Gjiliana

 

 Gjiliana

They were arriving for customer acceptance checks on some equipment and I had to go to Heathrow to meet them. Three men and a woman. I parked and walked into Terminal 2. The usual crush. A coffee, pad of paper and thick felt marker later, I had a clipboard sign that read Marcal Avionics Ratania Party.

The flight was on time. There they were: led by a tall and stout 50-ish man with a shock of white hair. I knew he led them because he alone had no luggage to lug. We shook hands and he self importantly handed me his business card: Cesar Halat, Commercial Manager. Behind were the two other men: both late 50s, one with thick black-rimmed spectacles, the other short, bald and pot bellied. They muttered unpronounceable names and described themselves as ďcommercial experts.Í The woman hovered in the background and seemed surprised when I held out my hand to her. ďGjiliana. IÍm the commissioning engineerÍ she introduced herself in a subdued voice, her eyes bashfully looking aside. But I noticed her.

As we slowly made our way to the car park, I noticed from the corner of my eye that Gjiliana had a bad strutting limp, and was surprised at the conflicting emotions this limp caused in me. While chatting desultory with Halat, I felt a strong tremor of compassion for the young woman. At the same time, and to my disquiet, I felt attracted to her. She seemed to be the most technically competent person in the party yet, Ratanian culture being what it is, she appeared lowest in the hierarchy.

I observed them as we got into the company minibus. Whipping out an ancient camera, the fat, smug Cesar climbed in alongside me in front. The two men, shabbily dressed in brown suits with pens in their front pockets followed. Gjilana started loading the bags into the back. I immediately went to help, smiling at her. Her eyes briefly met mine and then shyly looked away. Some years older than me, in her early 30s, she seemed to be worn out with the constant effort that a Ratanian womanÍs life is. As she got into the minibus, I noticed her reaching down to lift her stiff left leg over the sill, and felt upset that she was a cripple on top of everything else.

They had insisted on the cheapest hotel. As Cesar treated me to Ratanian village firewater, I reflected on the worn bedspread and smell of stale ashtrays in his room. It was the best in the joint: others had to share bathrooms and toilets. My thoughts absentmindedly drifted to Gjiliana. I wondered what the matter was with her leg. Perhaps it was paralysed, or injured and never mended properly. Or perhaps she had an artificial leg... Just then, there was a knock on the door. As if to answer my idle speculation, in walked Gjiliana on a wooden crutch, the left leg of her cheap black jeans screwed up and tucked into her left pocket. She nodded embarrassedly at me and began talking animatedly to Cesar. They spread out piles of paperwork over the table, bed and floor.

Gjiliana had propped her crutch by the door and now hopped efortlessly around the room as if she was born one legged (for all I knew, she might have been...), smoked acrid smelling Ratanian cigarettes and spoke hoarsely in the harsh vernacular of that remote Asian-cultured European nation. The tiny stub of her left leg alternately flailed hidden in the folded trouser leg or lifted jerkily as she swayed over the papers.

I found the sight of the maimed woman immensely distessing. But I also found it arresting and moving in a strange way which I was loath to acknowledge. Yes, she was attractive. Beyond her smallpox-marked nicely sallow skin she was beautiful. There was an internal intensity shining through and colouring what was already a nice starting point: your basic pretty and lanky brunette with a good bone structure. More, she had an enthralling butchness in the way she gesticulated and grimaced. Maybe losing the leg had made her hard and determined in a special manly way..? And the Ratanian allure was reinforced by the exoticism of her irrevocably changed body: the way she moved was unique to her, and the active vestige of her left leg made me speculate on the mystery of her life, fate and appearance in reverse proportion to its minuscule size.

