Chapter Fifteen
Past Revisited
I admired the sight of my wife as she arranged clothes out. She’d bought me several suits and even now she was busy mating up ties with them. She’d first hold up one tie and then another. She seemed to come to some sort of conclusion and she threw two of the ties onto the bed, while draping the three remaining ones over the three suits that she had bought me.
She glanced over at me then and her eyes drifted down me admiringly as I finished toweling off. The first shower before lunch, hadn’t quite done the job so I’d taken a bath after lunch while Zora had shopped. I felt like I’d lost several skin layers, but at least I didn’t stink anymore.
Several pretty dresses were also hung up along with my suits, “You like?” Zora asked with a look to her eyes that said that she liked very much what she was looking at.
“Very much so.” I said never taking my eyes off of her.
Her smile was teasing, “I meant my dresses.”
“They’ll look nice on you Zora, but right now I think your best look involves less clothing.” I said as I backed her up to the edge of the bed.
I glanced down then and picked up the two discarded ties.
Apologetically Zora said, “I couldn’t make up my mind in the store, which ones would look the best so I bought two extras. Sorry for the waste.”
Taking one of the ties I smoothly looped off both of her wrists and had her hands tied together in front of her before she could even blink. Her shocked eyes raised up from her bound hands to meet my gaze.
“See there’s no waste darling.” I said glibly, as I saw her struggle inwardly with your captive state.
I was treading on dangerous ground and I was pretty sure I was making her relive some horrible repressed memories right now, if the hell to be seen in her eyes was anything to go by.
Gently I asked, “Do you trust me Zora?”
She blinked and I watched the hell fade away from her eyes and she seemed to recognize me as her lover once again. She breathed inwardly and shook her head yes even though I could tell she didn’t like what I was up to.
I turned her around then and I blindfolded her with the second tie. She sucked in her breath and started to shake and I cringed inside at what I was causing to take place within her, but grimly I pressed on with the plan.
Click.
She jumped slightly startled, “What was that?”
“My knife.” I responded evenly.
She jerked hard, but I held her in place as she asked in a panicked voice, “What do you have a knife out for?”
Keeping my tone light I said, “Silly girl, how else do you think I’m going to get your clothes off with your hands tied?”
“Oh.” Came her response as I sliced her shirt away and then the straps of her bra.
She was still shaking and almost in a whisper she said, “I don’t like this game Elon!”
I let my forehead rest on her bare shoulder for a moment. In the month we had been intimate with each other Zora had denied me nothing that I had desired of her. This was the first time that she had ever come close to telling me no and it pained me that I’d driven her generous nature so far.
“I know you don’t Zora, but it’s a game we’re going to play.”
She continued quivering within my grasp, but she didn’t say anything. Her hands started raising towards her eyes, but I pulled them back down.
I picked her up and laid her on the bed and began kissing her and she began to relax a little.
“Relax honey and trust me to make this enjoyable for you.” I whispered into her ear.
Bravely she raised her bound hands up above her head and I tied them off to the headboard.
Shadows had grown dark outside. I sat with my back to the headboard beside of Zora, who was still tied off to it. I had spared no expenditure of effort into completely overloading her senses with pleasure for hours. About an hour ago she had passed out completely worn out from passion.
I waited silently in the dark gloom of the room. I had removed her blindfold when she’d fallen asleep and now I gazed down into her face waiting.
Her hands suddenly tightened into fists and pulled against the restraining tie. Denied freedom of movement her face twisted into anguish and she moaned. This was what I had been waiting for.
I eased down in the bed and brought both of my hands to either side of her head as I accessed the part of her mind and the memories that haunted her that she always kept locked off from me.
The vividness of the memory that she was reliving had me jerking with pain at the impact of linking with her.
The town was burning. Bodies lay bloody and abused in the street everywhere. They were many bodies and most of them were headless. Here and there were pyramidal piles created of the heads of the fallen bodies.
The scene within Zora’s head was both surreal and horrible. Surreal, because despite how real it felt I knew the basis for all this imagery had happened long since and wasn’t occurring in real time. Horrible, because such a scene of utter destruction and death had ever occurred, especially because the one I loved had lived through this.
The heat of the fires consuming the buildings of the town was blistering hot, but I continued to make my way down the bloodstained street unmindful of it. At the end of the village was a church now wreathed in flames. In front of it in the street lay a mangled body of what had once been a man.
He had been whipped to death and was beyond any recognition, but intuitively I knew this man was Zora’s father. Torn up hymnals and Bibles lay strewn on the ground fluttering and curling from the heat of the nearby flames. I continued on.
