the saucer, onto the counter and into the sink, a long river of green tea that would not stop, as he used his hands across my shoulders and back, beneath my shirt to my belly, and down under my skirt waistband to my panties, and then back across my arms and breast, cupping them through my shirt and bra, until I yelped, and wiggled away slightly.

"You don't like this, Ava? You want me to stop?"

"Ne," I answered in Croatian. "No, I mean, mozda, maybe." Those words came out of me, even though I had first read them three years ago, and had not reviewed them since.  I stopped pouring the tea.

He continued to stand behind me silently, while I moved to his touch staring at his spice rack and hot pads by the stove. He rubbed his pelvis against my bottom, but kept his torso detached. His face came next to my face and neck, caressing me dryly without kisses or hot breath. His hands unlatched my bra and swept upward to catch their contents. One hand was dispatched to the front of my skirt, where it dug a shallow ravine between my legs to my crotch. My rear hummock pushed against his hardness, which he lowered to fit into my oscillating divide.

I swayed to Dragans touch like a standard in the wind, losing myself to the power of desire, if not for him, for the pureness of power, that from any source always originates in desire. I was melting, loosing sap, broken by the ceremonies in the dark, performed before my face in black, cries uttered for my benefit, stricken by his increased importunities, because of time wasted.

I understood his antithesis; this was a foreign man, who came from lengths across the sea, to capture me in his arms, to press his weight rhythmically against my hips in an upright stance. With my back to him, words unspoken, he was easy to disguise. Separated from his individuality, he became a lover with a shared soul. He was Alki, Rudolf, Paolo, Sasha, and Johannes united in an age of conquest.

They had all caught and held a hill-girl, keeping her in their clench and thrall. Thus, I became a Slav reduced by my masters, my hindquarters appropriated a degradation: shiva, Sklavin, slave, enslaved; I answered to them all, before their martial law. 

I turned to Dragan and kissed him, his lips surprisingly soft. He took my hand and lowered it. I held onto his waist, which was beautifully shaped, above strong legs that thrilled me with their length. He had a slenderness that would always be, from a long practice of moderate consumption. He took my hand again, and made me feel where he was hardest; holding me down, so together we could cup this ultimate density.

Dragan's solidity was a large nugget, hard packed into the space directly behind his fly; compacted like the alloyed metal of industrialization that gave way at the edges to my alternate contracting.

In contrast, his arousal was a personification of the Slavic nature forces, the gods of fire, wind, the thunder god answering to Teutonic Thor, and the god who was the special protector of cattle, surviving into Christian times as St. Blasius. An arousal that was bio-metaphysical.

I was this diverse land of diverse climates, a peasants self-sufficient wheat patch, corn patch, tobacco patch, plums and vegetables, sheep from the mountains taken to the summer pastures for their homemade yogurt and cheese. I was the Balkans: the Turkish word for mountains. A region violent with peaks.

Commandingly, Dragan subordinated my landscape with his pagan marvels and left me awed. At my wrist, his bites turned my skin to porous rock; his pounding heart beat my breast like the Bora winds from the frostbitten Alps. He was the tribal patriarch, bending me back, so my hair would fall free, and catching it, wrapping it in his fist, pulling it tight, as he would an ewe to market. This power, that was one with the crashing seas and moody skies, I would harness for myself, to harrow in my fields. To make me believe. But as I stroked him through his pants, feeling his dogmatic vigor, I recalled another creed for another supernatural being, a German celestial who insistently bedeviled my woods, waters and pastures; the most autarchic lord of them all.

Dragan pulled up my panties, folding over the sides so my ass cheeks became exposed, tugging the elastic upwards so the cotton crotch grated against my bisected mid.

"I have refashioned your underwear into bikinis," he said, and grabbed my cheeks, closing what he could in his hands.

This is what I wanted, spontaneity, male bravado, initiative, and nastiness in secret. I wanted what Johannes had failed to give me: completion.

I led Dragan back to the couch and switched off the lights over his head. It was dark but my portraits still glowed. I laid on top of him awkward in my pose. I kissed him again, using pressure to substitute for true ardor.

Suddenly, he switched me onto my back so quickly and adroitly: it was like being tossed in a kung-fu move.

"No," he decided. Then very slowly, he said: "Let me."