Cesar and Gjiliana comically kept me abreast of their conversation: ďis a big problem!Í; ďah, is not problem at all!Í; ďis anodder problemÍ; ďah, no, is no so difickle at allÍ. The Ratanian drink had transformed me and glimpse by little glimpse I began openly eyeing Gjiliana. I had to admit that my morals suffered yet another defeat in the face of my sex drive: every time her stump jerked, so did a muscle of mine, with less and less inhibition each time. Perhaps I was imagining, but she also darted the odd glimpse at me. And maybe she had overcome something in herself too: her bashfulness seemed to disappear by degree and she began flashing shy but wanton smiles at me. Then, as Cesar gathered and put away the papers, she hopped across to the empty chair facing me, carefully and deliberately positioning her stump on its back thus propping herself, and addressing some pleasantry to me. The latter went over my head: what mattered was the non-verbal communication. It went something like ďThis is me. Maybe you like me? IÍm showing you my very special body part: observe!Í All the while she watched me straight in the eye and monitored my reaction wearing an earnest expression on her face. I glowed with love and admiration for her and hoped it showed in full measure through my eyes and face.

Thursday and Friday went without a hitch. The party pored over the equipment, tested it, signed papers and oversaw it being crated and shipped off by truck. Gjiliana had used her artificial leg and appeared very much the subservient Ratanian woman, though it was clear that she was the brains of the party. On Friday I took them out for a farewell meal near their hotel. As we strolled back in the cool October evening, I felt Gjiliana behind me and turned to her. Our mutual attraction had become embarrassingly obvious to everyone who watched, and we had gazed longingly into each otherÍs eyes all evening. Now I asked if we might go out for a walk after her colleagues turned in for the night, and she assented.

I had already learned a lot about her. She was a married woman with two daughters in their early teens and a responsible job. Her leg had gone in a tram crash when she was just twelve: she touchingly described herself as ďan invalidÍ with a ďwooden leg.Í During the walk we chatted more about the life that awaited her in Ratania and her impressions of Britain, which she was leaving the next day. I had taken her hand into mine and was perversely excited to feel it bob up and down with each strutting stride of her rigid leg. At length we walked back to the hotel, stopped for a few more minutesÍ chat, kissed like schoolkids -- and she was gone.

I slowly walked back to the minibus and fiddled with my keys, intending to look up at her window and blow her one more kiss. But her window did not light up. Instead she opened it and called out to me: ďdonÍt go, is no lights in the room, please help with electrical.Í I came through the door like a shot, taking the man from reception with me. She stood in the corridor with her left trouser leg empty. Once the fuse had been mended, she gestured for me to come into her room. We kissed and hugged for a long time. Then she left to get a shower.

With her out of the room, I imbibed its girlie aroma and sniffed her still-warm left leg. Crudely made of discoloured wood worn shiny, its grotesque thigh and shin had been sawed through and many wooden shims added to keep up with GjilianaÍs growth. This made it look spindly, like a pegleg. The non-articulating knee increased the resemblance. The crude external hinges had been wired fixed. The funnel-like socket had also had ďsurgeryÍ, with a thin slot cut into it and plywood added. Inside it nestled a thick cotton cloth which smelled rankly of feet: the only comfort for GjilianaÍs stub in the whole travesty of a prosthesis. A rag held on with a short male sock had been stuffed around the foot, presumably to make shoes fit. Three frayed and grubby broad leather belts fashioned as harnesses arched around the socket top.

She strode back in on her crutch, dropped it on the floor by the bed and hopped over. After I had taken a shower I crawled past reception and slipped into her room. The lights were turned off, curtain drawn open and I could see her lying on the bed naked. We embraced again and my fingers slowly made their way to her stump. It really was no more than a breast-sized lump of flesh, feeling like an additional and very much smaller buttock. Inside it, behind vast tangles of gristly deep scars, jerked no more than an inch of amputated femoral bone. Pressing it into my fingers and insisting I dig them in as much as possible, she let out a series of deep convulsed sighs. I felt brazen. My fingers squeezed her amputation, my thumb pressed her anus and my other hand stroked and probed her drenched vulva.

I leant down, opened her femininity carefully with both hands and slowly fingered deep into it. It glistened with successive floods of gooey aromatic fluid which reflected the street light. The powerful tendons of amputated muscles kept trembling, tightening, raising and convulsively jerking the stub, then letting it fall dead while its fascinating scarred surface rippled like a bodybuilderÍs chest. She kept gasping and crying quietly.

