A BOY, RETURNED
BY NICHOLAS HOLLAND 

The following true story was first published on this website in September 2025. Only personal names have been changed.

When I was a very young man I spent my junior year of college abroad in a university town in southern ____. Having relatives in that country, and having visited them every year or two during my childhood and adolescence, I felt at first quite comfortable there. It was a false comfort. Culture shock set in soon enough, perhaps all the more so for taking me by surprise. The novelty of the relatively anonymous relation of undergraduates and faculty in European university life was a major factor. It seemed nearly impossible to make friends among the native students surrounding me, where everyone simply haphazardly attended lectures together, mostly without the common purpose of passing a final exam. I joined the city’s cathedral choir, the sort of place where one would expect to make at least a few convivial acquaintances; the choir was wonderful, and the music outstanding, yet even though we basses and tenors fraternized after rehearsals and on our trips together dozens of times, I was always treated as an outsider, not excluded, but just ignored. The people of ___ can be like that. It takes a long time.

But a boy – not the boy of the title of this story, but significantly a boy – changed all that in the nick of time. Toward the very end of the academic year I got to know a family that lived outside the university city, in a big old house in a small village. There were three sons – twins of almost eleven and a youngling of seven – and one daughter, going on fourteen. A grandmother, who died shortly after my visit, lived with the family also (though her strong traditional dialect was incomprehensible). The whole family was taken with me, and I with them. I was the first real foreign acquaintance they had ever had.

This came to pass because I had had a crush on one of the twins, Joseph, a soprano in the choir of men and boys of the cathedral at the time – their star soloist, in fact. His twin brother sang alto but was not a soloist. Our choir’s cool star soprano “discovered” me during a day trip by the men and boys of the chamber choir to a baroque lakeside chapel for an afternoon concert. Fascinatingly, any of the older males (mostly university students) of the choir who the cool boys thought was cool was deemed cool himself, and the cool boys sat on the laps of the cool dudes during our bus rides. I’d simply told Joseph after his performance at the chapel that he’d done a fantastic solo, and he appreciated my appreciation. “Oh, you’re that foreign fellow, eh?” and suddenly my exotic origin was cool. And he sat on my lap most of the ride back. Which I quite enjoyed.

One day after rehearsal, Joseph and his brother eagerly introduced me to their mother, and they invited me to their village for the twins’ eleventh birthday party, to be celebrated a few weeks later. As this all happened at the very end of my time abroad, I would have already returned home by then, so instead they invited me to visit that coming weekend, by myself.

It was an enchanting visit, in some ways an adventure back in time –  to a still genuinely rural village, and to boyhood itself. Oh, that sunny day by the slopes of romantic vineyards by the forested mountains! I got along wonderfully with the parents and the four children. They were spiritedly, devoutly, and chaotically Catholic (while I was agnostic at best), but completely open-minded and inquisitive concerning me. The children were raised in a spirited mixture of old-fashioned discipline and big-family disarray, and certainly had far more freedom than most of the West would grant them today. (If the twins missed the bus to their Catholic day school, they wouldn’t come home looking for a ride: they’d hitch-hike.) The father was half the time at an agricultural office job in the city, and half the time in his vineyards; the mother, as jovial a soul as I have ever known, was constantly back and forth between home and church, her kitchen a floury mess, constantly producing hearty meals and luscious cakes, all consumed with loads of Catholic conviviality, heaps of whipped cream, lots of loud shouting at each other over the dinner table, all punctuated every few days by big clean-up operations to start the cycle all over.

I fell in love, not so much with Joseph (to whom I was deeply attracted), but with the family as a whole. We kept in touch over my senior year by mail, and I paid the family a springtime visit as well.

A few months after my college graduation, I moved overseas again for a short-term internship in a city not far from the family, close enough to pay surprise weekend visits. We’d go hiking with father and the twin sons (Joseph and I nearly killing each other one gray autumn afternoon with a shared tumble down a high mountainside slope of loose gravel), but mostly we hung out at home in the village, having endless breakfasts with the mother at the big dining table, playing chess inside or ping pong outside into the wee hours, riding bikes with the kids, talking, talking, talking about our lives.