 He pulled off my shirt and yanked off my bra. I started to protest, but then I realized this was the action I had been praying for. Together with a double to fill the form. I tried to lie still, conspiring with the darkness to make me strong, keeping my eyes shut to protect my sovereignty. He went from one breast to the other, surprised at the opulence of flesh, and the pert nipples deep cast.

    "Wow," he exclaimed. "I love your breasts. I never knew you were this way."

            He flipped up my skirt and ripped off my panties, pulling them along my legs in one flourish. I rolled my thighs inward.

            "No you don't", he warned, and yanked my ankles apart.

He held me open as if he were to judge the spatial relation between my urethra and anus before outlining me onto a painter's canvas. And then he dove in, headfirst.

            With the first touch of Dragans tongue, I yelped and buckled towards the ceiling. Liking this position, he raised my hips with his arms, and made a tabletop of my body, holding me so high, he had to be upright on his knees. I had never thought someone so concerned about decorum and correct behavior would be slurping away at my inner labia and hidden clitoris like a Roman procurator at a bacchanalia. I would not have guessed the blithesome rites of anthropophagy were the custom of the region near the Voivodina.

            Afterwards, he surveyed me like a tourist from icy circumstances, seeing hot springs, various sporting facilities, clear skies during the summer along the beach.

            Once more he took me to dine, but this time he gourmandized, and conversed with me in an intimate tongue, a language of flexible verbs, and a vocabulary that was largely original. Against my thighs he sang folk songs. And along the plumpness of my rump, he carried on his work, not in prose, but verse with regular rhythms. I heard a long series of metamorphose as he spooned into my basin, a dialect merged with the Celts, trespassed by the Visigoths, held by long German rule, and influenced by Roman and Venetian Italy.

            In my response, I thrashed and flailed, bucked and retracted, fidgeted and lulled to his linguistic medley, while speaking the idiom familiar to the Scythians, incorporated by Pannonians, the archaic nomenclature of the sub-Carpathians.

When Dragans declaiming was done, he moved alongside me to assert his rough plank and forested groin for my delectation. I could smell from him the fertility of the Danube Plain and the catch of the Black Sea. Officiously, he led himself to my lips.

However, I was still nostalgic for a bale and bundle which was no longer within my reach, the celebrant of white asparagus in spring and plums in August, the repeat intruder whose kinsmen were the natural enemy of the Slavs, and the only implanter my womb would enclose.

My body quit its peaceable agriculture and pleasant vistas, and began Operation: Evasion. I got up from the couch, and meant to dart for the door, but because I was disrobed, I had to scramble further into Dragan's house, to the bedroom and his bed, to use the covers as my clothes.

Dragan followed me and closed the door loudly. The walls and the ceiling shook and shook, and in my fright it was the shellfire over Sarajevo. I held the sheet up to my shoulders, covering myself up with Bosnian mist. He used his finger to separate out the six republics of my body, and then collected them back into one nation state.

In the living room, a gypsy was singing in Portuguese, slurring her words: her mouth thick with 500 years of Moorish rule.

Dragan translated for me: "I love you. I really, really love you."

He then used his knuckles to stroke my cheek. I turned my face downwards, and sighed. He lifted his shirt and moved his chest towards me. It was hairless and the nipples prominent.

"Take me into your mouth, Ava." I held my breath. He goaded: "You have to take care of me, too."

He hugged me so hard my bones creaked. This was the threat of Ottoman prepotency, the forced imprisonment of the purdahs, the Koran in one hand and the sword in the other, the destruction of the infidel, which I was.

I turned my face away. He roughly brought it back to center. I was as scared as the Bosnian and Herzegovinian children kidnapped to Osman's citadel for nefarious aim.

Dragan took his thumb, that thumb, and placed it in my mouth, and then bent it upwards, so that his knuckle stretched my mouth wide open. This made my jaw ache, and the only thing I could do to relieve the pressure was to draw him deeper with my lips.

This made me made into one of those abducted pawns of Bosnia-Herzegovina, trained to serve in armies against their own.

With his thumb in my mouth, I began to suck. Deliberately, he inserted each of his fingers two and three at a time. Now there was no doubt; he was the Bavarian overlord in all his malevolence, binding my three distinct topographies by fist and strap.

I closed my eyes, and let him lead me to his twin kernels of erectile tissue. I opened my mouth and dutifully nursed. The friction in my mouth caused by the constant warring between the Germanic and Slavic tribes.

