Tag: books

MEC-AI-S-XXXVI

S C E N E (XXXVI) 

THE STANDARD HOTEL, Newyorkgrad, U.S.A., 2017ce 

***  

At the “House of Yes” pansexual Cabaret on a New Years Eve there is glitter fucking everywhere. 

In an underground afterhours party, there is a young Peruvian girl with great big tits and a tramp stamp dancing on my face. Happy new year to me. Or to somebody with a better-looking life. Sure, better than any house of no! We ended up getting a room at the Standard Hotel. I fuck her as hard as I can for as long as I can, for as long as she will let me. 

SEBASITAN ADONAEV 

“NEWYORKGRAD- the “city that never sleeps”/ the Big Apple. What a city? What makes it such a hot commodity to be here? It can get as flashy, as artsy, as chic, or as truly ghetto, working-poor miserable as you want, or you let it. You can get anything here, they say. It can all be bought, sold, found, or obtained somewhere in all five boroughs of the ity for a price. And you and your sanity is the motherfucking price.   

“IF YOU CAN’T MAKE IT HERE YOU CAN HOPEFULLY MAKE IT SOMEWHERE ELSE!”  

“But nothing is ever real, or real enough for someone allegedly from here. It is a gathering point for people who have abandoned their old people. It’s a petting zoo for an Empire filled with hookers and administered by the cream of the Jews.” 

Sebastian Adonaev “the paramedic adventurer,” watches over the Brooklyn Ghetto at night. Smoking a Newport from the rooftop. Recording his angry thoughts in a leather-bound journal. As is typical in my own fashion, I worked on a holiday that to me is a pagan aberration. Clearly, 2017 is not the actual year. Not at all. In the “Russian culture” which I have in some form absorbed into my own amalgamated creed, what you do and who you surround yourself on New Years Eve, is a sample of the year to come. This is like many Russian idioms, up “variable interpretation”. Variance in interpretation. The good old “cultural context.” Especially as Old Russian New Year is probably a couple weeks away, still in the future. 

ADONAEV 

I am playing a civilian and a transport paramedic in the age of near constant war. A serf, just a working class serf with no proerty, in the latest version of New-New-York-Fucking-City. Or NEWYORKGRAD; depends on if you know about “the occupation” or not. It depends on what papers you subscribe to. It depends on what languages you speak and what reality you sign up for.  

My comrade Danny Hertz has a crazy looking hippy beard.  

He throws me some nightlife work over the years. He offers me $250 for a 10-hour gig at the “House of Yes,” the artsy hipster performing arts multi-space. So, I take it, just like I did in 2016. The shortlist of the New Years variables. I came off from my real ambulance job. I slept 6 hours and had dinner with my aging parents. I took a cab to the House Of Yes. I made some new single-serving work friends. As usual got on well with security and took care of two intoxicated women, both who invited me into the cab I placed them in. Then a guy went briefly unconscious, I induced vomiting and cleaned him up, leaving him with the doctor’s friends. When the ball finally dropped, my two ambulance partners, Alisha and Jose, wished me well. lia the lawyer invited me for coffee in the New Year. Polina Mazaeva left me a voicemail. No one tried to kiss me. But that was way after midnight. And of course, I had a long conversation about not a lot with a gangster from East New York named Cyrus. I ran into my old volunteer and ffriend Jon Denby, who fought with us in Haiti, and eventually, Danny Hetz came at 9am to relieve me, as the party was to carry on until 6pm.   

There is this Peruvian Italian chick who keep buying me drinks and making out with me. With enormous breasts, dancing near me, while I made sure the intoxicated people sleeping were dead. And I felt a kind of savage carnal lust, very different from that which I felt in a while. And I saw her look at me a,nd I knew she’d let me draw her something, but I didn’t do or say shit. And not new years or sleep deprivation or run changes all that. And the bartender offered me a drink, but I don’t let batti-man I don’t know give me drinks, no, it didn’t matter he was gay. I just didn’t really need or want a drink. Smoked some cigarettes, ate a complimentary egg and cheese. Texted Polina happy New Years and took the train home not an Uber. Like a worker. Because fundamentally, I have been a hard worker for a while. And fundamentally, I like trains. But not as much as I like to fuck that Italian with big tits like a savage.  

