One of the saddest—and most ironic—casualties of the internecine Greek-Turkish war on Cyprus that divided the island into warring camps three decades ago was the once-famous and elegant Ledra Palace Hotel. The Treaty Room of the Ledra Palace, a hulking stone edifice in the Moorish style, had been the venue where the British secretly committed the crime of slicing up the Arabian Peninsula and Levant at the end of World War I in a purposeful—and highly successful—effort to make political boundaries perpetually volatile there. A similar travesty was to be committed in the same room by the same British in the early 1970s, when, with a green grease pencil, a British officer drew the "Green Line" cease-fire line separating Greek Cypriots from Turkish Cypriots. The irony for the hotel, was that this green line went right through the hotel itself, indeed down the center of the Treaty Room, condemning the once five-star hotel to the oblivion of a no man's land. The building subsequently was taken over by the United Nations peacekeeping contingent as a barracks for its troops.
This all led, in a roundabout way, to my memories of the most exuberant and playful lover I've ever had—not to mention the thickest cock I've ever taken.
Foreign diplomats like me in Cyprus were permitted to cross between the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot zones, but there was only one always-available border crossing, and that was on the street running right by the entrance to the Ledra Palace Hotel in the center of the capital city, Nicosia.
Our cars had to stop at, first, the Greek checkpoint right under the front balconies of the Ledra Palace, and then drive slowly through the UN-controlled buffer zone and stop again for a document check at the Turkish checkpoint.
I credit the military unit sign above the entrance to the hotel, now UN barracks, for becoming Svend's man toy. I had stepped out of my car while the soldiers at the Greek checkpoint were checking my diplomatic passport and I looked up and smiled at the new unit sign, which said "The Norwegian Stallions." I found that so incongruous, expecting "stallions" to be used for a military unit from the American West and for Scandinavians to use something like "Vikings," instead, and this incongruity made me smile broadly.
At first I didn't see Svend, sitting on a stone balcony just above and to the left of the unit sign. If I had seen him first, the "stallion" name wouldn't have seemed incongruous to me, and we probably never would have met. He was a magnificent blond hulk and he was sitting wearing only a pair of loose khaki shorts in a rickety chair braced back against the wall. When my eyes did turn to him, seeking a slight movement at the periphery of my vision, the smile was still plastered on my face. His shorts were so loose at the legs that, with his propped back position, I could see all the way up his legs to a pair of huge balls. He stared cockily down at me, obviously very pleased with himself—and fully knowing his manhood was exposed to me—and with every right to be pleased with himself. He was one hung of male young in his full glory.
I do remember having a fleeting impression of him smiling broadly back at me, but just then the Greeks were finished trying, as their usual wont, albeit halfheartedly, to dissuade me from driving into the Turkish enemy's camp, and I was on my way.
The whole incident didn't really make that much of an impression on me—or so I thought. I was crossing the border on an important mission. If I hadn't been preoccupied with that, that Norwegian beauty probably would have haunted me for some time thereafter. But weeks later, when I found myself temporarily alone in Nicosia without family, I took advantage of sneaking into an underground gay bar in the suburb of Makedonitissa, very near to the main UN base inside the buffer zone.
I was at the bar, quietly drinking—a bit too much, I'm afraid—and taking in the gay scene around me, when a Norse god saddled up beside me. He looked sort of familiar, but not really. But he certainly looked good—all muscle and square-jawed good looks.
