We will tell you now, what is wrong with this world and our country! No matter what country that it is we are addressing.
It is that you the people believe in yourselves more than you believe in each other. You believe you are in this world alone.
The fate of the individual has ground under iron heel even the faintest notion of the collective good. And rat racing, pitiless individualism has robbed us as a collective people of both our human conscience as well as our “duty to act”.
There are rights we all have: Women, Men, and Children which are ours by virtue of being born human.
No deity nor national charter bestowed them. When either religion or the state fails to secure these rights, then these institutions cease to be of value. They become a danger. Both the state system and the ideas of every existing religion present clear and present threats to human rights.
The states by trampling them or failing to enforce them. Religions by explicitly negating women’s role in the world, sanctioning violence against non-believing minorities, and promising a world of plenty in a world you will never live to see, and no one has ever come back from.
The authority by which we or any other member of a Party of resistance compels you, a civilian, to “take hold of your rights” comes only from the hearts and minds of other women and men just like you. We hold up no religious gospel or ideological flag. These rights for many decades were put to paper, but ignored by all governments.
Let us reiterate what you may already know. It is in fact in every country too hard to feed one’s family. It is too hard to own the roof over one’s head even in nations where TV and mythology lead some to believe the streets ‘are paved in gold’. The governments of all “safe and civilized Northern nations’ currently disparage and despise the immigrant while the natives seem to have forgotten complexly the exodus and plight from which their families once fled.
The time to even speak of possible pacifism has passed.
We believe deeply in cutting the knees out from under each and every tyrant and local oligarchy who together bleed and raped over half the nations of this earth. But in all the wars fought, has a single human right ever been advanced or championed? Were not all these “Great Wars”, “Crusades”, “Jihads” and World Wars 1, 2, and 3 all just bloody contests to control the resources below and above the soil, to dispose of an excess working class and to compel foreigners to the economic bondage of some great power? Governments have sent millions of young people to die, maim and get maimed, kill and get killed for nothing other than a cold hard national ambition. The local Oligarchy of the time, used the state system for naked conquest.
Crusades and Jihads were about the control of religious oligarchy, the Oligarchy of the priests and imams. The World Wars were European, Russian, American, and Japanese bids for empire; control of “the Core”. They didn’t stop fascist dictators from engaging in further atrocity as long as they were proclaimed anti-communist. Neither the Communist nor Capitalist nor Third World ideologies built better worlds. They built up the very instruments of terror we now oppose. Massive armies of spy surveillance, state torture, nuclear war, and armies that if unleashed will finish off the earth.
They have not ended slavery, they expanded it. They rebranded it, but it still retains the essence of complete bondage and subjugation. There are more forced sweatshop slaves, child slaves, harvesting, mining and sex slave workers, and indentured sweatshop laborers than there ever were plantation slaves or serfs in the 18th century. The West didn’t ‘liberate women’ without completely objectifying them. In America 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted before age 18. 1 in every 147 Americans in the prison system. The West as the gall to compare their advancements via armed struggle to be somehow superior to those of the Monarchists, Fascists, Communists, and Islamist Theocracy. These are all different brands of Oligarchy!
Poverty is a rampant genocide. 7 in 10 people live below $5 a day. 4 in 10 below $2 a day and over 2 billion people, 2 of 8 billion live below $2 a day. Even in so-called wealthy, “Northern” nations, most people work their entire lives, living to work and working to live. A human life expectancy of 120 has been brought below 50 in most nations on earth, even in the wealthy North most die before 80, most black men die by 53.
Damn the Oligarchy for its callous dominance. Cruel indifference to human suffering, abuse of power, and massive ongoing theft! Those who speak in numbers and fact checks while tens of millions starve or die of easily treatable diseases; and every year hundreds of thousands fall to rape, pillage, and war while millions of women lack control over their bodies and tens of millions remain slaves. Of course, every oligarchy sets up, benefits from a priesthood speaking of unseen God! God of Gods or spirits telling us to be patient, accept hard work, and accept our rough lot; in the world to come all will be “amazing”. They also set up a modern priesthood of management for thought and public opinion. The media and many talking heads explain the “hiccups” to universal progress.
We tell these men to damn their banal statistics, damn their intractable apathy, their failed policies, and their unwillingness to move in the defense of the powerless. We will launch a war unlike any the world has seen. A war of workers, not blinded by made-up race and unseen magic gods.
If naked you came to your country, then near naked you will depart. And if bandit rapists drove you here or there, or if some planned famine killed ¾ of your family before the rest died reroute of Cholera, or you came here or there shackled beaten, and stolen in the belly of a ship; then you’d better damn never forget where you came from. There is not a safe zone in “the North,” or in the deepest bunkers, or up on Mars. There is racist police violence, poverty, and a plague of fever, cough, and death. When the world gets worse, and it has the potential to; the people of the North will build taller walls. With land mines and robot sentries.
What is to be done when there is nowhere safe to run or hide oneself?
If the question is “what can be done”, the interlude then is who should do it where. The interesting thing about this manifesto is that we can give it as a speech in Cairo, Damascus or Jerusalem, Paris or London, Moscow or Beijing, Port-Au-Prince, Port of Spain or Kingston Town. When we speak in the local language, we have fire in our eyes and passion in our hearts; then we earn their time as well as their ears too. People know that something has been broken for a long time.
There are some pretty universal deficits when it comes to global human rights, no one knows they have them. No one knows who grants them. They are a product of Enlightenment values, Socialist pressure, and common sense. They are a list of demands.
They have already been written down in 39 separate United Nations documents. They are violated everywhere.
Because we are not interested in part freedoms, half freedoms, freedoms just on paper or any abridgment of these 58 noble rights enshrined in the halls of the United Nations and trampled everywhere else: we’d make a good wager that our message speaks as true in the Gaza as it does in the Gully.
What is to be done? What is the way forward? We need to demand that governments adopt these rights as laws, or we bring every single government to its knees.
Who is the primary agent of change? We, all people.
As Church, Mosque, and State have all failed so colossally we must rise to repossess them. We must not replace a corrupt order, that of the Westphalian State System with a new corrupt order. Nearly every nation is an arbitrary creation; a plantation with a flag. States must become tools in the hands of humanity for justice and rights, not soothe-saying witch doctors urging schism and bloated bureaucracies enriching only themselves. We are students of black history, and a cruel unnatural history is what we have read. We indict the entire state system as lackeys to Oligarchy; Oligarchs must be tried and imprisoned. The bureaucratic bloat of each state must be reigned in. The nation-state is an anachronism. It must be replaced with community-centered, democratic autonomy. This is the underlying message of the Democratic Confederalist Parties, the parties of workers and the oppressed; which is to say nearly all people living today.
If these rogue governments, puppets of Oligarchy cannot be controlled through fair elections, they must be brought to their knees via armed struggle. Not the so-called ‘bourgeoisie’ against the so-called ‘proletariat’, that is an old language. Worker against Oligarchy. People who toil, who strive and spend their life as some kind of slave against a tiny, tiny faction of powerful families. Vampires that use the state system to keep us working, keep us afraid. It is not seditious to say “I am a Worker!” You should say it proudly. The Working Class is the class of most humans, the class of people who make this machine run, and keep the lights on. It is time to paralyze the machine. Turn off the lights and leave the factory floor.
We are writing of a class of people that currently cannot feed their children, a class that is still affixed in chattel slavery, a class that dies of curable diseases, and lacks even clean water coming into equality with a far smaller class that has all the world’s good things and far too much more. The basis of all rights is equality before them.
We are workers and this is a Party for Workers.
Saying who is the responsible party is actually the initiating question of this manifesto. We must believe that it is our duty and destiny as Workers first to set this example, there is no particularist destiny when it comes to human rights. They belong to all women, children, and men. They belong to men who love men, women who love women, and also to people born either woman or man, but don’t identify as such or change it later. If you are alive, and you are a sentient creature with a heart, soul, brain, and conscience; you are entitled to Human Rights. “An Injury to one is an injury to all” As long as a single person has their rights violated, we all have a permissive air of rights violation, a virus.
Rights for all or rights for none!
So who will be asked to fight? In this struggle of Workers against Oligarchs, Oligarchic Collectives will bring the entire heel of spies, torture, police, military and government abuse on us for these ideas; Every man, woman, and child who is able has to fight. Our unity must be a total unity. No rights will be secure if even one gay, black woman is slurred in closed quarters. We are after all fighting a long and total war. We are fighting internationally. No nation is real, each is an artificial construct to divide the Working Class. We have some allies, but mostly we have an array of well-resourced enemies. With nowhere to run or hide, not even Rojava or Cuba.
If you want to be free, “free” being the full attainment and total implementation of universal human rights as well as one day seeing the end of the war: Not just the several dozen live fire wars raging, but the end of man’s willingness and ability to make war then join humanity’s cause. This is no prelude to a dream. No woman or man ought to fall under the wrath of war, famine, pestilence, or disease, not while in some many gilded ghettos, fear of these horsemen have been nearly obliterated. We look you in the eyes and tell you help is coming and we’re going to win some of these rights or die trying.
This is no “I have a dream”, when the pages end, you open your eyes and help us hold the lines. We will tell you how.
“We’re going to get our Human Rights the old-fashioned way. The settler way, the cowboy-cowgirl way. The Kurdish way. With tenacity and brazen force of will. With zealous persistence. Or more specifically the kibbutz bootstrap way, the way once called “Zionism”. Until the left and Palestinians made such a word a dirty word. A word associated with Occupation. But the idea of “Zionism”, before there was Israel, before Israel became a colony of America; the idea was to build piecemeal institutions of a state that didn’t yet exist. Step, by step set up a Parallel State to whatever unjust order was horse-trading, masquerading as reality. The idea of “Zion ”, the world to come built in the world of the real, is also known by the Hebrew people as “Tikkun Olam”. Zionism today is almost purely associated with Palestinian oppression. Tikkun Olam, a liberal kumbaya for social justice, is in an age of unmitigated bloodshed and terror.
We’re going to have to build thousands and thousands of forts way up in the mountains and hold out for a human dawn, that will hopefully arrive before the Capitalists bleed the entire earth dry and we are left with a violent, well-armed desert. Killing each other over water.
Democratic Confederalism is the ideological fusion of hated and maligned Jewish Zionism and a Kurdish interpretation of Socialism. It has profound commitments to participatory democracy, women’s equality, environmentalism, and the protection of ethnic/religious minorities. It is the ideological merger of alternatives to a failed Capitalist Modernity, a solution process where the state has collapsed or the state is an agent of great predation.
These forts, these outposts will radiate the ideals we fight for. They will demonstrate the viability of a human rights-protected world, collective economics, democracy, and non-state solutions to daily problems. Our children and our grandchildren will be given their rights. Our outposts, be they infrastructure, training academies or schools to help, heal and save this sick, sad world are our answer to the failed projects of Capitalism. We will build up our own credit unions, charter schools, vocational programs, volunteer rescue agencies, housing cooperatives, clinics, banks, universities, and major syndicates modeled on justice. Framing Human Rights goals alongside Workers’ power. With Democratic Confederalism and actionable work to achieve Human Rights, we will craft the foundation of thousands of confederated cantons; a series of Parallel States. If the existing states cannot or will not legislate Human Rights Enabling legislation and will not arrest these criminal Oligarchs; we must achieve rights for ourselves and deny the state system our tax revenue.
Democratic Confederalism is the future. It is the full achievement of human rights by social networks and grassroots infrastructure when an elected or self-appointed government fails to provide or threatens us. It is not universally adversarial, but it is a matter of survival. It should be defended with armed self-defense.
Our main foreign policy as a movement and Party is the full and total exportation of the technology and ideas into the hands of our fellow human beings more oppressed than ourselves by man or nature. The weapons of our immediate war are the bootstrap teaching outposts, guerrilla medical programs and clinics; makeshift vocational academies, and security services that prevent inter-ethnic bloodletting, or that of state actors against their own civilians.
We will not, and cannot fight a war purely on ideas like the United Nations has done for 70 years to implement these documents. We must make the governments afraid. This is the only reasonable way any of them will make a change. But we must make them nervous, not terrified, in terror they will only lash out with the entirety of their military and police forces. History is full of this. However, the majority if not all state governments must be removed. They are illegitimate and serve in the Oligarchy of each nation.
We are not the kind of people who build a school to watch it burn down or build a clinic to then see nurses abused and aid workers threatened or a local community victimized for wanting to improve its condition. Every single institution we set up must be defended like a fortress. Defended by a People’s Defense Force. Note carefully from history that our enemy the Oligarchy and the repressive forces of the State will kill rape or torture anyone it believes is a threat. It will rape your loved one in front of you and put whole ethnic groups in death camps. It will torture your activists, kill your leaders and call you a “terrorist”.
But you’re only a terrorist if you are killing unarmed civilians. You’re only a terrorist when you kill people who are not part of the actual war.
When we build a school or a clinic, we know we plan to defend each and every one we set up with our lives and steel. In East New York, in Cite Soleil, in the Gaza or the Gully or Rome, Istanbul, or Jerusalem we will fight for human rights like a war for Armageddon with the calculated strategy of Machiavelli acting out the Art of War. We have to form quite a lot of something out of almost nothing. In the world today, the world of real Human rights isn’t worth the pages they are printed on.
You have to begin in your own community by feeding the poor, clothing the naked, and teaching ethics to the young people. You must of course begin close to home and enlist the support of your family and friends. You begin small but always dream with grandeur. Question tradition, it perpetuated wrongness. Question impossible, everything was impossible until it was done.
You must focus on small victories that build off each other. Feeding free breakfast to children or busing families to visit prisoners, is only revolutionary when it offers service the state does not provide or provides inadequately AND is openly associated with a Party of the resistance. Keeping a few blocks litter free, keeping them safe and then drug-free. Litter free is an act of charity. Safe is an act of community control of policing, drug-free is a challenge to some gangs or the mob. You could work to rehabilitate convicts and junkies, which is charity. You can integrate the disposed into a meaningful role in the community, turning them from a vagrant to a worker. You could teach law and accounting to the poor or volunteer in a shelter making art, the move from a charity to a revolutionary communal institution has a lot to do with intent. Capitalists and Oligarchs fund charities and foundations to appear philanthropic and wash some of their wealth. Most charities, like NGOs, are about pork chop politics; about small solutions to the worst elements of obvious poverty, but they are not revolutionary.
A communal institution is revolutionary because it seeks to take control of the means of development, it seeks to compete with the inadequate or absent service the state provides with the tax base.
There are many beachheads to secure. Which is to say places so hopeless that any help is something. There are refugee camps so large they go on for all the eye to see, miles and miles of squalor. There are countries where social services are given only to the preferred ethnic group. We will win this war, but we must wage it correctly. The purpose of an emergency group is to set up the beachhead which introduces the skills to develop the initial communal institution, then the strategic planning in place to create backward and forward linkages between these institutions. Until the revolutionary institution is a valid alternative to what the state offers, further de-legitimizing the state. But expect assault in the front and the rear and side upon these mechanisms.
Thus to secure our rights we must control the means to provide social services, the means of development. To transition from pitiless capitalism to socialism or some False Necessitarian fusion, we require organized workers’ cooperatives; to control the means of production. You cannot seize institutions of the state and expect them to behave in a manner that is less corrupt, and less fallible. You cannot take another man’s factory and declare it a worker’s cooperative. In many ways, Democratization of the social and economic spheres of life requires new institutions and Social Entrepreneurship; Democratic Confederalism is an ideology of governance that values empowerment.
We set up new schools, new clinics, and new infrastructure run by the workers. We set up new enterprises, also run by the workers. This does not mean total equality attributed to communism, or enforced top-down restriction like State Socialism; there is room for elements of both Socialism and Capitalism in a society that is democratic and human rights reinforced.
We have to focus on where the state has failed or is flailing. This is the strategy of an emergency group sent to secure a beach head, build the first forts. But at some stage, at an early stage, the Party must protect its institution and confederated structures.
WE CANNOT VIOLATE THE RIGHTS OF OTHERS AND HOPE TO SOMEHOW LATER FULLY OBTAIN THEM FOR OURSELVES. WE CANNOT GET SUCKED INTO A PROTRACTED GUERRILLA WAR WITH A DECADENT AND BRUTALLY REPRESSIVE NATION-STATE SYSTEM.
We must always take preventative measures. There are some very guilty men in the world, probably a few women too, but they’re all going to die of old age just like everyone else. Hopefully in white light tight plastic rooms heavily guarded with the latest life-prolonging health options available in The Hague. We advocate the capture and imprisonment of war criminals, but we cannot call for their assassination. We must isolate them, indemnify them and then better educate their grandchildren.
The posture of the People’s Defense Forces must always be defensive. There is a large body of precedent to suggest against embarking on a people’s war. Such campaigns are bloody, and decisive and always result in widespread death and destruction. The Defense Forces are to protect communities from aggression, state aggression, non-state paramilitaries, theocratic fundamentalists, or criminal banditry.
There are ten key pillars to the Democratic Confederalist Party’s basic functionality;
Democratic Autonomy (establishing meaningful participatory democracy in all structures, systems, assemblies, and bodies of governance)
Human Rights mass Mobilization ( widespread Human Rights Active Education and Policy Level Implementation/enforcement)
Radical Inclusivity– which includes but is not limited to co-gendering of all leadership/ management roles, affirmative action to include and empower ethnic minority groups, total freedom of spiritual practice, and full rights and inclusive safeguards on gender identity, sexual preference, and sexual orientation.
Property by Use– connoting that one only has rights to own what one can immediately utilize.
Control and Enhancement of all local Social Services (controlling and improving on the means of social and economic development).
Control and Democratization of Productive Mechanisms (controlling and democratizing the means of production).
Mobilization of a Peoples’ Defense Forces (enlistment of local forces for deterrent self-defense and policing drawn from the communities they serve)
Actual Social Ecology and Sustainability– (broad policy commitments to safe environmental practices and resource management)
Actual Equality before the law– irrespective of one’s wealth, ethnicity, gender, spiritual views, or nationality.
Militant Non-Violence: Understanding of violence to be a fundamentally degrading and consciousness-lowering practice.
Know that you are not alone in questioning why it’s been so bad, for so long. Know that we have had a very long night and you have been born just before dawn. Know that good women and men serve in this Party and that we all stand on the shoulders of giants that fell fighting for an idea whose time has arrived. The only question left is to ask what you can specifically do to end your role as a collaborator or as a civilian and begin training as a champion of our people and our universal rights. And we have a few ideas!
It has long been established that land, or the possession of land does not bring any inherent, long-term security. Its capture in fact is one of the fundamental historical exacerbations of humanity’s many woes and burdens. Defensibility is no sure-fire guarantee of anything other than temporary survivability, but that does not connote fulfillment of human potential. So “new land” therefore always has old problems, and surely now there is no “new land”. Even since time immemorial, there has never been an ‘empty land.’ There is always an indigenous population and a conquering outsider. A colonizer and the colonized. It’s never worked out well to say the least.
So we don’t obtain universal human rights by the settlement of land upon some aggressor-violators’ territory, not in the traditional sense anyway.
There is no uncharted isle, no unclaimed valley: the world is a much-sectioned-off place. Invisible little, bloody lines telling women and men they are forever divided. But we will fight that false notion on the beaches, shores, and airwaves, with the pen and with the rifle. What divides us are invented lines, lines of conquest, colonization, and subjugation. The nation-state is not natural, it is man-made. It is a false consciousness imposing loyalty, a flag, and an anthem along with a mostly made-up history of a global slave population; the working class.
Some slaveries are far worse than others. Some slaveries take on the shape of careers. But make no mistake, you will be kept working until near the day that you die too early from exhaustion and stress.
SO ALWAYS WORKING FROM WHAT IS, not what we’d ideally like it to be, is the first major break from “Traditional Colonial Zionism”. We do not make the capture of a new nation any type of objective or means to our ends. The second defining break is the level of participation. Having a land need not make one a ‘real people’ as any Kurd or Basque can tell you. Nor are the good things of life always enjoyed within a so-called ‘State’ as virtually every Congolese, Sudanese, or Sub-Saharan African can tell you.
So, first things first. Seizure of land solves absolutely nothing.
Second, tactics of economic and political Zionism can be harnessed without the politics of identity-based nationalism and that is called Democratic Confederalism. An ideological theory established by Murray Bookchin was; Jew, Zionist then Anarchist but was put into practice by Abdullah Ocalan; first a third-world liberation nationalist, then a Maoist then a Democratic Confederalist. Ocalan built on Bookchin who built on Wallerstein who built on Marx.
Thirdly, the mobilization of a wealthy Diaspora is often a detriment. Always better to mobilize the working-class Diaspora. Rich people really do all think quite alike. Much of a diaspora is riddled with collaborators, people who defected from confrontation, and their children, and children’s children who culturally have imbibed the rapid individualism of the North and the West.
We must reject all forms of nationalism. The only valid nationalism is nationalism as a cultural sentimentality, not as a unifying identity. Nationalism is a structural implementation of slavery and a re-conceptualization of the feudal order.
No nation on earth has clean historical hands! The particularism of the United States of America is that it was a colony that shed its metro-pol Great Britain quite early on. And on top of that within three hundred years came to age as a world empire; presiding over the Globalization Epoch of Capitalist Modernity. It is now in decline and the People’s Republic of China is emergent.
Who can blame the United States that cannot blame Russia, China, Spain, Japan, France, England, and virtually every European country? Every nation on earth took part in genocide & atrocity of some kind pre, post, or during slavery and colonialism. And to the cultural nationalists of the undeveloped world and their Diaspora, we remind them that there is no well-documented golden age in Africa, South America, and Asia either, even before violent pale monkeys barged in with some germs, guns, and steel.
THE IMMEDIATE AIM OF THE MOVEMENT IS TO DEMONSTRATE A RANGE OF TACTICS WITHIN A SCHOOL OF THOUGHT CALLED “DEMOCRATIC CONFEDERALISM” TO IMPLEMENT “PARA-STATE INFRASTRUCTURE” THROUGHOUT THE WORLD. TO FIGHT FOR AND OBTAIN UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS AS OUTLINED IN THE UNITED NATIONS DOCUMENTS BEARING THE SAME NAME AS FACTS ON THE GROUND. ESTABLISHED BY “WORKERS’ PARTIES”, “COMMUNAL INSTITUTIONS”, AND “WORKERS’ COOPERATIVES” AND DEFENDED BY “PEOPLE’S DEFENSE FORCES”.
We are not simply content to document or apprehend war criminals, we need real infrastructure and we need it now. No more after-the-fact, agonizing atrocities. We need emergency groups, we need flying columns, and a reserve army of human rights professionals and labor.
Since 1948 there have been few positive developments in the cause of human rights. No army will enforce them; no champions have risen with arms to heroically bring them into a state of real being.
Once again, until the time the United Nations or any state actor will actually protect and enshrine these rights then the women and men of the Workers Parties, and the hundreds of international formations like our own will take this burden on our shoulders for the sake of our future.
We lay claim to our 58 codified rights and bellow help is coming, pushing forward to inevitable victory! We don’t want a state, or some land and we don’t crave power for the sake of power, or the ease of doing some business. Using the following tactics outlined in this program we seek a massive and overlapping set of infrastructures generated by civilians, through Workers Parties to enforce and enact these rights without the blessing or endorsement of any government. Where others have failed we will succeed; because we must succeed if we are to survive.