Then she propped herself on her arms, lay on top of me, bent her leg at my left side, flopped her stump to the right of my penis and very, very slowly and gently impaled herself onto me while showering me with tears and kisses. She then slowly extended her leg and began the slowest rolling and swinging motion, directed it seemed only by her muscular stub. Even in intercourse her motion was sublimely one leggedly unique. I probed her stringy armpit hair and shivered with pleasure remembering a proscription on armpit shaving in The Joys of Love. Her broad pudenda and anal area were plentifully haired too, and I liked it.

Though almost totally flat, her breasts had the largest irregular, warty deep mauve aureolae and the hardest inch-long broad nipples. I chewed and sucked them lightly and held her, feeling a prominent wart under her left armpit with one hand, and fingering her hair-ringed anus and vaginal slit with the other. We gazed into each otherÍs faces enveloped by a positively narcotic force field that blinded us to all else in the world. And then we collapsed in a shattering, profound and memorable mutual draining of emotion. The clock showed 01:49.

For some minutes we lay next to each other recovering strength, and then we began kissing again. By seven, we had explored every mode in which an ultra short stumped one legged woman can copulate. We gently fornicated with me lying on my right side and entering her past her tiny folded-upward stub. We rumped furiously with her spreadeagled on her stomach and her intense face screwed up in immense painful pleasure as I pumped from behind. We shagged vulgarly with her lying on her right side, stump raised, and me holding her large right and tiny left buttocks as I worked inside her. We fucked standing, with her increasing and raising the pressure by lifting and lowering her leg on and off the floor, stump flailing by my right thigh. We screwed with her standing and hooking her stub into her crutch handle and me entering her unobstructed vagina from below. We shafted while she wore her groteqsue wooden leg, black belts tight around her torso, pegleg ominously waving above my head, stump cloth by our heads acting as pheromonal aphrodisiac. We buggered painfully while the handle of a forearm metal crutch displaced my penis from its rightful home; then we reversed the order.

As she climaxed, cascades of unintelligible Ratanian descended from her mouth in a deep Alto voice. Successive waves of delight brought to my lips words I would have associated only with pain and misery just a few days earlier. ďAmputee,Í ďone-legger,Í ďstumper,Í ďcrutcher,Í ďpeglegger,Í ďhopper,Í even ďcrippleÍ now carried a perverse but powerful and special sexual allure I could never have suspected before. She told me she knew she was special to men because of her amputation and drove me wild with incantations like ďI am one leg invalid with crutch,Í ďI am one leg woman with wood leg,Í ďI am woman with stump and no leg,Í ďI have sexy feeling in stump.Í She told me to say the Ratanian for stump (ďcukanÍ) one legged invalid woman with a crutchÍ (ďabmocukea invalide zona we abma kraleÍ) and ďjust because I have one leg doesnÍt mean I donÍt like to fuckÍ (ďsame zaxo mame abma cuke ne zneqe co ne me si ebatiÍ). It was magic...

In between frantic lovemaking sessions, stomachs gurgling in extreme hunger and exhausted sweaty bodies slithering, we lay still in each otherÍs arms, my hand usually cupping her stump. Badly sore and totally worn out, we forced ourselves to do it again and again as if we knew that this all too brief acquaintance would be the sexual peak of our lives and wanted to make the most of it. At eight, she revived my flagging manhood by massaging it as only the possessor of an ultra short, strong, soft and supple -- positively prehensile -- leg stump can. She sat on me, extended her powerful long toed foot into my mouth and while imbibing its flavours I toyed with her different sized buttocks one last time.

By nine, we were dressed, showered and ready to leave. She inserted her stump into the wooden legÍs aromatic socket, strapped the bondage harnesses on, dressed, and kissed me sadly. I left by the back door, drove once around the block, met the party in the lobby, drove them to the airport, and managed to give her a last wave as she strutted grandly through passport control. It was October 1983.