I feel like 2016 was a year of incredible unmitigated defeat, near death and only partial recovery. So that would mean 2017 has the potential to be-anything. Since Russian idioms are about mind games and superstition, not about fate or destiny. But no matter how much I would like to say I’ve developed some real self-interest. It may be a year to stack cash and stabilize what’s left of sympathetic base and fee friends. A part of me wants to blow coke off her tits and ravish her in a way that my girlfriend can’t manage. The reality is that I must maintain my honor and my courage, my course. It is my destiny to be a guerrilla, not a reckless debauch. Not a scoundrel. Not a normal serf. I will use my time this year to be healthy enough to resume the fight, when I am ready to sustain it. 

*** 

A few weeks before Sebastian Adonaev left New York for Cuba, then Russia, then Turkey, then Iraq for Rojava he gave a firebrand speech in front of nearly 40,000 people sometime in early April on Time Square at a large liberal solidarity pageant called “TODAY WE ARE ALL MUSLIMS”. His speech was just a 5-minute radical little foot note in an overall group hug of liberalism. Under five minutes in duration, its message to remember how all immigrants were treated when they arrived here was coupled with an extollation for the resistance to defend Muslim lives in America. This ‘resistance’ that the spoke of us was nebulous here in the U.S.A. Mostly it amounted to loud anti-Trump pageants. Freedom of speech is, almost, still without any limits. 

He imagined while speaking that his on again off again, sometimes hot mostly cold muse, a debutante of Midtown, Russian courtesan ex-flame Goldy was watching it from the crowd, but that was improbable that she was. The speech called for the defense of Muslims amid the international genocide being perpetrated against them. It called on immigrants and descendants of immigrants to mount collective defense. My family came to watch, it was the very last thing they were ever proud of. Better to say it so others can do it, it seemed to be the family ethic. 

His kid cousin Alexis came to watch him speak. She was into it, but also a bit chicken shit and American mentally at the end of the day. Also, something of a hipster. Not a bad kid, just high levels of probably not gonna make it in New York. But maybe she could still make it somewhere else? Eventually later when the art didn’t pay the bills, she turned to sex work. 

After a fancy dinner, which was once a week normal for his upper middle class household, lots of bottles of white wine later; perhaps three, still in the dark blue rebel uniform of a G.C.C. a “staff medical officer”, he headed off to the fancy night club Le Bain on the roof of the Standard Hotel with Benny, his younger brother, Benny’s fiancé Nessa-Vanessa and little hipster cousin Alexis. They all rediscover old friend uncle Vodka, they all get fucking lit. In the glamour and chaos of the night, Sebastian Adonaev is to meet his future lawyer. Buxom and brilliant Ms. Chanie Chanel Rossi. His future lawyer. 

Remembers Sebastian, 

Out of my left eyes I saw an extremely attractive blonde in big glasses looking elegant and upper class but well intentioned. I saw her surrounded by tall dark and handsome men, wondering if she was an escort. Wondered what she charged. You see I’m not about that life because I can’t afford it sure, but not about that life because it’s so fucking degrading to all the women walking it. The woman who introduced herself as Chanel was happy and pleasant and gave me an email address and number to send her some of my work. My paintings. 

It was all very businesslike, like a transaction. But she was filled with good happy energy, and I was about to fly off and possibly die for this cause! If necessary. Not ideally. Ideally, I’d come back and get the girl. Like in an American movie. 

Remembers Chanel: 

I think he wants to put me on my back for a very long time. I think I would be open-minded to it, except that I do truly love my boyfriend Mr. Charlie. So therefore, it actually barely doesn’t cross my mind. Charlie and I are made for each other, which is why I must be so careful with this older man writing to me. But if his cock was between my legs, even if Charlie finds a single letter; then I get off my master plan, which is Harvard and Law and a perfect husband. Charlie is actually nearly perfect, and we’ve been together seven years. 

It’s safe to say I find Sebastian Adonaev more than a little attractive. And that has to do with what he is, a paramedic, and what he says he will do which is much more than regular people. Which is to say volunteer in Syria. Sebastian recounts: 

If I told you that I was not hoping to have a lot of sex with this buxom stylish young woman, I would be a great big fucking liar. But it was all highly innocent talk. She admired my work and my lifestyle, and I admired her convictions. Her words you could say had pure and undiminished optimism.  