Literal translation: the hands don’t reach it Meaning: to not find the time to do (something) Example: Да все до уборки руки не доходят.
“ I can never get around to cleaning.”
In Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, “The so-called Russian Quarter”, “the Little Odessa.” Depending how you Post-Soviet identify. The Russian Quarter is always teeming with life behind the wall. Were I to put my finger in it; my nostril to the whiff beyond her buxom chest; it smells like potato pancakes, cherry perfume, cigarette smoke and fish. Smoked fish. It runs along and below the above ground Yellow Q and Orange B Express train line which rumbles above like a mechanical wave breaking in the six story tenement row houses made of red brown brick. Following the Q line above ground the architecture of the quarter goes from a mix of these artless, durable six stories inter mixed with modest suburban homes running towards the coast. The Northernmost boundary of the quarter is Kings Highway because it is here that street signs appear in Cyrillic. Although the Midwood Ivoryish zone overlaps with the Russian quarter until avenue H where the Haitian Bar Lev line was drawn in 1996. Drugs nor guns nor traffic can move north of that line or south. District Midwood is one of eleven Ivoryish ghettos in the greater New York area, a place of prayer and tunnels and coming and going. Kawa Zivistan lived in that district for eight years on Ocean and H. He knows its comings and goings.
The Russian quarter is awash with small restaurants with live music sung by comical Tamidahs and various slender, busty, well made up on every level Slavic goddesses. And price fixed meals. Its western border is Coney Island Avenue, which at Kings Highway becomes a Pakistani district where Shar’iah law is secretly enforced. Coney Island Avenue runs parallel to Ocean Avenue to the east and ocean parkway to the west, and these three routes had to be thoroughly barricaded to turn back the advance of the National Guard and the 104th and 116th tank column of Christmas Eve; 2015 or in the parlance of the rebels AR 3. That is still three years to come. The eastern border of the quarter was Nostrand Avenue. Where the Russian quarter ends and the West Indian quarter begins, largely composed of Haitians and Jamaicans. There were never walls around the quarter, not before the revolt or after not even when the southern rim of Brighton and Coney Island because the internationally famous green light district once the Soviet was recognized by Russia and China in AR 7, or 2019 Common Era. There were not physical walks but perhaps linguistic mental walls that trapped the mentality of those.in the quarter somewhere between the 18th and 21st century. Perhaps between the old world and the new. Perhaps rendering the seditious place it was and is, a place unlike any others where huddled refugees and expatriate radicals were walled in Breukelen habitations in a space that was neither Russia nor America, a purgatory. For had the three million souls of the future Breuklyn, excuse me Breuklyn Soviet ever been embraced by the Americans perhaps they would not have enjoined the rising. For what solidarity did those in the quarter have with Ivoryish spies and black revolutionaries? Nothing. Less than nothing. So little nothing that the majority of the quarter might have seated the whole thing out, we’re that an option. But with all the other tribes in arms and the National Guard shelling so indiscriminately well most joined in the rising before long simply to avenge or protect their own.
That is a characteristic that certainly embodies the Russian quarter. They are rugged social individualists. Very few are actually Russian. There are several hundred thousand former Soviet refugees that speak Russian. But few are slavic. They are Ukrainians, Ivory, Bulgarians, Tartars, Uzbeks, Kazaks, Chuvash, Turkmen, Armenians, Georgians, Bukharians, even a few war like Chechens. They all are in-grained with the Russian Mentality. As in their circle of live work and loyalty contracts rapidly even in the face of minor hardship. No other race has ever been fully enslaved by its own people first via brutal serfdom then via even more brutal Stalinism. It ruined them as a collective or idealist species. That circle of loyalty contracts down to one. In a way few other races do. At a certain point they might throw their children and wives into the rising seas. A wretched generalization but their individual will is harder than any. It is impossible to break. The social nature of their individualism is the solidity of the alliances they form. With anyone that properly secures their ends of individual betterment. They are turtle loyal and truly blind for those that aid them. They go inside a hard shell indeed and not god or insects can crack it. It is made of the strongest stuff. Perhaps always having anything but predators as presidents and thieves for kings? Often the Russian quarter was festive, often feisty, often a place of lawless abuses. You couldn’t ever know unless you knew the name of a song in Cyrillic.
Daria Andrevna meets Sebastian called Kawa on the boardwalk. Kawa stands there smoking a Newport sizing up the Green from the Blue Tatiana not knowing how different they really are. He looks sleep deprived. Daria then tells him this rambling story about being the great granddaughter of a German baroness. This seemed like the kinds of stories all White Russian women concoct to erect a regal lineage that the revolution had maligned. Yelizaveta and Maria hadn’t made up such stories, they had others though that were comparable. But Yelizaveta and Maria’s fathers had been Red Russians and inner party members. They were less fixated on the 19th century it seemed. There were always these vague and ambiguous narratives Kawa noticed about what their fathers did or didn’t do during the Soviet Union. Maria’s father had completely disappeared in Chechnya, allegedly been shot by friendly fire; he had been a General, but was dead before she was four or the family joined the exodus. Yelizaveta’s father had been a “dentist”. Or perhaps an expert interrogator. It was hard to deduce. What was the truth and what was the darkness that creeps out into his world any time he encounters them, these post and former Soviets.
Anyhow, Dasha was claiming to be part Ivoryish via her German Baroness Great Grandmother and that was her story for now. Her father apparently had just been a tramp and ran out on her mom at fairly a young age. She kisses him on each cheek and takes out a picture, wrapped up in papers and a bow.
“For you,” she states.
He opens it and it’s quite something, so black and dark and vivid. A heart. A black, black heart. But, his or hers? To what symbolic level goes it?
“Amazing, I love it,” he replies.
And for the nearly the first time in his life, he means it.
“I’m just so glad.” She says with her big blue person eyes beaming?
“Shall we go get some red wine?” she suggests.
That night long after midnight, late, late after a few shots, and some wine and a few dozen shared cigarettes in Cafes in and around Manhattan Beach they walked their walk, tumbling really toward the yacht yards and mansion of Sheepshead Bay.
At one point she yanks his collar close and says; “taste me”; she puts wine into him mouth to mouth. The night gets early, he’s lost chasing her.
He runs his fingers through her thick blond lion’s mane. She leans into him on bar stools or when they go outside to speak, let her tits rest on him, brush against him.
“So you’re really an Ivory?” she asks.
“Yes at least partly.”
“I want to ask you silly questions and you will answer them off, she smiles rolling up into his arms, “and you will get a prize if you win, understand. True answers only.”
“Would you denounce your Ivoryish G-d and become an Eastern Orthodox Christian to please my mother?”
“I don’t believe in either G-d’s monopoly, why not?”
“If we were poor would you work on Saturdays to support me?”
“As I have for years.”
“Would you steal for me?
“The moon itself. And whatever was needed.”
“Would you make love to me with my husband sleeping in the next room?”
“Your cries of passion would wake him, so only if he were drugged.”
“Would you kill to protect me?”
“Without a thought.”
“If I killed someone would you help me cover it up?”
“Yes of course I’d try.”
“Try?”
“Try. Depends on the mess not the risk.”
A mental picture flashes in his head of a memory. Was it real? The two of them dismembering corpses and melting them in acid?
“If I asked you to kill for me would you do it?”
“Are you in trouble?” he asks like a stupid American.
“You know I’m a married woman?”
“I’d like to suggest it lacks certain integrity.”
“Does it? How could you know? You’ve known me what, five weeks?”
“Time is relative.”
“Maybe. My husbands a total monster and my boyfriend is a bit boring,” is all she says and pulls away from him.
She shows him marks on her poorly hidden.
She has black and blue marks on her chest and under both arms. Like she got herself fucked ruthlessly. She has handcuff marks on her wrists.
“What do you want me to do about your situation?”
“There is nothing that can be done.”
“I could take you away.”
“You could try.”
“You have to tell me what you want me to do, not what you assume is possible.”
“What’s the thing you Americans say, oh yes: You and what army.”
“What are those marks from?”
“Me being loved by three men.”
He looks sad, it breaks through. Sad for her and him both.
“You could leave with me. Tonight. I have enough money to get us away.”
“I doubt that. I have expensive tastes.”
“Curb them?”
“Are you going to give me new clothes? And a beautiful home; and pay for my school. And give me a credit card. Give me money to send to my ailing mother in Penza? Ivory.”
“I think I could give you a better life than this shit, this life. In this miserable city.”
“You can’t give me what I need. As sweet as you are.”
“I don’t think you’d be with me if you didn’t think I could try.”
“You’re broke. You’re in school. You’re up to shit, I know. Don’t think I don’t know what you and your friends are up to. You’re all gonna die.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Do you think I don’t know?”
“What do you think you know?”
“I got to know a lot of guys when they brought me here.”
“Who?”
“The Perchevney Bratva.”
“You’ve told me so many fucking stories about how you got here. Who keeps you, what’s even true? What! You play mind games like the best of us.”
“My girlfriend and I were hired to let a couple bankers work us up two nights ago. When I told you I was studying. I was being fucked by two Wall Street guys, swapping my friend and I for hours. These marks are from them, not my fake ass paperwork husband. Not my most generous boyfriend Serge.”
He wonders what if any of the story is real.
“The Wall Street guys were fucked out their minds. They were going at us for hours. Taking long breaks to do coke and talk about shit they own.”
He has been asleep because she keeps feeding him booze. He wakes up sometimes and knows his role, but then goes to sleep and forgets what is about to go down.
“They know you and the rest of so-called resistance are going to attack the stock exchange on 17 Fructidor. In but two days. They know that you’re all going to try and take over the whole district and provoke a state of emergency. They know everything. The cops know. The National Guard know. The F.B.I. know. The Bureau of Homeland Security knows. Breria, too he certainly knows. They are going to lure you all into those very narrow streets and spaces. They’re going to wait under one day. They’re going to kill every single one of you with a gas. Now you tell me. What horse am I betting on? My fat American paperwork husband. My Russian accountant boyfriend washing money at the biggest hotel in the Midtown? My boss, the Illubadori pimp who pays me one grand every night I take a Wall Street guy, a banker or celebrity out to dinner? Or you? The charming but totally bipolar ambulance man, who has less than 400 in the bank, is on the Department of Homeland Security tertiary kill list, can’t buy me a new life, and can’t save me. All you have is happy noble Amerikanski ideals and some poems. You probably shouldn’t ever see me again.”
He knows she’s right about at least what’s in his account.
“I can get us out of this city, I can take you away from this life,” Kawa says, “I…”
“You are going to tell me you love me?” she asks him.
He doesn’t respond, that word means nothing anyway in English.
“You better not even fucking dare say it.”
“I’ll give you my life and I kill anyone who is hurting you. I’ll bury your husband, your boyfriend and your handlers. I’ll bury Breria himself.”
She kisses him hard. Fuck it, she thinks he’ll probably be dead again in a couple of days.
And that was how she began to suspect that he truly was the man she’d dreamed about as a younger girl with the powers she was born with, from a line of old soul sorceresses; and she of course recorded the entire conversation on her smart phone recorder as evidence for her handlers, well we all have them really.
Shortly they could cross this very, very loose and erratic cannon off their growing shorter list. He was so fucking out there, he was not to be allowed to walk off the map this time.
“I know a little inn at the boardwalk end with mirrors on the ceiling,” she whispers to him, “I have to sleep at home tonight but he’s not gonna come home tomorrow. You can’t save my soul or fix my life, but you can do what you want to my body, if I like it.” Now that was a value proposition, if he had ever heard one. Because he believed in his heart, that sometimes things were like Russian literature and sometimes they were like American movies, but if you fucked a woman good enough and hard enough she would, could, might really love you. ‘I think that I may have been listening to lots of music from the Caribbean, culturally speaking. That’s what made me think like that.’
Literal translation: I am going to show you where lobsters spend the winter.
Meaning:
AN ABSTRACT THREAT, “Or else!”
On 10 Fructidor the Bronks Okrug is being completely surrounded by the National Guard and U.A.S. Federal military forces under the direction of the Department of Homeland Security. All of the bridges into Strong Island are check-pointed close. The National Guard opened the day with artilaeary stikes which caused uncontorleld fires in the North Bronks. The smoke from the Okrug can be scene for many miles. Today at a large demonstration shortly before midnight targeted air stikes wiped out most of the deputies gathered at Hostos for the People’s Assmebly. This was still the Bronks though, so the militia foces of Bronks fired back. The siege of central Breuklyn continues, smoldering on. The Ivory New Year begins right before sundown. A strange new year, counted out across time way past 5,000 and change.
“What year do you people think it is,” Sasho asks Kawa.
“We believe it is 5773.”
“My phone says different. Says, it is actually just 2012 my friend,” Sasho says, “Martina is it 2012?”
“It’s 2011 on Bulgarian post Soviet time sir, but the Americans think its 2012.”
Kawa interjects,“What if the year we were all told it to be was utterly a lie?”
“What a question!” exclaims Martina.
“What if something terrible once happened and they lost control. The powers that be. So theory wipred it all out. Wipred out memory, history, and time. Then just reset. They reset reality for us all by about 3,000 year out of wach.”
“What a wild assertion!” says Sasho, “You people think its deep in the future?”
“What is the year wasn’t 2012 at all,” explains Kawa, “ but instead it was 5773! Where did nearly three thousand years of human devleopment go? No one ever asks that. Why are some people using the moon and others the sun to track the months? Why was the Gregoran calender and the Julian calender so far off the date the Ivory have set? The phone devices, the shift calenders, even google say the year is 2012. The year the Mayans say the world will end. The phones and calenders they have in the work camps sat it is THURSDAY. But why does the week have seven days, not ten? Who decided on that? According to the Ivory the month is called Tishrei, and this is the evening of a new year. 1 Tishrei 5773.
But, Sebastian doesn’t keep time on the clock of bondage, deception, or the clock of invisble friends. To him and the members of this club, it isn’t really September, it isn’t actually Tishrei. The week has ten days not seven. There are ACTUALLY two days of work. Then two days of rest. Then two days of work, followed by four days of rest. And this is the month of Fructidor. The month of Fruits.
“There is no J letter in old Ivory, so I don’t know how we can be called the Jews, or Jewish, or Judean. I was a Y sound; Yehud, Yudea, Yudean. The romans used the J sound.”
“Ivory is an Americanization of Eivrei; where they get the world Hebrew from.”
At a tavern of very ill repute on Ludlow Street some friends are getting ready for “A JUDEAN NEW YEAR’S PREGAME PARTY” on a Thursday evening, or such it was billed at on the place cards.
“Why are some of you called Ask-a-Nazi? And others called Suffer-dick?” Martina asks Kawa pouring him some Astika into a glass.
“I think some of us just took the name the master oppressor gave us,” Kawa replies, “and some did not.”
Slavi Perchevney the sullen enforcer doesn’t need a list, not even the drop of a name. He’s killed many people before. He will have to do so again, “That’s how the news is looking these days”. He either knows the faces of the regulars. Or you pay and that’s it. Maybe you look like the $20 mark or maybe $40 mark, it’s a call he can make quickly and quietly. Mostly if one is a big chested female, or a big spender type the price per ticket goes down. For a regular though, it costs nothing. He takes responsibility for the trouble caused by those he or she brings to the Tavern. Mehanata is lit up this Thursday for almost Ivory New Years, mostly an excuse for Z.O.B. officers to congregate, report and share a beverage. The city is going up in flames around them.
Step down the hall, go straight, not upstairs, go past the coat check unless you want to be robbed, open the second wooden door and leave the time, space zone. The lights are now quite dim, the place is still cast in a dead, red light and loud gypsy Jazz is playing from the band below. Welcome to Mehanata, the Bulgarian Tavern in the wilderness of North America.
Rafael laughs off the varying contradictions and swills back his cold Astika beer. The Bulgarian bartenders by now know the sober pensive Kawa as well as the dumb faltering drunk Kawa and they wonder what metamorphosis this latest tale will bring. Although he acts like a humble outsider he is known in this haunt since 2001. Bottles have been broken over heads! Guns have been drawn and unloaded. Disaster has befallen him and glory too. And he is not like all the other Americans people know who come here. Kawa believes in things which are dangerous to speak of. Kawa has always been under Sasho’s roof. The tavern attracts many good tales and vice mongering spirits. The tavern has been the roof on which Kawa has laid huge plots and fallen down with no teeth. But he is not just a regular. He is the favorite American of the Voorhi Alexander Pervechnvny. Surprisingly he never gloats on that or uses it to drink on the house. Perhaps because some person or group of people keeps wiping out his mind.
Justin, Sasho, and a troop of little Mexican wet backs are down in the sub-basement digging with pick axes and shovels. There is a hatch under the basement chamber called ‘the ice cage’. The wall-to-wall ice box where wall-to-wall two minutes of binge vodka drinking happens at fifteen dollars a minute. It’s all the exact same vodka bottled up and cut in various ways. Well the floor has a hidden hatchway that drops you quite deep into a smuggling tunnel out to Breuklyn via the old train lines and then out to a pier in Coney Island’s Sea Gate City.
They’re not digging a new tunnel. They’re digging a demolition bin so they can completely blow apart and seal the hatch and the tunnel to Breuklyn behind them in the event of a big police raid. Which will not be long coming. Especially with all these terrorists and spies fucking about in the Tavern every weekend for the past six weeks.
Kawa Zivistan has a short palaver with Rafael and Viktoria on the subject of Daria Andreavna, then stands outside the social club with the Fenian bouncer James White.
“You’re becoming quite a regular again,” says James White the former cop, “That’s what they call a real poor life decision.”
“I used to come here when it was on Canal.”
“The old place eh.”
Raided often and burned to the ground in 2005. Many were killed.
The burly Fenian bouncer looks every bit like an off-duty cop. Maybe, just maybe he smiles a little bit more.
They’ve spoken amicably of their blue-collar nights many times previously. When Kawa is heartbroken as both Maria and Yelizaveta rendered him the past four years, when those two relationships ended he took back to the tavern. Because the best way to get over a woman is to get under another woman, as everyone knows. But his will as man was vanquished. That is a polite way of saying he had no ability or will to entice women on the dance or make small talk with young loose women that so fill the dance hall. It was in these periods he got to know Rafael and Viktoria in different capacities. Got to palaver with a lot of the insiders he used to know in other forgotten lives like Justin, James, James, Hella, Tanya and Sasho sometimes.
They had all supposedly met three years prior at the Tabor Gypsy festival on Floyd Bennett Field and he had become a confidant to Rafael ’s revolutionist notions and Viktoria’s worries on her husbands’ ways. His cheating. Rafael it seemed lack anyone to palaver with on the issues of the world, philosophy or his long held beliefs in socialism, and Victoria on whose shoulder Kawa cried about his lost loves was also quite willing to console her about Rafael ’s alleged philander which was not quite real, but wasn’t either quite imagined.
“You’re becoming quite a regular again. I’d say for sure. Slavi lets you in without paying? I’d say that means you’re carrying the card now, again.”
“It’s supposedly a rebel friendly place.”
“For now. It’s quite getting bad up in the Bronx. Maybe you heard. We may switch loyalties back to those with the truest monopoly on violence. The state. You might have to eat your fix somewhere else before the stakes get too high. Before the cheese leads you to the mouse trap.”
“Good to know!”
“All we partly retired civil servants have to stick together,” says James White, “no matter which foreign government might be paying either of our bills this week. Don’t come here on a Wednesday though whatever you do, it’s a whole other crowd.”
“Worried I’ll shoot the place up?”
“I’m worried you’ll see things you don’t really want to see, again. Or remember, things people might have done to you,” says James White the Fenian, “remember things about yourself. That is highly dangerous to remember.”
Card stock place holders on candle lit tables towards the back of the third floor declare several long wooden tables: “Reserved for the Banshee Otriad ”. Sixty some core and provisional Kadro members of the Newyorkgrad Banshee Association, a clandestine organization of EMTS, Paramedics and Emergency workers are drunk or drinking, loudly occupying the third floor mezzanine of the Mehanata Social Club.
Except for the club’s current ‘Chief-of-Staff’ the Haitian Paramedic Emile Cange, who is a nominally straight laced Seventh Day Adventist and his fiance Praise Augustus, well it’s almost midnight and the music is blaring dancehall in their honor, and Zivistan is calling for a toast. A running joke in the club was that for the past decade or so they never seemed to miss an opportunity to go hard drinking on an Ivoryish holiday.
There are a lot of Ivoryish holidays, approximately twenty of them resulting in innumerous number of work days to be taken off on top of the Friday into Saturday Sabbath, which man of the club members had paperwork submitted to their employers, were their shops union stating that they couldn’t work on these assorted holidays and also, Fridays past 3pm.
At some point Trickovitch had sat down with a calendar and made the calculation that utilizing the Ivoryish religion’s observances, one could get a whole lot of rest. And it caught on. Pretty soon over half the club carried bonafide conversion papers, certificates of Bar Mitzvah and bris where appropriate, kutb marriage contracts, the world.
Nikholai and the man named Lt. Moishe Klein, the clubs only actually practicing Orthodox Ivory had made some Russian rabbis in Brighton a good price and long term agreement they couldn’t refuse.
“Hamesh, Arba, Sheloash, Styeim, Ehkhad!, Happy Jewish new year!” yells Kawa Zivistan slapping Mickhi Dbrisk on the back. Although, there are still two actual days to Ivory New Year, this being the Rosh Hashanah Pregame Party for the club’s inner circle. The New Year itself doesn’t fall on a weekend. But Thursday is an adequate party night too, sometimes near the end of the world.
Kawa Zivistan, with a gray flash in his eyes, is now dead sober somehow. As if the drinks he’d pounded, all five Astikas and three Stoli shots, and the bottle of red, then white there were glasses, real cold glasses of bubbly Borjomi mineral water.
Somehow in the Melee of the dancehall, in the flashing light and flickering candles of this tavern he had tuned out his fun and put upon the game face mask of his title, Chief Planning Officer of the Banshee Association. Surely not all thirty two of the guests were beyond all pale of corruption, but Banshee was a proto trade union with a 10-13 fund and an underground ambulance newspaper. Anyone could sign up.
But now at the round dimly lit table at the end of the long catwalk above the main dance floor, past an easily removed barricade was seated Dbrisk, the Bajan businessman Magnus Goldbar Allamby, who always carried in his own sweet wine bottles; Mara the half pint Fenian always drunk at these things, Trickovitch, paramedic biker Anya Drovtich, Nicholas Mapfre (only there under peer pressure and perpetually nervous), Chief-of-Staff Emile Cange, a paramedic and Zivistan the leadership as it were, out of sight, out of mind looking over a document printed on gray card stock, downloaded and translated just the night before.
The Anonymous, the vast anarchist hacker underground, had circulated a cut and paste manifesto. One which Banshee could never overtly endorse, but certainly various operatives of its armed wing, the Z.O.B. were certain to lend their talents behind. It is to be a collective response to the uprising and its grievances.
At all major Banshee gatherings, there was copious amounts of booze consumed, the Mehanata Social Club such a choice place for meetings and for gatherings for it was loud and rowdy and hard to bug, or hard to track the ins and outs, hard to see who signed what, under who’s name, easy to deny anything.
