The Survivals Dance
Written by
Adler S. Walt
Playfully dedicated
To my co-conspirator
Polina Mazaeva
CAST
- ‘Blacksmith Winter’ ‘Kawa Zivistan’, ‘Zacharias Abu Yazan’, Sebastian Adonaev, a CHECHEN New Yorker; our antagonistic protagonist, a guerrilla on the move. ALSO KNOW AS THE FATHER OF NIGHT.
- Maria Silverrtova of Moscow, a MOSCOVITE; a tavern shot girl, an inquisitive journalist.
- Polina Casperova Mazaeva, a war Forrest wife and a CHUVASH, crimson hair.
- Anya Rumi Baghdadi, a Lebanese CHECHEN prophetess, diplobrat of the Green Zone.
- Carla Santiestiban, A Cuban working girl, jet black hair.
- Ana Campbell, a British YPJ Martyr, blonde and bright eyed.
- Adelina Blazhennaya, sorcerous Slavic linguist of Chelyabinsk.
- Yelizaveta Alexandrovna Kotlyarova, a Russian American doctor of hands and feet.
- Justine of Erbil, a Dutch humanitarian fixer/ freelancer.
- Ayar of Kirkuk, a Kurdish CHECHEN fixer mafiaioso, mustached and hungry.
- Dan Oldtown, a comedic British Jew, an internationalist guerilla. ALSO KNOWN AS THE FATHER OF FLAME.
- Jansher the Spirit of War, a Georgian a PKK guerilla entrusted to teach the internationalists basic warfare.
- Abdul Rahman, Piling, a French African an internationalist guerilla.
- The Gangster Medvinsky, a Ukrainian intellectual tough guy, who sometimes weighs in on the Russian mentality and American cowboyism.
Whatever actor isn’t reading from the black or red books, is silently or at a whisper trying to sell the audience fake vodka shots. Which sometimes is just water, cranberry juice, or Pedialite. Or drawing pictures of people poorly using techniques of exaggerated color and bust size. These 12 characters can we played by 2 to 4 actors, the men change colorful guerrilla uniforms and the women change wigs.
All actors read from the pages in their own means and fashion.
Prologue
Setting-“The Iron Curtains Rise with Post-Soviet Futurist Prose.”
Reads Sebastian Adonaev:
I once tasked myself with building a small, disciplined revolutionary organization in Israel that could strike at human traffickers as readily as it could train medical workers in zones of atrocity and deprivation or war. First, I went to Palestine and saw the wall. Second, I went to Haiti and wet my hands with the blood of 300,000 who died in the great quake. Then, I sucked in my chest and got ready for the death I thought immanent Syrian Civil War.
I used the field hospital Wi-Fi and a Syrian sim card to let everyone who was listening know I’m alive. It’s not that many people anymore. It’s a blonde debutante in Midtown, following me out the corner or her eye from a high tower of captive luxury. There’s a sexy Harvard lawyer who gave me Mindfulness on the Go, and her cute little sentimental blessings. My parents say almost nothing, my brother especially. Polina Mazaeva, my lover, she has shut be off right during the final battle for Mosul. But I write to her anyway; “I’m alive, motivation is high!” “I’m alive, tell me the weather in Boston, New York and Nizhny Novgorod. Besides Ms. Chanie Rossi, Ms. Daria Skorobogatova and before Polina; no one seems to be keeping any track of my exploits. That mighty revolutionary organization we’d tried to build, well it crumbled in my absence amounting to zero less than nothing.
I began in Cuba, then Russian Federation, then popularly mobilized Shi’a Iraq, also Kurdish referendum North Iraq and then into the hell of Syria. It all took about 9 months to ruin my resolve and lose my mind. Then in Cairo I waited two days in February and then into indefinite detention in the New York Hospital Camps; which swore I was a mad man. I recite in my cell a poem that was my 88th; made for one Elena Komarova, a confidant who can’t deal with my lifestyle anymore. It was about red and white Russians, about Moscow and exile and death and love and what I will refer to as my Special Period; my special period of love and war.