Peter, the youngest, was less often to be seen. He was notoriously independent, disappearing on foot or by bike as soon as he’d appeared, suddenly re-appearing, and disappearing again. He was skeptical of me for some time, having concluded upon my first visit that I was some sort of brotherly hoax: I couldn’t really be an American, since I wasn’t black!

During these weekend visits I slept in a ground floor bedroom of their huge house. There there were two beds: one for me, the other for a different boy every night, in rotation, so that each would get their share of private time with me. It was grand. We’d lie about, lights out, chatting about whatever was on our minds until we drifted off to sleep, me in a longingly blissful daze of boyish presence.

One night, toward the end of my short internship and just before Christmas, due to problems getting the “who gets to sleep downstairs” schedule equaled out, one of the twins ended up sharing the bed with younger brother Peter. Fortunately no fraternal feud broke out that evening (they were sadly frequent), and the brothers fell asleep peacefully in their one bed. Now, I happened to be awake in the middle of the night when Peter got up to go to the bathroom. When he returned, he found that his big brother had sloshed over diagonally in the bed, and as his brother was a beanstalking young lad, Peter could not figure out how to get back into it. From my bed I observed his puzzlement, so I invited Peter: “You can sleep here with me.” “Really?!” he replied excitedly. “Of course!” So in he climbed, and we snuggled and snuggled and so on.

From then on he nearly always slept with me. If he went to bed before I did he’d be there waiting. His parents would sometimes put him to bed in his own room, but after lights out he’d sneak back into mine. A few times I even tiptoed to his room and carried him to mine – he always grinned conspiratorially at that, and I smooched his smile. When he got older he would go to bed elsewhere, but join me later.

We became quite a pair, both despite and because of the differences between us. He was reckless and adventurous, down to earth and unsentimental, athletic and unafraid, disappearing without explanation or permission, getting into scrapes he (usually) escaped. One afternoon when he was nine years old he went missing for over three hours, and his mother had grown furious (more furious than worried) as he’d said nothing about going anywhere. His mother and I were upstairs drinking coffee when we heard scraping sounds on the cobblestones outside: Peter was dragging home a hefty wooden bench that he had just constructed with the help of a neighbor – precisely the bench we had all been talking about earlier that afternoon, the bench his mother had imagined in the front entrance for putting on and taking off boots and shoes and so on. I remember all three of us setting up and sitting on that bench, Peter’s mother uselessly scolding him, batting him on the head and trying to look serious while we all smiled and Peter laughed his rapid little laugh...

I had been very different as a boy, obedient and not a trouble-maker; a lego-builder, not a wood-worker. But after a while, in virtue of those very differences, I found myself infatuated with Peter. He was beautiful, too: not fair in classic choirboy fashion, but robustly, belligerently handsome; sturdy but lithe, dirty-blonde and brightly blue-eyed, with a forthright expression on his face forever presenting the possibility of mischief. His predominant form of locomotion was to scamper. And, especially in his early years, he sang all the time: though he was not in the choir (where he had lasted only a month), he picked up on his older brothers’ music and would sing it bounding about the house in his bold untroubled alto. Bach’s Magnificat resounded through the echoey stairwell for many weeks, as did (oddly enough) random snippets of Wagner’s Parsifal, making a merry sound which, like the incident with the bench, made it impossible to be cross with him for long.

I visited the family often over the following years, and even spent an entire summer with them while on an academic scholarship. Peter grew ambivalent at one point about our sleeping together, and, inevitably, too old to do it with impunity, but we got away with it at irregular intervals. I was usually left begging for more of his company while he went off on his bike on his solo adventures, but once in a while he would surprise me – in the bee house, in the hay loft. By this time I was truly in love. I won’t pretend he was “in love” with me in the same way at all, but his affections were those of a boy for an older young man in whom he delights and from whom he learns.