A version of this document had circulated for weeks, the uprising though aborted on the labor day weekend had to meet the popular response, the demonstrations happening in all the boroughs; the wild anarchy about to happen on 17 Fructidor, 2011 when the anarchist federations, unions, socialist parties, student groups and the usual left suspects sought to again storm the District Financial. This thing they’re all signing, it’s written in Ivory.
That following evening of Fructidor 11th Kawa and dozens of other activists using the Signal text dispatch system, boarded the subway cars with flicker masks and blue fatigues. They took nearly every train line hostage across 5 boroughs, all numbers, letters and colors. Terror and spectacle abound! Not even one lethal bullet in the guns, which almost no units even had to brandish; the captive audiences were petrified or participatory in the action.
Kawa’s unit takes over the A train Manhattan bound from the Rockaways alongside an anarchist named Spiker, the actor Siegfried Sassoon, Fenian Mara Fitzduff and an Otriad film maker named Nicholas Mapfre. Mapfre, a childhood friend of Sebastian had at some point realized that when the revolution did break out, he’d like to be able to film it.
Dasha called out to him earlier on the black berry smartphone to ask him to be careful. She is no damsel in distress and he is no Shamel Basayev, this time. But she knows him much better than he knows she or she works for. She knows he’s waking up from a daydream.
Trains are stormed all over the city for mostly militant public addresses and passing out of homework assignments from big gray bags. Although, all of them are emptied right before the District financial where many cross. Emptied and dynamited. The bankers take cabs to work, caps or ferries or are driven. This is to keep all of their surfs away. Deter servitude.
The speech needs to be cut short because he gives it over each transfer of the cars. Sometimes Spiker Timchenko or Siggy Sassoon or Mara Fitzduff gave speeches. It begins with, “My name is Zachariah Artstien, an organizer with the human rights resistance! Affiliated with the Z.O.B., we are not here to hurt anyone or take your money! We are here to declare that you have human rights and we must now link arms and fight for them.”
“Today is the 11th of Fructidor, when ten years ago the Oligarchs manufactured an attack on us to secure their power and control. In six days the People’s Army of the General Resistance Alliance will attack the District Financial itself! If you ain’t running with it, run from it!”
Newyorkgrad is the city of such theatrical disturbances. It’s also a mind-your-fucking business city. Its people are also heavily armed. But no one pulls on them tonight.
“Please don’t get yourself shot to ferment hope for you alone,” Dasha warns him and she hopes he isn’t killed because he is capable of making a woman care about him. But perhaps not her on a long enough time line.
Kawa and his associates with their scary flicker masks, one with a video camera, tell tales of the People’s Protection Units of Rojava. Of Ivory apartheid. Of the one Noire or Mestizo youth killed every 48 hours by the police. Of the 1 in 8 American Noire men in prison. Of war, endless war consuming all around for the dubious purposes of Afghan and Iraqi and Persian “liberations”. The conspirators film the whole thing, in case they are captured or killed. For the viewers at home on the Live-streams.
After all the tales end, told by the three hostage taking narrators, “We are sorry for our operations washing aside considerations of your health and safety. You cannot join us, we are organized tight as a drum, but go to your churches, mosques and temples, your gangs, crews and neighborhood councils, stay strong and carry on as we are all under siege together.”
And to a captive train load, an adaptive audience held hostage, the cameras of Nicholas Mapfre running, Kawa began a speech, about a four minute speech per car.
“Hyper-development is the physical and moral state of core country populations that result from proximity to overabundance!”
“While each core country maintains an underclass of newly arrived immigrants, ethnic subturns, welfare subsidiaries, helot serfs and others are utilized for domestic exploitation on a variety of levels. Low cost wage labor, military or police service, undesirable or dangerous work, service sectors and prostitution; jobs considered below the acceptability of core ethnic identity in power.”
No one got up to open fire on them yet, which was good, as they were wearing blue uniforms and crazed masks in the age of public transport terror.
“Noires in the United States, Algerians in France, Turks in Germany or various former colonial groups in England. However, nearly every person citizen or undocumented migrant residing in a core country can despite low probability of achieving meaningful wealth; access a range of social services, enjoy relative security and purchase a full range of consumer goods. Hyper-development affects all within the territories of the Core.”
“While clearly some of the highest Palma Index and GINI coefficient variances occur within the core at a rate in the United States of 47 to 1 in wealth difference; hyper development is the result of goods, commodities and general capital flows back to the centers of financial hegemony; New York, Berlin, Geneva and London.”
Now Spike Timchenko jumped in, his mask was a grimacing ghost sleep no more mask; “While the political directives of the U.S.A. form the overt course of policy and international relations; shared race, history and basic cultural religious values have allowed for Euro-American elite consensus to function more fluidly than its 1945-1989 core contender and nemesis the Soviet Union grappling with a far wider ethnic elite, a less structurally manageable economic system and a far new set of oligarchs; the inner circle Kadro of the Democratic Confederalist Party, K.G.B. and subsequent energy moguls.”
He wonders if they understand anything he’s saying, wonders if they have unplugged from their smartphones and iPods.
Spiker the anarcho syndicalist continues;
“Hyper development leads to things like the U.S. obesity epidemic, high levels of moral decay such as the feminist consensus that 1/3 women in the US is a victim of sexual assault before age 18. It is access to too much food, constant imperatives to purchase more of everything, the owning of multiple vehicles per family, the imagined entitlement to home ownership and the ownership of homes far in excess of what a family unit requires. It is an exaggerated sense of importance and uniqueness.”
He concludes as the train rumbles into the upcoming station.
“It is a complete apathy as to what is occurring not only in one’s own community but certainly the rest of the world. It is media oversaturation; constantly plugged in cell phones, movies, music and video games. It is a decline in meaningful literacy, a tacit embrace of ethnocentric white (in the case of the current hegemonic order) supremacy. It is over availability of print media and pundit debate, but relatively poor engagement of the political machine itself. It is the right to vote between red and blue flavors. It is a severely myopic worldview manufactured by the educational system and media.”
“Power to the people!” an old Noire man says and pumps his fist.
“We are asking for you to work in sympathy with the resistance,” says Zivistan, “we have a bag of homework assignments. Simple ways to assist the general strike and uprising coming on 17 Fructidor. The best way you can assist it is to join us in the streets. If you cannot stay at home. Wall Street will be a battlefield. Support the American division of the Resistance anyway you are able.”
They were mostly greeted with quiet applause, but no one shoots at them or turns them in. And in this city that counts for something. Most people take home work, perhaps largely out of curiosity. Later Kawa Zivistan and his three cohorts are at the end of the line and the job has been carried without any of the possible predictions of arrest by the authorities or mob violence against them. A sigh of relief.
“It’s nice to see that on the eve of Fructidor 11th, 11 years later, security is tight as drum,” notes Spiker Timchenko an anarchist, also a childhood friend of ‘Zachariah’, the sometimes nom de guerre of Kawa Zivistan in the Middle East.
So when Kawa gets back to the financial district and he confirms around 2am with Dasha he’s un-arrested and also alive and she breathes back a sign. He writes a new poem for her. Place it in old school gold painted stationary. Dedicating resistance to her, although to her, it is more like street theater carried up on a moving, highly privileged stage.
Daria texts him;
“Don’t disappear jsut yet man. I made you a painting of your bleeding heart.”
Bleeding out yes, unasked for and unheeded, a mighty pump. His heart was quite known to hemorrhage over little and for nothing at all.
Pronunciation: STROeet’ ZAMkee iz pisKAH Literal translation: to build sandcastles Meaning: to have highly unrealistic hopes
On Brighton Beach, Brooklyn there is a sign which says “SHE SELLS SEA SHELLS, but still is just a whore.” If one follows Brighton 6th all the way to the water you arrive at the two Tatiana’s, competing Russian restaurants on the Boardwalk, one with a blue awning, and one with a green awning. The blue one has a better reputation for food and music. The green one for gambling and bare knuckled boxing.
They meet the next day they can for a picnic in the warm fall night of Fructidor 11th. Daria collects Kawa from Blue Tatiana Cafe on Brighton 6. He carries a burgundy satchel where he’s put inside a four course home cooked partisan meal of rice and cheese and chicken and Georgian red wine. He is drinking Borjomi Georgian Mineral water when she finds him. He is drawing what looks like Brighton Beach flooding and practicing a couple Russian phrases that she’s taught by text message. They share some cigarettes and make a picnic on the beach on a big red blanket he’s found.
Sun is setting in its subtle shimmers of red-yellow tones dwindling on the abyss of horizon, but on the desolate sands of Coney Island you can watch the cosmos illuminated retreat for some time before making an abrupt departure into the blackness and glow of a goodnight moon. The sand is gritty. It is a populist sand from the untidy refuse of millions of Chornay and their summarily visitations. The innumerous high rise public housing complexes punctuate the Boardwalk as far as the eye can see. All have left it a tainted oasis, but it has an old school charm. This place hasblight. It has dirty littered sand and a still; mesmerizing effect on some types of minds. The sun does not set on Brighton Beach and Coney Island; it drops off suddenly into the sea. The evening abruptly becomes night.
They lay out a burgundy picnic blanket right below the parachute drop with the steeplechase pier in sight just to the west and it seems like they are very much alone in all directions, though a couple vagabonds are late night fishing. She has just come from her boxing class at the Underground Gym she has as of lately been attending since the night a deranged man stalked her from the train to her lobby. She has no make-up, but her hair is well brushed, maintained and flowing, her gym session doing quite little to alter her fresh faced and polished appearance.
That is a Russian art form too! Being completely made up to get groceries, glamorously present oneself for buying coffee, not allowing the elements to chip the facade of womanly presentations.
Kawa Zivistan has just come from the paramedic training academy on Kings Highway and has a dark red picnicking backpack, and is dressed similar to how he was at festival, in ems ‘battle dress uniform’ blues and black boots and a scaly cap and a red bandanna tucked exposed in a back pocket, in case a woman begins to cry or a riot breaks out due a spontaneous eruption of the lumpenproletariat.
He has set up before them a three course meal of sauteed mushrooms, broccoli rob, breaded chicken, and pilaf rice accompanied by Illubadori style avocado salad and three types of cheese that he cannot pronounce and a bottle of Chilean red wine. He has brought red and white icon candles and they flicker in the spreading moonlit darkness. Picnicking is a poor man’s refuge at romance and he’s done all the cooking, though he hasn’t been on a picnic in two years. You don’t ever forget how to picnic if you were once good at it, it’s like riding a bike.
The Rabbis say that an Ivoryish man ought to be able determine if he could marry a woman in four dates, but Kawa is only half an Ivory so perhaps it takes seven or eight?
“Beg me to let you take me on a date,” she’d once said the night she nearly killed him, and he’d told her he never ever learned how to beg. But, how he’d learn with this one. She had thought about breaking plans with him, unsure if she could justify her prolonged absence after boxing class, but she ran with it in the end, as he had seemingly put all this work in. The food fared much better than she had suspected he was capable of.
‘He looks so happy!’ She thinks. He makes jokes and he’s witty for an Amerikansky. ‘Odd how he fetishizes us,’ she thinks. He cannot speak any Russian and has never been there. Curious fascination. The sun down and the candles flickering she dispenses with small talk to pry out the root of his amorous fascinations.
“What is it that you think you know about this Soviet mentality you are always referring to,” she asks, preparing well in advance to be disappointed by the answer. She already feels a certain pang of contempt when he switches out of the black suit into this blue paramilitary attire the ambulance workers wear. It was a reminder that this was not the prince in the suit and tie to carry her immediately from this coastal ghetto. It was vaguely unnerving for reasons she had yet to articulate or place why a child of solidly bourgeois parents residing in the financial district in that beautiful loft was playing hard not just at proletarian, but at a Democratic Confederalisttoo! It was if anything vaguely a spit in the face of all the work she’d done to flee, that he who was born with a silver spoon in the greatest city on earth might be romanticizing the cold criminal empire she had fled. But he did it so sincerely that what first might be a laughable nativity took on a charm, a quirky little juxtaposition of opposites.
But what she can’t place and what makes Sebastian Adonaev so interesting is that he is so genuinely interested in her. He seemingly truly believes in these blue collar proclamations he makes. She suspects that by the end of this picnic she will be ready to relegate him to a passing hello at the social club, a drink on his birthday. Temper down his courtship considerably. Before something happens that might get everyone in trouble. She has a full plate of suitors for a married woman anyway she thinks, ‘what will this crazy artist rebel will bring to the table but trouble.’
“Well let me attempt that then.”
“Attempt away,” she smirks, swallowing down her wine. He is aware that she is perhaps even more magnificent without her make up then when wearing it, he is aware that she is a wild eyed beauty and her coy happy smile never seems to leave her continence open to other interpretation.
“First let me say that I do not mean to casually lump some several hundred million of your former countrymen and women into a pigeon hole.”
“A rabbit hole?”
“A pigeon hole, it means a stereotype.”
“And rabbit hole is a wild goose chase to nowhere yes?”
He smirks at the deliberate nature of her word games and nods.
“Nor am I so presumptuous as to think that without speaking Russian I can mount any attempt at a psychological profile.”
“Less words man,” she smiles.
And he wonders to what extent she fully takes in any of what he will say or has said. And she takes in absolutely everything knowing the power of pretending to grasp a little less than she does in English.
“Okay then, you have no sentimentality to speak of. You have no romantic notions of rose colored thinking, you have no arbitrary beliefs. You have loyalty to no one, no country or code of law, no god, only a tight perimeter of proven personal or blood allies, and these except perhaps in the case of mothers can be severed off the minute they prove, disadvantageous.”
She grins at him and her eyes declare admiration for what she’s hearing.
“More beyond more!” She demands.
“The mentality is like a cold ongoing calculation, it weighs the merit of all actions and all alliances. Its root were I allowed to play at the idea is pre-serfdom, although that condition is history’s most long running subjugation of a people, by their own ethnic group. The only people to have completely enslaved your own people for over 600 years. And then the Soviet system generated a brutal regime of para-psychological survival of the fittest whereby education and corruption were wedded wholly into the national character. And now, the world’s first open oligarchic collectivist mafia state masquerades as the fourth estate.”
“Why do you use so many fucking words man,” she says smiling again. She does like to hear him give these little speeches she realizes. His education is the only proof of his upbringing besides the large loft he resides in. It must be that he not only likes the sound of his voice, but also he perhaps has few people ready to hear him speak on these things.
“Because I think in Russian obviously Devotchka,” he says. Which means ‘girl’.
“Don’t call me that, I’m a lady!”
“Pardon,” he says but can tell she enjoys berating him for his verbosity and his mispronounced bevy of Russian phrases.
“Alright then. But what in the world could be attractive about that mentality that so fascinates you? I consider myself a little sentimental, mind you.”
“Cultural diffusion forges the greatness of this city. The merging of ideas and the fusing of mentalities. You can learn hope and romanticism here and we can learn rigorous pragmatism and parapsychology from you.”
“We will eat you alive if these things you say are true.”
“I am not such a patriot as to assume that in the result you describe that is an impossibility. But the mentality isn’t so powerful if it is only used for pure personal gain.”
“What is good for then? Seems good only for taking care of oneself. If what you describe has truth-ness then all we are commended for is our ability to sell one another, or sell ourselves without being tricked into seeing a purpose. Here is your mentality then, you Americans see miracles in the streets. You believe in too much destiny, in God, in heroes. You are not an old nation so you’ve had no time to develop any real culture, and your world views, maybe not a liberal bourgeoisie part Ivoryish like you, but most Americans don’t have a worldview. I will now use my words in English to speak to you on things. I’m not sure you know just how little I like Russia, like Russian things, Russian food and people. Everything. I hate Brighton Beach, I hate living in a ghetto. My mentality if you find such things interesting, as evidently you do, is shaped by living in a world where no one but my mother and a small series of men have offered to protect or help me. I’m not tough as you say so many times. I have had a charmed life and around me have been enough people to help me along. My mentality is that of anyone who has been hungry, I have ambitions and dreams. Believe me that my American dream is bigger than yours ambulance man!”
“If you say so darling.” And he pours himself another glass of wine.
“What is parapsychology to you? How do you define this term?”
“Mind games. Clever manipulations via social engineering to get your way. But that’s just the beginning.”
“I have no idea what you talk about,” she says but that’s what anyone who has a bit of a game in them fronts like.
“Well you don’t have to put your cards on display at this juncture,” he says.
You’ll never see my cards, she thinks.
“How is the food then?” he asks.
“It was much better than I expected. I would not be eating it otherwise. Terrible idea to let men get false notions about their own abilities. Especially the kitchen and bedroom abilities. Followed by their bravery, and also the depth of the credit.
“I couldn’t agree more,” he says. And suddenly they are kissing yet again. ‘Woops,’ she thinks with a smile. Passionately he presses her against the sandy ground and rolling about off the picnic blanket they wrestle for dominance lips never unlocking at any moment.
He then reads her another ‘stupid poem’, which he wrote for her before the train ride. This is not that poem exactly, as she has long since hidden it away with all the others, but this once has a similar cadence. They extol her, they lament the world; they beg her to always take him back near her when the world is not looking, when the world blinks.
Dasha cannot always read the handwriting of Kawa. His handwriting is something like Arabic, something pure and crazy. She knows what he means because they text prolifically, but she asks him to read each poem in the beginning because she knows he will find the right way to explain his longing.
That night past midnight, after their meal which she appreciates, but isn’t writing home to her mother in Penza over locale; she allows him to read another.
She kisses him passionately again, for what else can she do. He is a hard worker. And then she pauses under the stars and by the coast of Breuklyn to lecture him again.
She has warned him that Mayakovsky couldn’t ever get Tatiana, his other great love and muse, to ever leave Paris for his brave new Soviet Socialist Republic. And he could never get Lily Brik to leave her husband, his best friend and editor.
“Poor Mayakovsky had to listen to them make love from their kitchen! He tortured himself you know. What if you come to hate me? I cannot ever do anything but travel home with you. You know I keep another man, my boyfriend’s bed is always warm.”
“I will never hate you.”
“You cannot possibly love me! I am selfish. I am demanding! I want to live in a huge house far from the Russian quarter and not worry about you!”
“I told you I’d never beg for a date once. I told you we’d just be associates of Rafael and the Mehanata Social Club. I’m sorry to say that I cannot be rid of you.”
“If I order you to go, will you go?”
“Why the tortures? Are my poems not true, are my lips not soft?”
“All lips are soft when the man is still alive!”
“Dasha I love you! Does your man have this much desire in him?”
“We have been together for 5 years. He is the first and mostly the last man I’ve known here. He is hardworking and good to me. He gives me things you cannot.”
What does a man say to the cold dead face of reality?
“This tryst is no real tryst. It isn’t an affair. You have tasted me, and I have nurtured your passion, and enjoyed it! But how far can this go! Please don’t beg for love that I cannot give to you. You will meet another woman in a month, I will be forgotten between the bed sheets! You have confessed to loving others before, you will again.”
He looks her dead in the eyes.
“I do not write frivolous things.”
“What are ‘frivolous things’?”
This is always the ice breaker to what will be a series of escalating fights on whether his love is real.
“I write to you from my heart which will not beat for another ever the same way.”
She kisses him again.
“What are all these kisses for when you say you will always feel nothing?” he asks.
“I didn’t tell you I feel nothing for you! I told you that we are nothing to feel anything about.”
She shoves him, then pulls him in close to her by his collar.
“I am going to tell you how to make love to me, with dripping hot wax on my back,” she says.
“I’m going to try and teach you how to seduce me with much less words.”
They stay out all night holding hands and kissing in the late night Brighton Jazz Cafes. She pours the hot wax out of a red candle and presses their hands together and bites his tongue.
When they finally part neither can stop turning around and smiling at the other, checking to make sure it really is to be over. They look, and they smile, and they walk a little more and look more, and look, and then it’s time to go home.
But finally she’s gone and he has to watch her go back to her man’s home and he just holds her memory close and boards the Q train back to the barricades near Atlantic Avenue, to make it on foot through the lines back to the heavily fortified district financial. In the whole night of course there had been no mention of the Siege in Brownsville, or the state of emergency over all of New York. There was no talk of summary executions or civil rights, or the causes of this uprising. He could tell her all about it another day, but he suspects she knows as much as he does. For a very short period of time in real time, time had frozen and the world as he knew it revolved only around this manic blonde creature, this old soul he was reunited with after some brutal time apart, that was a real feeling. A madness was taking hold in America, a mighty wave of retributive violence. But for this moment all he could think about was her. The entire history of his people and their struggle, is temporarily forgotten. Kawa Zivistan is living for the very first time. It seems like a happy hope now. But sadly, it is all a deception and also a delusion.
Pronunciation: SKOL’ka duSHEH uGODna Literal translation: as much as the soul wants Meaning: as much as you want Example: Пой сколько душе угодно. You can sing to your heart’s content.
“POETRY AS LOVE IS AN ACT AND ADMISSION OF TOTAL POVERTY!” Daria yells at Sebastian in the Park as she throws the pages of his poem at him. They scatter on the balding grass.
In District Murray Hill, Isle of MannDasha goes twice a week to the Murray Hill District in the east side 20’s of the City to University of New York Baruch. She is studying business administration. Around the corner from there is a dungeon where clients bring her to submit to their cruel behavior. The place is perfectly legal. It has two Chinese themed rooms, a wrestling room, a faux medical clinic, a Spanish Inquisition/ Medieval torture room, a water sports room, a cage room, a glamour room and a tunnel they bring the fuck girls and sissy boys in from. It’s actually a franchise. They say no sex on the premises, but people definitely have had sex there. But it’s not actually about sex. It’s about humiliation and sadistic domination. If just want to rough fuck a whore, you got to a hotel or order an out call. In Newyorkgrad there is an app that lets you order women and men like a pizza. This place near her school is catering to men and women who get off in a different way. Get off beating and whipping and crushing a person into their slavery. Well anyway the work pays well. It’s not her favorite venue, but she doesn’t get to pick. The city seems like one big brothel these days.
Sergei has been funding her bachelors in the meantime. He’s also given her a black Amex card, a monthly allowance and promises soon a car. He pays her rent and is home only once or twice a week. Let her run pretty free. That’s love. Sergei is her official boyfriend. A minor sponsor. He officially works at the Atlas Park Hotel as an accountant. But that is only his taxable job. He is connected to an agency in Panama where the ultra rich launder money offshore. The house on Banner Ave is not his primary residence. Then there is Dmitry Khulushin Koch. Dmitry keeps taking her on ultra premium dates. Dmitry is not her “paper work husband” in that under the patronage and sponsorship of Dmitry she was actually married to a Mr. Maccluskey in a completely fabricated wedding. That cost 25,000. Now she works for the agency, a side venture Dmitry operates more for sport than money. She’s worked off about half so far. Dmitry is a corporate lawyer officially. But in reality he is the Bratva of Sasho Perecheveney. They’re in business together. Illegal imports of cigarettes and people. Brothels of course and lately something about ‘living forever in epic times’. A venture promising immortality by transferal of the soul through neuroscience into a new body. They claimed it was experimental, but really the Oligarchy has done it for centuries.
Kawa, he writes stupid little poems. But that is love too actually.