"You're a good girl, Ava," he cooed.

I pulled away, my body forming massive walls, concentric walls, more intricate moats and towers. I would not give up, even though I was employing mediaeval strategies and blockades against the modern war machinery of the Post-Industrial Revolution.

"I should go. This is a mistake." I looked him in the eye, ignoring his erection, unashamed of my nudity.

Raw cunning marked his brow. Intent upon destroying the unity action between all my Yugoslavs, he induced Bulgaria to attack.

"You called me; you came to my house," he said. "Are you trying to provoke me?"

I stood up and took his T-shirt to cover myself, though I was at a loss about what to do with my nipples, which were as prominent as minarets.

   "Dragan, I must go."

    I kissed him on the cheek to say good-bye.

   He pulled me down to him by the collar. I could see the vindictiveness of Archduke Ferdinand's kin in his expression.

"You know how long I've waited," he imputed.

    He wretched the material tightly, the pressure imperceptibly increasing, and with one final yank, tore the shirt all the way down to the hem.

"You started this," he exhorted rigidly. "You can't make me stop. I will have you yet."

He grabbed me by the shoulders and smothered me with a kiss that was a pretext to occupy and destroy my Serbia and the start of the Great War.

Against the voracity of his war engine, I knew I was ridiculous. He was a pasha set to sack my peninsula and plant his crescent pennant.  This time, there would be no Peter the Great with his ducats to subsidize my insurrection. If his chastisement left me in rubble, then so be it.

In my darkness, I heard the warning bell from the church steeple, the stamping of galloping horses, the battle horn sounded, the quick thud of running, babies screaming, livid curses, heavenly appeals, merciless orders, women shrieking crazed with pain, houses aflame, the clang of metal against metal, the suck of blades withdrawn from the bodies of the slain.

Of his country, he was fond of saying: "We were the ones who stopped the Turks from encroaching upon the rest of Europe."

I became a living bulwark against the salvo of his kisses, hit by a broadside of hugs, wounded with an enfilade of caresses, until drenched in his own perspiration, he lay quietly upon my chest, muffling a cry of desperation.

He looked up at my eyes and vociferated: "You've seduced me." 

Dragan tore the sheet from me, and threw it behind him. I still had my skirt on, but it was an insignificant barrier. The light came from the alley and showed his face, bitter but calm. When he pulled me down by the ankles, the skirt flew up and over my chest, obstructing my vision. He pushed apart my knees with his, and knelt between my legs. I did not see him infiltrate my underground passageways with his fingers, stroking the underside of my clitoris, which was expanding with fast blood.

But I felt the Mohammedan Turks pushing in, forcing their regimen of terror over my Southeastern Europe. My pelvis swelled, wept copiously, throbbed. Ottoman decadence and theocratic foundations fomented. I responded to the call of the faithful, prostrating myself towards Mecca: Allah is Great. There is no God but Allah.

I could not find a patriot; all my nerves were conspirators. 

I cried out: "Oh, God. Oh, God." 

He brought me proof of my willingness by his fingers coated with my thick fluid.

"You cannot deny this, Ava."

He put his fingers to his mouth, and licked them thoroughly; each finger down to the palm washed by his tongue.

He unzipped his jeans and took my finger and stroked it against his penis, which had begun to seep. It was clotted and rich. He ran my finger against my lips, and then pushed my mouth inward with it, until I was forced to taste his pre-ejaculatory issue, still warmed by body temperature.

He kissed me and shared his own aqua vitae.  I hugged him, squeezing him with a might that was not my own. When he petted me softly, I bristled from his tenderness. As I raked my nails on him, he shrugged me off.

"How you inflame me, Ava," he said, slapping my ass.

Dragan and I were Yugoslavia during WWII, plotting against our German dictators, while we fought amongst ourselves. He was the Goths stamping out the Sarmatian Christian churches on the way to plunder Rome. We were embroiled in disputes for the shortest and most direct route to the trade and rich resources of nearby Asia. Roses, gunpowder, rubies, silk and cloves were the tributes he wanted to smuggle back from his Crusades. But first, he had to cross the daunting Balkans of my body to reach the fertile Danube Plains of my heart.

I got up, and tried to swing my legs over the side of the bed. He caught my foot and dragged it back on the bed.

"I am beginning to think you like playing the terrified virgin."

