A postcard home
Discovering new sensations in Istanbul.
Written by Tom
Edward Hooper creaked down the steep wooden staircase to a parlour, dimly lit by bulbous brass lanterns, set with coloured glass in the traditional Ottoman style. A stove in the corner gave off a little heat, but he still felt cold. He hadn’t slept well and he felt coated in layers of grime, accumulated from his long train journey across Europe.
Edward had reached Istanbul’s Sirkeci railway station the previous evening. The Orient Express may have been comfortable, but the soot from the engine had built like mascara round his eyes. He had taken a small room in a modest Pansion on a steep alley in Galatasaray, where washing facilities were a jug of water and a copper bowl.
The owner brought him a glass of sweet Turkish tea from the small kettle on the stove. He had a narrow, friendly face with bright eyes.
“You are welcome in Istanbul, sir.”
“Thank you. I am thrilled to be here.”
“You didn’t bring your wife?”
“No. I’m a bachelor.”
“Without a wife, you have also freedom to see all it has to offer. I am not so lucky as you in that respect!” The owner grinned and gently squeezed Edward’s shoulder.
“I so look forward to my stay. But before anything else, I need to bathe and wash properly after my journey.”
“Then you should go to a hamam.” Looking quite intensely at Edward for a moment, the owner added: “I recommend the Yesildirek Hamami by the Golden Horn. Tell them that Mustafa sent you.”
On the narrow street outside, Edward dodged heavy metal barrows laden with cauliflowers and hessian sacks. Though it was late March, it was cold, with bursts of sleet driven by a sharp northeast wind from the Black Sea. He tilted his trilby to the wind.
Istanbul looked grey. The colours of the Ottoman Empire had faded with Atatürk’s utilitarian, modernising Republic. The poverty in the streets, still scarred by the Depression and post-war upheavals was all about him, reminding him of London’s East End. The ubiquitous flag of the Republic, as well as a fluttering hammer and sickle above the Soviet Consulate and the swastikas draped either side of that of the German Reich added the only colour; blood-red without warmth.
Edward didn’t hold radical political views, though he had faith, a social conscience and misgivings about his worthiness. At 25, he was young enough to have escaped the Great War, but its consequences and enduring tragedies had deeply shaped his own family and his generation.
By the bridge over the Golden Horn, he bought Turkish cigarettes. The smoke was almost as fierce as that belching from the ferries churning the water beneath him. Watching rows of fishermen braced against the wind and sleet, he wrote a postcard to his mother announcing his safe arrival and thrust it in his pocket.
The door to the Yesilderik Hamami opened to a large anteroom surrounded by wooden alcoves. A serious young Turk gave him a glass of tea and a simple cotton towel and gestured that he should change and then follow him.
Through another set of doors, Edward was immediately overwhelmed by a vast vaulted ceiling with skylights shaped like stars and a crescent moon. Shining marble pillars surrounded a flat dais, with all the magnificence of a grand mosque. In the corners, dimly lit and shrouded in rising steam, he made out more alcoves and vague human shapes.
Emerging from the shadows, a strong hirsute man in a towel beckoned him and without speaking, began to lather him forcefully with a warm, soapy sponge, drawing his arms and legs, and pounding his back as he lay on a warm marble slab. His cotton towel was already soaked, hugging his loins.
Edward felt a rush of excitement as the masseur’s hands worked at his inner thighs. He felt the towel lift away from his buttocks which the masseur squeezed and pummelled hard. Firmly and rhythmically, the masseur worked Edward’s muscles through silky bubbles of soap.
With each move, like a wave from the sea, Edward’s hand felt a hard crotch come to rest in his palm, slipping away only to return a little harder. The towel had now been pulled free of his body. Edward felt his last defence had been played. His balls were now being massaged and his cock was stiffer than a white collar from the laundry.
There was no dignity in his release.