Kawa is enrolled in a paramedic academy on Kings Highway and works a full time job in salvage and a part time job as a nightlife paramedic. His company the Junk Luggers pulls out the metal from the walls of demolished homes, carts off unwanted sofas and literally ransacks the homes of the recently dead. Black listed for union work Kawa can’t get hired on a legit ambulance anymore. But he still works after hours clubs and raves taking care of overdosing creatures of the night. Daria doesn’t have any appointments today at the dungeon otherwise. Just a boring class. Which is less immediately lucrative than whatever the fuck her john had her do last week with that electrified whip and a ball gag.
She may have drunkenly told a lot of this to Kawa on her last date but he didn’t seem to pity or judge.
They illicitly miss each other. So they text and flirt. Perhaps she can work him in sooner. So they meet on a school night and Kawa reads to Dasha a brand new poem. Entitled “THE ESCAPADE.” He presents it hand written on a parchment page with gold lining. Thus an American Mayakovsky is for a short time re-born in Newyorkgrad.
He reads, ehm, recites:
While others were sleeping; I dreamt with you awake.
We walked those cobblestone streets below big dead glass towers,
Past the very dens of the money changers and harlots,
Near the Golgotha of the Jew Crusader alliance, near Vesey Street.
This sprawling neon jungle blots out the sun, blots out the stars,
God’s moon and hope.
The show of you!
Shines through.
All the way we go from Brighton to the districts.
That bright!
I could walk tall, in your tight dress, your smile, your crazy all night.
I was skally cap clad; I was winding, I was bullet proof!
Your crazy big blue eyes opened fire on all,
I’ll always remember what you did on that roof.
Your darting hungry look
Cut the line, steal the lightning. Like a dagger when you need sudden surgery.
A reminder I was a new attraction.
But still alive, with a use.
And when we went about the city in waking life what we did at night Reminded us of past times.
We are temporarily blinded by the flood lights of crazy.
Blinded, you captured, captivated and then compelled us to deeds that might make past operations seem like parlor tricks.
Past creations were to be mere scribbles.
To upcoming tomes you’d never bother to read.
Old brush strokes,
Gunshots now. From the hip to move my hips to your hips to your lips.
Now the shots are with the precision of a Cupid coated round.
An Israeli sniper.
I am for you:
Hear!
And I am aware you are a quite quickly moving target.
I want you to know a lot about me.
When others ask:
Did you kiss me, did you hold me,
You can say “I own him in full”.
Say; “He breathes in this city, just for me.”
“He writes whole worlds into books for me.”
“He moves his limbs up mountains, for me.”
“He take over trains, he battles monsters, he tempts the very wrath of the Jew God and the spirits to be with me,
One more night after night hand to hand.”
You can tell them whatever you want, or our nothing.
It’s an affair after all I suppose.
You can tell yourself what I’m cut from will not be seen about for one thousand years. Once you decide.
In the fall.
Out by Steeplechase pier, by the Eiffel Tower of Brooklyn, Kawa and Daria died night after night.
When the sun rose, we were again alive.
We died in the bars.
We died on the coffin train.
We died in the cholera ships.
But since you tasted my blood, bit my very finger hard that first night;
I’ll drip wax on your back.
Dripped on your shoulders and lower back, dripped on my lion ring, dripped on our hands clasped together in chains.
Your hand pressed in wax to my own. If we really died it could be with such a smile now.
How many nights of one last night?
40 days and nights and counting.
If they take me again it will cheat us both of the magic in this,
The darkness in this escapade.
And the old hope in the old lives, they make me want it too bad.
If I die tonight or in the morning, for real with will be with a small smile.
This is real, it is quite pure. This is Russia white, the good shit.
But don’t cheat me out of an hour a day or a year.
I want a life, with you blond crazy blue you.
A loveless life is not any life. Poems do not cause children,
Ambulances move faster than their Bentleys, relatively speaking.
Less fashion for force.
He can give you credit.
I can show you freedom, which came out cheap.
Not freedom to move and buy freedom from service, servicing loveless nights and boring nights and weird strange nights.
I want credit and freedom, she said. Love and a power broker.
Freedom with eyes wide open to the sky.
Whine mine turn green and yours go silver.
And I can show you a life where you will never be afraid again,
Afraid of a boring lackluster loveless ride.
Dasha, I may ask you to burn a bridge soon you’ve built over 5 years,
I will provide all the petrol.
And if there were things you thought you needed on the other side; I know how to replace them with better things.
I can cook and I can clean and raise children. I can save lives, you have seen me move a mob with words.
I do have the strength of 40 men.
And I know how to actually love!
To thrill you with my words and back them with actions,
My stiff kisses, my hundred thousand years without, nights of white satin and solid gold dice, old-old lover loves.
When you kissed me you saved me.
It was only fair.
You’d just a week before nearly killed us over one single cigarette.
Because you’re fearless like me?
If you were my partner we could take on any army with switchblades.
Back to back, hand to hand.
Or help move a nation to rise, or two. I don’t need you.
To do anything. Just watch my back from dagger men.
Whisper, “Good luck droog!”
“Come back to me alive every day and I will climb up with you!”
I will cross canyons under moonlight.
I will elude the follow-follow men.
I will uncut the spies.
I will break enemy lines under the dark cover and even,
Outsmart the Loupe Garrou in you.
I will make it through the forests.
I will always, life by life get back to you.
And you will in this manifest of energy want for nothing.
And our children, will be the children of heroes.
I am an American.
But this is not any American film.
You are Russian, but kitchens are where I cook, not make self-murder like my man Mayakovsky.
Your man is temporarily a lucky man.
He had five whole years to lie beside you.
I had under forty days to taste your lips, and I would start a war.
Notice the full extent of mesmerization.
Your eyes, they fuck me again, your eyes they tell tales again.
They made love to me before my body could react.
When you first looked at me in the dancehall.
I for the first time, knew sweet surrender.
The taste of wanting to wait.
And as we lay in the forest,
Below the double barrels of the blue moon,
I knew that if you escaped with me I could love you for the rest of my life.
And dissembling, and more lives to come,
I remembered that we’d done this before.
More in the rest of my lives, we reunited our fires, we are very old souls.
We can be old souls forever, if it pleases you.
What the fuck are you on? She asks with a grin.
But in the real world, in the world of woman and man.
It is really just a new kind of Russian novel.
So I will love you, you will love me, you will not leave your man.
And likely I will die with a barrel to the gob.
I will have to open my own black heart and let you try and read it.
Then this majik will be defensible with reason, before it implodes as you claim it will.
It has to be based on facts.
Proof?
Give me no longer than November, I will plan our escape!
I am a man of my word.
All a man has.
In the end, promises all will be unkempt.
I have always done the things I set my promises intention toward.
Everyone knows that I am Sebastian Vasilivich Adonaev, from a family of warrior women and medicine men,
An endless escapade is coming.
One I’d like to share.
Daria grins in glee and claps. This man is the unadulterated stuff.
He reads to her in the park as the fall falls in. It will be the first round of many, many poems where his emotions entangle her with great worry. Where she cannot read his English writing and has the poem read then re-read by a female confidant. The early poems didn’t rhyme as Kawa began reading Mayakovsky and assumed that to craft such pieces meant visceral images not rhyme. He missed the underlying reality of Mayakovsky being quite famous for his rhymes, but in Russian, only the translations couldn’t pull that off.
Shortly after the seventeenth poem he changed his entire cadence back to rhyme. This impressed her far more, but that wasn’t until later. It didn’t impress her enough even then to give him exactly what he was asking for.
“You’re always so well dressed, so damn fashion forward. English doesn’t have enough words for all the grades of beauty I must be forced to consider whenever I see you,” he says.
“Flatterer.”
She peers back at him with big curious eyes. They are seated in the Park across from each other looking coy. She’s a flowing blue dress and her tight leather jacket and he’s all composed like he isn’t about to whip out a small pistol, don a mask and take over a subway car over universal human rights later in the week, don’t ever tell a Russian woman that.
“You remind me too very much of the dead artist Mayakovsky!” She reminds him.
“Then allow me just to live like him a little longer. And act through him as well. And because this is set in America, with fearlessness I will walk the tightrope between idealism and pragmatic Post Soviet individualism.”
“What does that even fucking mean?” she asks.
“I’m not sure yet.” He replies.
So over time he wrote many poems, each penned just for her then recopied, but they all had cadence alike extolling her virtue and ways, also declaring himself a true rebel, making great cause just for her. Fighting monsters for her real and mostly imagined. Urging her to run away to the West Indies with him.
They sat there in a small Nipponese pub drinking lightly. He confided in her a bit about his past imprisonments, his varying rebel plots. His expectations to which she responds only that she pities him. It is not a pathetic pity, only a smug solidarity.
“I feel like I must make to hug you,” she declares, “that is what we do in America right?”
“I don’t know why you feel like any of this struggle is yours to bear,” she exclaims, “who wants to just fight and fight big inevitable things?”
Then she went back to her college and he off to carry out a wild plot to help take over the A train on the anniversary of 11 Fructidor in solidarity with the Breuklyn resistance forces, coalescing around the General Assembly being held three times a day on the Barclay basketball courts and all Borough uprisings, Staten Island not actually being a real borough, not in anyone’s imagination at all, they say they’re Italian, but their just a bunch of newly soft Sicilian civil servants, they’re happy doing trash, contracting, police work, hose work and the work of the ‘White Church’.
It was a happy pity she now exhibited and in parting it somehow made him feel loved, respected and strong. But that was not what she intended. She kisses him hard then says, “Poetry is still just an act of poverty isn’t it though, how far can you get with pretty little words that can’t be backed up by anything real?”
This idiom means ‘to reach the handle’ or ‘to reach rock bottom’. The handle refers to the part of a traditional Russian bread that was not eaten as it had been held by different people. The handle was given to dogs or poor people. So if someone ‘reached the handle’, that meant they were eating leftovers that dogs normally ate.
“A SAFEHOUSE MONOLOGUE” in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
“I call out for her still into the death of a black ghetto night!” I will tell you now, most dear Tovarish, a story of our times. For if in the past I have written you of things that were and things that also could be; of fanciful alternate lives; or perhaps of wars or magic beyond your range of sight and passions beyond your range of feeling. I have now set pen to paper to put down the events of our common year 2011, 5773 in the year of my tribe the Ivory. Known in your argots and crude vernaculars as the calendar year of the Hebrew people, ‘the loathsome Jews.’
We found ourselves in that year in the City of New York, called ‘Newyorkgrad’ a city where no one I had grown up with could live anywhere near the center for a mass of aristocrats, entertainers, money handlers, robber barons and oligarchs had pushed us all into their service living in the districts that ring the rivers East and Hudson. In that year I was surrounded as was my way with former and post-Soviet gangsters, with newly arrived immigrants, with various Muslims and mystics, with Karibes and subversives, with ambulance workers, with jazz musicians, with those who live the life of night. The right composition of any good dancehall party. Then, living most precariously in a string of south and central Breuklyn apartments, making the kind of small talks I’d made for years, small talks of very, very big things I was reminded of an Old Russian saying, the words of some bathhouse mystic; that:
‘If I saw the size of my blessing coming, I would understand the magnitude of the battle we must fight.’
Someone said that to me in the winter preceding the Labor Day Rising. It was the voice of Emma Solomon broadcasting on Fire Switch Radio, live from Port-Au-Prince.
For years I had been part of a little embattled Otriad, a small group of idealists and EMTs, of visionaries, malcontents and perhaps also some hard radicals, a group of paramedics and their sympathizers that had on an island off the Coast of Galilee, Rhode Island pledged their meager resources to building a resistance movement. A movement which we certainly did not begin and will not perhaps unlikely see the freedom and equality for which we have prepared to lay down our lives and accepted as our duty to act upon.
On Labor Day, we participated in a failed and foolish uprising in the borough of Breuklyn and most of us were rounded up, arrested, displaced or simply killed.
I told my brother Benny in a letter, ‘that I do not know if the resistance is now 40 or 4 million women and men. I have not spoken to my commanding officers since 2007. I do not know where Tabor commander Solomon is, if she is even alive. I do not know where General Avinadav DeBuitléirs is building his secret army in Mother Africa, if still alive.’ I told my expatriated brother, that ‘I took my orders from Tel Aviv in the fall of 2001 and have attempted to carry them out to the best of my human agency, despite so many setbacks and perilous dehumanizing conditions we all have faced.’
Shortly after publishing a manuscript about the events of the uprising and uprising, as I remembered them the secret police dragged me off the street, into an ambulance and I spent some five weeks in the camps. And then was released, as if nothing happened, but everything was different.
I then, broken and despondent, met a woman on the roof of my family home in the District Financial which changed everything. For this was the most important woman of my life. And I was to battle and die for her, over, and over and over again! Tragic hero made me! She was and is the bravest one. I play along.
How now, this was to be the story of her future and my past, everything would take on new significance. I cannot fail this time, for so many other times there has been such a dashing of hopes! Over five thousand years we have had our hopes so utterly dashed, we “Jews”, we the Ivory ones. I digress, as if mad with love and war and such high emotions.
Translation: The eyes are afraid but the hands are still doing it
Meaning: Feel the fear and do it anyway
“BLACK-BLACK HEARTS”
In Battery Park, Isle of Mann,Kawa Zivistan is wearing a rough cut-up gray leather jacket and Daria is wearing a red one. Against her better judgment, they met in early Fructidor at the fountains and hanging gardens near the downtown City Hall, just immediately north of the District Financial. Daria dresses glamorously as always. Perhaps just a little too colorfully appropriate to have come from university, as per Sergei. That was just her look, her way of conducting business.
The fall came up on them all suddenly.The leather jackets came right out. The first real kiss had to occur properly. There was so much dynamic tension, well only for Kawa. Our two scar-crossed, tumultuous near lovers meet to have a drink off at the Weather Up Spirits Bar. The place is sort of old school, dimly lit with gas lamps. Master craft of a sixteen to twenty four dollar cocktail short menu. They try everything at least once. The fog of lust and cocktail takes hold pleasantly by the third round since they’re stronger than the average hooch.
Kawa pays. As is completely expected. He is a man after all. He’s always expected to pay in her culture. Even though she has a black card in her inner thigh pocket. The bill just about empties his checking account. That’s how liquid he is.
Buzzed and in fine spirits, they go for a walk in the Hudson River park where the creepy anti-capitalist Tom Ottorness statues haunt this haunt. Kawa used to try and use the sculpture park by the Hudson to explain his quasi-socialist views. He prepares to make up a yarn for her amusement.
Climbing on one small statue and pontificating, he falls somehow. He twists his ankle and falls, and she catches him with a hard kiss. A real one planted right to stop him from ruining anything with his chatter. She blows hope down his lips, gives him so much reason not to feel pain.
He falls before he can tell a long, old soul story. He has just begun to craft her tale when in his big leather cowboy boots balancing himself on the back of a large copper turtle pedestal he tripped himself up coming down hard on his right foot as it twisted making wet crunching noise in his mind.
He’s now in terrible pain and thinking something in him is torn. And then came her opportune kiss. It was quite opportune. She keeps kissing him, upside down while putting on a song from her phone somehow ‘Black-Black Heart’, but not until she uses her tongue to never let him utter a cry or a yelp even.
She swallows his entire tongue. Upside down. ‘I only kiss you because you are in pain’, she thinks without thinking too hard about it. ‘Please, please Dasha; just keep kissing me’ he thinks actively.
But eventually the time for kissing has to end, it’s running late on a Wednesday. She recalls her warning, “Are you a jealous man?” She has a bed to return to in Brighton and he buys her a cab with the very last of his money. He presses green notes into her hand.
I am a jealous man when it comes to you, he thinks. Cuddled just twice, kissed just once. That’s all it took to own him.
“I belong to another man. I do owe him quite a lot,” she warns him.
“I’m not in trouble, or even ever abused. I am a mostly happy girl. My future though uncertain is not tarnished by one ounce of an immediate need.”
“Kiss me again.”
“I will. But don’t get used to it happening forever.”
The cabby shuttles her off into the night and he curses his ongoing unrequited love life. He asks the heavens which are blotted out by the district; “Why me! Why must I always go after something which I can’t claim, even her.”
But the first kiss was a true kiss and Daria who has sworn off affairs as of lately likes the way he felt on her lips and she therefore swears that she will see him yet again because he is passionate and she has read long Russian tales of men and what they do when they open their hearts and then close their eyes so it seems this Kawa has.
“I’ll call you a good distraction and will keep you from wanting me to have your last name,” she vows to the moon as she crosses the old bridge back to Breuklyn.
“But you do distract me, and this may end so terribly. What have I done this time,” she wonders. Then she yanks him into the cab and off toward Brighton Beach they go via the Tunnel which is the only way in, the only way through the blockades and street fighting lawless tumult. Her tits in his palms, her tongue working his mouth the cap driver as if non-existent. Making love on the move as if they had only hours, maybe just days left to reunite with someone they had thought lost forever and had almost deleted the very painful memory of losing, having lost.
This transaction would go on indefinitely for many more moons unbound by human time. It was hot and desperado. It was as though for now, the two of them time revolved around each other purely.
Sometime a bit past midnight. Watson and one of his female accomplices take the police informant Joshua Hunter into an alleyway and they shoot him in the back of the head.
Pronunciation: KTOH ni risKUyet, tot ni pyot shamPANSkava) Translation: He who doesn’t take risks doesn’t drink champagne Meaning: Fortune favors the brave
“THE LABOR DAY RISING BEGINS”
On the Grand Army Plaza of Brooklyn, the ground rubbles. Hold your breath. Breath the smoke in if you must. You have to push yourself man, and you have to see things, make connections where you’re not totally sure they exist. You have to count down, you have to blink. To squint, break your knuckles and bleed maybe, bleed in quiet. You have to try, dig in your stuff, you don’t see it. Pity, you can’t. You don’t have any solidarity at all. You don’t even know you’re still a slave. The Chornaydo. The world reminds them every day.
I don’t know if you can picture it yet comrade, the big wink. I don’t know if your mind can see the uprising as it was, how it all went down. In a heartbeat, all was in flames. Anyone with black skin just being shot down in the street like rapid feral dogs! It didn’t have to be, no it didn’t! We could have reached some settlement the liberal elders said, I fundamentally disagree.
Black lives certainly don’t matter to anyone at all in America!
Were you to observe the crumble of the high grounds, the moral roads into base animal rage, I think it was enough that one in eight of their men was in prison, I think it enough that one died a week it seemed, a week, a day, every 48 hours? Statistics are all make believe. I don’t think any whites thought of the chornay human anyway, so it was a real surprise that they were so organized!
The signal was a song, it is impossible to plan an uprising without a good soundtrack, that’s an old Haitian saying, and the gunfire erupted from makeshift big truck alliance barricades and overturned cars, piled by the Grand Army Plaza. And the human spear thrust north, the melee of thousands, supported by millions counted on by no less than five billion souls, took over Manhattan and burn it all down. Light it all on fire. Make them pay!
It was probably not a very good day for those brave marauders in the front of the flying columns. Those the police sentries emptied clip after clip into. As was expected, before being torn apart and beheaded by the mob. The crush and screams of feet pounding the parkway, the blare of the signal song, the gun fire on both sides, fire bombs bursting in air.
Perhaps as many as four hundred men and women too plus died in the fire fight to conquer only one square of the board, the Grand Army Plaza was on fire and the Garveyites were killing police officers with the Kalashnikovs the Russians sold them, well anyway the Ivory who sold them spoke Russian, but that’s as misleading a term as Chornay.
That eruption, that mostly Noire eruption charged north supported by tens of thousands of masqueraders, there was gun fire all night. You could be sure they’d ban Jeauvert this time for real. What was it really all about? This annual dry run, now that the streets were wet with blood.
The uprising had been about grievances, but it wasn’t about politics. It wasn’t about the handful of modest reforms groups put out there on the wire. No, it was about hate and about rage and about decades of powerlessness, about the failure of non-violence and playing the game to advance. Well, anyway what really was there to write about?
Sometime around noon on 1st Fructidor a heavy duty series of synchronized bombings knocked out the power grid in all of Lower Manhattan when the Consolidated Edison Building and some relay stations blew up. Led by Z.O.B. agitators, Uhuru fighters and the Garveyite Militia masqueraders broke the police lines at Grand Army Plaza and began marching north toward the City. To the epic beat of steel drums and Soca, the uprising had begun in great disorder.
The Labor Day Parade and its 2.6 million marchers were violently turned back at the Manhattan Bridge with tear gas and water cannons. A good deal of Downtown Breuklyn was put to the torch in the block to block street battles which carried on until Fructidor 3rd, when the barricades hardened at Atlantic and Flatbush; a General Assembly was organized on the first day of the rising and based itself at the Barclay Stadium. There were a wide range of street battles driving the first Labor Day Rising (now called the Great Disorder) which would continue for several weeks in the National News cast as urban looting. The bulk of the rising didn’t utilize short guns or bombings or arson burning. Just days of rioting and economic disruptions that got recast somehow as black on black crime.
The National Guard was fully called up on 4 Fructidor. Barricades and popular General Assemblies to rally and loosely democratize ‘the people’ went up also in the South Bronx and South East Queens triggered by the same factions that planned the Labor Day Rising. The state tamped up repression. The bodies piled up. It was getting tense as hell. It would not be long before the rebellion spread to other cities in the U.S.A.
From Manhattan one could see the signs of smoke plumes rising from Breuklyn below. Concentrated machine gun batteries and cruel tetra-drones stopped the largely Negro rebel onslaught at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge. The internet went down for 48 hours. Corpses were piled very high. Then burned with flame throwers. The city was surrounded. The initial rebellion was mostly suppressed on Day 37. The razing of Central Brooklyn followed the epic ‘Battle of Brownsville’. No one learned anything in the popular press outside the city. In many ways for many reasons it was all shrugged off as ‘race riots’ and ‘some kind of weird weather emergency.’ It was as if America had not even acknowledged a people’s uprising had begun that day. For the most part, the outside world just played along.
Literal translation: take something from a ceiling
Meaning: to make up information, without any real data
“TO TAKE SOMETHING FROM A CEILING”
Sebastian goes later uptown to visit his friend and longtime associate Nicholai Trickovitch to sp.eTk about the Russian woman he’s just re-encountered. On the Upper West Side of the Isle of Mann it’s quiet almost always. Intellectuals are mostly not party animals. The air smells like down river mist, like smoked fish, and bagels. Located about seven miles north west from the District Financial is the Upper West Side is an affluent gentrified ghetto of well-kept, mostly spacious and well furnished apartment homes with door men running from 79th street to around 96th street between Central Park and the Hudson River. The entire island of Manhattan, excluding some small clusters of housing projects in Harlem and lower East side, a smattering of Section 8 and rent controlled units too; the Isle of Mann is the domain of the country’s elite, 2 or 3%. The upper upper middle classes, a new rich financial class, athletes, celebrities and around 57,000 people with net worth above 37 million a piece and up. Sports players, movie actors and celebrities live there too. It’s a fortress of steel and glass. An Oblast requiring 4 peripheral boroughs and over 7 million serfs to service it.
For many many years the oligarchs of other nations laundered money in real estate, particularly along Billionaires Row on 57th street and Central Park South. As well as the ultra-rich gated community of the Hudson Yards Compound.