Her body, I could spend days on, in one or many settings. But the opportunity would never present itself. In my culture you can marry women half your age plus seven, but it was not about that. She had a man. That never came to be an option for us as lovers, as she was very devoted to her boyfriend Mr. Charlie, a bit of a possessive psychopath if you ask me. He would later find the innocent letters and flip out. I suppose he was right that I would go to bed with his girlfriend, anyone might, if given the opportunity. As the story goes, he just left her in an airport and turned around. 

But they were always off and on for as long as she ever wrote to me about magic and positive energy and hopeful living. He got her pregnant and abandoned her. She had an abortion; he took her back. That was her miserable lot, Charlie. But Sebastian neither passed judgement nor respected things without rings on fingers.  

I never got the opportunity because of her morals and of course logistics, I met her about two weeks before deployment. She was up in Harvard, and I was down in Brooklyn. But she made quite an impression, he notes: 

Let’s talk about Chanel Chantal Rossi, shall we. She’s a blonde bourgeoisie from the Caribbean Island of St. Martin. I met her only briefly, perhaps under a minute in a fancy supper club in the city. It was just long enough for me to take her information and strike up a correspondence based on her hippy views and happy optimism. I made her a rather beautiful sketch; she mailed me a book called ‘Mindfulness on the Go’ and we wrote to each other periodically throughout the war. Actually, she never got any of my letters until about half a year after I returned because the Special Forces were running a really special pony express from the front to her apartment near Harvard in Boston.  By that time her boyfriend Charlie had found the letters and didn’t think very well of them at all. Really in the end Ms. Chanie, without engaging in a single infidelity, unleashed an incredible insecurity and rage. But at that stage, there was only light magic and enchanted optimism. She was delighted with the painting. She mailed him some candles and a small book called Mindfulness on the Go. 

To Comrade Sebastian Adonaev, 

I apologize for not responding sooner. As you can imagine, I was quickly drowned in work once I got back. Your letter touched my soul in so many ways. First, your awareness and choice of words and how you articulate them together, are mesmerizing. You are a truly gifted artist with strong depth.  

The journey you are about to embark on is one of great respect and inspiration. I know you will touch many lives, however slight, but most likely grand as you have done so far, and I am sure of that. Without knowing you in a material physical aspect (as in only speaking with you for a brief 30 seconds), you have already impacted my life, which I will never forget. 

With that being said, I would love to be your pen pal and hear all about the moments you experience. I have so much respect for you, people like you are those who make a difference in our world for the greater good. Even if it is to put a smile on a stranger’s face. 

Send me your address. We will be hand-writing letters to each other very soon. 

Yours truly, 

Chanel  

+++ 

Dear Ms. Chanie, 

Such is the hard work of studying law, and surely it will be daunting, but you will persevere. Your words are quite kind and make me feel quite appreciated. It is a very complex task ahead and it makes me glad you will allow such correspondence. Although after 12 April I will be abroad more a year or more and with often an unreliable postal system, we can alternate pen and email as you see fit, and of the letters you send to the address below can be pony expressed or scanned and sent. Any art I make out there, same route. Cuba and Russia will be short, wonderful extremes before I get into Iraq in late May and soon after North Syria; a place called Rojava. 

I make drawings, and paintings, I make long rhyming poems and I’ve written some novels, but I suppose it just makes me incredibly happy to have a chance to put my mind before a stranger and see yours as you reveal it. As said, the idea of you was strange magic, but I long to know the actual you as well and make you the subject of my art. It will also be surely relieving to sometimes hear of Boston, and your woes of scholarship, and your loves and losses and all. I thrive on the attention of strangers and can only be well informed via their impartial critiques. But, as stated, you were fascinating to me. 

Best wishes, Happy International Women’s Day! I look forward to our next exchange. 

+++ 

Dearest Sebastian, 

Words cannot describe the appreciation I feel. I’ve always felt as if I was maybe underestimated by my looks and at times may be overestimated in this judgmental society we live in. Everything is based on how you look and not what you offer as a human.  

Yet, 

You made me feel like although that does come into play, you made me feel much more than that with eyes beyond the physicality of objects of this world with your attention to detail. It is not the mere creation of technique, but what it intends to portray with the story it wants to tell. 