First I must warn you, I’m very powerful as a man, half the year or more, in that I do not fear death and consider my well plotted deeds heroic. But, I’m jointly powerless before a woman who believes in me and so it was fate, misplaced silly fate, that when the war ended for me and none of my confidants were attentive, obsessively, yes obessivively I made a new muse out of a tavern shot girl. Not amorous, not frivolous. I just wanted that pretty stranger with the Vodka bullets to care if I was alive. I wanted her to believe in my seriousness as a hero and an artist, I wanted her to trust in my, ineffable might.
Back in a holding Cell,
So-called “safe and getting help” in the Big Apple,
Sebastian recites:
[Ineffable Might] {88}
1!
I have to get through tonight.
Through mid-precarious forward assaults on the best of my iron vest incites.
My failure of amorous insight I like best,
The hole in the hollow, the pump that replaced the very black heart you stole from my mostly tumultuous chest. Mm-hmhm.
The pretend of a sigh, I know not the reason the rest of us feast while beyond citadel gates the rest of them die.
You have no idea how I try, when each time, each slight, each break of a promise of long life to come presides over the wisp of a hum!
After a long kiss good night and each missing delight.
Is the price I pay, I repeat what I say’ I slip not a single bit eager away, since your departure, wrong or for right
Grim departure into Moscow’s deepest ring roaded abyss, the spire of citadels cracking the rims of the night.
Did I get the last part of this parable right, the cold comes so quick and pulls blankets across over and under, unearthly so deathly, so white?
Was the price that I paid for surviving the run and gun into 30 decay; the brak and bray of the fire fisted fight?
All just a lie, a lie upon lie; a fuck upon a fuck of hardly giving anything since your flight back to Moscow my mind run amuck!
Know the palm of my hand, from the width of my spite. And the nose to the palm and the fist to the fall and dashing and lashing the fuck of if it all,
Ineffable might!
The spittle the bleeding the taking the needing of need, the needing the worst kind of slashing and misreading, the cut of my guts and drop of the floor.
I can’t take one more bit of this shit; the wanting and needing and lusting and ego size feeding the lies that I tell in the dark in the blood in the spit.
I have written nothing of note in a fortnight, the sublime in a rhyme the taking and selling and trading of time. The wasting of me, taking all I had left of shadow of man with an blackness of soul, that hole in my chest and the tack of the toll.
The words that in hatch marks we chiseled on the tree of life, cut into the fabric of magic unknown. We cut with a knife a most frivolous thing; a tantric phallus with fairies, with cantankerous birds and bare breasted women based on the porno graphs as a young man I was shown!
Warbler please, I balter blather bother as I beg you on my knees, as my own skin is a second hand cloth that I have no mastery of, Daphne grazing swans as stabbing eyes.
The tower lies. The science of lord of the flies. And the words they use the fish gut stench of reasons for the uncouth means their ways implies.
Dear one, citizen scientists playing along using flashier cars well-oiled sport teams ongoing efforts to pretend that they’re strong;
Hyper Development just setting in the death of man in the forest somewhere is a trumpet cacophony playing along.
2!!
I have to get through tonight.
A black breaded bite.
A bit from a stripper pop cake, or the glare of cattle do ambulance lights!
Exploding the quiet of poorly spent plight. I am sure that even my audience will agree I pick a most precarious fight?
How did I find a woman like you? A painted face pixie/ glowing indomitable spirit. A triumph of happy delight.
For my pain is leviathan. Swallows me Jonas like whole, the whole of the real the epic created the lies and masks and the anted up toll.
The world to me is mountain.
A treacherous fort on a series of hills.
At time my heart stops for a minute or two and escape I go from the physical plane; a gust of grey smoke; above the knives of the killers
The laugh of the joke;
The spies and their lies; the whores and the pills; the dagger men banking on newly spent kills!
I escape.
With an ephemeral form; ineffable might.
I arrive in the future, a futuristical place; optimistically new: a futurist man remade in my vast powers of so endlessly loving the very most essence of you.