One day during the long summer I spent with the family, Peter and the twins got into a fight of some kind (I never understood over what), and Peter’s older brothers had sort of beaten up on him. Their mother had decided to give them all “the spoon” – that is, an old-fashioned whack on the bottom with a wooden spoon used not only for beating cake batter. At that time, young and liberal as I was, I found this sort of punishment barbaric, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with it, so I slipped out of the house for a long walk, ending up in the next village a mile away where I had a beer at the local pub to calm my nerves. When I eventually returned to the house, Peter’s mother was at the dining table peeling potatoes for supper. She told me Peter had gone off on his bike, in fact looking for me but not saying so, just as his father had come home wanting to know what the fight was about. Peter obviously had not found me, and when he returned, his father was furious with him for going off (yet again) without saying where. So he gave Peter quite a thrashing. As soon as I heard this I got up and went straight to Peter’s room to find him crying, shaking, and sobbing, quite intensely. It was horrible. I’d never seen this tough kid cry, not like this. I stayed with him for maybe a half an hour, trying to get him to calm down, to take deep breaths; I stroked his hair and helped him slowly sob it out. At one point his mother peeped in the door and sort of smiled, as she was less disturbed by the teary consequences of this style of discipline than I was. She said, “He’s all right, you can leave him alone,” but I would not leave him.

A few minutes later, his father leaned in through the doorway, giving one of his sterner fatherly looks, only to tell us supper would be ready in a few minutes, and he left again. The stern fatherly look seemed directed at me. I stayed with Peter until supper, telling him I was on his side, and his crying finally subsided.

There was now a wedge between his father and me. Not hostility on his part toward me exactly, nor on mine toward him – I didn’t like his child-rearing techniques, but I didn’t hate him for it; the feeling was reciprocated in some way. Something akin to rivalry. I had interfered with his parental disciplinary authority. I remained perfectly welcome in their home for the rest of the summer, and for several visits thereafter. Yet from that night on I sensed in him not only a skepticism towards his son, but a suspicion regarding my relationship with his son.

Over the next few years I visited as often as I could and spent as much time with Peter as I could, and we snuck off together as often as we could; as I said before, less often than I’d have wanted. I would get a little weepy sometimes when it seemed we weren’t together enough, and he always consoled me and made me shape up. “Be strong!” he would tell me with a big grin and a hug. I had a lot to learn from a mature twelve-year-old, made of tougher stuff than I.

Of course we got into spats. I admired his impulsiveness and spontaneity, but these could veer off into meanness and disregard for others. I tried to check him on that, and he did not like me doing that. I was sure that I could influence him positively in this regard, but his parents, his father especially, thought that I was naïve about the matter, and that Peter was a born trouble-maker – and not likely to come to much good.

One thing we all agreed on was that Peter was far happier one-on-one – with anyone, not just me – than with a group. When the two of us escaped the crowd, he was instantly relaxed and cooperative, almost no matter what his mood (a notable exception, which makes a great story, must be related – but not here). He was then happy to be either the leader or the led – a joyful companion. We’d go out for walks or drives together to the city or the forest hills or lakes or castles, and once we’d hit our stride he’d take my hand and spontaneously say, “Now I’m really happy!”

Other times he was not really happy. One sunny spring day we’d planned to go on an afternoon bicycle trip together, but just before we launched off, one of his older brothers asked to join us. I was in no position to say no, but Peter was particularly resentful of this disruption of our one-on-one and at once started acting obnoxiously, riding dangerously into the left lane as cars approached and things like that. I told him to knock it off, but he was obstinate, and lagged behind so we couldn’t really see him. At one point on the way home, lagging behind again, he suddenly caught up to us, and as he passed shouted “maybe I won’t sleep with you tonight, then,” and sped off ahead out of sight. At the age of twelve he was too old for the remark to sound innocent, and he knew it. I pedaled like hell and caught up with him, told him not to play with fire like that, and hoped his brother had not caught on.

But he did sleep with me, and that very evening, when we were alone at last, he gave me a medallion he had made in school, a funny caricature of an elephant sawed skillfully (and with great pride) out of a piece of transparent plastic. He had showed it off to everyone. I attached it to my key chain and I carried it with me for the next eight years.

Ordinary school was not for him. Bright, often brilliant, ever astute but never intellectual, he was too restless and anti-authoritarian to be content even in the relatively happy little schools he attended. He wanted to go out and learn to do and make things (like that bench), not stay inside merely learning about things. These days they’d drug him for ADHD, I’d wager. When he was thirteen he got into trouble insulting one of his teachers, trouble that got him disciplined with numerous detentions, which he practically bragged about to his mother. “You think I’m bad now? Just wait until I’m sixteen!” he told her one afternoon when I was there to hear the story. I began to worry.

