They were innocent days. I had felt no shame being nude among family. In a home where pants and underpants and dresses and panties came off very often, it was provincial not to develop some immunity to the feeling of shame. Although some of my older siblings demurred with me, nothing could have been more natural than nudity.
And then I grew up.
My father was a generous man, who channeled his generosity towards adopting, as family, people he thought he could trust and people, in his beneficence, he pitied. He could be forgiven for seeming condescending but his intentions had always been noble. The time was rife for his sons to be trained in religion. It was just another one of many rites of passage boys took in my family. So a new resident tutor was employed for this purpose. His name was Kohnsan Tin-Haw, and my brothers and I were to address him as Master Kohnsan or Master Kohn for short. Father regarded him as his own brother and so accorded him all the privileges of an extended family member.
As the newest member of the family, Master Kohnsan was venerated as an elder, given free use of the house, a grand chamber suite and an important place at the dining table. The family grew to respect, trust and revere him due in part to his own careful orchestration while he schemed his way into our hearts.
I was fifteen and, together with my other adolescent stepbrothers Jorhan and Erzhen, was put under his religious tutelage. Master Kohn conducted his classes with one pupil at a time in his care. He had professed the magnanimity of preferring to give us individual and undivided attention. Father was impressed and grateful. In the full year that I studied under him, I found him to be an intellectual manque, articulate, if often given to grandiloquent monologues, and well-versed in foreign affairs and the philosophy of such thinkers as Descartes, Jung and Sartre. I liked him. He would have liked me more had I exacted passive submission to his orthodox moral and religious authority.
About the same time, Father had employed, just for me, a tutor in Mathematics because that was my weakest school subject. Father took him in and treated him as a son but he chose not to be a live-in employee. I embraced him into my heart immediately for he was handsome, droll and close to my chronological age, though far mature in mental age. His name was Kyyern Li and in public I addressed him as Master Kyyern. In private, however, he was my Ky. I was to be his ingenue lover, and in Father's and First Brother Mishka's absence, I sought his intellectual and emotional counsel in many academic and personal matters. Now, I was deeply in love with Ky. I believed I had made him fall in love with me, too.
Things sailed along relatively calm waters in the first year. Then one tempest-filled day I found out that, unable to be the captain of his own corporeal soul and world because the world of palpability was lost to him, my little autistic brother had let Master Kohn steer him into the currents of treacherous waters. My nine year-old brother Jieshan had often wandered into Master Kohn's private chamber for no other reason than the fact that he was in oblivion of his surroundings and he enjoyed gamboling in the labyrinths and making us seek him out.
Our mother had sent me in search of him. It was time for his feeding and bath before the rest of us supped. I had often heard Master Kohn talking to my only full brother behind the door of his chamber, and so I had guessed that day that Jieshan might be there. I stopped outside Master Kohn's door and, overhearing noises of crying inside, I was instinctively consumed with fear for my baby brother and myself. I dispensed with convention and entered the chamber without giving my tutor warning.
"Good God," I cried.
Jieshan was on my tutor's lap, his diaper undone and around his knees, his penis clasped in the latter's fisted hand. I snatched my Jieshan away. His diaper slipped to the floor while I carried him on my hip. My little one continued to cry on my shoulder.
"What were you doing?" I asked Master Kohn, but I had my suspicion already.
"Your brother had soiled his diaper, that's all," Master Kohn explained in a calm voice. "I was about to change him."
"On your lap?" I asked. "And what with?"
I bent down and picked up the diaper. I inspected it briefly and then threw it in Master Kohn's smug face. "It's dry, you son of a bitch," I exclaimed.
"Relax," Master Kohn said, shooting me a look that suggested he found my paranoia unfounded. "You're frightening the poor boy. See how he's crying."
"Don't you dare, sir," I snarled. "I heard him crying outside your door. Don't you ever touch my brother again or Papa will be told."
I realized my ill-devised threat had been imprudent for surely Master Kohn had, later in the evening, gone to Father at the first opportunity to take issue with him of my conduct. Father had me summoned for an audience with himself and my tutor at the ancestral altar. The summons paralyzed me with renewed fear.