The sheer will of my love, you say what know me of love?
It’s in my vertebral wires, the pumps and valves below and above; a flame driven of ebbing and tidying; expending reason, self-abasing, or pleasing, it keeps sails on the good ship Adler aright;
The good ship takes flight:
With red balloon ballast; for the love of the goddess they’re calling a piece, I fly like a battalion of eagles, no goslings or geese! Get me out Shrakasa Waltham; take me back to your arms; take the thick of me deeply and thrust away all this pain give me back my beloved, give me back my release!
Release to your arms, then everything’s right; and out of the sickly black whiteness of my last winter’s long running night.
3!!!
How did I come to be in this place! In this night. Despite all my lastingly brazenly brokenous promises made; most find my goodness of motive in fuck or in fight.
I chose this. You’re right.
No ugly Waltham, no you. That’s what I know. That steel hand on your chest is a pledge that I’d love and support you through it all.
No matter how far. Or the places apart that we go.
No matter the heights.
Unlimited loving, but lately my powers are limited few; alone in this grim Shrakasa camp; staring at screens, talking in circles. Dreaming of you. When i look in a mirror I see a masked man; hiding his weakness, his murderous features a terrible blight.
What know me now of love. Perhaps you were always right.
What questions are these?
My face has been dashed. I’ve had current, a beating or two, my face has been water board splashed. Bleedings and squeeze.
You hate when I beg and you hate worse when I bellow; but if I can pray prostrate to the thing I call god;
I can beg the swifter return of the woman I love on my knees.
4!!!!
Black Gates of Ringed Roads!!
Halve the Bad Lands in between! Moscow where is Moscow! I am blind and bleeding from the ghastly things I’ve read but also seen!
I’m going to cut my very timber eyes-hatchets out for falling fancy i have invalidated the thrusts of bulldog black intent.
Replicate in my countenance a bleaker predilection, vast pre tension boils over; guest workers four leaf clovers; borrowed money poorly spent.
Click boots on black tarmac prospects covered in haggardly snows, my own sound and both unquiet mind plays ballads to your kind;
To flaunt all trepid interpretations of my base medical vocations, back hand to brackish bankers, my boots will crunch his jaw and leave all these business men cocksure now cock less grind.
I will beat him palpy pale, I’ll kill your Thomas cop I’ll brutalize your vile builder Andre and stab his heart with dagger bursts rip apart his vicious tale. Thought you my poems pretty song? I’m a most violent nemesis to any motherfucker who has done my woman epic wrong!
Moscow where is Moscow it’s a place inside my mind; it’s a fortress it’s a mountain citadel, it’s a place I am kept from my only love and therefore it becomes a hell.
The deadness spreads inside me.
And the poems end but not my own is rightly neigh. I hate the thought of poetry, I like the thought of killing; killing myself to slaughter out the oligarchs and all your laundry list of vile, brutish guys.
I hate now the face of me!
I could kill ten thousand Europeans
Burn out every sand of Europe’s soil
It’s just a place to rape and shit and pee.
What people want they go to see! I try and tell them what to think more of perfect you and less of violent raging me. And you underestimate the violence that was done to those by Europe done to you and done to me. Done to mine and done to yours, I have fallen and am in drowning in my tears of madness dash my face upon the floors;
You left me here for Moscow, I am thus a dog a broken wolf and breathing smoke.
Hanged men hang for forty days before thieves decimate the corpses for the secrets in their cloak.
What near a life by proxy we.
Three continents apart is our manufactured destiny.
And you so fearless, you so noble, you so perfect and so true. Were the only thing that held be from these bastards back, of fear for me and more for you!
The Moscow spires and the snow fall, the oldness and the thrill. The vastness of separation is a poem not a kill.
The winds howl out and call for layers, my words mean nothing but effigies of deed and love between our warring peoples might seem ineffable, indeed.
I see you in my all my happy dreams, your thrilling beauty juxtaposed with my potential coming might. But for now like tragic Mayakovsky and his Tatiyana;
I am red.
And you are white.