Bad student though he was, uninterested in the world of letters, we did keep up some correspondence when I was back home (our story pre-dating the internet or cheap long-distance telephone calls). That I was the only one he would willingly write letters to gave me bonus points in the eyes of his parents. He didn’t write often, but he wrote real letters, and the arrival of each letter was a major event that forced me to re-arrange my life for the next several days so that I could bask in countless re-readings and the careful design of a return letter (a difficult exercise, which needed to take into account the fact that his entire family, and maybe a few neighbors, would be reading it). I’d ride high and low on a single such letter from Peter for weeks of happy sad longing tears. I still have these letters. I received one, a thank-you letter, shortly after I’d sent him a book about bears for his birthday. He wrote, “I got the book! I love it! Thank you dear Nicholas. How are you? When are you coming again? I love the bears. Can you see them where you live? Oh, Nicholas, dear Nicholas, I must say, you are my closest and truest friend.”

That fellow weeping on the subway was me.

I resolved early on to prepare myself for his growing out of our relationship over the years, or rather for it to evolve into something, well, transformed. I supposed, or I assumed, that the playfully erotic element of it, passionate as it was for me, would be likely to dwindle first, squelched by Peter’s fledgling heterosexuality and the waning of my erotic affinity for the waxing adolescent body.

On a later visit, as soon as we could be alone together in his room, both of us giddy to be together again, hugging and grinning goofily at each other, I said something to the effect of “You know, you don’t have to do anything, you know, just to please me. I just want you to be happy and comfortable with me. I’m sorry if I ever pressured you that way.” His reply was a smile and the words “Don’t worry about that!”

“You’re just great,” I replied with a smiling shake of the head. I leaned into him to peck him on the cheek. But as I approached he grabbed my head and engaged me in a big wet kiss. We had done other big wet things, but not that. It was a kiss of a depth I’d never experienced, a French kiss that lasted I don’t know how long, and was soon repeated.

Well, the next spring, I intended to cross the ocean again, and I made an anticipatory phone call, but everyone I spoke to seemed ill-at-ease. I spoke to Peter, who proudly told me he had set a record low mark for classroom behavior among pupils not (yet) expelled from school. Oh dear. I did cross the sea, staying at first with friends and relatives, during which time I made a few more phone calls about visiting, but again, everyone – mother, sister (who sounded as if she’d just been crying), and brother – seemed not to encourage it. Peter, it was discreetly suggested, was becoming a problem that they didn’t know how to deal with. The currents of masculine biochemistry were clearly aggravating his more aggressive side. I borrowed a car from a cousin and drove down to the old village early one night, including right down their street, but I did not knock on the door. He might have been just yards away, but I couldn’t do it. I found a pay phone a few villages away, called, and spoke with Peter’s father – who told me, giving no specific reason, not to visit. “Write sometime,” gravely spoken, was his final request.

The only time in my life I had contemplated suicide was in the following few days. Every bridge I crossed in that borrowed car suggested it.

A few days after that, still in the country, I wrote a letter to Peter’s parents, saying that if I could be of any help with Peter, I would be there for him and for them, in whatever capacity they saw fit, but I received no reply. I started to get a little paranoid – or rather, I started to get rightly, if obsessively, worried. What if Peter had done something really rash, and they sent him to a therapist? What sort of questions would be asked? What was the nature of his father’s attitude towards me? It became too easy to imagine his father suspected funny-business. I had to operate under the assumption of such a suspicion in any case: the West had entered an era in which the likes of me, who once might properly have been clearly seen as just the person to steer a veering boy back on track (a blind eye turned if necessary), would be imagined instead as the cause of his going off track – the root of every evil.

But worst of all was that I could not see Peter again. I didn’t even dare write him again. I had to disappear. A year or so later I looked into hiring a private detective, but it was too expensive.

As the years passed, I reminded myself again and again that Peter was someone I ultimately trusted, someone ultimately loyal and true and better than what his parents had decided he must be. But he was gone, and I was in the dark.

