Free Funeral Rites by Jean Genet Page A

afraid?”
    “No. I said I wasn't.”
    Erik remained calm. He did not even feel angry. His heart was on his wrist. He heard the watch ticking.
    “I'll give him the watch,” he thought, “and that'll do it.” He thought vaguely that by admitting he had the watch he would escape being buggered. Obviously one doesn't send an executioner to execute watch thieves. That's a childish fear.
    “If I can get it off. . . .”
    He managed to unbuckle the strap. The watch fell to the wet grass. He felt purer. Yet he had no doubt as to the man's intentions. They had walked a few yards farther. Erik leaned against the executioner.
    In spite of the cold and dampness and of his anxiety and disgust, Erik was thrilled. He had a hard-on. He shivered, and suddenly, brutally, he pressed against the executioner.
    “Ah!”
    The man's smile faded, then for three seconds he seemed to hesitate, to wait for an inspiration, and as his eyes met Erik's fleeting gaze, suddenly, at the right corner of his mouth, his smile returned (only to the corner), and became more pronounced, confident, and decisive.
    “You're good-looking,” he said, freeing Erik's left shoulder from his grip and stroking his cheek with the back of his hand.
    Thus the most spiritualized form of Jean was giving fleecy asylum to the love of a Berlin executioner and a young Nazi. Let's see it through. Erik and the executionerwere locked in an embrace, face to face. Erik's underpants were torn. His khaki breeches were falling down and forming a thick heap of clothes between his legs, and his buttocks were crushed in the fog against the red bark, those soft-skinned, amber buttocks, as rich to the eye as the milky fog whose matter had the luster of a pearl. Erik hung from the executioner's neck with both hands. His feet were no longer touching the wet grass, though his breeches were, having fallen down between his naked calves and his ankles. The executioner, whose prick was still stiff and was now between Erik's pressed thighs, held him up and dug into the rich earth. Then-knees were piercing the mist. The executioner was hugging the boy to him and, at the same time, backing him up and crushing his ass against the tree. Erik was pulling the man's head. The executioner realized that the boy was solidly built and tremendously violent. They stayed in that position for a few seconds without moving, the two heads pressing hard against each other, cheek to cheek. The executioner was the first to break away, for he had discharged between Erik's golden thighs, which were velvety with morning mist. The position had lasted only a brief moment, but long enough to beget in the executioner and the morning's assistant a feeling of simultaneous tenderness: Erik for the executioner, whom he was holding by the neck in such a way that it could mean only tenderness, and the executioner for the youngster, for even though the gesture was necessitated by then-difference in height, it was so winning that it would have made the toughest of men burst into tears. Erik loved the executioner. He wanted to love him, and little by little he felt himself being wrapped in the huge folds of the legendary red cloak inside which he cuddled at the same time as he took a piece of newspaper from hispocket and politely handed it to the executioner who took it to wipe his prick.
    “I love the executioner and I make love with him, at dawn!”
    The same surprise, the same wonderment, made Riton say much the same sort of thing when he realized he was in love with Erik, in the small apartment where he had lain down beside the Boche who was sleeping with his mouth open. Each of his thoughts, which sprang from and were suggested by his excitement, tortured Riton. He was amazed at first at having a hard-on, with no other provocation, because of Erik, who was stronger and older than he:
    “All the same, I'm not a queer,” he thought. And a moment later:
    “All the same, I must be.”
    This certainty made him feel a bit