I sent word back that I would be along shortly for I was putting Jieshan to bed. My little brother lay on my pulse while I lulled him to sleep. He was trembling and terrified. Under his changed diaper, his penis and anus were red and tender to the touch.
I couldn't help remembering my other full brother, Joachim. He would be fourteen this year had he been alive. He died at the age of two after a short battle with leukemia. His small and diseased body could not have fought and won. I was four but I saw how devastated my mother had been. It took four years for her to mourn for Joachim before she would agree to conceive again, but she had grown weak from the mourning and Jieshan's birth had been a difficult one.
I could not let Mother know now or ever what had befallen Jieshan for she could never survive another guilt pang. When at last I was convinced that Jieshan was asleep and safe in his crib under his nurse's vigil, I sought my father.
I found Father and Master Kohn in the ante-chamber which was kept as a shrine to our ancestral altar. Father was in despair. In his hand was the broken statuette of a deity.
"Explain this, please, son," he demanded, looking very aggrieved. "Did you break this icon in rebellion towards Master Kohn's lessons?"
I sank to the floor and wound my arms around Father's knees. He could not possibly believe Master Kohn's lies. I was going to tell him the truth, for it was already on the tip of my tongue, when all of a sudden a frightening realization hit me. My God, I thought, Master Kohn did this! For all of his religious fervor and pious advocates, he was able to bring himself to break the deity into two and then fabricate a lie about it. Yet, here he was, none the worse for his sacrilege and still in one piece and wearing that smirk. There was no lightning and brimstone. There was no god of fury who meted instant judgement on all that incurred his wrath. My God, everything he had taught me and my brothers had been a lie, and he knew it was a lie. And now he was challenging me to call him a liar knowing too well I was precocious enough to realize that the ante was his.
For at sixteen, I was at an age when adults believed boys readily espoused negative impressions, so even though I had never lied to Father, and he knew it, what was to stop him from thinking that I could start to lie now? And if Master Kohn could commit such an unconscionable abomination as iconoclasm, and yet live, what was to stop him from committing worse atrocities that could bring irreparable harm to Jieshan if Father were to take his side now? I knew that Father could never believe the truth. Father could not be faulted for the seeds of a year's worth of trust had been sown in him and were now being reaped by Master Kohn.
And so I could not pick up Master Kohn's gauntlet. What was a little caning from my father as long as Jieshan and Mother were safe?
"Yes, Papa," I sobbed, "I did it. I wasn't thinking. I'm sorry."
It was more than a little caning I got.
Father tore his garment in sorrow and called my oldest stepbrothers and then my mother and stepmothers who all heard about what a grotesquely degenerate being I had become. I was then dragged to the exercise yard, which was Father's choice of venue for carrying out a caning for only extremely serious offenses. Father had my body stripped of all its covering, my tunic and trousers, and all my undergarments, my boy-knickers and undershirt, and then placed my naked body on top of the caning stool. My buttocks were raised, my wrists and spread ankles were tied with ropes, and I felt worse than a convicted criminal. My mother was already weeping.
Father was handed my cane; it was long, thin and made of rattan. At the best of times, it was my redeemer, and I relished it. At the worst, such as today, it was a rapacious predator that could inflict untold physical and psychological damage on its prey. It was then that I dreaded it. I was an animal of prey now, stripped and exposed naked, vulnerable to human exploits and used for their good. I was helpless to defend myself and the one I depended on to protect me was about to be the one from whom I needed protection.
THWACK! The first lash from my father was forceful and I thought it must have sliced my bottom into two. I felt abstracted from my bottom, as if it had been carved from me.
I also thought that I had screamed for help. But no one came to rescue me. No one showed pity or offered words of comfort. I had broken a deity and desecrated the house. I was the demon's child and would be lucky to escape being put to death by stoning or drowning. I was the lowest form of life and ought to be outcast. Where Father had always had ready words of encouragement and advice when he was disciplining his children, there was none for me. He had been too distraught at my deed and silenced by the guilt of having fathered a monster such as I, as well as by the fear of a divine revanche. I longed so much to tell Father this was merely superstition, for see how Master Kohn had escaped condemnation of his own and he was the heretic, not I.
But the cane was landing on my naked bottom again.