Maria: A white Russian rejects the patriotic turmoil and material insufficiencies of the mother land for the French European Parisian comforts of the bourgeoisie, or in our epoch, flees non-Moscow for Manhattan.
Scene One
Opening credits, the Iron Curtain Rises
Setting-“My heart is on my bloody soaked, evil caked sleeve.”
Reads Maria Silverrtova:
Let me roll up my sleeves and also my skirt, a little! Look at me in the eyes! I have all my teeth to bite. So sexy and educated and multi-lingual. What, a, catch to catch. I am a wild debutante, elusive and amazing. I am a journalist of course, forced to pour men off shots in a tavern downtown.
Zdrastvistia! The purpose of this play is to buy and sell luxury carrots. Also a flying carpet to get you home after all the bullshit we will make you sit through telling Russian American tales. Also to warn you about Chechnyans, and also to distribute out a phone number where slaves with abused lives can get J 1, S 1 or go to college. There is singing and poems. We will try and pour you things called Vodka, but it’s not vodka; to us it’s like water for wound care.
Good and bad men went to war and women also went to war, and Americans and Russians watched out the corner of the Newspaper or telescreen. And of course supplied the arsenal and the airstrikes.
The papers called them “the Chechnyans” because when the war kept going, people came back trained in god-only-knows how much carnage capability. The war I’m referring to is the Syrian Civil War/ the Revolution in Rojava which was a phantom menace to all. But it was more a dark dream based on improbable odds. Chechens, are in fact a very real jihadist menace that fought us to the last bullet in Mosul, Raqqa and Deir-A-Zor. They brought their whole families into the Jihad. These re-moniquored “Chechnyans” weren’t like them. They were secular and young, and mostly on the Kurdish or Shi’a side, or the Pesh Merga. They all left our families at home. There were plenty of war path teams and factions, mine/ ours was the most moral, but lived in a state of total delusion. They were following a pudgy faced aging man in Turkish solitary confinement. We thought breaking rocks was a useful form of soliloquy.
Reads Sebastian Adonaev:
I kissed her very hard against both our better judgment. Last time I kissed her like air. I saw her un-maked unpacked, un-made-up Slavic beauty face on her birthday, before we did one last job on St. Pat’s day. We weren’t supposed to do jobs like that in Midtown, people get upset.
I pulled her through to my reality, for the last time and she was completely pissed. The reality wasn’t very nice because it wasn’t the American dream she had set out to conquer on someone else’s name. That name and those papers had failed her mightily. I yanked her through to the other side. The serf side, the Warsaw ghetto side. I was still just a petty gun slinger, Syrian Civil War vet on the run from the war in Syria and my own mind. I did 80 days in Bellevue City hospital and filth was still on my fingers, elbows and toes. I hadn’t slept well even one night.
She was still just a high end whore a year later? Not fair but probably true. But she wasn’t like Maria from Moscow anymore, doing what she did and still does with her tits and high ball shots and take home party favors. She was way over long walks with artists. She was regressing into Capitalist Modernity, the place she’d always wanted to end up, was now boring. Her suitors never waned. Especially the pesky Brahman roommate.
It has been a long road from Havana to Brooklyn to Russia, into the Middle East and back. With stopovers in where civilization has come to a resolute end in the Fertile Crescent. Burning down river by river shore to deep sands of desolation.
My name was once Sebastian Adonaev, but the Kurds named me Blacksmith Winter, or Kawa Zivistan. The Arabs, they needed to name me too so they called me Zacharias Abu Yazan. Because my then girlfriend correspondent Polina has a son named Yazan. I was 33 when I deployed but looked and felt younger. Her name, my timeless old Muse was Dasha, but this isn’t about her. The other books were all about her. This is about the time a Syrian war vet caught feelings about Maria Silverrtova, a buxom little Chechnyan, like him. No, it was about picking up the shattered pieces of this nightmare, resiliently.