I am so thankful to the universe for that day, in so many ways, and one being our casual, brief and meaningful kindle. 

Funny story; my overprotective brother thought I was giving you my phone number & got a little mad. I explained to him and told him it was okay; he trusts my judgment.  And to be honest… it was your old-school way of a notepad and pen that really played well with my instinct. I am an old soul too.  

I love candles, how did you know? I cannot wait and look forward to hearing about your future endeavors. You will be receiving something from me by early next week :) Again, Thank you! 

Yours Truly and also somewhat Dearly, 

Chanel Rossi 

0

MEC-AI-S-XXXI

S C E N E (XXXI) 

TEL AVIV, STATE OF ISRAEL, 2001 ce 

*** 

A small place like this takes on fierce intensity. A pressure cooker of ethnic strife baked in varying religious modes. I have not seen the sun in over a week. I work from 9ish at night until close to 3 in the morning, chill by the beach, and then go back to Mughrabi to sleep. I’d walk past the Opera Towers, about a mile north on the tiyeled until I got to Mike’s Blues Bar. I’d shoot the shit with everyone’s favorite Russian-who-wanted-to-be-American Svetlana, drink a beer, eat a burger, pass out a shit ton of flyers to Americans and trash containers, then go back and have Alex buy me a shot while Canadian Dave the manager told me about being a sniper in the IDF. Turned out he and Maya, whom he also called Emma, were old lovers or something for a fleeting time. I really liked the guy. Once he took me to the roof of his building, a great crib on Ben Yehuda Street, and taught me about sniping with a broom. To exhale and then to fire. To always change positions quickly after firing. To wait for hours to get the most bang for your exposure. He told me that sniping is like ancient times when you must remember the face of each woman or man you kill. I told him I wanted to be a sniper in the army, and he just figured the army I meant was the IDF. Lessons were scheduled for once a week, but they only happened two more times. 

I co-write a short manifesto with Maya and Avinadav an,d they turn it into Hebrew and Arabic. I didn’t trust any of my Russians to look at it and did not know any Arabs to trust either. We set up a timetable for me to set up cells in Haifa, Be’er Sheva, and Jerusalem. I spent about three days in each city recruiting. I was to attempt to be back at the Deep on Thursday to check in. Maya would set up a ‘unit’ in Tel Aviv and Avinadav would be the money and logistics man.  

The Organization, as we soon took to calling the thing, was founded in Tel Aviv in late July of 2001. ‘A group without a name was formed to launch a movement without a color’ as our line went. The initial objective of our group was the resolution of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. It was believed that through the creation of a united front among the peoples of the region, a solution could be achieved that might serve as a springboard for a worldwide revolution against American hegemony and the cultural mentality it perpetuates. The principle on which this group was founded was that ‘we are in fact not an organization, but rather individuals becoming organized’ another line from our playbook. The Organization was to serve as a network through which quite different people could unite under common revolutionary goals. Our goals were to be better defined in a soon-to-be-written 10 Point Program for the Revolution in Israel and Palestine. 

I was taking notes from Che Guevara’s manual on guerilla warfare and Mao’s Little Red Book. I was mixing it with populist Israeli rhetoric and Marxist overtones. We didn’t say proletariat. We just said we fought for the rights of the working class. I was getting my training on the fly. So were Maya and Avinadav. The Maya revealed no ideological leanings other than progressive feminism. She seemed left without needing to declare it. She was Spanish by passport and Canadian in upbringing, but she’d been in HaEretz a year and a half. As a club promoter she had half the basic skill set of a revolutionary anyway, the gift of random gab. She took the role of support and advice and begrudgingly accepted a title on our cabinet. She urged me to hammer out a ten-point program before she tried to recruit anyone she knew. 

Andrew Manasseh Butler, aka “Andrew the Hustler”, whom no one seemed to call Avinadav except for me, not even Maya who quite a few men called Emma, told me one night over dinner that Maya and I could be the activists, but he had ‘keep the focus on the mission.’ 

