Chapter 3 - Meryem
Meryem trotted up the steps of the old museum. It had been such a joy getting the assistant curator post. Fresh from university with her archaeology first degree and masters in museum curatorship she had been one of the lucky few of her class to have found a job that perfectly matched her qualifications. Not London, of course, and indeed somewhere rather out of the way, but a nice town nonetheless. A hot day and her light cotton dress swished against her knees as she rummaged in her bag for the key. It was strange walking through the empty museum. It was something which might have worried many walking past the stuffed animals with their unblinking glass eyes and the sarcophagi from Ancient Egypt. It did not worry Meryem, indeed she revelled in the oldness of things such that she made a point of always seeing her blue black hair was neat in a polished silver mirror from Roman times displayed not in a glass case but hanging on a wall. She liked to imagine who might have used that very mirror millennia ago.
It amused her that her sandals had something of the Roman about them, though her light cotton dress was hardly a woollen toga!
It came as a bit of a surprise to find a parcel placed in front of one of the displays in the Classical gallery. The statue was of the minor Greek god Himeros, a very fine statue of a young winged man, alas much damaged though well restored. Meryem picked up the parcel. It was not so much a parcel, when she looked closely, as a piece of rolled cloth clearly with something within it. Carefully she unrolled the cloth placing it atop one of the glass display cases.
"Oh!" She said aloud.
What was within the wrapped cloth was more than a surprise to Meryem. There were, of course, penes aplenty in the museum. She was not unused to such things. Her university course had not avoided that. She knew ancient peoples were no less interested in, or even obsessed by, sex and procreation than were modern man and woman. The classical statues sometimes had revealed male genitalia, if not defaced, but of small proportion as was the Classical tradition. Other exhibits did not shy away from the procreative purpose. There were Paleolithic stone phalli, one carved quite clearly from a stag's antler, a double ended dildo from Roman times complete with a single set of balls (beautifully carved but it did make her blush) and some of the Greek Attic vases certainly had some rather strange pictures upon them.
Strangely, surrounding the dildo within the cloth were small white marble tear-shaped pebbles, perhaps a hundred or more. Meryem reached and lifted the dildo. It was rather heavy. Meryem smiled, she liked the idea of a weighty penis. Not married or with a man she was not experienced in such things but had her thoughts and dreams. An idea of weightiness, a heaviness in her hands was not an unusual, private thought in her bed.
Meryem had been amazed, when she lifted the weighty stone up in her hand, clasping its shaft in quite a rude way, to find it fitted perfectly the scarred stone at the junction of the thighs of the statue. It was like none of the other statues - it was quite a different portrayal of maleness. Meryem liked what she saw!
The old curator had been excited when he arrived and she had shown the object and the tear-shaped pebbles to him. He had disappeared into his office with that intense look she knew when he was becoming absorbed in study. She did not expect to see him again that day.
The security cameras had recorded the benefactor. A young girl laying the parcel down at the very end of the museum's day. A quick glance around and a hurried placing and then a pause as she had stared at the statue. She had walked briskly away out of the camera's view and then, after a few moments, reappeared not once but thrice as if she could not bear to really leave the parcel there. Once she had almost touched it again.
It was all very mysterious.
The old curator seemed almost obsessed with the mystery and the object. He had watched the security recording and had Meryem look back to see if the visitor had been there on other days.
Two weeks later the old curator had lead her down to the statue of Himeros and shown the restoration work he had undertaken. The statue was once more entire. She had blushed as she stood there. The representation of a young erect man albeit with wings was stunning. More than stunning as it had a particular effect upon her. She felt a creeping wetness between her thighs.
It became her habit to visit that particular room last on her early morning rounds before opening the museum. She found herself moistening every time in anticipation. Just as when she had first unwrapped the marble she could not resist touching it. So upstanding, so perfectly detailed, so inviting a caress. Indeed more than a caress: it invited stroking, a running of a closed hand up and down the shaft as if 'exercising' it - the word in her mind. She found herself holding its testes as she slid her hand. Each morning she imagined it spurting as she had seen boys do. The thought excited her. The idea of white semen pulsing high in the air from the penis' head as her fingers flew up and down encouraging the ejaculation. The idea just made her the wetter.
Each morning she found herself making a ring with her thumb and forefinger and stroking up and down the upraised organ. Slowly at first and then faster as if willing it to ejaculate.
It was perhaps inevitable that one morning Meryem would bend her head and take the knob in her mouth. Hard, smooth and cold but so the shape of a penis' head. So rearing up as if waiting to be sucked or...
Later in her office she was embarrassed by what she had done. Aware of the recording security cameras but with her back to them it was difficult to see what she had been doing and, in reality, only she ever looked at the recordings. Mere fondling was one thing, fellating the marble statue quite another. In her dreams though, the statue. Meryem was man-less and slept alone. To awake in a sweat in the darkness of the night and have to pleasure herself back to sleep on account of remarkably vivid dreams about a young, virile young man - with wings - was not what she was used to. She was not unfamiliar with what fingers and thoughts could do to her body but the frequency and tenor of her imaginings were now different and stronger.
Each time Meryem looked at the statue, so perfect, so male, so virile, so erect, she knew what she really wanted to do.
Would it be such a wrong thing? It was not as if the statue was a real young man.
"I... I couldn't help myself... I"
Meryem stood in the exhibition hall completely naked and with blood running down her thighs. Never had she felt so embarrassed, so awful. There was nothing to hand to hide her nakedness or the awfulness of what she had done.
The old curator just stood there, Dr. Jennings, in his tweed suit. His spectacles twinkling in the electric light. He was looking at her, looking at her body. "You were a virgin?" He asked.
He must have been watching, standing at the entrance to the gallery. She had not seen him so engrossed and absorbed in her... act... with the statue. He would have seen everything. Dr. Jennings never arrived that early, yet he was there.
Meryem looked down, "yes," she answered, "I have not been... with a man."
"You will hardly have been the first -- on that representation. I suspect, indeed am nearly sure that would have been its purpose -- the defloration of young virgins. Probably hundreds, who knows, a thousand even young maidens would have climbed up and pierced, their veil of virginity, their hymens torn asunder upon that carving."