This is a cry for some extra hands, some Hamsas, that survived to talk about the Syrian Civil War. This is a love song after a series of hard fucks in Spanish and love making in Russian. This is a Post-Soviet Lullaby, written in Imperial English. I have heard on the wire that Anya is losing her mind in Baghdad and Ana Campbell, that optimistic young woman I have hand grenades to; well she dead and here I am in Capitalist Modernity’s heart, doing nothing but stupid love songs.
Reads a deceased Ana Campbell:
Yes, forgive me loved ones, I died immediately in an airstrike in Afrin. My body was in, smithereens. Afrin was until it was overrun by Jihadists and the Turkish state, the Western most canton of Rojava; the besieged revolutionary movement called Democratic Confederalism that defeated ISIS and took over 45% of Syria, until the Turks began to genocide us in April 2017. I died pretty. I was a true believer. Sebastian blames himself for my death, but really I was a true believer in the cause. I could have died much worse if the Turkish Army or its proxies took my alive. I would have been gang raped. And had my head cut off eventually.
Sebastian lives with his guilt but Dan Newey another guerrilla I almost kissed, he does not. Dan Newey is in in British prison accused of terrorism. He mourns me loudly. Honestly, we all lost a lot defending the Rojava Revolution, but we internationalists that the papers call the new Chechnyans, we were actors on a stage of world events, but we didn’t do that much. Now I’m dead, which I’ll tell you seems like being on the mountain without being shot at. It’s peaceful, I’ll have him tell you that. I died with my AK in hand. I believed in this, I wasn’t mentally ill. I wasn’t a bandit girlfriend. This was, this is, big and important, but sadly as far as self-defense; a mirage. Without American airstrikes to back us up we melted under Turkish airpower.
At the time of writing this my corpse is still behind Turkish lines and it looks like Mambij and then all of Rojava will fall to the Turkish Army, a U.S. ally and second biggest in NATO. I am happy and dead. But vicariously I grieve for my Arab and Kurdish comrades who prepare to make Shahid Namorey (immortal martyrdom).
Reads Cancer the Guerrilla:
Actually, I tried to prepare them for a lifestyle of revolutionary militancy. Kill the enemy. Kill the enemy before the enemy can airstrike, execute, torture or disappear you and your friends. I don’t think they all got it. The training was just too short. They retained much of their Western bourgeoisie privileges. They thought it would maybe be like a movie. It’s a shame the woman died, she was the one with possibly the very most potential, excluding the Germans. That’s all I can say about that, Heval.
Scene Two
Russian American Love Ballad #01
Brooklyn Soviet
“An artist, is just a colorful, self-destructive fool making muses left and right of women who he is too poor to build a life around, but so much of a distraction he can keep them for a bit amused. An artist is a social parasite, with no aim, especially a poet for god’s sakes. Death to the artists and cheers to the investment bankers, the engines of productive society, I’d like to be fucking one,” so Maria of Moscow voting with her lips not her feet against American artists.
“He appears more infatuated with the idea of a real relationship, than the mechanics needed to keep on going,” said Daria to the secret police when the arrested her in January.
“Who is Polina Mazaeva? A coy Russia agit-prop? No, No, she actually has fallen in love with this radical. And they are preparing to meet, but have composed a number of Russian American, or Americano Soviet love songs and scribbles. Truly, I just wish he would die in Syria and we can close his file,” wrote Case Officer David Smith of Homeland Security, Station 4443.
Dear Polina Mazaeva,
[American Russia Love Song 116]
Sebastian:
We now sit down in different cities,
We are all dying, on our own, in a terrible way.
We went hunting, for the words in Russian or in English for, the clever, slash redeeming things, we might, even begin to try and say.
Maria:
Raise your head and hands up rude boy!
That’s not how the Story Ends, this time!
“You found your son, you saved your wife you helped your people win the war.”
Ana Campbell isn’t dead this time, regular people, comprehend the revolutionary side of this long epic thing that sounds like lullabies and gory folk lore!
That’s not how the story ends this time;
Tragically as it might be, you get to start again. Tell us what you fought for!
Sebastian:
No, no, no, this isn’t right, I turned my gun on Newey before the fire fight that night.