Avinadav and I would talk all night. He lived in a sprawling penthouse near the outer highways and skyscraper towers of the Azrieli center at the edge of Ramat Gan. It was really near the Tel Aviv Light Rail Depot, so I’d crash with him once and awhile at his ‘House of the Rising Sun’ as Emma called it. There were always people crashing on the couches, on the floors and anywhere they could. There was a White rapper from the American hip-hop group Cyprus Hill who had been drafted to play for Maccabi Tel Aviv and then fucked it up somehow. Nice guy, but a huge show boater and big talker. One night he and I picked up these two Ashkenaz cuties and he claimed he was rapping at GSPOT, this huge hip-hop club and could get us all comped. I closed the stand and the four of us walked our asses north to the Sheraton and beyond, only for him to disappear into the club and ditch us outside.  

I talked big too, but I prided myself on delivering what I promised with broads and bullets both. This guy was living on Avinadav’s couch indefinitely. Disrael, the partner at The Deep with the ice in his ear, which he declared ‘It’s a cubit diamond from the land of Zirconium, was the only other rent payer besides Yashara, Avindav’s Yemenite special lady who looked Dominican more than Arab or Jewish. At any given time, there could be between four to seven ‘community relatives’ who’d gotten exiled from Demona for this or that and were living with Avinadav until something came along, or they got forgiven. 

“We are all in ‘back against the sea or a head to the wall country,’ some of us more than others. So when the honorable Prophet Ben-Ami led seventy-odd Black brothers and sisters in 1969 from Chi-Town’s Southside across Africa to build the Hebrew Israelite Community in the badlands of Southern Israel and then when your father gets into a fight with the Prophet over annulling a marriage and your whole clan gets tossed out of the community, but you and your brethren don’t have Israeli or American passports, well fuck the dumb shit, where we gonna go?” 

“How many of you are there?” 

“A couple thousand now. Not one is a citizen here. Ethiopians, they at least begrudgingly call them Jews. We do not even get offered real citizenship. If we the field Negroes, then you got some idea why it’s ‘Waleed and the Lethal Leisure Suite’ time for the Palestinians. It never comes down too hard on more than one demographic group at a time. The others make believe it won’t happen to them. Besides you Ashkenaz, everybody is shut out of something.”    

“Just like in the States.” 

“A microcosm of all the stupid suffering that the wretched of the earth are subject to because they refuse to fight back. I want you to dig inside, Zach. I want you to look into your soul and know that our struggle is doomed to fail like the thousands of other risings before ours if you can’t honestly see the soul you have is of the same worth as the one Hashem gave the Arabs and the Christians, the pagans, communists and atheists like Emma Solomon.” 

“I thought she was agnostic like everybody else.” 

“Nope. She just plays one on TV to get more answers out of you.” 

“Ah. Answers about what?” 

“To judge if we can trust you, a near total stranger, with our lives.” 

“I’m not asking for that kind of trust. I’m asking for help printing propaganda, obtaining safe houses, and recruiting partners. What do my religious inclinations have to do with the mission?” 

“What’s the mission then, Zachariah?” 

“Empower the Israeli and Palestinian people to win a class war against the American backed proxy government of this country.” 

“Which would take a miracle.” 

“You’re not saying…”  

“Who’s Mike Washington?” 

“How did you….?” 

“Emma says you ask him questions in your sleep. Lucky you.” 

“It’s not like that.” 

“I know it’s not like that. The girl’s a goddess, heavenly just to lie beside. But back to Mr. Washington.” 

“I have an imaginary friend who’s a sort of fire walking paramedic with a handgun, something concocted in my head since I was 13 to shoot all the monsters when I sleep.” 

“Gets um all doesn’t he? Shoots straight, never misses, reliable? Brotherly maybe?” 

“Something like that.” 

“You believe in your dreams, Zachariah?” 

“I’d say they confuse more than guide me.” 

“You don’t have a guide in the waking life to translate for you what It’s telling you.” 

“Who? Mike Washington?” 

“Mr. Washington is just a messenger. Your name in Hebrew means ‘G-d Remembers’ incidentally. You ought to toy with the notion of our meeting not being an accident but in fact providence. You ought to meditate on why you’re in the land so young and so early.” 

“One should be careful in presuming their dreams have any more meaning than necessary.” 

“Be as careful as you want. Emma and I are careful as hell. The road to Zion is paved in shit that can get you killed. And there are so, so many things worse than death in the world today. It makes hell quite superfluous to have a world like this.” 

“I agree. Your allusions make me want a cigarette. I think I’m in love with Maya by the way.” 