And he began to nibble and taste my toes.

I saw in Dragans narrowed eyes and the male musculature in action, that he had absorbed the rapacious invaders of far history in his subjugation.  The archers of the Huns, destroying what the Goths had spared; the Magyars of Hungary, raiders on horseback, pillaging more property for their monarch; and the Romans, who conceded that the insubordinate Pannonian Slavs were the best warriors in the empire. They were the source of his strength and sexual arrogance.

I saw the blood and bones of hundreds of Montenegrins, who fought to the teeth for autonomy in their native state in his strong and extensile limbs that pitilessly pinned me down.

I wriggled, caught as I was in the disorder of my senses, overwhelmed by this duce, who was trying to kiss his way up my legs. He mouthed my inner thighs, breathing hot air on them, and then licking them with a broad tongue, annexing my western settlements for Italy between the world wars.

I tried to kick him away, only my kicks turned to undulations that surged with his every incursion.  The pleasure was languorous, splendorous, and contiguous, moving to the back of my calves, which I inadvertently arranged for him myself as I tried to throw him off.

His hands quickly investigated my clitoris, vagina and anus, a Greek finding refuge after the fall of Constantinople, in Beograd, Nish, and the old capital, Kragujvac. He then returned to fondle my cultural centers at considerable length, moaning my name, Ava, Ava, Ava, gaining privilege and predominance like the Vlachs aided by sultanic favor.

Slav, slave, enslaved, those were my real names, a powerless peasant beneath him, trembling, heaving from the strain, as he established his eastern orthodoxy over the foundations of my previous sanctums.

"Because I cannot be your first lover," Dragan threatened, "I will take you elsewhere, less searched."

Then he rubbed his cock against my crack, traveling high to my coccyx, then low to my puckered hole, rimming it, colonizing the frontier. He took advantage of my subservience, pressing me, oppressing me, frightening me with implied pain and intrusion.

"You'll stay Ava because you know you deserve this. You want this."

He was right. I would allow myself to be trampled by his big Byzantine boots for a Palladian rebirth. I would abandon myself to the mercy of his revengefulness and a reactionary policy of the blackest type for his Neo-Hellenistic imperialism: because it felt good, and it was something I could not control. And I, too, loved to be scared to death.

But I also loved to repel and run and fight because I was Dalmatian aligned with agitators against Venetian dictum. I was Macedonia after the Treaty of Bucharest, divided for my spoils between Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia, and ready for violent sedition.

I pinched his side; he bit my buttock. He scratched my inner thigh and drew a bloody line. I grabbed his head and came up with hair.

In essence, I became more Croat, a toughened combatant, better resistant to the Turks, a reliquiae reliquiarum, a buffer zone for the Austrian court.   

From this cause, I revolted by starting uprisings of my own; using my hoisting hips to repulse his inroads, and pouring hot oil over my swelling walls. I pushed my head hard against him repeatedly, as he nipped my earlobes and gnawed the back of my neck; catapult, battering ram, flaming arrows, I threw my armory against him.

But Dragan, born of warfare, reared to attack, a product of a thousand armed conflicts proved to the both of us that I could be debased, brought down to a villein state. He kissed and nibbled me, poked and ringed, crushed and hovered like the Avars out of Central Asia, destroying my cities and ancient basilica, using my strength against me, taking my contesting as signal he was rubbing me right.

My head was smashed into the pillows; wrist locked together in his right hand, and held over my head. He took advantage of my recumbence and crowned himself king. He granted me a constitution that humbled me, and made my native dynasties almost slavish vassals of the Hungarian coronet. My breath was harsh in my throat and my skin smoldered. I arched my back and my thighs came apart. I was his bondwoman, moaning in the words of my governing Croatian ban, Da, da, da, da Yes, yes, yes, yes. 

And then, he reached beneath me and compressed the open-air theatre above my pubic patch with geometric clarity, towards a center of interest, activating my G-spot without trespass within. The pillow of flesh inside me ballooned. He made surgical strikes against the short bridge of my taint in all media, relief and in the round, small and heroic scale. Inside the moon of my buttocks, he wedged his shaft, sawing a deeper cleft, inflicting the dominance of his solid mass over the space allotted between my cheeks. This admonished me of his epical expressions, prodigious energies, vehemence and willfulness, and that his immediate ancestors were the subduing Franks of the Rhine.