Polina’s alone and in poverty, she’s trapped in Novgorod. What have I done!
Sebastian is sealed in a psychiatric ward! Making these fucking phrases rhythm rhyme for fun!
Anya’s losing her little mind in Baghdad.
Piling and Dan Newey are in French and British prison, so this happy tale is really quite black and rather fucking sad.
Maria:
That’s not how the story ends this time!
I’m a woman not a shot girl, I’m a journalist not someone’s whore!
What were these hands grasping for!?
Tell it better, give us something, give us hope give us something to believe in!
Don’t let your martyrs’ dies for nothing, hold out longer dear dead Afrin!
Sebastian:
That’s not how the story ends this time!
Sebastian finds his mind in chapter three.
And long live the Kurdish resistance, I wonder what Anya can see, when the lights go out and the rubbing oil turns her to Cleopatra.
But, this is sad long terrible black soliloquy. Resistance was our mantra.
About the things we did, to we. It was murder carried out like tantrum.
Maria:
That’s not how the story ends this time!
Afrin is defensible, Anya is a happy kid again. Yazan conquers his disease. Sebastian has the strength of lions, of over 45 men! But that’s all in your sad Americano mind game!
But now we begin, everyone lost something and it seems hard to think we could ever win. It’s over you all lost, things are still the same.
Give them something to believe in!
Sebastian:
“Give, me, back, my shattered life!”
Let my people find a way to win!
And she’s looking at me now like she’s ready to go!
Turn back the clock give us our lives!
And she’s looking at me now like she’s ready to go!
Turn back the clock give us our land!
And she’s looking at me now like she’s ready to go! (Ready to blow).
Turn back the clock give us our lives!
Maria:
That’s not how the Story Ends, this time!
This is not a ballad for people who build bombs!
This is not a ballad for, people who turn cars into battering rams! Man, your life is nearly gone!
That’s not how the Story Ends, this time!
This is not a ballad for two people who move on.
Scene Three
A Prologue
In Brooklyn Soviet
Sebastian Adonaev reads:
Sometimes, old friend, I cry from own weakness. I bash my Jew face against various mirrors around town angered by my own lack of force, lack of seed, and lack of ability to carry my band more truly into glorious and successful battle. I beat my frail fists on concrete walls which always win! I ask my God why it untrusted me with anything at all. For I am so small and so unable it seems to be a good fighter, an adequate lover, or a good leader, or a good son, or a good husband to Adelina, a good much of anything. I started the game with such a strong position but have not leveraged that to advance my people and cause, even protect those I loved the most!
And then I remember my actual role, not the role my mad ego ascribes. I am but one single partial partisan. One isolated man with such true friends.
I am commanding, a funny word “commanding”, more appropriate term coordinating for can one even give orders to a volunteer? A force that numbers at any given time no more than ten to maybe twenty women and men. And no God nor man nor foreign government gave us marching orders; well at times a Russian woman gave me some directions, but only when at most desperate and bleak junctures, I had to no council to turn to. But, I brought almost all this chaos upon my house unaided! But this is hardly a wide conspiracy. But looking into my own soul I am not doing this for God or man, I am not simply avenging my losses, nor am I simply working off a duty to act. No, no; I am self-propelled and highly lucky. I am doing this because my eyes see fire. I am doing this because I have seen the view from the top of the Mountain, I have seen the killing fields too. I have a great empathy with my kind. I wish good to triumph over callous and well planned evil.
And the responsibilities that were impressed on me by the old leadership, they were small bits. And I say to myself that if our little band with no weapons and no training and no funding and the protection provided us only by our passports and various skin tones could do so much! Still we did accomplish a range of small things in the Americas and beyond. We took over buildings, and organized demonstrations, built unions, operated a substantial underground press. If we could build youth brigades and lay cells across four continents; if we could operate clandestine supply chains, raise tens of thousands in equipment and supplies, conduct hundreds of underground political trainings, infiltrate major city civil service organizations, if we could smuggle activists and trainers into distant countries uninvited and opposed by government. If we could do all of this with no outside support and do it with keeping all our partisans out of long term prison, and have only buried three men in seventeen years of war under questionable circumstances. Well perhaps we are all still young and the war shows no sign of being over. Perhaps we have a small latent talent for freedom fighting and if not killed or imprisoned could with a little guidance grow more professional.