The wealthiest people; people who own property live in the Midtown, the .pTer West and the Upper East Sides of the Central Park. Looking out over it from above like a big public lawn. This ultra-gentrification of the city took its purest form in the mid 1990’s when the economy was still booming, the police forces were tripled, Wall Street hedge fund tycoons and robber barons consolidated wealth alongside globalization and the demise of the Soviet Union. And the lesser oligarchy of everywhere decided to turn the City center into their Eastern American sex playground.
By the time of the Great Recession in 2008, the only working class people living in Manhattan were clusters of Petit-Bourgeois professionals who bought things or secured rent controlled units in the 1980’s. The New York Times, the paper of record suggested that by 2012 there were over 57,000 individuals with net worth above 37 million apiece and greater living in the City! More concentrated wealth than London and only slightly behind Moscow. Hard to count billionaires in any of the leading metropolitans, as most of the wealthiest ones launder away the bulk of it.
Sebastian’s father is a teeth puller. He owns a small practice on Staten Island mostly treating Cops, Firemen and Sanitation worker families. The loft they own in the coop at the North end of the district financial is mostly paid off. Sebastian had never lived in it. He grew up in a rent controlled apartment in Waterside Plaza. He ran away from home at age 14, was locked up in a youth offender faculty by age 15, became a Democratic Confederalist by age 16 and was living abroad for most of 17 and 18; then he came home and lived with his best friend Nikolai Rosetree Trickovitch for a period before chasing rooms for rent in all boroughs besides Staten Island where the rent was less than $500 a room, or a couch or on a floor mat.
There is no person on earth who better understands Sebastian than his best friend, his loyal Droog, his comrade, partner and companion. They are so alike in both genes, upbringing and disposition they can anticipate each other.
The train ride on the 2 Red line from the Financial District historically preserved print shop Sebastian’s family lives in; to the 96th street and Broadway train station is about a twenty minute ride. Nikholai rarely goes downtown. Nikholai has a long memory, he remembers most of the thirteen years of continuous friendship. It has had a lot of ups, downs and misadventures. But Sebastian brings a world of drama and intrigue to Nicholai’s life, which could have otherwise been uneventful. And Nikholai brings Sebastian qualities he utterly lacks; self-analysis, dispassionate reasoning grounded in fact and most importantly; restraint.
Introverted Nikholai is happy in his solitude. Sebastian can never enjoy being alone. The two men have come to need each other, but it is mostly Sebastian who is always in trouble and Nikholai who devises the maneuvers to the next crisis.
They look out over privilege itself. Seventeen stories up, the rooftop deck of the Trickovitch Family Penthouse looks North and West over the Hudson River, the Upper East Side, and also the George Washington Bridge where people who jump always die. There are not one but two private garden terraces. So much light and so much air, all somehow under nine hundred American dollars. Much to the chagrin of the Satmarswho own the building, the House Trickovitch is completely rent controlled.
Most other families in the building were bought or were forced out. The whole building worth tens of millions, the unit they occupy could be sold for 5 million outright.
Sebastian Adonaev is wearing his favorite brown beret scally cap and looking somewhere between manic and marmalade, caught somewhere in between possessed with some inner zeal, and at timed calm, cool and collected. His eyes are strange and happy as though he wishes to recite a poem. Or give a speech, which he frequently does at dinners, on trains and in public parks. He isn’t totally of this time, which is logical having immersed his thoughts in the past to make something better for the future. Although he does not ever smile except behind closed doors he is by all accounts charismatic. On an adjacent bench in the roof garden, shirtless with a Noblesse dangling out his lips is his best friend and long-time partner in conspiracy Nikholai Trickovitch.
Penthouse J has been in the hands of the House Trickovitch since early 1981. That was not such a heyday for New York City as some newly arrived ‘hip’ individuals have come to believe. By the mid-1980’s looters and vagrants were scaling the walls to steal anything not tied down, there was trash everywhere you could get accosted at knife point in an alley. You could get stabbed to death in a public place with dozens of people watching. That was the old Newyorkgrad.
Located on 95th and Riverside Park, it is now one of the most luxurious and safest of safe houses. Which is to say a lot of small talks happen here on sensitive things. It is rent controlled and guarded by Shqiptarëtis. They are highly warlike these Shqiptarëti s. Good at moving people and things, also safeguarding things for others. Nobody wants to fuck with the Russians, because they send Shqiptarëtis after you.
The place has wall to wall books and a rather large aquarium filled with amphibious turtles. The building has gone co-op, and they are the last remaining holdout sitting on a highly choice property paying $1,200 American a month for it, adjusting for utilities and service fees. A good number of Ivoryish lawyers have been paid to figure out how to extract them from this property, so far unsuccessfully. The Trickovitch family employs and are related to Ivoryish lawyers as well. It was once a little more of a zoo filled then filled again with animals and young girls with long legs. Now it is a sad, empty place for plotting with Nicholai’s fraternal twin brothers living in other cities and his parents more frequently at their upstate farm than here, often now for weeks at a time. The apartment has a functioning landline.
Sebastian rarely calls by mobile when he intends to visit. He calls from a subway payphone to the land line and then just shows up. Nikholai was the very first young person they knew with a bulky mobile phone as early as 1998. Nowadays both men don’t carry them very regularly. Both men use quarters, both men have thrown away $10 phones. They both have Sky Pagers, but neither are doctors.
Nikholai, it is rumored is paralyzed with some dark inner depression, some sickness inside him which makes him overly analytical. For a time he was married and playing house in Midwood, Brooklyn deep in the shtetl. Midwood is a place about one hour by train from 42nd Street, Time Square city center. One of the earliest New York settlements in the 16th century, now firmly in one of the largest eleven Ivoryish Quarters of the greater New York area. Nikolai’s father grew up there, as did Sebastian’s as did the populist secretly centrist politician Bernard Sanders currently running for the Presidential Primaries. Midwood is New York City’s most staunchly propertied Modern Orthodox Ivoryish district. Along with Crown Heights, Borough Park and Williamsburg which are the more black hat ultra-orthodox neighborhoods dominated by particular Rabbinic sects that find the entire gentile world profane and unholy. These four neighborhoods are surrounded and slightly intermixed with a sprawling array of Afro-Caribbean and African American ghettos and slums. The districts toward the Southern Coast are Russian and Italian respectively, but most of the Italians left for New Jersey, Long Island and Staten Island in the 80’s. The Haan quarter of Brooklyn is based in Sunset Park, but the epicenter of the colonization is over in Flushing, Queens. The unofficial population of Brooklyn is around 3-4 million persons, over a million not officially or legally supposed to be there.
Nikholai and his then wife, Ms. Krissy Kristina, moved to District Midwood as it was close to Brooklyn College where they were then going to school. They both had grown up in Manhattan. They lived a happy, secluded and hyper sexual life for more than half a decade out of sight and out of mind.
Then some years later, Krissy completely vanished, and Nikholai returned to the security of parent’s Upper West Side penthouse barely leaving now except for jaunts, benders, mild malingering whoring and occasionally a revolutionary plot, when he must to keep up appearances of being a trusted inner circle man. His connection to so called political activism is not academic or experienced, mostly were he to admit it, he has been sucked into the revolutionary vortex by association; enabling increasingly bold incarnations of Sebastian Adonaev’s little Otriad; their “irregular detachment for agitation, propaganda and freedom fighting”.
“The most striking thing about her is the murder in her eyes. They beg a man closer with the promise of bliss then deny him everything,” mutters Sebastian. He’s always talking about and obsessing about, eyes. Nikholai knows the code though.
Sebastian speaks of “her eyes” so he appears less crudely animalistic speaking of breasts and other luscious fleshy appendages. Behind this charade of romance, knowing Sebastian for so long, since teenage times; Nikholai knows the projected poet, from the lusty rake and barely tamed savage. The periodic excursions into serial monogamy are punctuated with inserting his penis artfully around town.
Nikholai isn’t himself tonight. He’s not even putting on a show of host and entertainer. He seems distracted. Perhaps vaguely annoyed that Sebastian is whore mongering on the eve of a revolution
Looking out towards the George Washington Bridge, Nikholai thinks of suicide, fleetingly but with conviction and plan. Sebastian observes the same Fort Washington district rising as the highest point on the island of Manhattan. There is no suicide in Sebastian, it is removed from his very way of being. He periodically began mentioning to his close confidants, “If you ever here I killed myself, it’s a lie, I don’t have it in me, they finally did it.” But, you don’t kill white people in America. It has to look like something else.
Sebastian ruminates in butterfly flaps of mental headspace. In his wandering mind he sees all the times he’s walked aimlessly around the Fort Tryon Park with a particular lost lover. Holding her little cold hands. One partner, in particular, comes to his mind for Fort Washington District. The Russian Ivoryish quarter perched up in the rafters of New York City. For after her, none of the other previous or subsequent ones had mattered. Her name was Yelizaveta Alexandrenova Kotlyarova. He had fought very hard to keep her love alive in some tantric, flickering form. She had left him for the fortieth time, this time breaking off both communication and sex, and ended all correspondence about six sad months prior. No other woman had even crossed his mind since then. But, then came Daria to kill him. Hardly an improvement really.
But, some neurons fire faster than others, and then his mind quickly reverts to his newest fascination. All previous lessons were lost. Were Futurist Newyorkgrad anything like more medieval times, both Sebastian Adonaev and Nikolai Trickovitch; are the disgraced sons of Ivory Duke. In layman’s terms, the prodigal children of the Upper Middle Classes of New York Ivoryish gentry. Both blessed with privilege, education, several serfs and white skin coats, cursed with seeming mental illness and evolving, not revolving revolutionary thinking. A product of privilege and perhaps Wikipedia.
Nikholai was briefly in the N.Y.P.D. Under two years. He was purged for his political affiliations. Lately he’s taken work as a hacker and an unlicensed private detective moon lighting also as an accountant. Wiggling his way listlessly through college. Helping cheating wives get their proof of infidelity or parents find their dead kids in Newark Grad, in the New Jersey Oblast. He can get to a lot of things in the dark of the web. He sometimes can be found moonlighting as a driver for the Red Cross in their vast housing and logistics Ponzi schemes. Taking money raised from one catastrophe to band aid, blanket and water supply the next one. They hand out prepaid ATM cards to people who lose their homes to fire or disaster, that’s surely appreciated. He’s cut off a lot of people, he begrudgingly lets Sebastian get him out of the house once or twice a year.
In this year, 2012 he can barely manage to leave this house, but he likes to make short walks into the dusk. He is a mostly functional alcoholic, notwithstanding his inability to hold a job, his failure to get over his disappeared wife, his utter failure to finish university and his paralysis. Haitian Rum Straight. Maker’s Mark Straight. And cartons of Newport cigarettes. Sebastian has never questioned what Nikholai does for work. He does something with the internet, living off his wealthy father and selling pills through Shqiptarëti s to Columbia University students. The children of the elite are addicted to something called Adderall to study and take their exams. The Ivy League is only nine blocks north. Sebastian stays out of his friends’ money. Almost all of his friends have either clean ambulance money or dirty criminal money, and not much in between. Colluding with angels and devils to make an uprising occur, things like that take allies and real dependable, actually won’t run allies take time.
“Go work from somewhere warm, droog,” Sebastian always encourages him, but Nikholai is cold and spiritually long dead. The blackness in him sees reality as it is, not how it should be or could be or filtered heavily through the ego. “Get yourself a new woman! A blonde with big inviting tits!”
But Nikholai never heeds Sebastian’s call to pack up for prettier places or faces and Sebastian never listens to Nicholai’s persistent advice to stay away from Russian women or be less of a committed ‘Democratic Confederalist’.
Back in the year 2000 they both joined the youth wing of the newly formed ‘Communist Party of America’, but both got kicked out for throwing a huge underage drinking party in the national office. Also launching a short bombing campaign connected to slave labor and the garment industry.
Nikholai sees the bridge out there in the pretty lit up night and thinks about sweet surrender. Sebastian, though here to talk about Daria and his near death experience, remembers his Yelizaveta, a fond memory of challenging strokes.
Yelizaveta, who Sebastian met while attending Hunter College, lived in a cute two bedroom apartment on Fort Washington Ave in a six story building above Fort Tryon; the tallest point in Manhattan. Officially her mother was a maid at the Benjamin Hotel and her father allegedly unemployed on disability. But, that was all deception. Not in any way their real jobs or capabilities. For on the outside the family looked like a struggling working poor immigrant story with young Yelizaveta clawing for the Russian American dream via dreams of medical school at Stony Brook University. But Sebastian was privy to the truth inside the truth. Her last name was not really Kotlyarova. It was Perechenova.
“In Russia we were called Ivory. Outside of Russia, we are finally called Russians. We are treated about the same,” once explained Yelizaveta’s father, Alexander Dmitrievich Perecheveney, “like niggers.”
Yelizaveta was Sebastian’s partner and paramour for the past two years. She met him in the student movement days before she left for Medical School in Long Island. They wrote many months of letters then for two years were partners and rigorous lovers. Then things fell apart. While Daria was igniting some new desires and unsung anthems, Nikholai had heard the songs all before. For years with Yelizaveta and a couple more with several women before her. Now Sebastian and Nikholai, born nine days apart, were both nearly 30, but once they were both wild at age 14. They had loved and lost many times, though Nikholai had loved and lost everything when his wife left him and disappeared into virtual thin air. They knew each other’s love and hateful songs.
They had all called in chips and put out feelers to find his ex-wife Krissy. No one likes to hopelessly cling to a failing marriage then have it break apart. People like even less when the person they love becomes a vapor. A ghost. When all the leads dried up there was still this terrible hope she was somewhere she could return from. When they almost had every ambulance and every gangster, every bad man, every snitch and every sound bite looking for Nicholai’s ex-wife. All the leads went cold. For many years they held radical meetings in a small Bulgarian Bar on Canal and Broadway. The owner, ‘Sasho’. Yelizaveta’s savage father.
They went together finally to Sasho, by 2004 the most dangerous man in New York City. The father of Sebastian’s favorite ex. A person who according to the IRS was collecting disability from a small rent stabilized flat in Washington Heights while his wife worked full time cleaning hotel rooms.
But, Alexander owned properties all over town. Alexander, born in Ukraine, raised in Bulgaria held a growing empire in disguise. His wife, Yelizaveta’s more Magda Marina; someone that looked exactly like her was indeed cleaning rooms. Someone that looked just like her had raised little Yelizaveta; but nothing was what it appeared to be.
Alexander is called Sasho by those that think they know him well. He is a fierce and indomitable man, but also a gregarious buffoon behind the doors of his famous tavern Social Club when no one was looking but those he mostly trusted dancing about with a cigar grinning. Sasho is also quite a mastermind. He found himself with a great deal of money at the end of the 90’s. Always plotting and constantly cashing on his plots. A Ukrainian Ivory when he felt like it. A Bulgarian Mobster when he felt like it. The IRS auditor registered him as receiving about $600 a month in disability. The very last man you’d ever want to owe. But Sebastian had owed him several times. But, even Sasho couldn’t find Ms. Krissy. Or that’s what he finally said after getting a lot of free work out of them.
The family safe houses were still ‘too hot’ to talk about anything heavy. There had been multiple police raids to Sebastian’s loft since 2000. The young men were always plotting too and that plotting got them investigated by multiple police and intelligence services. Sebastian had to flee the country for the year of 2000-2001, he moved between London, Paris, Madrid and eventually Tel Aviv evading allegations of terrorism in New York, largely unfounded. He came back in November of 2001 after the towers fell and moved in for a time with Nikholai’s family. Shortly after they got back to plots, plans, direct actions and trouble. As young men causing trouble should do, they both moved deep into Brooklyn in 2005. But while Brooklyn and the Bronx have many alcoves for sheltering rebels and criminals, they always needed a dangerous protector. So since then, their little Otriad has taken shelter under the roof of a loving lesser Post-Soviet Bulgarian Oligarch. And there were a lot of business relationships now facilitated by this.
In 2010 amid a terrible blizzard Sebastian Adonaev had saved the life of his then girlfriend Yelizaveta. Perhaps a lot more had happened that night. But after the storm cleared the Otriad never owed Sasho a thing ever again, the story went. That was the part of the story Nikholai knows. There was some attempt by a rival crime boss to ruin Sasho and his family that night. Sebastian and Mickhi Dbrisk had stacked up some bodies and both cleared town shortly after.
Alexander’s daughter, maybe daughters, also his wife were taken and set to be snuffed. Some rival Voorhi named Kahn. Sebastian and a readily assembled flying column fought their way through a snowstorm to rescue Yelizaveta and most of the family from Kahn’s goons. The whole city was locked down by thick snow and no open roads from a Sanitation Strike. Sebastian and his crew went hard. Grabbed up, Yelizaveta was found with a broken tibia, lying bleeding and hijacked in JFK airport. That night was so pivotal for it was the first time Sasho owed anyone anything and found out about the secret little thing his daughter had going on with Sebastian. But then a lot of other things happened. Sasho was shot five times and nearly died. Another daughter no one knew about with another wife got her arms and legs cut off. The flying column set off a huge explosion at the Plaza Hotel. It was real fucking messy, Sebastian and Co. killed a few people that night. Nikholai partook in the retribution and blood bath.
After that night. Yelizaveta loved him even more, her father respected him and also owned him. But her mother Tanya Marian was simply horrified. Never the same woman again. She worked full time to end the entire relationship. All in just a seven day blizzard. When the Department of Sanitation finally plowed the roads they found the many bodies of decapitated gangsters littered in pink piles.
Sebastian was locked up for a month. Sasho bailed him out. Not for the men he killed, but from lack of sleep. Sometimes when the work he did took over and he wandered around town in big circles engaging the universe and a lot of other people. An ambulance picked him up near Coney Island. He never was held very long before the American Civil Liberties Union or family lawyers got things negotiated. They never killed anyone or blew anything up, that’s what the lawyers always repeated over the years.
Most of the work Sebastian and his outfit did was propaganda. Historical lectures, street theater, speeches and lots of diner salons on topics of subversive relevance. Sebastian’s father was the dentist for a lot of detectives and high ranked cops, which helped some. Sebastian and Nikolai picked up with Sasho, which helped a lot. A lot of the time some standoff happened and Sebastian took himself hostage. The police hospitalized him a lot more than they put him in the tombs. It was easier to get rid of him that way, since they recognized those that knew or heard that he was a city EMT and an affiliated person who never put boys in blue in harm’s way for the most part.
Yelizaveta’s mother ordered her to break the whole affair off immediately in the Winter of 2010. So after a year of hiding and sneaking around, breaking up, fucking hard and making up, then breaking up again in circles; the day after his 28th birthday, giving him a good hard last ride, Yeli decisively ended everything. Sasho was never consulted with or weighed in on the romance between Sebastian and his daughter. He was of course by then aware it was happening, and did nothing. Sebastian never asked permission or asked him to do anything after the final break up. The man being paid to be her disabled father, the double who knew Yelizaveta more than her biological father; well he was the only other person sad about the whole thing.
To the brutal and brilliant ‘Bulgarian’ gangster slash businessman, Sebastian Adonaev amused him. Reminds him of himself as a young man before he lost his Communist style, or Democratic Confederalist type thinking and found over a million ways to make money breaking the law.
Not that any of these things have anything to do with two fucks of an anything. Except to paint the portrait of Sebastian as more hopeless romantic puppy than a stone cold political killer, which he eventually became after losing enough friends in the years of the underground. Sebastian still loves young Yelizaveta, the prim Jappy medical student as ferociously as he ever had. He served her needs and courted her involvement in political projects, and she certainly did quite a lot to assist him. But, her mother wanted her to have nothing to do with a young man so alike to her father, both her real father and the man hired to play her father.
“Well actually the best way to get over a woman is to get under another woman,” said Nikholai. A famous Old Russian saying. Yelizaveta eventually got her mind voluntarily wiped and went to medical school in Havana. Sebastian fucked as many hipster sluts, lap dance whores and floozies he could. But Yelizaveta has a pussy made of gold, a sharp analytical mind and a thick butt.
The two partisans stand on the Penthouse roof deck drinking Vodka and smoking stoags. Cheers to the maddest plots! The great revolutionary struggle! To the Martyrs! To Krissy! To Yelizaveta! The smoke and drink washes them into places before and places to come.
Nikholai traverses a daily memory road with his vanished ex-wife. Wonders did she leave him or was she taken away, and by who? Sebastian is regularly and often existentially dying from his beliefs. Women just distract that he is a committed zealot, let him pretend he wants a ‘normal life’. When his partners reject him and his unstable, if not probably impossible pursuits, he goes harder at them. Which thus magnifies the danger to himself and others. Before this recent anguish over Yelizaveta, there was the big breasted anarchist Hali Viktoria. An artistic Swedish radical to whom Sebastian was for some time engaged to marry. There was also the prim debutante Ukrainian Ms. Maria Parsheva. Less passionate, less muse worthy but certainly highly influential were Polish Democratic Confederalist Yovanna Koracab and his long lost Syrian Sephardic Israeli partner Emma Solomon. Although the sad memory of Emma was always a specter.
Not that the list of other unlisted, less contemplated lovers and girlfriends were of less importance to his human development, but the women who evolved him were their own league, they all attempted to love Sebastian ‘as he was’ and better the quality of his life game.
Maria and Yelizaveta were the two other former Soviet lovers Sebastian had taken as his closest partners in the past four years. It would be incorrect to say he dated “Russian Women exclusively”; as later inferred by the Russian photographer and gangster Oleg Medved. He had merely intimately engaged only just two, one right after the other. And that was enough for him to suspect there was something remarkable about the character of a “Russian woman.” The first, Maria brought such stability and calm to his mind. She made a good home with him in Midwood Canton, she pumped him full of sex. But Sebastian did not love her completely for she did not excite at all intellectually. She would suck on his cock for hours, or take in in uncomfortable places sooner than talk about the ‘emancipation of the negro’ as she called his work dismissively. She never seemed angry or critical. She removed Sebastian from the stresses of Paramedicine and also radical organizing.
“That’s all she seemed good for,” Nikholai once suggested, but he later impressed her on one very particular occasion. She could barely converse on the political-theoretical level, much less cook.
Nikholai remembered the little redhead Maria as something of a “submissive Soviet Jessica Rabbit,” complete with a cute little mole, slightly husky voice and marked non-fascination with much that wasn’t Soviet in origin, besides Sebastian of course. She sure did hold her own on the “train job” though, that bloody staged mess in 2007. That was the time when Nikholai, Sebastian, Maria and a foxy little Chechen named Angelica had to hold off a murderous mob of sixteen working poor white hooligans from Gerritsen Beach with a briefcase, a few prayers, and good Bangladeshi Samaritan. Which got them all over the papers and Sebastian into the ranks of the F.D.N.Y. Though he was purged for his politics after 4 years.
Sebastian Adonaev would forever view Maria as his “Betty Shabazz” as their black nationalist associate Justinian Tomas had once described her. This was a real gesture of flattery on Justin’s part by calling Maria his“Betty Shabazz ” he” he was calling Sebastian an Ivory Malcolm X. Or something to that effect of flattery. Betty, like was a strong woman who stood behind her larger than life man without involving herself in the political melee. Sebastian and Maria lived together for over a year, they broke up on Block Island after one of the clandestine Z.O.B. Congresses. Sebastian had allegedly left her on the beach and swam out into the night.
Nicholai just thought of Maria a Russian Geisha, until he watched her do the train job. At that moment under fire, her realness did in fact come out. Nikh still had no trouble though after the break up confiding “She was just a Geisha, a gold digging off the boat. A stay at home fuck.”