"Oh, you like that Ava?" he rasped. "You're a naughty one."

I was tangled up in my hair, slipping in my own ooze.

He pounded against the gates of my asshole, unwilling to tolerate a long barricade.

"No, no, not there," I finally pleaded. I was what an Athenian orator once declared: a Macedonian and not a Greek.

Like the German Holy Roman Empire, which neglected its southern charges for business in the north, he pulled away the flying buttress of his cock, and stopped his interference into my backside.

My neck, my shoulders, back, sides and hips then became Ljubljana's landmark triple span, mediaeval alleyways, castellated hill, and promenade. He meandered through my undiscovered city center by mouth with appreciative eyes wide open and told me what he saw. He stroked, tickled, probed, hooked and strummed my pink pussy lips where the river, park, old quarter and church of my erogenous metropolis were all knitted together by one reactive filament. I shivered no matter where he sojourned. With two fingers he held me open and brushed my enlarging clit with his thumb, copying it over with classical and folk designs, then added his mouth to transpose and harmonize.

I bowed my back and tossed my head from side to side. Tenderly, he caressed the supple curvature of my abdomen and breast. One single unifying philosophical as well as emotional thought motivated him. It was tripartite in nature: the love of me, the development of relations, and the pursuit of commitment.

"You're here, here at last," he gasped. "I've always wanted you. I will always want you."

My whole body was wet with light perspiration, a condensation: my desert ending its draught. A mist lifting over the turquoise river Soca.  

Dragan could do what he liked. He turned me over and poked his dick in my face. My hands, still bound over my head, were pushed down very hard so I could not escape. But I did not try that hard. I was in a harem of my own devising. He soothed me by massaging my belly. I combated him by shimmying like a temple trollop.

With his free hand, he pushed the hair out of my eyes.

"I won"t," I protested.

Calmly, he held the base of his dick and struck me with it against my chin and cheeks, beating me lightly, then more so.

I was expecting the worst. Clemency rarely followed savagism. I had fought against him, and I had fought with him. My thighs ached to strangle him. I knew he would not stop until I was quiescent in a living death. I was afraid that he would do as Sultan Mohammed II had done in Bosnia after defeating the Magyars. And turn on the land he had saved. To scorch it beyond retrieval.

My face was stinging. My masochism was no longer in exile. In order to preserve myself, I caught his flogging prick in my mouth, and held it gingerly until my tears fell to wash it. I brought the sea to his side.

He collapsed onto my chest, and lavished me with kisses. My whole nipple was engulfed in his suckling. The power scales changed. He was no longer a pasha, a socialist, a communist, a Catholic or Venetian flagellating everything Slav on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. He was a Croat mother worshiper, a pagan dying to sip from the maternal tit. I was the cays and the coast of matrilocal love, the lake reflecting the mountains of the mother goddess. He wanted back to the matrix, where all things originated. He was a baby at my breast, babbling. With filial devotion, he licked and sucked my snowy peaks; lapped and nuzzled the broad valleys of his first love. 

I softened towards him, played with his ringlet hair, which was all that I could see. He looked up at me with eyes so large and needy, for a moment I almost lost my guard. I knew I had to be strong against him, strong because his need for me was stronger than my need for Johannes, only because it had lasted longer, and that kind of need would flay every inch of my skin if I did not contain it.

"We will be connected forever," Dragan foretold. 

He kissed a diaphanous border around my ribs that caught the falling dawn. To enliven me and make me glad, his fingertips painted my sides with shades somber and pastel. When each bone was translucent with pure color and prismatic rays, he divided the honors of mosaic and jeweled glass between my shimmering hips and brightly nudged tummy. His mouth and tongue were a media of polychromatic light, dazzling, igniting, hypnotizing all of my senses, and promoting the illusion of infinite space and the radiance of time.

At my open thighs, I felt a mild incandescence building to inner warmth. He brought the sea to my side. On the wall of my outer chapel, reflected in stained glass was our heated tug of war. Here I offered him, the boon he had thirsted for: the way to my estuary.

To this etherealization of interior space, he brought his tongue to taste and to sip. He lapped me with an upward motion, directing my eye to the lumens above.  Then linear movements and gradations of light made by his whole mouthby sucking hard and soft carried out his theme to surround me within translucent clouds, where the starry crown of immortality waited to be touched.  

"Ava, I more than want you," Dragan said. "I pray you."