THWACK! THWACK! THWACK! THWACK! THWACK! THWACK! THWACK! Father was using it to lick my entire raised up bottom with precision of placement and pain. I screamed, howled and cried for mercy. Mercy was not mine to grasp at today.
The cane brutalized my bottom twenty times and left me in a swoon at the end. After that, I was untied from the stool and Father himself dragged me back to the enclave where the ancestral altar was ensconced, ordering me to kneel before it. Of all the hypocritical condiments to the bitter medicine I must take to cure me of my recidivism, Master Kohn then led the family in a long session of cult-like incantations, prayer and meditation in order to re-consecrate the house and restore peace. Our mute and mindless gods were being appeased.
Corner time was on the floor facing the enclave. I was forced to kneel with my upper body prostrate and my nose touching the floor. My anus was sticking upward and outward in this posture. I was thus exposed for an hour while my brothers and sisters came and went, but no one was allowed to minister to me or touch me. I was sobbing during the hour. My bottom was in trauma and badly needed soothing and medication. While it ached, it was also torturing my mind with the reproach that my suffering had not been worth it.
I was omitted at supper and instead made to stand on a chair to be further displayed naked and shamed in front of the dinner party. Father had sentenced me to an extended lesson with Master Kohn the following day and my stepmothers argued with him about having me dedicated immediately to a temple idol as restitution before misfortune befell the family. I had single-handedly spoilt everyone's dinner.
At last alone in my chamber, I challenged Father's ordinance with a call to my tutor, Ky. I had been forsaken by everyone and needed Ky badly. I must have sounded desperate for he arrived at my home in half the time it should have taken to reach me from the city. Father was in no mood to argue with anybody that day and so consented to Ky's visit.
Ky had a habit of carrying with him a bottle of oriental multi-purpose liniment everywhere he went. "You never know when some man or woman has a headache just when I want _s_e_x_," he had told me one time. I believed him for before I came along, he had used to be everything to everyone, _s_e_x_ slave, slave master, toy boy, paramour. He simply loved _s_e_x_ and fell in love easily. Now there was only me.
The liniment proved handy, for while he was rubbing it liberally into my welts, I already felt comforted despite my broken body and spirit. I longed so much for the truth to be told to Father but now that I felt that the worst was over, it no longer mattered, and I was restored to my first conviction. It was better for Jieshan this way. Ky had also been sworn to secrecy.
"I don't think this is helping Jieshan," he said to me nevertheless. "But I see your mind is made up. Only let there not be a second time for I will not hold my peace then."
There wasn't a second time. At least not for Jieshan, for I had given Master Kohn my crudely-worded warning the following day when I appeared naked to him for my lessons. I promised him that I would not tell Father the next time he hurt my brother but neither would I hesitate to take a rapier to him.
"You're nothing but trash, sir," I told him between meditating from a scroll.
From then on, Master Kohn turned his perversions towards me. Shy of touching my private parts, he subjected me to verbal abuse, threats of a caning in his hand and an assortment of mildly sickening acts of _s_e_x_ual harassment for the slightest and pettiest misconduct. As the days passed, there was to be more misconduct on my part for I despised him and his lies. I tolerated his abuse for the sake of Father's religion, Mother's sanity and Jieshan's innocence, all of which had to be preserved at all cost.
In the short time that it took Master Kohn to turn my house from a normal champaign into a ravaged field of mayhem, I had learned some very important lessons. Master Kohn had brought shame to the house and in so doing, transported me to a new plane of understanding of shame. Nudity had become vulgar in his presence for he was vulgar. I was never again free to be naked in my own home. More than this, Master Kohn had created a maelstrom of confusion in my inner and secret sanctum. My conception of _s_e_x_uality, spirituality and eschatology was also never again to be the same. They had all taken on a new anathema of life.
Master Kohn was a worse type of enemy than all of my father's political enemies and the revolutionaries that waged their continual wars in the jungles, but openly so. For Master Kohn was noxious, crafty and sly, and his influence insidious. In every sense of the expression, he was the enemy within.
Ky had very sweetly deigned to stay the night to take care of me. It was my turn to be lulled to sleep. Ky kept me close to his chest while I wept for the burden of the truth and the loss of holy innocence that I knew could never be recovered.
THE END