The second significant Russian girlfriend, Yelizavetaveta was headstrong and wild and Sebastian could never forget her. No matter how many women he got under. Yelizaveta, a spoiled daughter of a very dangerous mobster in a subjective reality, a working poor dreamer in another. Hustling to become a doctor to get her parents out of poverty. Pretty much in her mind alone, since two actors were playing the two people raising her while here biological parents lived like the underworld kingpins they are. No one approved of her at all. Though no one really said so while it seemed to make him happy; everyone later told him ‘Yeli’ was walking all over him.
Nikholai remembers young Yelizaveta emerging into the picture. Sebastian’s bedroom as well as club house gossip sometime in early 2009. He remembers her at meetings and social functions. As “a mouthy Americanized Russian Ivory blonde. A know it all little bitch who walked all over you privately and publicly. And privately yet again. She emptied out your pockets, put wild eyed ideas in your head, and reduced you to bawling tears when she eventually left you over her mother’s total lack of approval.”
But Sebastian never saw it like that. He’d held the relationship long past when it should have ended. He left her with a box of letters and she had held on to a diamond engagement ring he’d bought from some Rabbi in a bathhouse.
“Your women are never far from the very center of your goriest war stories,” Nikh notes.
The two comrades Sebastian and Nikholai had been active in the student movement. Later in the underground when the student movement was suppressed. And later in the Party, active in the insurgency and its defense committees since 2000 when Sebastian got out of the behavior modification camps he’d spent a year in. Escaping on Valentine’s Day back to New York from Upstate. The year they did their first job. They both opposed their government’s imperialism as well as the capitalist system generally. Sebastian always put amalgamated Communist type ideology to it, but Nikholai just always felt the government was repressive. The Noires and Mestizos were totally oppressed and the population brainwashed into fat apathy. There have been a lot of great and also “highly mediocre women” and a lot of jobs since then. Jobs, being their little word for resistance operations. But not for nothing, since Sebastian Adonaev entered his “Post-Soviet amorous period,” as Nikholai liked to call it, well the jobs had gotten quite a lot more ambitious. The man needed an iron clad muse all assumed. In reality, he simply needed to be loved so that the love he put in the world could find a singular dedication, another soul to whom he could do all his work for.
“How do you think that bodes for longevity? More importantly; for the fuck or the love making? The full blown Russian-ness of her” asks Nikholai. As Sebastian had informed him that Daria was fully Slavic and all his other so-called Russian lovers were variations on Ruus Ukrainian or Russ Ivory.
“Referring back to this new lady being a full blown Slav?”
“Certainly. Slav is only one letter from you being a slave after all. And you and I know full fucking well that it isn’t the female who’s the slave in these Cold War flings. Those women walk all over men with their parapsychology and high heels.”
Sebastian had come to believe that Nikholai harbored some rather base prejudices against ‘the Russians’ but had never determined why. Nikholai had come to believe that Sebastian, unable to love himself at all, found himself enslaved by a series of at least partly damaged, somewhat dangerous, quasi gold digging immigrant women. Russian and non-Russian alike. Both men had father’s three or four generations removed from Pre-Soviet Russia with Ivory blood. Both had mothers eight or nine generations American by some distant way of Germany, Ireland, Scotland, and famine. Both men share a political conviction perhaps reflective best of being born Petite Bourgeoisie in the leading city in the last violent flutters of an Empire.
Sebastian had not previously thought of how Dasha performed in bed. It was as if he had known that already, being a man. From first sight as she sized him up like a slave on an auction block being told to find a cocktail.
“She can clearly fuck a man into pieces,” he replies.
That wasn’t up for any speculation on his part. But this was not the immediate attraction, the shapely form and the physical curves, the eyes he keeps talking about and the crazy in her. There was some great familiarity she bore to someone he used to know. There are poems and songs about that. And it most certainly wasn’t either of his previous Post Soviet partners. He felt a sexual pull, animalistic in nature. But this was a different thing. A Deja-vu about loss and longing.
“I bet she is pretty damn ferocious,” remarks Nicholai.
An apt word for her, all things considering what transpired on that rooftop but four weeks ago.
“I can’t stop thinking about her, actually. She’s made more remarkable not by her sheer dangerousness, but by some feeling I have of having seen her before in another time. I speak not about a blackout in that Tavern. I must confide in low volume about other lives and other worlds. A pure predator not even posing as a house pet! And the things she confessed to under torture.”
“Tortured her, did you?”
“I did. With my choice of words.”
“This is your primary instrument of torture Tovarish Adonaev.”
Tovarish is a former Soviet for Comrade. Nikholai is a Russian-Ivoryish-Fenian-German mutt just like Sebastian. Their New-Yorkerness, supersedes all that imagined identity. Neither of their mothers is HalachicallyIvoryish, though Sebastian’s mother Barbara had gone through some motions to convert to the watered down Reform version. So the black hats would, of course, disavow them both as sad losses to the Gentiles. Neither Sebastian nor Nikholai could marry lawfully in Israel either, but that didn’t bother Nikholai as he had no intention of ever going to that particular colony after hearing many of Sebastian’s accounts. Sebastian and Nick both look enough like “the Russians,” but they speak, and they think like children of the American Upper Middle-class intelligentsia. Both of their fathers are medical professionals. Nikholai’s father is a neurologist, and Sebastian’s a dentist. Both fathers are committed, Ivoryish Atheists. Both gentile mothers being American ‘hippie’, openly minded sorceresses perhaps predisposed the young two men to their lower ‘case communism’ as they’d be denounced as being national traitors over and over. But, they were not ever doctrinaire Communists affiliated to any of the mostly irrelevant, highly decimated American party factions. orthodox Democratic Confederalists, or working in the local Party organs. The nine of which in New York were marginal anachronisms at best composed of the awkward and the elderly. They simply were two young men of privilege aligning their lives with the plight of the much-trampled masses out of empathy not necessity. They were only about as Ivoryish as their value for education, but sometimes Sebastian was known to make a rude display of it in the form of Holiday parties.
They typically since 1999 did Rosh Hashanah, the Ivoryish New Year’s, Hanukkah the eight-day gambling potato pancake party, Passover the Exodus Fest; and Sukkot the eight-day tent party feast. And the rest, perhaps about were all causally omitted. As well as poorly understood.
They had met in their freshman year of High School. Sebastian’s home had been robbed, and Nikh had shown up with some weapons and an offer to help him get his honor back, his Rep. They rarely agreed on anything besides opposition to the government, and the greatness of big firm breasts augmenting rough sex, but they were very similar men in disposition. They both enjoyed the drink and could work each other into nights of sheer ethanol rampage. In the City, culture, genes, and habits their cloth was of similar cut. Until the year 2010 though, Sebastian has been married to his varying interpretations of what would come to called the ideological and tactical school of ‘Democratic Confederalism’ via a latent Zionist Universalism while Nikholai had been married to Krissy, not needing angry politics at all. But things fall apart. Sebastian returned from his ‘second homeland’ Illubador in cuffs and Krissy ran out. Then as stated completely vanished. It was perhaps Nikholai’s inner misery over the fate of his marriage and Sebastian’s inner misery over being denied what he had imagined was his occupied homeland or imagined was his destiny that put them back together, leaving them open to suggestion. This led to the expeditions into Ayiti and the beginning of their participation in the armed struggle. Via a machine of networked factions and sympathizers the two had built in tandem over a decade; called initially the Youth United For Equality Movement in the student days, The Organization during the long dark years and after many alphabet soups of shells, splinter and reformations; the Banshee Association, later the Banshee Group and after a merger with the Irish and the Negs; the Z.O.B. Their political club, their own Party.
“And let us all be frank that women can give men any number of tremendous suggestions and wield a power that shapes a man’s deeds. Perhaps you could say women, with more love for the world and more investment in its future can direct the violent ego driven nature of men.”
“She didn’t tell me everything, but enough to conclude she is a victim, a prisoner of sorts. With a dark Post-Soviet past to unravel all of her callous behaviors and the smile she hides behind.”
They had toppled backward together toward the precipice, and in the free fall, he had pulled her with him to collective death only averted because of certain laws of physics. Well, it was impossible to know truly, Yelizaveta the young scientist could have explained it, but she was long gone these days.
Rather than tumble into a pit of death, Sebastian grabbing onto Daria altered the trajectory of the plummet. She had made every effort to follow his deadly, beckoning commands and rather than go through with it honorably he had tried to take her with him.
“How Russian American.”
“So what the fuck really happened on that roof?” Trickovitch asks.
“Well we fought and we toppled and we landed on top of each other half off the edge. Then we just lay there quietly panting. I realized that she had almost just killed me and I had almost just taken her with me toward death.”
“That’s really hot. And by hot, I mean real fucking stupid.”
“Well, anyway. So hearts were racing and looking down into seventeen stories of death she then grabs my hand and bites down into my right shooter.”
Sebastian shows the little bite shaped wound. There was a literal ring of red bite marks around his right index finger.
“I think I know her from before,” Sebastian finally admits overtly in hushed Ivory.
“Before, eh. Tovarish. You need to take more of your salt medicine.”
“No, I mean maybe. But this was different. I am not making chemical, electrical mythologies droog; I remember Dasha Andreavna Skorobogatova Maccluskey from before-before.”
“You’ve always been a sick fuck. A brutalist. It gets worse when you low dose or drop dose, or of course go full Wakefield and don’t go to sleep. And you need not let fourth-dimensional things interfere heavily with the gathering war effort,” Nikholai replies and lights another mentholated smoke.
“Well then she calms down. And we do this kind of half swoon, half cuddle, half makes a reevaluation of an enemy. As she did just tried to push me off a roof and kill me. Daria tells me that she paid 25,000 dollars to come to America and have an arranged marriage setup to a man named ‘Maccluskey’. She said she had to work the debt off and the work was highly unpleasant. She asked me if I wanted to take her on a date. She told me she knew the Financial District very well and could tell me who and what to hit.”
Sometimes Nikholai Trickovitch believes his best friend is a mad Hebrew prophet and a highly inspiring leader over the years, to some. And sometimes Sebastian is pure draining.
“Don’t project and don’t believe any of her Russian lies. You always seem to tell a tale always darker than it is. The world is evil enough on its comrade story teller. As for her offer to help? Why? What’s in it for her? I think you should ask where this woman came from, question why she ended up meeting you at this very stage. You know, right before the biggest job to date. Don’t think with your dick. You’re not her type. What are you holding? What do you have in the bank? The whole thing looks fucked at every angle of evaluation. She tried to kill you man.”
“She told and made most illicit references to what she did to come here. Perhaps she wants out of who holds her paperwork. Or maybe something else,” Sebastian suggests.
“I’m not sure she did anything but prove you’re easier to kill than the rumors suggest, you’d both been drinking and we all know just about anything can come out of a Russian woman’s mouth drunk or sober. We both know all women lie,” Nikholai replies.
“Just about anything can become true or untrue, dangerous or stunning. A top or a bottom. But given the entirety of the encounter, it seemed Daria was alluding to her imprisonments and debts. Whatever their current state might be.”
“But are they even true? All women lie, and these Soviet women lie highly convincingly as if it were storytelling as art or advanced parapsychology. You magnify and exaggerate all suffering to fit in the contexts of your often convoluted radical politics. You make every single woman around you’re your damsel in distress from Capitalism! You’ve done so time and again. I’ve been here for it all. Remember your truest, most equal partner Hali Viktoria, the one you quite nearly married? Before you dated and slept with former Soviets in this endless succession, you did date and slumber erotically with Americans for a time.”
“Nicholai, you’re making something out of prejudice. I had just two serious partners after Hali. I know what you’re getting at. But really man, there was only Maria, and then there was Yelizaveta. And there were a couple of short stands in the Stans in between, but they meant so little and felt like so nothing that I all but stopped my fucking for fun. My hand gave me greater pleasure,” smirks Sebastian.
“Comrade Hali Viktoria was the kind of woman you need to find again, or just steal her back from that Italian hipster musician she dates or something. You’ve done such things frequently. Not these cold, possibly morally vacant Russians. They will never understand you, and they’ll never seriously join this cause,” says Nikholai, “Just like Maria and Yeli, Daria will completely reject your ideology, reject your some-what hooligan Bohemian lifestyle and leave you the very minute you become hard to deal with. Which inevitably you are! Incredibly hard to deal with,” says Nikholai.
Nikolai Trickovitch is referring to the only woman that anyone ever thought had made a realistic and well-suited partner for Sebastian Adonaev. All of his friends, comrades, and co-officers never went so far as to say “Maria Parsheva is a Russian Geisha,” or “Yelizaveta Perechenova is a condescending, high maintenance Ivoryish American princess,” but they all said it when the two women broke off the relationships. Sebastian’s mother was vaguely prejudiced by now of anyone who even spoke Russian.
Hali Viktoria the Fenians-Swedish-American wild rebel. Hali Vik was not a natural fit either though. Her big tits and flirtatious demeanor caused a lot of fights with overly forward strangers. Sebastian remembers momentarily the time Hali cut her risks, and he had to get up to Massachusetts and find her doped up in a roadside motel. He also remembers ‘the Lowell Job’. When they burned down half the Meth Labs in the city and engaged in a running gun fight with the Cambodian street gangs. Which had been a messy overexertion of well-intentioned violence because Hali the Vik, had gotten herself in a lot of trouble, but Sebastian may well have made up stories in his head too?
Part of Sebastian’s condition was that everything was always happening at once in total recall. If he did not take a medicinal salt to lock into the present, he gets overwhelmed by the intensity of everything.
Well anyway, Hali was ‘safe in Italy’ or maybe Texas now, and while there may have been a little bit of torture, murder, barbarism, and war utilized to get her there, well nobody was dead and buried in Lowell that didn’t deserve somewhat to be dead, burned and buried in Lowell.
Nikolai and Sebastian being best friends talked a lot about their women. But there was one woman that Nikholai knew precious little about and that was Emma Solomon, but he was correct that Hali Vik the only American was, in fact, the only person he might well have married in a normative sense of what that word means. For in the State of Illubabor, Sebastian was in paperwork at least still quite married to Emma Solomon. But bigamy of paperwork is not the same as bigamy taken to the firing mechanisms of the inner heart. Was it these four women that had made Sebastian believe in the struggle as if it were love? No, only Emma did, and Emma was dead. Or didn’t exist in the same space that everyone else had.
Yelizaveta in a completely separate way was real in his head, heart and phallus. Because she had worked on his body very thoroughly. And he had been employed heavy on hers. They were together for only three months when the storm hit; someone broke her leg, someone tried to kill her dangerous father and Sebastian fixed it all. Then he was imprisoned. There were many lovers, not an inappropriate amount but a good amount still. Sebastian had well ripped the heart out of their young Polish comrade Joanna who loved him as no other woman had or perhaps could but to whom he felt youthful nothing. But that was a decade ago. Sometimes, he felt like all his pain with loving women that couldn’t love him, in the same way, was due to what he did to Joanna.
Sometimes it was too many women to believe any of it was really love at all.
Nikolai had been married to a Syrian Italian Puerto Rican model for seven years named Krissy Kristina Safra. Or just ‘Ms. Krissy’ for cute. She had wanted very little besides children, and she was an agoraphobe. She didn’t leave their Midwood, Brooklyn apartment very many times in the seven years they lived together. The product of near ceaseless sexual harassment and advances on the street, she preferred the life of a managed housewife. Her father was a rather wealthy lesser Oligarch. A Syrian Ivory, who had converted to Christ faith early in life and married a Puerto Rican-Italian mixy; but he remained ethnocentric. Also allegedly connected to something big in the Central Intelligence Agency. The parents completely disowned her for co-cohabitation with a Ivory Ashkenazi. Though Nikh wasn’t even very Ivoryish at all and didn’t even have a Ivoryish mother, or even a Bar Mitzvah. They had gotten married early at age 18 and lived together in District Midwood until their late twenties. Adonaev rarely saw his best man then, but Nikolai was happy playing house, he was domestic in his soul.
Eventually it ended, he wouldn’t bear her kids. She didn’t want one, she wanted 3 or 4. And he didn’t know if his life wanted to look like that. The money wasn’t great at his job, and she was even a little more home bound than he was which seemed extreme. They bargained and fucked, bargained and cried. Then, they divorced and then she completely disappeared, into smoke. As if her father had managed that; which maybe he had. The very last time they saw each other to sign the divorce papers she gave him a parting fuck. He poured olive oil on his cock and put it deep in her ass for as long as he could think to. It was the kind of rough goodbye sex from movies, which passionate, angry people have in real life. It was the kind of sex Yelizaveta and Sebastian had for a year since they broke up about once a week for a year. Nikholai doesn’t like to equate his last encounter with Krissy as sodomy with Italian olive oil. It was a lot more than that. Deeper than rough anal sex. She had completely rejected him and then cut him off.
Nikholai has been fucking and drank his way towards oblivion lately. He felt nothing anymore now that Krissy was gone to god only knows where. Self-destruction or the arms of a wealthy man, who only knew? In all likelihood, her father probably just gave her a trust fund and sent her abroad somewhere. But dark minds make up the worst possible scenarios about everything. After Krissy, every single woman Nikh was with looked like a lumpy mommy. Nothing to write home about any single one of them. Women that emasculated him even further.
Then Nikh puts out the past with his latest cigarette.
“I am only suggesting slowness and loads of needed caution is required are you to obsess, I repeat the word obsess! Further about another woman you meet by the brink of your crazy pursuit of wild partly damaged women. Joanna was great to you, but you never felt anything and that destroyed her and perhaps forever cursed you if you believe in the dealings of love. Hali Vik was the closest thing I’ve ever seen to you to being unadulterated happy for a brief fuck of time. But let’s not forget just how much we had to burn down and knock around over that little lady, and that you may have saved her life, but she nearly killed you. Maria Parsheva was a loyal little Russian geisha, but between various factors that we need not rehash, that too was doomed. Though, on the train, what a little gangster she was! Perhaps you did faster more far reaching organizing so moved as you were by Ms. Yelizaveta Perechenova, but you have such a way of making women into these wild muses and then yourself into tragic fucking art. And to be frank, Yelizaveta completely emptied your bank account. She also humiliated you on a weekly basis by refusing to give the relationship any stability after you got out of prison. All the women you take as your serious partners, well none of them have fathers and all of them of dark pasts. Except for Yovanna who you sort of just destroyed. Poor noble woman. Which was rather sad because none of them loved you as fearlessly as she. She was the only one who followed you into the camps, remember, into the Palestinian territories. She was a very quality woman. But, you were bored and cheated on her left and right!”
Yelizaveta has the most brilliant and scary father. Bulgarian by nationality. Ukrainian Ivory by blood. But he was highly amoral and probably also bipolar. About as high functioning Bipolar as a major criminal/ business man can get. When he arrived in America in the 1990’s the ambulance men carried him off all the time, like every other year. Until Sasho had every single paramedic working north of 168th street killed. Had Newyorkgrad Presbyterian Hospital burned down? Made Washington Heights once again since the 1980’s an entirely unsafe place to live. So, it went to reason “that the daughter of a bipolar man carried away by ambulance men should perhaps not marry a bipolar ambulance man.”
That’s what Sebastian’s condition was also called, Bipolar 1, invented medicine for deviant minds. That thing did not really exist. It was simply one more way the Western governments colluded to chemically neuter powerful people.
Firm and logical now, but not always so, certainly not in 2009. After Sebastian secured Yelizaveta and the Perecheveney Bratva during the great blizzard and brought her to a hospital for treatment. After Sebastian, Nikholai and some of their men thwarted a major Euro Mob attack on Alexander with their reign of bombs and knives and terror in the snow. After Sebastian was taken by the secret police for a month and disappeared into torture land. Well, despite the conflicting recent record of heroism, Yelizaveta’s mother Tanya Marina forbade Yeli and Sebastian to see each other, and a woman with only one functional parent will follow the will of her mother in the end. But, Yelizaveta was a little crazy too and loved Sebastian. So for a year, it was on again and off again, rough and deep, hard and passionate, presents, secret rendezvous and lots of art, poems, dinners, flowers and a lot of time in the sheets as well as in showers, tubs and the floor.
“Dasha is an entire continent to herself. I ask you not to compare and contrast my various past uses of love and longing. I can’t even truly say that I know her well enough to speak anything like love to her. I only felt like I was in the presence of a long lost friend.”
He almost said, ‘murdered wife’ but he decided that Nikholai would then actually mock him. As everyone had and would that he suggested something like that too.
“A damn construct man! Do not mistake your fucking black Israelite training for reality or it will consume you, again,” that’s what Nick would yell at him in simulations.
“You love dangerously and often inappropriately. You don’t let go at all. Just remember that Hali Vik was also the closest time, in my memory, to you being killed by another man, a group of men really over a woman. I suspect that is something you are secretly craving in some reminiscence of an older life.”
“Well, maybe she hasn’t got a man, per say. Maybe she hasn’t got a dark past at all; maybe it’s just a mind game. I’m very hard to kill as you know. Dasha has already tried.”
“You might have easily both stupidly died. And truly this time for absolutely nothingly nothing!”
“She claimed to Rafael Ernesto she remembers nothing about that night at all.”
“A back out as a reconciliation for your improvised murder? Prosto, so if she had killed you she wouldn’t even have remembered it! And you get off on this dangerous trash?”
“A blackout woman thinly hides a dark past in my experience.”
“How now! What of it! I fail to see what, at all, is attractive about her willingness to murder you!”
“This isn’t base lust. Or a strange love. This is something deeply surreal brother. Something I haven’t felt before in the same way. They say she has been coming to the Mehanata Social Club for a little under three years, but I’ve never seen her before. She never pays, always leaves alone. Drinks like she needs to part the Red Sea via her consumption. I’ve never seen her at the social club before, I’m there all the time as you know. I have no idea how I could have missed a busty, wild, sexy thing like her.”
“That my friend is only called a big fat trap. Who’s trap, I’m not sure but a trap certainly none the less. You have many enemies. She is not what you or we need right now. Not at all. She is nothing but big tits coming with some real bad trouble.”
Sebastian would perhaps not have noticed her because for the past year and a half he had weaned himself off that particular den of Bulgarian sin and former Soviet misery by convincing himself no woman on earth could be as angelic and pure as his lost Yelizaveta, his last and most highly imperfect love.
“The trouble is you’re not a hopeless romantic,” continues Nikholai getting yet another cigarette fired up, up off the last one, “It’s far worse that you’re a perfectly real romantic. You usher in the entirety of the 18th century for the coldest of former Soviet hearts. Some of these poor girls, they have to learn how to protect themselves from whether you’re sure you’re serious or not. More precisely you need to protect yourself from your projections of love and the cowboy like the way you shoot cupid’s arrows off in your artistic yet unpredictable shifting of moods.”
“I’m deadly serious with this one though. And I will not weigh its risks against the others. You are lecturing me about my love life as if I were proclaiming a new love. I am speaking about something else now. Not romance or fucking. I am remembering things that were, shall we say, got deleted. Got mediated away in their hospital camps. Washed down with salt! I am telling you not that I plan to try and bed Daria Maccluskey. Of course, I will try, that is what men do. I’m trying to tell you that with all the sleep, salt and training in the world; I know that woman from before.”