He reached over to the bed stand with the picture of his girlfriend in three-quarter pose, and pulled a condom out of the drawer. I did not watch him don it over himself.

Instead, I thought of my starving pictures in the other room, revitalized by the sumptuous feast he would put before me, the daintiest viands, and the abundance of fruits offered on plates of silver and gold. At this moving banquet, I knew, he would serve me wine from transparent crystal glasses and gilded goblets, as connoted by his glistening foreseen palette in which time was a moving image of radiant eternity.

But then, my pictures in the living room changed again, and I saw German soldiers sitting at the edge of this groaning table during theological confrontation with the Lutheran Reformation. At that moment, my eye and imagination was not led outward, onto the transcendental beyond, but to my subjective self, the center of my architectural space, not at some remote point beyond the horizon, but within me, myself.

It had begun again: a wholesale Germanization of my Dalmatian coast practiced for three centuries in my mind.   

Dragan stood on his knees and hooked his arms under my thighs. His legs were under me so far; I was balancing on my shoulders. I was hoping for the exuberant and enchanting beam that he had shone between my knees, and that my gradients would be hiked with homage in mind. But instead, my alpine uplands were the killing ground of the Isonzo Front, when Italy entered the war and clashed with the Austro-Hungarian Empire when Yugoslavia was still a southern territory.

He split me open, and stretched me out. I countered by closing in on him, tightening my hold, garroting him. From his first thrust, it was a battle fought in trenches and caves, and resisted with bombs, rifles and even spiked clubs.

"Oh God," he gulped, "Ava, I feel you holding me close".

Before long, his German forces joined the troops of their brethren in a lightning assault. He stroked harder, deeper, claiming the bloodiest series of mountain battles in the history of my Slovenia. Every time he entered me was a blitzkrieg. There was no build up; it was just sudden annihilation. Leaving me to wrestle with the psychic and emblematic repercussions of this inclusive ejection, and the sacred remnants and remains of the desideratum that endured.

Time elapsed quickly, and again the major powers buffeted. Germany pawed its way to extended ground. We took to the air, as he had always promised, above elevated land that had always been difficult to cross. But the skies were just as precarious, filled with dogfights and bombers, and the shellfire of anti-aircraft guns, aimed remorselessly against me.

It was too much for me to defend. I pulsed against the whip of my Nazi collaborator, and gave into the sweetness of his flicking lash. My senses became omnivorous feeders. The flash point spread from my body, to my toes and fingertips, which expanded into stars.

In my turmoil, I screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed from the pleasure of it, rattling Dragans computer of its baser metals and discs, disturbing his photo enlarger with nothing to project, swirling the waters of his wine in their racks, messing the hair of the landlady smoking downstairs, floating on the air that was damp with the dew, to the bedroom of Michaela asleep on her back.

Dragan tried to muffle my mouth with his hands but it was no use. I was the loud outcry of largess, indulgence with a meaty weapon.      

"Molim, Molim, Molim," I pleaded. Please, please, please.

Perfidious woman, I named myself in arrant spite. I deserved to be paraded through the streets, bound, and shorn bald, to mark my traitorous alliance with the enemy sect.

But instead with unabashed impunity, I soared, hailed for my heroic losses.

Every vector and sector of mine was mizzled with felicity and roses. Even the folds of my waist, which came and went, felt the jubilation.

Dragan retreated slowly, but advanced quickly, sometimes doubling the pressure of his thrust, an inch before collision with our pubic bones.

"Radi sto te volja." Do what you please, I begged him.

I upsurged on my toes to give him deeper access, and curved my back so my breast spilt backwards. The atmosphere was heavy with funk and crime. My hands rented the bed, sabotaging the sheets.  He was the uptake of insemination by tanks and missile launch, punching through to new boroughs, and heisting in the stir, plenty of candied boodles.

"Ah Bog," I prayed to him. Oh God! Have you forsaken me?

He was fully engaged, bombing my Belgrade when I resisted his axis power. My foe would not be deposed. Down went my turrets and baileys and towers. Up went my howls and spasms and sweat. At that point, in a demonstration of German efficiency and impressiveness, he overran the rest of my republics in one swift breach, and then went on to initiate a fratricidal war between my Croats and Serbs that was gory.

I have never been pummeled so hard. And I loved it.