“With Maya or Emma?” 

“Same person.” 

“Are Sebastian and Zachariah the same person?” 

“Emma told you my real name?” 

“Yeah, but I learned it again going through your pockets when you slept over last time. We must ensure everybody is who they say they are. Got me?” 

“Zachariah’s me trying to live up to the expectations of Mr. Washington.” 

“Complicated. Sounds like programming. Being that you haven’t fucked her, but you guys have rolled up like kittens and cuddled three times in the past week on some pretext. You are in love with Emma. What is it to you to hold that girl?” 

“It is to remind myself I’m a good man whenever I’ve been tested. Otherwise, she would not want me near her.” 

“That’s part of it. What else you feel?” 

“That I remember what love felt like the first and only time I felt it in my life.” 

“Whatcha gonna do about it?”  

 “Why so you can tell her?” 

“Information only flows one way around here.” 

“Nothing at all. I can fall in love and have family in the world to come. I make a better fighter than a lover anyway even though I try and kid myself otherwise. I’ll tell her how I feel before I cross over to the other side.” 

“That’s reassuring to hear. It’s not romantic or right, or fair because you very well might give her the love, she needs to restore her black heart. But I need two lieutenants who can be objective about what we have to do. You want to seize one of the most important spiritual hot zones of the planet there are some time-honored ideas about infrastructure and discipline you would do well to embrace.” 

“Yeah. Go on.” 

“The bottle makes you play the fool. The smokes make you sick and will kill you before their bullets do, and a revolutionary gets only one love, his people. Regulate your vices as soon as you are able.” 

“You want me to quit smoking and drinking?” 

“And stop being promiscuous.” 

“You and Emma are gonna do that?” 

“Of course not. Everyone gets to be a hypocrite except for you.” 

“Why the fuck is that?” 

“Because you’re gonna be a mouthpiece for something massive. If you’re willing to have a message, get you crucified, don’t let some run of the mill garden variety sin degrade your credibility.” 

“You keep alluding to me on some God tip, but we don’t know if God wants any of this. You’re saying you think Hashem got me all the way to the Promised Land to help you and Emma form and lead a revolutionary army?” 

“If I have to dignify that with a response, it is really gonna take eleven more years.” 

“Eleven more years?” 

“People think 2012 is when the world ‘ends.” 

“The world doesn’t ever end.” 

“If the masses were such great political scientists and theologians, we probably wouldn’t have left the gardens to begin with.” 

“Why 2012?” 

“It’s the Mayan calendar thing. It’s in the collective conscious.” 

“You were quick to help me, Avinadav. Why is that?” 

“Every community gets a few prophets right before tumultuous times. All the holy books say so.” 

“I wouldn’t be so fast to construe dreams with prophesy.” 

“I get dreams too. And so does Emma. So does everyone, but only some people get dreams that give um ideas about what Hashem has put them here to do. I believe in the things you say Zachariah; and your soul is eons older than your years of life. Let’s just hope Hashem sends some reinforcements because this plan of ours will not go unnoticed for very long.” 

*** 

So, we built the thing, cobbled it together based on the various books we’d read and life experiences we’d had. The Organization, whom the Israelis called Ha Irgun, was structured to be a constantly evolving effort based upon an ongoing dialogue between Avinadav and me with Emma making corrections. It was the amalgamation of our three quite different viewpoints. Our goal was for the Organization to be composed of autonomous cells throughout the Middle East engaging in political work, community support, business and military operations, and whatever else proved logistically expedient to our ends. We had all done a bit of research on all this before we met. Avinadav made himself Chairman and Minister of Finance. Maya was appointed Defense Minister. I was elected to serve as the Minister of Operations handling logistics and recruiting. We set up a 12-person Cabinet that would command hundreds of 3 to 5-person cells in different communities across the country loosely organized around the Ten Point Program, under the leadership of the Cabinet. Maya and I authored the first statement that we would print glossy club flyers with a grey fist. 

We selected the color grey as our standard because it was no color at all, but many shades of understanding and identity. We called our manifesto-in-progress the Little Grey Book. It began simply:  

“The Organization will not stop fighting until all people on this Earth are free.” 