The before. Whenever he spoke of the ‘before’ it made Nikh nervous. Nikh has grounded himself fully here right now.
“All of them! You say things like this madness about all of them. It’s either a blessing or a terrible curse you love so early and so often. You love as you do but I am your stalwart Droog. I know what happens when you speak like this. I suspect a curse upon your entire well-being was laid in this trap. You seem to enjoy these unstable, untenable trysts as if pursuing the romantic ideal of poorly constructed epics might necessitate your energies to live a more basic life. Not that anything you do is basic, but I suspect you’d always be happier as a wandering bard than as a loosely grounded resistance fighter. ”
“I have no idea anymore. I just feel something in the molecules, my friend. I am telling you that what we have been planning for so many years might well hinge on this person. I haven’t written a magnificent poem in many years. If quite a little good art was made under Yelizaveta, it was because she asked for it and returned it and sucked it out of me on her knees. They are all entirely different loves. One loves the struggle because one always thinks it noble, or heroic and the cause just and the suffering of our people, all people immense. One loves a woman because she emboldens him. Makes him a real man by showing love as something justifying our human condition.”
“Different Sebastian’s have said different things on the matter over this decade mind you. You must look at yourself in the mirror more often or more deeply. For one thing, you’re too lean for my liking and your hair is too short it means you aren’t eating. That is always a giveaway that you are about to do something reckless. Police, tortures and imprisonment tend to follow an old friend.”
“You’re being a real Ivoryish mother now. More praying is perhaps in order?”
“I certainly don’t care what you pray to this week, but you do need to eat more, drink less and certainly not be chasing around a woman you hardly know, who happens to show up, now. Three weeks from the biggest job you’ve ever been a part of. The biggest job ever as far as this country is concerned. And for the love of god: You just got over Ms. Yelizaveta and were beginning to sleep around more casually, so please just don’t get drunk on any more rooftops. Just be cautious of what a wild woman you are dealing with. And please, whatever you do, just don’t tell her you love her until you can pronounce her last name. And have done the homework on the skeletons in her closet. This is a Russian fucking woman after all. They play no games, not with one damn thing. We could sort of vouch for Maria and Yeli, but who is this bitch? Seriously, who the fuck really is this Daria Maccluskey?”
Nikolai then asks Sebastian quite specifically, “What really happened up on that roof then?”
Sebastian blows out his smoke.
“I died and was immediately reborn, like the last few thousand times,” quietly responds Adonaev puffing his cigarette, “we toppled to our very deaths. We died in a very inglorious real way. Stupidly and drunk. But, miraculously we then awoke panting in the alley way, holding each others’ near death hand. This all happened in the blink of an eye. Then we got up, and I dusted her off, and we walked out as if nothing happened. She gave me her number on a note, and I put her in a cab.”
“And you think you see the soul of your dead wife Emma in her, is that the story?”
“Nikholai, please do not judge me. If I’m so fucking crazy why is anyone following me into this war?” little
“Because we’re all a little crazy too. You’re just a highly persistent man,” Nikholai replies, “perhaps also simply obsessed, even crazed. People need that in a leader.”
But Nikholai Trickovitch does not judge him for too long because he too knows what it is like to bear forced eternal separation from the one you love. He too is gifted with a long memory and knows what Sebastian first lost that brought him to the revolutionary road. He simply is aware of something that Sebastian Adonaev is not because Sebastian is at least partly sleeping, still taking the last load of salt drugs they put him on, putting everyone on in lesser doses in the water supplies of the city while Nikholai is completely awake. Drinking bottled water.
They’ve been friends for a very long time. Since when they were young. Just before Sebastian did his first bid in the camps. The drums of war begin to beat in the wilds of Brooklyn.
In Midtown Isle of Mann, Sebastian waits for the omnibus. Sometimes you have to take a step back from the big picture and make sure your troubled friends stay out of trouble. As usual, Michkai Dbrisk was doing the best he could in a poor overall situation for doing business. He was for whatever logistically foolish reason rushing to meet Kawa Zivistan and catch a jitney to Strong Island. Which was last minute and outlandish, but something was clearly going wrong with the long game.
The Z.O.B. underground was composed of several pre-existent overlapping formations. One had been led by Sebastian Adonaev and Trikhovitch; called the Banshee Group. One led by Mara Fitzduff and a defrocked Fenian Priest named O’Sullivan called the Fenian Brotherhood. And a third faction led by Michkai Dbrisk of Crown Heights called Uhuru. Later re-branded several times and merged with other factions and entities into the durably Democratic Confederalist guerrilla force it was on the eve of a bloody revolution in North America.
“I know that man so well I could wear his skin, and you’d be convinced I was he, I know his very heart, I know his small talk and his long game and that crazy fucking Ivory is one of my very best men. The first among equals at our table. He paid dues for a long time, oh he still pays dues, but I trust my children with that man,” says Michkai Dbrisk, the tall, dreaded physician assistant by training, rogue paramedic, a bad man. A real Jamaican.
Explains Dbrisk:
“Kawa Zivistan is of course really named Sebastian Adonaev on his birth paperwork. Everyone who knows him mostly as ‘Kawa’ doesn’t know him at all. He really is only ‘Russian’ by perhaps insertion and appreciation. He speaks less Russian than is appropriate for having a decade of from Russia with love, he’s tried to learn. There were lots of well-meaning flashcards. I mean people have always taken him very seriously. At this point he probably speaks more Russian than old Ivory, which is the useless language of his tribe. He is without a doubt, an Illubadori dual citizen. His father is definitively Ivory, his mother a convert to reform Ivory type thinking. Well, maybe there are some doubts about all that. He suffers from the bipolar condition, prevalent in Ashkenazi Ivory.
Yelizaveta Aleksandrovna, his last serious partner and love interest tried the very best to control the bipolar, but of course one cannot. Why he has this obsession with Russian women is anyone’s guess. Deconstructing it is silly as we love what we love. Yelizaveta was good at many things, though hated by all of Kawa’s closest circle besides Dbrisk. There are so many details Dbrisk knows his man cannot come close to remember. Because his ‘soul’ is partially reloaded each time. The evil science behind the process is confusing to Dbrisk and everyone else aware of it. Kawa however, can die and die and die. But he can be easily reloaded into new bodies someone keeps making for him. Just like the oligarchy does.
Now, you must think Kawa Zivistan is a philanderer and a manipulator and really only in love with himself, hidden behind a revolutionary belief system. So said Yelizaveta Aleksandrovna on so many occasions during the years of the original clandestine training operations in Ayiti. All these Russian women, he must be rich, some thought. Well that was no one’s business, but he dressed in other people’s used clothes, and always kept a very modest one-bedroom apartment in the Midwood district. He was generous with his couch when people were in trouble he always came up with cash. He drove a real basic automobile, the Honda Civic 2009. He upgraded at some point to a Guyanese modified Charger with bulletproof tinted glass. Nothing fancy either except the Guyanese had gotten under the hood. Love, yes love he believed in it. He may have never led a very large Otriad, only ten to twenty, but he did have a following when healthy. They took him many times and tortured him many times and he wasn’t the same man all the time. His memory of his own hardships never seemed to reload with the bodies. He could die, and emerge a month or too later as a new Kawa, but fundamentally the same Kawa, the rebel.
What’s a little torture and possible death when you have all these hot Russian girlfriends? These were very serious trysts some of them. Despite the suspicions ofthe Department of Security in the Homeland, none not one of these lovers were actually F.S.B. agents. None were manipulating the ‘strange abilities’ of Kawa Zivistan. Most of them, truly looking into their hearts, suspected the family estate would be left to anyone other than his blonde brother Benny Zivistan, the respectable Spanish businessman. So the love, when it was love, well it was pure shit each time. Masha-Maria, Yelizaveta Kay, Adelina, Alina, Alina, and Polina ‘the Red Fox’ were mostly free-spirited artists, in love with Kawa’s very old soul perhaps.
They actually loved this Ivory for him, for his strange bearing. His unique vision and also terrible ways.
Thinks Sebastian:
‘Why are Chornay always so fucking late to every single g-d damn thing?’ He waits on 40th Street and Lexington Avenue amid the towers of midtown for the Hampton Jitney, the express bus out to the Hamptons located on the far eastern end of Strong Island. What’s so terrible about sometimes being early? But they had been slaves, maybe still are mostly slaves and thus were excused somewhat from just about anything in his mind thereafter. Only a racist Blan oppressor makes you work for free for five hundred years, reduces you to raped and broken human cattle, and then complains when you’re late, but they were about to miss the bus. But this was no way to regard one’s stalwart ; ‘Chief of Operations’, the Jamaican gangster and medicine man Mickhi Dbrisk. Even if that was a kind of racism to itself. Which clearly it often was. It is impossible to exercise one’s inner racism, you can try so hard and the whiteness still returns. The curse that comes with the skin privilege.
After Daria replied by mobile phone she wasn’t leaving Breuklyn, the night before Labor Day Kawa Zivistan had called his bad man partner in crime Mickhi Dbrisk To escape the city briefly to the country to a place called Montalk for a midnight journey. A day trip, the night before Labor Day proper which locked down Breuklyn with 2.6 million masqueraders and full mobilization of the NYPD amongst other agencies. Each year they flipped a coin over Hamptons v. Jouvert and it was “heads for Hamptons’ ‘ this year. But really only because Dasha was occupied, Mickhi never actually ever wanted to go out during the sometimes gunplay active Juveaurt nor was he ever particularly interested in trips to the Ivory elite Hamlet called ‘the Hamptons’ where the Zivistan family had their dacha. Kawa clearly hadn’t woken up completely. Mickhi was supposed to be on the front lines of the rising tomorrow. It was as if Kawa Zivistan could not even remember the revolution he had helped in no small part to inspire and plan for over a decade.
Surely, they needed to make a long palaver.
Mickhi Dbrisk and Kawa Zivistan had met in the LaGuardia Community College seven years prior in the EMT program. They helped found the Banshee Association together and later the nucleus of the Newyorkgrad command of the Z.O.B. underground. In the seven years that they had known each other Dbrisk had seen his friend through many ups and downs, many treacherous jobs, and many lives saved and thankfully none taken. He had seen just what Zivistan was capable of when he took his little salt pills and worked under the right woman. Dbrisk also had seen his partner fall down real bloody, horror show hard. He’s been to a few of the funerals.
“It feels as though I have awoken again from a no good, terrible, very, very bad dream,” Kawa tells Dbrisk in old Ivory talk. A talk he’s talked about before.
“I heard you say that once just after you came back from the earthquake atrocities in Port-Au-Prince. The next thing I remember is you with a sharp bear knife heading down to settle a score in District Garrison Beach over that attack on the Q train. Then came another arrest, your escape from Lenox Hill hospital and the beginning of the end for your municipal employee status. So forgive me if I worry every single time I hear that again. Last time I checked actually, just two weeks ago Kawa Zivistan, the underground man was quite dead.”
“I’d like permission to completely step out of the chain of command to handle a situation I’m in.”
“Of course you don’t ever need my permission to do something you’ve already done.”
“The full assault on the financial district will commence in seventeen days? The Brooklyn elements will rise tomorrow at noon?”
“So it seems,” mutters Dbrisk, wondering if the Kawa who is also Sebastian truly came back fully this time.
“We have committed all of our best volunteers to serve in the medical detachment. It will raise eyebrows if you are not there,” Kawa explains as if Dbrisk isn’t aware.
“I plan to be there at the uprising of course. I just need to handle something first. Something time-sensitive.”
“Well I plan not to be there tomorrow when shit goes down for real, but you do whatever you want to do. Be wherever you gotta be.”
Mickhi Dbrisk is a six-foot tall, smooth Jamaican paramedic. He quietly leads one of the mightiest guerrilla squadrons of paramedics and EMTs history has ever known with its many bases in Brooklyn, in the highest peaks of Jamaica and also of course in Haiti. The little park occupied in the Financial District’s northern frontier was such a small side show. The public-private park called Zuccotti which a year ago was taken over by students and radicals and has since become the epicenter of a national rising now most regimented and entrenched against the national elites, has always been dis-interesting to the Noire factions.
Dbrisk leads quietly because he is a true gangster. That is how a true gangster leads. He had been held in prison for over a year where he marinated his gangster by refusing to name names of co-conspirators. He now raises three children. Sebastian as Kawa has helped save human lives on three continents as a paramedic adventurer. Dbrisk has faithfully built a resistance movement largely not leaving the borough in which he was born. In the diffuse and decentralized chain of command of the militant human rights movement Dbrisk holds the position of ‘Captain’, also ‘Chief Operations Officer’ of the Z.O.B. Otriad and underground. The name of the faction he leads alongside Zivistan and few others is also known as the ‘Banshee’ ‘ or as the ‘Breukelen Bath and Rifle Club’ or the ‘Banshee Association of Newyorkgrad’.
Kawa has been a founding leader and a true knock around guy. Michkai Dbrisk though is a bad mother fucker but subtle, keeping the home front organized. Managing the awkward alliance inside the Z.O.B. of Jamaican and Haitian gangs, Ivory radicals, Zionists, Garveyites and Fenian terrorists. A real Shatah, leading from a position of both love and fear .
Dbrisk leads the ‘Special Operations Section’ of Z.O.B., concerned largely with the training bases in the West Indies, the command and control of urban partisans, periodic bombing missions and strikes against rival groups, criminal elements in zones of control and the real enemy; the Oligarchy. Kawa Zivistan, for many years, had been leading the Planning Section. Concerned with the strategy of the clandestine movement. Scott Boltzmann Sevastra led the ‘Communications Section’ specifically the Fire Switch pirate radio station, Banshee newspaper and the affiliation with People’s Television group. Mara Fitzduff co-chairs Communications Section and is the most active deputy concerned with Newspaper distribution which largely solidifies and facilitates the movement’s vast support in F.D.N.Y. fire suppression, N.Y.P.D. uniformed peace officers, Sanitation and EMS in general. Nikolai Trickovitch leads Logistics. Mostly arms acquisition, vehicles and safe houses as well as the underground railroad logistics set up from the ‘grad to the West Indies. Michael Goldbar Allamby is the Chief Financial Officer raising money via control of trucking routes, racketeering, extortion, bootlegging, wine smuggling and other mechanisms. Anya Drovtich leads the Information & Intelligence Section, also dubbed ‘Committee for Public Safety’ with the highly sly Shqiptarëti beauty Erza Pula, the chief legal counselor. It’s the movement’s intelligence body and also the internal affairs secret police.
A very, very big operation in motion. Its moving parts happening as Kawa and Dbrisk speak at that Midtown bus stop, involving short wave transmitters, an electronic magnetic pulse bomb and the full mobilization of thousands of armed partisans.
The core philosophic pillars of the guerrilla movement are inspired by long imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan are rooted in patience, humility, wrath on enemies of the people and gratitude for heroes and martyrs of the struggle. On that note, Dbrisk would of course like to avoid a bus ride to Strong Island, but being patient is his forte. If Kawa is not well, something is wrong with the plan. More importantly Sebastian was his main droog. You look out for your ‘troubled friends’ even on the eve of history.
It is now the fourth whole day of Kawa not sleeping. He was not actually using this new vessel for sleep, during the Bohemian festival he just drunkenly closed his eyes. Dbrisk doesn’t want to go to the Hamptons, but he needs to see what condition Kawa’s condition is in. Something is amiss.
They board a nearly empty 10pm bus and make small talk in a private cabin at the rear of the jitney. They are informed by an attendant it will be a two and half hour ride express to Montalk, the easternmost village in Strong Island. They lock the back cabin door. They take out the batteries of their phones.
“Every time you die, you come back only part way. It makes everyone nervous. Like we’re in a conspiracy with a man who isn’t risking what everyone else is. As far as I know, when I die, I die,” says Dbrisk who takes out a pistol and places it on the table between them. A ghost gun made in America.
“I’m not sure what you’re saying man,” replies Kawa Zivistan.
“I fear that this thing will again destroy you,” says Michkai Dbrisk, “I’ve been at your funeral two weeks ago. You were supposed to die and get reborn somewhere peaceful, take a rest. You’ve been getting fucked up and tortured hard last few years. Emma wanted you to rest. But, not even two weeks go by and you pop up on the radar at some encampment in a park. You call me on an unsecured line and say let’s take a day trip to the Hamptons. The very night everything is about to pop the hell off. Makes me think the secret police know what’s about to happen, them or something worse like the damn meddling Russians.”
“I doubt it will be a clean shot,” Kawa says of the rising.
“Listen droog, I’m on this bus because you are my friend, and I’m worried about you. But, I will have to get off this bus in Brooklyn, before the expressway. As things need my attention now.”
“They say I’m very hard to kill,” Kawa replies.
“There are many fates far worse than death, sadly we both know that.”
“The Rabbis say there are no secrets between brothers. So therefore I know the truth. You suffer from ‘cotard’s syndrome’. You believe you are dead and this is your afterlife, a fucking endless nightmare of plots and struggle,” says Dbrisk using a memorized code statement.
“The rabbis say all kinds of meaningless things,” Kawa replies in Old Ivory, “That’s why most of the Ivory were put to death. Sounds like the words of someone who wants to know a secret, within a secret. The coded word, the symbolic meaning, the seven out of seven translations of the word of the name?”
“I know, I knew, I understood and also over-stand, that you die and then come back. This has gone on for a very, very long time. Who makes you your bodies or uploads your soul, well only HaShem and the devil know all that. I know that you and I have been around since the very beginning, even before the Mede Confederation and the First Great Revolt, we are very very old friends. Regular humans live 36 to 89 year lives. Every time you watch them die, you feel responsible I think. Though you are not a god, you are a very old man being uploaded into a freshly grown flesh robot over and over for war. When they smile, you smile along, but you don’t feel human happiness anymore I think. Only zealot hate, pure and utter revolutionary revenge. When you are crying, you are imitating a grief that you explicitly do not know how to feel. But, do you ever cry for yourself I have to wonder? Have you become something more like the enemy than like a living dying man. Whether or not you are even actually dead or alive is subject of debate. Are you really Sebastian my friend of over 5,000 years or just an Illubadori golem, a murderous agitation propagandist striking out at those that live at mountain tops and highest towers over lost loves and dead friends, that are mostly murdered over the years because they came to love you.”
Kawa says, “When no one is looking at me except the one who I so totally loved in a real human way, then I am alive for a short period. As for total recall of all my memories. It might scare you to know I remember very, very little before falling off that roof.”
Dbrisk glances at the gun on the table. “If you actually love her so much why don’t you just stop fighting, eh? Like she sometimes pauses to ask you, right. You’ve done so much already and here we are having the same conversation we five thousand years ago, allegedly. Four hundred years ago too. That we will be having again and again it seems. We wage this war epoch to epoch, husk to husk! The trouble with your model is that they upload your soul on part way, and frequently with memories that are not objectively real. Whereas my model is grown on the tree of life. When I come back, I come back whole.”
“If you doubt for one second I’m the man you knew. If you think I’m some hunter-killer upload. You should shoot me in the head,” Kawa says.
“Do you remember the very first job we ever did together in Babylon? The first job we didn’t do right really,” Dbrisk replies, “since the Mede Confederation fell apart completely.”
“You always remember your first job they say,” says Kawa, but clearly he can’t.
“When you leave your body, where do you go?” asks Michkai Dbrisk.
“I go back to Zion.“
“And what are you doing when you get there?”
“I’m walking around on a very long boardwalk. I’m running into many old friends. I’m with my true love and wife and my family.”
“How many times do you remember dying?”
Kawa Zivistan looks up into the eyes of Michkai Dbrisk. They are gray, not the brown-greenHaShem of the eyes he was born with.
“The body is a vessel for the soul. The flesh is a vehicle by which the soul carries out the work of HaShem in the world of man.”
“Don’t recite the New Social Gospel to me, my old friend. Don’t put on your mask when you speak to your brother.”
“Sometimes I look at my face in the mirror. I don’t even recognize myself. I cannot always be clear about what I did in this life or the last that cut me so deeply or burned me so asunder. I have memories that I cannot say match records of objective reality. I would not recognize haShem from the devil except by the conduct of the vessels they occupy. Tell me brother, when you leave your body where do you go?”
“I go back to Jamaica. I don’t die nearly as often as you friend. I’m on the boardwalk. Running into old friends. On my way home to see my wife and my family.”
“What is going to happen at the Millennium Theater?”
Kawa Zivistan, Dbrisk notes, is now talking about the future.
“Well according to the New Social Gospel. You, Ms. Emma and several hundred fighters will go in and for three days hold the elites of the world hostage. They will then pump in a gas. And absolutely everybody will be killed in the fire fight that then follows.”
“I don’t remember anything about it.”
“It hasn’t happened yet. You’re moving way outside of the fourth dimensional plane. I have to follow your own protocol on this matter Sebastian. I might have to take you down again, if you’ve been taken over by the enemy. Tell me the real name of your wife and the town in Illubabor you were born in.”
“So maybe you’re not really you,” Kawa replies in old Ivory. Neither touch the shooter on the table or look at it again.
“What’s your other name then Sebastian. The one you were born with in Illubabor?”
“Zekh’ariah. Hashem remembers you.”
“And your town?”
“Obliterated.”
“What was it called then?”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Your wife’s name!”
“Daria Andreavna.”
“No. Man, no! That was definitely not her name at all. That’s a Ruus name. You were not married to a Ruus woman. That is a brand new name someone etched awkwardly onto your book of life! Brother, they are manipulating you.”
“How many times have you been to my funeral Dbrisk?”
“Irrelevant data right now. I’ve never heard that name until right now and I have known you for over 5,000 human years.”
“How many times according to the New Social Gospel?”
“Three times. At least three. Once, when you, Emma and I died in Jerusalem around 2,000 years ago fighting Rome. Two weeks ago, suspiciously right before this new revolt against the Oligarchy when you and this Daria mysteriously fell off the fucking roof. Then had staged deaths organized immediately after, absolutely sloppy Mossad work. And your third funeral is coming. It’s coming in three more years, right before the revolt ends in our total victory! When you and Emma Solomon lead the raid on the Millennium Theater which triggers the world to come.”
“I also know that I died on the night of the Great Blizzard. I died in Ayiti during the revolution of 1791 also right after the 2010 earthquake atrocity. I died on the Q train as the bandits raped my poor Maria. And, many other times. I’m not a hunter killer. I’m not a ghost shirt. I’m just getting this body back online.”
“The other times I cannot speak to. You were taken to the hospital camps numerous times. I have no idea how many. But, I saw your corpse two weeks ago without its head and knew some real fuckery was on. I saw your cold dead grinning mangled body with two alleged shots in it when we buried you in the Bronx. I have read your corpse will be desecrated on national television three years from when the department of homeland security announces all of the terrorists at the millennium are dead. I do not have blind obedient faith, but I believe the very specific prophecies revealed to Maya Sorieya Emma Solomon the long awaited Meshiakh, speak of the man grown on a tree and the man in the gray mask, but they get real damn specific with dates, times and places.”
“Well here I am. How now, can you trust that Kawa is Kawa your droog, your Heval, your brother, your Akhi, or do we have to stay up all night and fact check back all the way to the very beginning of imaginary time?”