“Evet?” Edward felt his face pulled to greet the masseur. The other hand straddled his balls and anus, now partially penetrated by a firm thumb. Gently, he was lifted from the slab. His soaking towel abandoned and of no purpose to an engorged cock, or the masseur’s thumb, still embedded in his anus. Edward was marched to the dais in the centre of the hamam and, with a hard smack on the buttocks, was sent skating belly first across an immaculate, slick marble surface.
“Mehmet, Sie haben mir einen recht schönen Jungen geschickt!”
Edward’s uncontrolled erotic slide had been halted by the glistening blond-haired thighs of a man, the meaning of whose guttural pronouncements were as much a mystery to Edward as the ministrations of the Byzantine civil service.
He looked up into the ice blue eyes of his impromptu buffer. “I’m awfully sorry old chap. I seem to have lost control of my brakes, what? Edward Hooper. How d’you do?”
“Brakes are not necessary here. Mehmet removes our brakes.”
“Well I do feel a lot cleaner, now, if that’s what you mean.”
“I’m supposing you are English?”
“I’m supposing you are German?”
The thighs belonged to someone whom Edward supposed might be in his mid-thirties, with confident eyes. Though he understood no German, the man came across as an intellectual, or at least someone of learning. He had short-cropped blond hair, Slavic high cheekbones and thick lips. Just over the thigh, still at eye level and a couple of tongue lengths away from Edward, he sported a wholly exposed and impressive long cock.
“Mehmet is very good. Do you not think? I think he has just taken good care of you and I can tell you are altogether pleased. So am I.”
The German hauled Edward towards him, looked deeply in his eyes and propped him up with one arm round his shoulder.
“I think maybe you are new here?”
“Yes, I came yesterday. Are you also visiting?”
“No, I am teaching. The government here is driving a modernisation programme. I am a professor at the technical institute. I needed to leave Germany and so this was an opportunity I could not forgo.”
The German’s hand had slid down Edward’s naked body and was gently massaging his cock.
“You mean you had to leave because of the National Socialists?”
“Yes. I was working at the Institut für Sexuellwissenschaft in Berlin. I am a psychologist. I was doing research on the entirety of sexual life. Two years ago, in May 1933, our centre was attacked by the Sturmabteilung. Our library of 12,000 books was burnt. The Nazis believe that our work is unnatural and contrary to the values of the German people. Our Director, Magnus Hirschfeld, escaped to Switzerland. He was a pioneer of sexual understanding. He invented the term “Homosexuell”, of which I assume you have heard and which I further assume, from looking at your penis, is a concept with which you are more than comfortable.”
Edward was, indeed, more than comfortable. But he had little experience of this world, that was to him at once shaming and yet overwhelmingly and lustfully gripping. Deeply protected by his mother and aunt after the death of his father and two elder brothers in the War, he had done little more than fumble at Cambridge with his Divinity professor and a couple of Communist fellow travellers.
“Is it not dangerous for you here?”
“Yes, of course. Istanbul is full of German refugees: Jews, homosexuals and free-thinkers. Yet Turkey is not such an altruistic refuge for us. They want expertise and so we have a chance, but there are also many Reichsdeutsche with strong connections to the Nazi leadership, with whom the Turkish government also wants to do business. They would happily send me back to Germany with the right representations from Berlin. Incidentally, in that case, Berlin would not be my final destination; the Konzentrationslager would be waiting for me.
“I must apologise. I failed to introduce myself: Doktor von Bülow, Manfred. May I have the pleasure, Mr Hooper?”
Tugging Edward’s cock, Manfred gently placed it opposite his own. Mehmet had ensured that neither cock had yet receded to its storage position, and neither needed much encouragement to flourish again.
“You are young, Mr Hooper, yet you have none of the inhibitions of your compatriots.”
“I think you are a gentleman of great knowledge. I never want to be inhibited in learning from others such as you.”
With a slick movement of his supple hips, Manfred opened his golden thighs and reclined, stretching his hard abdominal muscles He pulled Edward’s resurgent cock to his perineum and then the tip of his soft anus, a pulsating deep rouge, like one of the sea anemones Edward had admired in rockpools on Cornish summer holidays.