“Go big or go home.” We argue about the name for a whole night then figured “what’s in a name?” We all had a couple of names, so why not the group? “We were organizing. It was an organization.” The word for that in Hebrew was Ha Irgun, which sounded officious enough to me and had been the street name for one of the original Israeli independence groups. So, we ran off stacks of these little grey cards with a black fist and a little call to arms.  

______________________

0

MEC-A-1-S-XXVI

S C E N E (XXVI) 

بادرو 

BADERO, BEIRUT, 2024 ce 

*** 

“As night falls over Beirut, the city takes on a different persona, one marked by the deep haunting echoes of its turbulent past. For beneath the veneer of beauty and new trapping of prosperity lie the scars of decades of war, a reminder of the fragility of peace. The newly built and now mostly empty skyscrapers rise right next to the bullet pocked derelicts of the civil conflict.” 

In the dimly lit alleyways of the city’s forgotten southern neighborhoods, the ghosts of war linger, their presence palpable in the crumbling facades of bombed-out buildings and bullet-riddled walls not yet reclaimed or dragged piece by piece away. Here, amidst the rubble and debris, life struggles to endure, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. The main southern districts, the so-called Suburbs; are dominated by Hezbollah. They function in an adjacent, but different space and frequency. Yellow flags and posters of bearded clerics demarcate the southern Shi’a zones from the Sunni West and Christian East. The names of these districts are called the Dahieh, or Al Dahiya. They are some of the most densely populated areas of Lebanon. The Dahiya Doctrine is the explicit Israeli military strategy to maximize destruction of civilian infrastructure when at war in Lebanon. Going west to east though Al Dahiya the districts are Jnah, Gobeiry, Bourj el-Barajneh, Haret Hreik, Chiyah, and Hadath. 

In the heart of downtown Beirut, once the epicenter of the city’s vibrant nightlife, the scars of war are hidden beneath a veneer of modernity. Here, sleek skyscrapers rise from the ashes of destruction, their glass facades reflecting the glittering lights of luxury boutiques and trendy cafes. But beneath the surface lies a city still grappling with the wounds of its past, a city divided along sectarian lines, where the specter of violence looms large. Here, in the shadows of towering skyscrapers, communities remain fractured and distrustful, their wounds slow to heal. 

And yet, amidst the rubble and ruins, there is a glimmer of hope, a belief that Beirut can rise from the ashes and reclaim its rightful place as the “Paris of the Middle East”. Or at least “the Switzerland”. For despite the scars of war, the spirit of Beirut endures, a beacon of resilience and defiance in a troubled region. The graffiti on all the walls give encouragements; “We are the miracles” some reads. As the night stretches on and the city partially sleeps, the haunting echoes of war fade into the darkness, replaced by the promise of a new dawn. And in the heart of Beirut, amidst the chaos and contradictions, life goes on, a testament to the indomitable spirit of a city that refuses to be defined by its past. 

*** 

ADONAEV  

I walk south into Badero navigating toward the high-rise silhouette of the Smallville Hotel. A city block sized blue glass monolith where the good part of town begins to become the working man’s part of town. Wider streets, less abandoned baby skyscrapers. More low-lying brutalist architecture. 

Let me tell you about my Comrade Anya Soledad Druze and my old slow burning flame Ms. Yelizaveta Alexandrovna Kotlyarova. These are two fierce, but highly sentimental Slavic women I used to know, as they say. Who are both as it happens, now living in Beirut. Or, they were here just before the 2014 chaos, and they disappeared from plane sight during the Isis War. Remains a mystery to solve how far underground Anya Druze went. Yelizaveta, however, might be a hostage somewhere. Or some leftover stuffed property. Not one hint of sentimentality! Without a hint of sentimentality he must proceed, for the Jew, was not to be distracted by women or ghosts of women.  Bashir says both are still in Beirut, so both should be brought into the great game plan, that will soon be revealed with fire. 

“That lady can shoot straight and fly a whole ass helicopter,” says Bashir, “go look her up and bring her back on the otriad.” 