With each orgasm I gave him my swift rivers, the waterpower over rugged terrain. I showed him my ancient cities seen on the ocean floor in the Bay of Kodor. I let him mine me for coal and petroleum to fuel his Third Reich. Each time he proved his invincibility. I called out his name in many ways. Alexander. Charlemagne. Attila. Hitler. Son of Vlad, Prince Dracul, enemy of the Turks.

Savaging my spirit was his feat. He lived to be exalted by my wails. He returned repeatedly to strafe me, and make me a refugee at the onset of winter. Even with CNN watching, and the protective NATO forces in tenancy, his guerilla battalions spiteful stole in at dawn to decimate the last of my Albanian squatters.

As Dragan became more excited, he thrust himself sideways between my legs, angling his body, as he would to do to climb the peaks of the Balkans. His strokes were rapid and penetrative, his erection harder, his thrust strong enough to repel an advancing army. No wonder the Slovenians defeated Milosovic in ten days.

I was swept away and made into solid foam. The foam of bread, meringue, sponge, cork, lungs and bones, the origin of the species. Bubbles. A single cell. I brought him deeper into my body, where I was filled with bubbles and film, tickled him with the effervescence of champagne, the frothiness atop a cappuccino, soaked him in a bubble bath, while slathering his skin with the slickness of shaving cream. My foam was porous and resilient, creating a place to store rocket fuel and absorb the impact of explosions. I was an ocean spray, cresting ever higher, and higher, and higher, light as the sudsy waves, flashing the whiteness of a breaker; then falling tremendously with the sea giving way. 

He waited for my last rippling curl before releasing himself. When he did, the bed seemed to rock beneath a lowering sky. His discharge spewed like fits of brimstone and liquid ash. It transformed him into a phantasm of primordial dread. He carried me up as if he had a griffin's wings, and stared at me with coal red eyes. I was suffocating in his clutches, each of his tremors bringing me closer to death. My pictures told me what to do to save myself. I kissed his chest. Ate away at his heart.

Incontrovertible, his agony was manifestly mine.

 "Ava, at last," the fire-breathing chimera roared.

When Dragan was finished, he held me tight, soaking us together until we made one damp trail of casualties and prisoners.

The war was over. The war was over.

He reassembled himself from his assemblage of tissues and organs as a man at peace. I had defeated him at last. I had slain the dragon.

He was happy with me. He thought my convulsions and whimpering meant I had lain down my arms, and become his docile vilayet. He kissed my forehead, and held me tightly, as if he would never let me go.

He spoke lovingly: "Tomorrow, I will ask your parents for your hand in marriage."

In the morning, I left his bed, and the site of my attempted genocide.

I had sought Dragan out, because I believed he was virile enough to ethnically cleanse me of my German element. I was willing to accept one Reichstag for another. I had accepted the fate of my body: to be fought over and checked like the land of the Southern Slavs.

The next day I glowed from my scourging. I felt light and free of all my past totalitarian dictums. Dragan's marks were at my neck, my bosom and under my shoulder blades in the shape and color of his mouth. But in my mind, I was clean as snow. It was as if Yugoslavia had never existed, as if Germany had never united under Prussian control.

The telephone rang. My mind went to another theatre of war. I saw it in black and white. Heard it in a newscasters voice.

Dateline: Hamburg, July 1943.

The British jam the citys radar and befuddle its defenses. 58 Flying Fortresses drop a payload of 3,000 tons upon the citys shipyards and submarine building yards. The next day, the RAF returns again to bombard the power plants, factory districts, steelworks and ports into absolute ruins. Old fires combine with new fires, ignited by incendiary bombs. As the air heats and rises, cool air rushes to take its place, creating tumultuous winds up to 150 miles an hour. A fiery tempest occurs. The night of July 27, all over the city, trees and cars are carried away and smashed into the superheated air. The asphalt is ablaze. There is no protection during this nine-day ordeal. Even those in the bomb shelters are suffocated, and then incinerated. This is first of the war's firestorms. Nearly half of the citys buildings are damaged or destroyed. Over 50,000 dead. Die Katastrophe.     

This is what I did to Johannes, by going to bed with Dragan. Die Katastrophe.

I answered the phone. My mind was clean as snow. I waited for the other voice to respond. It was not him. I wanted it to be Johannes. Still. My pictures curled up and died. The dragon had left his lair.  Die Katastrophe.