Guided patiently by Manfred, Edward slipped into the sea anemone, firm, convulsing, coaxing him strongly inwards, warm in its welcome. Edward’s cup was overflowing. Against Manfred’s hard body, observed through beautiful cool and seldom smiling eyes, Edward felt the rumblings of a deep volcanic eruption. Manfred took the younger man’s loads with a researcher’s satisfaction, as if validating a deeply considered hypothesis.
Edward eyed rivulets of spunk merge with tiny steam-fed streams under Manfred’s prostrate body. The eyes were still steamy, but the coldness had gone. Edward wondered how many other naked men before them, engulfed in lust, steam and oil had disgorged their semen across that marble dais. An Ottoman paradise, now in jeopardy from the ugly forces of the modern world.
“You will come tomorrow I hope?”
“I will try to do better tomorrow.” Edward was feeling proud, satiated and humble, but overwhelmingly resolved to serve and learn from Manfred.
In the cold sleet outside, Edward felt an inner warmth, an elation, a knowledge that he knew who he was and what he wanted.
He was not in a mood to walk on to Sultanahmet. He would leave Topkapi and the Hagia Sophia to another day.
Instead, he retraced his steps to his Pansion in Galatasaray.
He climbed the creaking steps to his room and lay on his bed, throwing his boots, overcoat, hat and clothes to the floor. He read a few pages of Agatha Christie’s latest novel, Murder on the Orient Express, before descending into the sleep denied him the previous night.
He jumped at a knock on the door. Before he could respond, it had opened. His host was asking him if there was anything missing.
“No, that’s kind of you. Everything seems in order.”
“You like Yesildirek?”
“Yes, it was very cleansing, thank you.”
“Did you see Mehmet?”
“Yes. I saw him - he was my masseur.”
“Did he massage you well?”
Yes, he was very good and kind.” Edward was not ready to be anything other than economical with the truth.
“When you mention my name, Mehmet gives extra good massage.”
Mustafa smiled. Only then did Edward remember he was naked.
Mustafa’s hand was already caressing the smooth crescents of Edward’s freshly laundered arse.
The light, wiry body of his host sprung astride him, trousers at his ankles. A hard, thin, circumcised cock slid slowly up and down the tramline of Edward’s crack. Pressed against his hole, Edward felt the same invigoration that Mehmet’s thumb had inspired. Then it deepened. He felt a pain and his hole clenched, but Mustafa was undeterred. Driving entry, Edward felt a pain he’d never before experienced, biting the pillow with tears and a cry.
Pulsating with pain, he also knew Mustafa was fully inside. Somehow, in his excruciating pain, he felt a deeper achievement in that. He was accommodating a vigorous Turkish cock. He felt spasms across his body and deep within his arse as Mustafa unloaded.
Mustafa was already pulling up his trousers as Edward turned round. He felt Mustafa’s cum seeping out. He reached for his overcoat pocket to pull out a handkerchief.
The door closed behind Mustafa and he was alone again. Nursing a raw pain in his arse, his sense of achievement was undimmed and had even renewed his libido. Wanking hard, he shot three more long strands into the attendant handkerchief.
Exhilarated, exhausted and expended, half in sleep, he held the handkerchief, sodden with spunk, high above his head, rotating round, he swung it back into his overcoat pocket.
Only then did he remember the postcard. He stood up and retrieved the handkerchief and the postcard, observing that his magnificent handwriting had been smudged, in places to illegibility. A yellowly blotch was noticeable and had sunk through to discolour the gardens of the Hagia Sophia on the other side.
Edward pondered. He should stir himself and buy another postcard. Yet, naked and satiated, and less than a day since his arrival in this remarkable city, he smiled at the thought of this spunk-stained greeting taking pride of place on the mantelpiece back home. His mother and Aunt Maud would be admiring the gardens of the Hagia Sophia through the magnifying glass, little knowing its true significance to Edward’s thirst for discovery in the East.
This story was written as part of a Naked Men Talking Writing Workshop, in response to the prompt "Historic Cum". Copyright remains with the author - this story cannot be republished or distributed without the consent of the author.
Gareth Johnson