After nearly a decade, the heartbreak was, well, not “overcome,” but at least not a perpetual source of grief and anxiety, sadness and worry. The trunk of my beloved’s plastic key-ring elephant finally cracked off and the animal left the key-ring without ceremony.

*      *      *

Almost exactly nine years after the “write sometime” conversation with Peter's father, the phone rang.

“Hello? Is this Nicholas Holland? This is Bobbie, calling from ___. Peter ___ would like to speak with you.”

A second later I was on the phone with Peter.

In the inner cover of that book on bears I had given him so many years ago, I had written not only my birthday wishes at the time, but my parents’ phone number. I thought (rightly) that their number was less likely to change than my own, and gave instructions for him to call that number if he ever needed me.

Well, so it happened. Peter got his friend Bobbie, who spoke English, to call my parents, and my parents passed on my then-current number.

Peter’s voice had long broken, of course, but it was his all right. He was clearly a little drunk, and suddenly so was I. I can’t possibly recreate the details of the conversation, but it was to the point: it amounted to a simple request from him. He had not finished his high school diploma, but had become a very talented metal worker, and in order to receive his certification as “master,” he needed to finish the one course he had failed in high school: his foreign language requirement, English. He wanted to know if I could help him.

I cannot describe my emotion when I put the phone down. I was utterly bewildered, deeply grateful, yet still deeply afraid.

But help him I did. I paid for his flight and for the six-week language class he took in my home city. He objected to my paying at first, but when I proclaimed it “nine late birthday- and Christmas-presents,” he gave in.

I picked him up at the airport, and there he was, an adult version of the boy I loved. I was in such a state waiting to see him for the first time in ten years that I could barely hold back tears as I stood at the exit terminal – in fact I shuddered with them several times over the course of an excruciatingly hour-long wait. But when he finally appeared and I saw his famous beaming grin I instantly sobered up and everything was just fine. He stayed at my place a few days (no, we did not share a bed) before moving to a dorm when his English classes started, and over that summer we spent many evenings together, drank lots of beer, traveled in my home territory, and recounted old times, some of them obliquely. My friends met him, including those few of my best friends who were in the know. My parents met him as well, not knowing (as far as I am aware) anything of the previous intimacy of our relationship. As I’d always known, he was thoroughly heterosexual and good with the ladies, and in fact I think he got laid more than few times during his visit...

We had a blast. Nothing “happened.” We exchanged love like radiation.

Shortly before he left for home, the day before if I recall, Peter had me speak with his parents overseas on the phone. It found it interesting that he had waited until the end of his stay before suggesting the contact. They were very appreciative, and obviously a bit humbled. I had always insisted Peter would come out all right, and here I was in the end helping to make him come out all right.

I learned, by his own admission, that Peter’s teenage years had been as difficult as we had all feared. Not delinquency, but recklessness; not anti-sociality, but unstructured masculinity. He’d even gotten into fistfights with his father in his mid-late teens. But he was a resourceful youth, loved life, and remembered my part in it – including the fact of that phone number from a decade before.

The next year I visited Peter’s home town, his brothers, sister, and parents – and, of course, Peter, now in charge of metallurgy at a very large construction firm and making loads more money than anyone else in the family. They all recognize that Peter’s summer with me was what turned him around, and I grew closer than ever to his parents.

Over twenty years later, the happiness of it all still reverberates, and I cherish every return visit I make. Peter is not married but is living with a woman with whom he has several children. I am not sure he is entirely happy with his domestication; he had been a rebellious self-starter, and that had been the key to our relationship. Modern life doesn’t have a whole lot of room for those. Still, he has an excellent job, is living back in his lovely old village close to his parents and siblings, and is getting a bit of a beer belly...

We’re very different people, and honestly I’m closer to his parents now than I am to him. He left the Catholic church he’d been raised in, while I’ve surprised myself by joining it, delighting his parents and sister, who attended my first communion.

Peter’s father and I are at peace. We will never discuss it, but I am sure that he knows my love for his son had had an erotic dimension, and I am sure that his quite proper concern over that was a part of our contest. But he was wise enough not to destroy me for it, and we now agree that, in the end, we each helped to raise his prodigal son.