And we have not killed one single person in seventeen years, in fact we have with our own hands saved the lives of thousands and counting.
“I’ve always said he has a fucking ton of potential! For good, for self or for evil, wherever his own heart ultimately sends him,” Daria once declared.
So, really as was explained to me then in 2012 before the uprising in Brooklyn by my confidant Dasha Andreavna; I could either surrender, collaborate or be utterly destroyed. But as she gauged my nature was highly American, she guessed correctly I would never tolerate a life of collaboration, so thus death or some impossible victory were the only moves coming.
I have been imprisoned twenty times. My brothers and sisters have never allowed them to take me for long. Each time they have chained me to beds, administered electricity, loaded me with drugs, asked millions of stupid questions to attempt to make me alter my perspective, denounce my own logic. I have observed members of the band lose their very homes and their livelihoods and their freedom and their health. I have seen men thrown through Plexiglas glass windows. We have been held in cages and also tortured. The deaths of McGaffey, Becker and Black were all sudden and violent and unexplained. I remember little Paul behind bars, I remember harassment and humiliation of Comrade Vik, I remember how much was sacrificed vainly in the name of this struggle. This struggle which absorbs my beingness as though it were the love of a woman, but I am a zealot. I am not good for anything but this. I am in love with my entire people and I have resolved that it would be better to be killed, to lose my privileges of skin and class, than to live in a world where a tiny vile few make the lives of the many, the lives of all I know and love a wretched grinding torture. Truly a half-life.
I cry sometimes, no longer in the presence of any others. Dasha mocked me so each time I failed to be a man. I cry because the horror is so vast and the injustice so great. And I have but ten to twenty partisans, several with wives and children. I worry that I am not going to be able to shoulder this struggle, that I lead my closest to sedition and doom. I worry I have not the moral fortitude, the calm patience of humble leadership, the organizational skills the funds we will need, the weapons, the uniforms, the petrol, the Planes, the will. For I am a man and I am seduced sometimes by wanting more good life, wanting to walk away. This is not your fight, she said, no one asked you to struggle!!
Friends, they torture me once a year. They tell me I have an unstable mind. They drag me away over and over and over again. I am grateful for such friends as you, who refuse to accept surrender. Who know that we can win the war! I wanted to tell you all, see what we do with just ten women and men. You have that many fighters too. Here we all are at the top of the mountain, assembled in the ghettos encircling the Isle of Man.
I loved her so much. Maybe only one or two of you know what I’m talking about. They took from me the only thing a man should care about.
I’m thankful for the resistance. I’m thankful for our little Otriad in Brooklyn. For the cells in Chicago, Philly, Baltimore and DC. The underground in Moldova, Cambodia, Haiti and occupied Israel. Thankful for Commander Reed in Mosul, Commander Bonhomie in Port Au Prince. Inspired deeply by the teachings of Solomon and DeBuitléirs. I love my family and my wife, I hope this is the year we go pro.
She is a million miles away, but she can hear me. She can see me. She liked me better before I found communism, liked me better before I rediscovered my religion. She even liked my used suits better than the grey uniform I wear now.
I raise glass to the East, for there somewhere out there I hope she is waiting for me, waiting for us to win. I raise my glass, I look my men and women in the eyes when I toast, “Long live the resistance, God protect the blood line of the prophets and the Meshiach and the Mahdi. God keep us moving along the straight path, not the path of those who are cowards, or those who have been lost and lead astray.”
For those of you who are joining us from home, for those listening from the trenches, from the fields or from the big house, or as servants in the towers. This is just a love song.
Yes, an epic Russian American love ballad set in the Middle East.
This is not a song for people that don’t know how to fire guns.
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 