I walked out of the deserted village following the trail of many feet. Here and there a dead body lay off to the side of the forced march.
The miles seemed to disappear quickly and in the dreamlike setting I was suddenly at a larger town. It wasn’t burning. Indeed some people were going about their business as if nothing had happened. Not so for others.
Some parts of the town were vacant. Their owners ripped from their lands and homes.
At the one end of the town was a stockade. Here countless people had been kept like a herd of beef cows at a slaughterhouse. The pen once filled with its human cargo was empty now and I followed the trail onward through my beloved’s memory.
The terrain turned more desert like and the heat of the hot sun overhead became more intense. The desertscape started giving up its victims.
At first they were in the hundreds and then the bodies lying sightless in the sand mounted into the thousands.
Buzzards, crows , and desert jackals tore at the naked bodies, as I walked through the scene of so many people’s tortured end. I knew where I was now.
I was walking along the lane of one of the worst unsung ethnic cleansings in history. Everything I was seeing and experiencing was the evidence of a genocide whose perpetrators said had never happened. This was the Armenian Genocide, which had taken place around the time period of World War I.
Armenia had been an old country with very early Christian roots that dated back to the early days of the Christian church. At some point it had ceased to be a country and was assimilated into the boundaries of Turkey. Muslims and Christians had coexisted in an uneasy truce within the same border of a nation.
The Christians had been the minority within Turkey. A falling away of relations between Christian and Muslim took place and everything had changed for the worse. Turkish soldiers under sanctioned authority drove between one million and two million Armenian Christians on death marches into the desert to die.
Some estimates of the death toll were even higher. Even to the current era over a hundred years later the Turkish government still denied that the Armenian Genocide ever took place, but such a refusal to claim responsibility for past misdeeds did not do away with all the evidence of their past actions, which offer their own testimony as did the testimony of those who survived.
Zora had survived. Somehow my precious love had survived this hell on Earth scene that lay all around me that stretched out as far as the eye could see.
As the memory unfolded I walked on through the hot sand littered with the corpses of martyrs. They became fewer and fewer, as the stumbling trails through the sand stopped one by one, until there was only one trail that continued on.
The desert grew dark and cold and rounding a corner I saw them.
There was a girl maybe ten years of age who lay on the ground shivering, as she hugged herself for warmth against the chill air of the desert night. There was no hope in the child’s eyes. Eyes that reflected an emptiness that was heartbreaking to behold.
Zora the woman stood within the ground plane of her remembered memory staring down at the earlier version of her herself that lay shivering on the sand. A little girl’s soul shattered by the atrocities of mankind.
I stepped up and wrapped my arms around Zora and she leaned back against me trustingly.
“You’re not that scared all alone in the world girl anymore Zora. You don’t have to keep reliving this terrible memory. I’ll protect you. I promise.”
She turned her face and pressed it into my neck in search of comfort and closeness as she breathed out, “I know.”
She was quiet for a moment before saying, “My Papa told me that there would be a man one day, who would change every misconception I had about what men were and that I would be happy in his arms.” She pressed back harder against me with the saying of her words and I held her all the more tighter to me.
“Are you happy Zora?”
She turned and hooked her arms around my neck and nodded with her eyes wet with tears, “Very happy! But I have a bone to pick with you Mister!”
“Oh and what’s that?” I asked cautiously.
“Why did you have to scare me half to death by tying me up so that this memory would be prompted? You know I would’ve told you if you’d asked!”
Actually I hadn’t known that.
“Maybe I just like to see you squirm and moan from unavoidable pleasure for hours on end.”
She made as if to slap me, but chuckling I stepped backward and opened my eyes.
My eyes met her now opened ones as we lay together in the darkened bedroom. Her eyes reflected the wrathful payback she wished to enact for how I had tormented her all afternoon, but she couldn’t slap me because her hands were still tied. A fact that she was very much aware of. Her eyes were stormy as she gazed at me.
“I’m sorry. I should’ve asked. Do you forgive me?”
She chewed her full lower lip for a moment indecisively before giving in, “I forgive you, but next time I get to tie you up!”
“That seems fair.” I admitted, as I leaned up on one elbow and started to untie her hands, but her words stopped me.
“Did I say I wanted you to untie me?”
I glanced down into her playful eyes that bore no trace of the awfulness of her past or of the need for revenge, because of how I had taken advantage of her instead of just asking as I should’ve.
It was wonderful to be her man. I didn’t have to be perfect, because all she cared about was how I loved her.
I kissed my captive bride all thought of releasing her, gone, as she seemed rather content to be as she was, forever mine.