“Tell me what’s happened to you, okay. No poetry or metaphor. Tell me about how long until you come back with all your memories intact. How quickly. I know it’s all disinformation about the cloning programs and the neural uploading and the parapsychology program. I know that neither we nor the Illubadoris have the science exactly and we will never have the science to save a man’s soul to some code and transfer his energy with all its memory in the span of a human lifetime.”
“Do you know me Michkai Dbrisk?”
“I know you very well, Akhi.”
“What’s your earliest memory of me then?”
“In the Neolithic Age. You were Zaka. A Levantine farmer. I was Davo. I was an African medicine man and then later a slave in the Babylonian city of Ur. They took our wives to be concubines to the sons of oligarchs. They took our sons and killed them before us for sport. It was a daily ritual publicly killing the sons of the proles. We took the nom de guerre Kawa and Andok and we helped organize theConfederation of the Medes. The very first major uprising against the Ziggurat system. That was perhaps 10,000 measured years ago. Later, many lives and battles in between you were the baddest thief and I was a medicine man. They framed up a thief and they nailed our bodies to the tree of life alongside the promised messiah. Her name was unpronounceable by men, so we called her Emma Rose Maya Sorieya. The mother of the changes. The ever returning hope. The flickering flame. I remember before my body died I looked out on Jerusalem and I saw forty thousand of our people hanging from the very trees. Then I woke up in Africa one hundred years later and the real killing began. I have known you since the days of Ur.”
“And when the body dies the energy of the soul is reborn in another living vessel. Old souls find each other so it seems.”
“Have you no understanding of what it might be like to be like normal men?! I know I do. I know that I enjoy the caress of a woman more than a haShem I have never seen. I know what it’s like to see myself in my offspring and want for them to grow into proud and free beings. I don’t live in the past, Kawa. I live for right now. In several lives I found you and I aided you each time. We have always fought side by side as equals. We fought wars and launched bloody revolutions. We have drafted various documents articulating freedom under god knows how many names. We have protected the very bloodline of the chosen ones faithfully for the past 12,000 years! You tell me brother why you and I can’t just stop. And walk away.”
Kawa Zivistan says nothing.
“Every human is loved by HaShem, by Jah! That love is exhibited in the compassion and solidarity extended by the righteous to the suffering masses trampled on by these cruel devils.”
“I know what that NSG book says. I helped write it didn’t I Don’t quote a prophecy to me. If you please.”
“What are we doing next then?” asks Michkai Dbrisk.
“We’re sticking to the haShemdamn plan.”
“Your plan or HaShem’s plan?! Emma’s plan or Avinadav’s version? The Cuban plan? The Blue Lodge? The Grey Cult? What about the damn Scientologists? The Satmar Hasidim? The Baha’i vision? The Shi’a Muslims or the Tibetan Buddhists’? The Marxists? Who’s plan man? You are my oldest friend. You my brother by blood and by deed, but let me tell you one thing before we set the sky on fire yet again. I’ve seen you die over and over. I’ve seen you get tortured hard body. I’ve seen the oligarchs lay waste to the very best laid plans. Over and over and over and over. I’ve seen them burn our people and our prophets each time we rise. Right now, we are precariously holding two canton districts on a war torn micro republic in North Syria. We hold Cuba and some small parts of the island of Hispaniola. Every single organized government on earth is fixing to break out backs. I need to look you in the eyes, and ask you. How are we going to win this time?”
“I don’t yet know.”
Dbrisk pulls off his tam and lets his thick lion locks drop out. He shakes them more a shudder than any kind of battle roar, and then he says, “Well that’s very discomforting. To say the very least.”
“HaHalom Sheli Likhiot Hofshee,” Zivistan says, “My Dream is to be Free. But it feels like very hollow rhetoric right now, “I need a fast bike with no built in GPS,” notes Kawa as he passes back the loaded weapon. Pushing it finally across the table. A soulful pause.
“I’ll get you a real fast bike. Guyanese. Ramped.” Then a soulful pause.
“I need a sholem with a silencer and the serial numbers filed off.”
“Brother. I will get you a very good piece.”
“You are a dear and trusted comrade brother Mickhi Dbrisk,” states Kawa. Mickhi doesn’t even have to nod.
“I’ve found my long dead wife. Restored in her latest form. It’s gonna be a real mess to get her out of Brooklyn.”
“Kawa. Sebastian. This Miss Daria, at least as you have encountered her this time, is not actually your lost wife. That might resemble her essence. Mimic her body, might mimic her moves. But, it is not her really at all. Just a body all drawn up to entrap you. The first shots of the uprising are really just eight hours away. Don’t get captured up now by ghouls and ghosts. Deceptions and distractions, as well as carnal fuckery.”
“The uprising!” Kawa mutters and he sees a forty mile high view of the city erupting in violence.
Mickhi can sometimes actually hear Kawa think.
“She bit into me,” says Zivistan and shows Dbrisk the bite marks on his right index finger.
“Well that ain’t no good my man.”
“No good at all.” DBrisk looks at his wrist watch.
There’s gonna be a real messy street melee to write home about in history popping and erupting like an avalanche of rage and burning, all day long. Kop Tete, boulay maisons! Cut heads, burn houses.
“So you just need a weapon and a fast ride?” is all Dbrisk asks.
“And probably also a prayer.”
“Well brother we can work with all that.”
The bus stops and somewhere on the very Eastern edge of Queens and Strong Island they both hop off the bus and walk in completely different directions.
Meaning: eloquent, talkative; in possession of the gift of gab
Literal translation:
“THE TONGUE IS WELL HUNG”
Sebastian Adonaev awakes on Onderdonk Fields and Dasha is still in his arms, tits still plump and cutely snoring. Fucking amazing luck, two whole nights! She is warm and breathing deeply. She clutches his hand to her ample breasts and thus is pressing her body against and besides him. Very much engorged he presses his hardness into the plump of her buttocks as if waiting for her to wine.
It is Sunday and everything would repeat itself again. Indecisive lusty flirtations with nothing to support the imagined memories and Oleg the bear stood by taking pictures. The festival of the Gypsy’s continued as the city braced for Monday’s West Indian Day parade. The dress rehearsal for any insurrection.
Eventually that Sunday evening Dasha and Kawa broke camp and headed towards the underground. They arrive at a small tavern across the street from the faded green light posts of the L underground train in bombed-out warehouse zones of so-called “East Williamsburg”. The tavern is paneled in old wood and is made up like some old school prohibition tavern; the name of the joint is ‘the Cobra Club’. It professes to combine mix-ology and light yoga. Much to the delight of Kawa who cannot think of two activities worse suited for each other than drinking and yoga, perhaps drinking and driving an ambulance.
It was here that he notices that Dasha has a dragonfly necklace and matching wrist bracelet, which he had not noticed previously adorning her. Although not on her person for the previous two and part days of the festival, now they were back on. And that all other times which has been twice before the festival she was wearing some accessory piece with this image it occurs to him. How curious. Or perhaps he’s making another enormous battery of false-positive conclusions, based on cumulative sleep deprivation.
“What then does the dragonfly symbolize?” he asks her.
“It doesn’t symbolize anything at all man. I just like the way it looks,” she responds.
It seems to gauge if she is lying, he thinks. After three days of general revelry, they are both a little out of body.
“Your eyes are now green,” she smiles.
“Normally they are…” he starts.
“Hazel Brown as pure bullshit, I know,” she smiles.
“And yours are now silver where before they were blue.”
“What kind of Amerikanski are you? You’re not like them exactly and yet you are them and you also have certain qualities that are Russian and yet surely not of us, at all. You’re a mad man aren’t you?”
“I am only half-mad,” he replies.
“Do you have anything else you need me to know?”
“I could help you with your anything.”
“But I need nothing from you. Not even some physical help.”
“Where are you and we gonna be when the weekend is finally over,” he asks.
“Complete strangers.”
“You’re an indomitable woman.”
“Are you a jealous man?” she asks. Beware any woman that ever asks that ever in history, it means nothing good.
Never go after a woman who asks that, says his father in his head.
He looks into her thinking; he could learn to be. There had been some deliberation on options, such as her joining him in the Hamptons at the family dacha (country home) or participating in the West Indian Day Parade. Honestly there was a lot going on that weekend, it didn’t matter if he could just keep being with her. Nevertheless, politely she said he could take her number again and call her later since she had to soften the conspicuous blow to her keeper inflicted by two night’s disappearance. One had to have a little, just a little bit of shall we say tact, attention to the protocols. Formalities of fidelity, anyway she doesn’t go into any details for the sake of his fragile ego, all men have a mostly fragile ego.
“I do not know if we shall meet again tonight, or ever, new wild stranger, but I did quite enjoy this time with you,” she explained and then they took the L toward the city and went their separate ways, she to district Brighton Beach and he to the District Financial. In his sketchbook on a drawing they colored together she writes in Russian; “Shame that it all will end.” Though you could translate that several different ways, all were pretty bleak.
Daria later, by about three hours, informs him by telephone later that evening she will be forced to remain on the coast of Breuklyn.
“Have a good time at the Neg parade or in your happy Hamptons, whichever you decide upon this year.”
Pronunciation: SKOL’ka duSHEH uGODna Meaning: as much as you want
Literal translation:
“AS MUCH AS THE SOUL WANTS”
In the Onderdonk Fields between the border of Brooklyn and Queens, Sebastian Adonaev awakes and Daria is still in his arms.
Amazing luck on his part! She is warm and breathing deeply and clutching his hand to her ample breasts and thus is pressing her body against and besides him. Very much engorged he presses his hardness into the plump of her buttocks as if waiting for her to Trinidad wine.
The sun has very much arisen. He finds it very tranquil and makes no effort to wrest her into the wake field yet. The drumming has begun again and the camp is awakening and she smells of perfume and also cigarettes.
Sprawled out on a fabricated Persian carpet, on a now deflated air mattress the thick of him pressed against her rear parts, tits in hand he smiles at small happy victories. Daria is very beautiful and for right now, his.
The Labor Day weekend is allowing the majority of eleven million multitude of Newyorkgrad’s working masses to take a three day weekend. This Bohemian Festival is well timed but is really just a tiny small Gypsy sideshow to a ‘Wiggle and Blatnoy production’ at the abandoned Pfizer Chemical Factory. Or certainly the wider 2.4 million strong West Indian Juveaurt festivities before the Labor Day Parade on Monday.
“Today is just Saturday which means there are three more to go!” declares Raphael Rafael , “hooray for our liberated labor! Labor Day is designed to fall not anywhere near international May Day, which is Democratic Confederalist international workers day to all other workers. Labor Day is designed to separate the bullets from the proverbial gun of the American proletariat,” Rafael Contreras explains as Dasha rolls her eyes and throws back some breakfast Vodka Oleg Megved has obtained to wash down late breakfast. Oleg, the Illubadori photographer of Ukrainian origins, ‘now from Boston’ exclaims: “This man looks just like a young Mayakovsky!”
“You’re right. It’s the hat and uniform and red arm band. A little junior Democratic Confederalist we have here,” agrees Dasha.
“Who was this man, Mayakovsky,” asks Kawa Zivistan.
“Mayakovsky was the greatest Russian Poet that ever lived in the Communist period,” says Oleg. Dasha cuts in sardonically, “the second or third greatest of his period at the very least.”
“You look just like him!” she says pointing to Kawa.
“He had lovers all over the cities and the towns! Marshal Stalin let him tour Europe, Cuba, Mexico and America knowing he’d bring those capitalist pigs to their knees: Just with mere Russian words,” puts in Oleg Medved.
“Let me put on this cap while you draw me more perfectly,” Dasha orders him.
He does as she orders. Daria looks like a partisan girl wearing it. A freedom fighter made so by the circumstances of her times.
“Spitting image of a Partizan,” says Oleg Medved.
He is every bit a burly Russian style gangster. Although really of Ukrainian origin with a puzzling stopover in the Promised Lands in Galilee. An Arab ghetto citadel called Nazareth. So he is certainly also an Illubadori and possibly also an Ivory. Only an Amerikanski might dub him “a Russian”. Or to use Zivistan’s favorite lexicon, “Former Soviet” or “Post Soviet.”
“Mayakovsky was something of a total romantic and free radical,” Dasha goes on, “he wrote no less than thirteen entire volumes of epic Soviet poetry. A full third just to his Tovarish, lover and greatest muse Lily Brik. One third socialist odes. One third marketing jangles for the G.U.M.”
“Tell him about Liana Brik,” says Oleg the Bear.
“Let him read about it!” laughs Dasha Andreavna, “it costs effort and money to move air in English.”
And Oleg laughs.
Kawa, who was earlier working on an epic caricature of Viktoria and Raphael; has turned his artistic abilities toward the capture of Dasha’s large eyes and breasts onto parchment paper.
“Woman! Tell him the goddamn story of Lilya Brik,” commands Rafael.
Dasha grabs Kawa Zivistan by his artistic medical coat tails and lays the sordid affair down in New Speak Jive;
“So here you have Russia’s greatest poet and writer. Stalin gave him a Carte Blanche to get away with almost anything at all. So here we have his madness and also his tumultuous love life. He meets Comrade Lily Brik and her publisher husband early in his career. They have a sick menage where husband and Mayakovsky have to share Lily while being partners themselves creatively.”
“They lived together right up until his ultimate suicide. He had to sometimes listen to her screw him from the kitchen even! That level of openness about the affair was absolute as her husband was a polyandrous man, a Futurist,” she declares.
“What is a Futurist?” Kawa asks.
“We believe in the future!” Dasha says calmly.
Oleg gives her a look, and grins a burly grin.
“A Futurist rejects all aspects of his past. The utility of the past having importance in general,” explains Oleg, “They simply refuse to be fettered by a long list of miscalculations, atrocities, strange tastes and barbaric dispositions of the world before. A futurist is actually only concerned with here right now in relation to the promises and revelations of the world to come.”
“This is what I just said,” Dasha snaps at him.
“You didn’t say it gracefully enough in English for my liking,” Rafael sneers playfully.
She gives him dagger eyes and continues.
“In the end of many trials and many years Mayakovsky couldn’t wrest her away from her husband of course. His closest friend and lifelong literary editor, he never interfered. It was Lili herself. She simply wouldn’t let him have all of her. He tried to lose himself to the passion of other women, such as young White Russian exile Tatiana, but it was an all or nothing love. Then at age 36 Mayakovsky put a gun to his very head and ended his foolish, albeit brilliant life. Over this Liliana Brik woman, his muse who could never properly reciprocate the enormity of his love.”
“The goal of every single artist! The art he longs for ecstatically is to fuck his muse into utter submission,” adds Oleg, “and when he can’t. He cuts off his ear or puts two in the head.”
“There was also the Tatiana affair in Paris to complicate the matter just a little further,” breaks in Daria Andreavna, “two perfect archetypes of unobtainable Russian women one red and one white. You see, while Lily Brik would not leave her husband, young Tatiana refused to return to Red Russia.”
“Impossible to subdue these kinds of women except with the most ultra-luxury carrots,” jokes Raphael.
“Don’t kill all his limited American hope in one shot of the story!” retorts Oleg in Russian, “Kawa will go acquire the books if he wants to hear the whole series of unfortunate events we have laid to his face.”
Shortly after Kawa and Dasha leave the encampment to wander the urban wastelands looking for a bodega and a place to buy more smokes and red wine. They make a curious spectacle walking together through the desolate warehouse district. There was not a Bodega in miles it seemed. The surrounding warehouse district is quite bleak. They are alone on a lonely highway except for an occasional passing mac or semi-truck. Salvage yards and trucker yards. Dasha’s yellow dress blows in the wind. The sun still beats down and Kawa offers her a water canteen and she drinks and hands him a cigarette. They’re looking for a Bodega in the industrial wilderness, but they can’t find anything besides industrial blight.
The grim warehouses are all one or two stories. All fortified and locked down with tall walls and barbed wire. The place is mostly without any life and smells of asphalt melting in the hottest heat of summer. Eventually after a great deal of pointless wandering and small talk they find some foods and make their way back to gypsy camp in the Onderdonk fields.
The hard dancing and drinking continues. Kawa finds Oleg at the makeshift gypsy tent bar.
“Could I be plain with you brother,” Kawa asks Oleg the bear as they watch the girls fool around in the huge rubber inflatable pool, “what is the Russian mentality really?”
“Oh, that’s just an Amerikansky code word. For building up an elaborate prejudice to former and Post Soviets, as you like to say. Or maybe, it is also the bunker mentality of thieves in law locked together under iron curtain quarantine.”
“Quarantine?”
“Quite so. That’s what this government did to our glorious but highly flawed revolution. Then what our fallen Soviet government did to us to attempt to preserve it. Locked us down in our Soviet Union. Put up the Berlin wall and iron curtain.”
“There are other variables?” Kawa asks Oleg.
“Tak, I am no apologist. Or a revisionist either. I won’t twist the past to meet the needs of the future. The Great and Terrible Stalin my parents grew up with or should I say, I read about growing up, for he was dead. He was a very different Stalin than the one you maybe, or maybe not encountered in your high school or college political science classes. To your people, all growing up after the fall; the Soviet Union was an authoritarian gulag state of bread lines and bleak material deprivation. To us, to those growing up at the very end of the U.S.S.R. growing up before the final fall in 1989. It was our country. Our revolution to protect. You grew up with Washington and Jefferson, the founding fathers. Lenin and Stalin. The material conditions of the common person, objectively measuring life; the U.S.S.R. was not spectacularly better or worse than your country. You had a better selection of fruits and jeans, we sent more people to college and lived longer. The U.S.A. systematically siding with Axis powers Germany and Japan exported dictatorship, torture and repression. The U.S.S.R. backed every single post-colonial revolt. Every single push for real change. We all could read and we all had jobs and no one was starving and since perhaps a full 1/3 of the world was within our socialistic sphere the quarantine was less shall we say, ‘impactful’. Our zone ran from Yugoslavia to Beijing. From Havana to Ho Chi Minh City. South ways as far as Angola, Mozambique and Tanzania! All I am saying is that we and our parents lived actually in different formative realities. On opposite sides of a great wall of ideas. ”
“Fair enough. But actually that isn’t what I asked you droog.”
“Tak, your government and your media spent nearly one hundred years teaching you red terror. The school house desk is hiding fallout shelter raids. The grade school formative notions of some inherent justice in free markets and so-called democracy. The numerous military interventions and C.I.A. adventures with torture abroad and regime change abroad. The fucking missile crisis. The Reagan years. It all built up a viral fear and hate. And by 1989 the Cold War was over. The Soviet Union collapsed. And anyway you know what you do with your enemy’s women! Ha. The men are supposed to be barbarians and the women all whores. This is a picture your country painted of Ivan”, well it’s my country too now,” Oleg laughs.
“Agreed. Whores and criminals are the stereotype, but I’m talking about the so-called mentality. The effects of this iron quarantine.”
“We like new things, this is true, but more importantly we like true security without being in anyone’s debt. Those that even remember the former Soviet Union remember only its hardships mostly via stories told to them. Deprivations and bread lines they really at this stage were too young to remember. I was born in Ukraine. Odessa Oblast. But I really grew up in Illubabor so I’m not even so shaped by all this political past. And of course, I’m something of an Ivory. At least below the belt.”
“Were you there towards the end?” asks Kawa, referring to Illubadore. Although everyone knows that actually you never ask anyone directly about Illubabor. He’s had a few many drinks.
“I left in 2000. A year before,” he pauses, “the events.”
“To the dead and events,” he says and raises his glass.
Kawa clinks a glass. Oleg continues, “Those that grew up after the fall of State Communism likely tasted western things and culture and simply grew up knowing they could be better off here. So some like my family used their Ivoryish heritage to go through Illubador then get here. Some got stuck in Illubabor. Enough for the fourth national language to be Russian. Well until, you know…”
Everyone of course knew what had happened in the place once called Illubabor. It was impolite talk.
“Yeah I remember that was about to happen when last I was there,” Zivistan exclaims, as if he doesn’t remember the whole place is dust and radioactive fire.
“Mentality? I don’t know, people are people. We all like a good laugh, some happiness, a toast and a good fuck!” says Oleg the Bear changing the subject.
“Well I believe that, but I think people can and do process data differently.
“No comrade, not so different at all. That Dasha you’re consorting with has just gotten off the boat, actually. Whatever barriers between you both seem to have been easily dispelled with vodka, wine and dancing did they not?”
“I’ve always had something for Russian women.”
“That’s because there’s nothing better than Russian women. Everyone knows that of course.”
“Why is it though?! What is it about them,” muses Zivistan.
“Well I bet you have many mostly misguided theories.”
“Surely I do. I aim to write them all down.”
“They make incredibly pliant whores. Once you figure out the sustainability of paying them” states Oleg to see a reaction.
But, there is none, perhaps the man still has romance in him.
Oleg, who got off the boat quite literally three days ago, wonders if he has the right mark. This Kawa Zivistan is a caricature of the potentially fearsome guerrilla leader his file claimed him to be. This man was, well he is just kind of a nostalgic hipster poet. A hipster living in another age, perhaps uncomfortable in his very own skin. Not a leader of men. Could this really be the most fearsome operative the American Resistance had?
“Russian mentality? This sounds like an American device to reduce us all to whores and vicious gangsters. Your media likes this kind of objectification to enable you to kill and rape us with less moral indignation” says Oleg the Bear.
“Perhaps that’s the truth though. That many of you do seem to have some whore and gangster tendencies.”
“If you claim it,” Oleg.
Dasha storms up to them appearing quite distraught as well as intoxicated.
“Drink man,” she says, foisting a bottle upon them. She shoves a cold bottle of red Georgian wine into Oleg’s hands. And he thanks her in Russian.
Then she suddenly exclaims In Russian; “I must leave! There is someone who will ask serious questions if I don’t.”
“Please instead, just stay,” Kawa lets alcohol speak for him, “nothing will happen if you do,” pleads Zivistan ignorantly.
“You don’t know anything about what will or will not happen to me anyhow!”
“Please stay, it’s already night and if you leave I’ll have to follow my code and escort you all the way home and then I’ll be waking up drunk on the beach in Brighton certainly.”
“I don’t need you to get home safe.”
“Well the code says real men don’t let women take the trains’ home by themselves after dark.”
“What stupid code is this?”
“The Code of the Haitian gentleman,” he replies.
“Well I am bound by no such niggle code and now I take my leave, man.”
“I’ll bring you home,” says Zivistan, abandoning his responsibilities to protect the camp completely, notes Oleg the Bear. She storms off and he follows after her and this in itself seems like a thing that has happened and will happen again as if a cosmic comedy.
“I live in district Brighton,” she declares, “which is a very long way off as you might know from as a real New Yorker.”
“Well let’s get you to this home half way then,” and it is like he was following a script. Or at least the partial memory of a dream.
Like an easily aroused, puppy dog blinded by the lights of lusting, he follows her out into the blue moon lit night.
But they only make it as far as a little tavern down the road called the Cobra Club, where hipsters allegedly drink and do yoga! A few drinks later they change course back to camp and never make it to Brighton at all. They end up back on the encampment floor in each other’s arms, holding tight to a memory neither can remember yet.
“Shame that it always has to end,” she scribbles in Russian on a note in the corner of the drawing he made for her. She writes in again and folds it in parts, tapes it. Above them still, two huge full blue moons rise on a red hot city. A powder keg just about ready to blow. They make eyes. They take a train. They bifurcate and take leave of each other.
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 