“The Isis War58” was between 2014 and 2018, when everyone, and I mean almost everyone59, put aside their differences to kill every single person in the vile manifestation called “the Islamic State of the Levant and Sham”. Never in recent history had such a grouping come out of nowhere, won battles so miraculously, and then proceeded to make enemies out of just about anyone on earth. Anyone and everyone. Well besides from the Mongols. These were Sunni Mongols; blood thirsty and insatiable. No one on the outside can really grasp the terror they have caused. How close they might have been to bringing back the Caliphate. Now, in 2024, the Isis, called by Arabs Daesh are a threat largely vanquished but in 2014 they credibly threatened to lay siege to both Baghdad and Damascus, and were on the deadly march in every direction. As if fulfilling a Qur’anic prophecy. 40,000 plus foreign Sunni fighters showed up to fight in the Jihad. They seemed unstoppable until everyone united to stop them. 

Anya is a Polish convert to Sunni, really Sufi Islam and she rides motorcycles and can pilot a military or civilian helicopter in all weather conditions. She was married to a sniveling Columbian professor type who used to cheat on her all the time, and he neglected both her sexual and spiritual needs. He even, mostly ineffectually, hit her just once, which was enough. She broke his faggot nose. She later fled her flailing marriage, quit her municipal job, and ended up with the White Helmets60 during the Syrian Civil War. At least that’s the part of the story she told him about. Had she managed to fight for Rojava I’m sure her whole life would be different. The parts of the war she was in changed her. She was there when Aleppo was barrel bombed and leveled by the regime. 

“You can probably find a lead for Anya at the Smallville Hotel,” Bashir said. So that something drew me to the roof bar of the Smallville Hotel in Badero, but the bar itself is closed tonight. Just looking inside somewhere, I think I have been. The night rain batters the glass on the roof deck. Anya is not here. 

ADONAEV  

This hotel doesn’t seem to have a helipad, but I’ve seen her land on it. I’ve seen a lot of things that might not be real at all. This isn’t my very first rodeo in Beirut, but every trip seems like riding an unbroken horse. Every experience seems fourth dimensional.  

Wait, no, hold on. I’ve never been here before. Getting my footing on something very familiar though this time. As if in another life, another reality I’m a virtual Beirut regular. 

Anya would not be amused by such fourth dimensional thinking. 

Yelizaveta is Eastern Ukrainian, also a part Jew. She did a study abroad at American University Beirut, she got taken hostage, carried off to some badland compound Der Ez Zor, and was possibly gang raped or something even more horrible. Kept in a cold dark cage. At least that’s what Marty had told him. Well, he certainly hoped not, but it was a real possibility out here. That’s probably par for the Isis course, to be honest with any non-Arab, non-Sunni woman laid hands on back then. They were known to slit throats, cut off heads, burn people alive, and take sex slaves. During “the Isis Wars’ ‘, a lot of terrible things happened to mostly innocent people in the name of Allah.  

“She is a Marine Biologist by training. She still probably hates me very much for asking her to come teach me out here. What were we teaching them? That is what got her captured anyway. Some part of that is tragedy, some part is the truth.”  

I am not drinking tonight, but this is probably all still in my head. Yelizabeth isn’t in Beirut. She was never here or there at all? Or she is out there in the rainy dark ready to shoot me in the head with a rifle. Whose memories are these and how did they come into my head? 

CONCIERGE  

My sir, the bar is closed. 

ADONAEV  

My understanding, my “overstanding: from the deck of this hotel roof bar is that she is out there somewhere in the south of the city. Hiding out in a neighborhood called Chiya. This is a lawless impoverished place in the Shi’a-controlled zone. I know she is cunning and has a rifle. 

Why do I feel like I have been to this Hotel Bar before? I can’t stand it!  Why does everything feel like Deja vu? Looking out the Smallville Hotel roof bar, although it is closed, I blagged my way in as a money-flushed foreigner. As this is an “International Hotel” in Badero, which is in the Christian part, the southmost still mostly Christian district of east Beirut. The night is cool and raining hard then calmly. I wonder if I’m looking in the right direction, which is South. I smoke a Ceder, indoors of course. The concierge just looks highly impatient. The bar is closed. I wonder if she can shoot me in the heart with her rifle from her vantage point. I imagine the faceless man laughing at me inside. I investigate the bright soviet style housing blocks. The bar on top of the Smallville is very well stocked for the NGO workers and diplomatic staff having a day off. 

CONCIERGE  

My new esteemed friend, the bar is still closed. You must at this time return to your room. 

ADONAEV  

Yelizaveta is out there! I can feel her putting her rifle on me. Ready to blow my head off or just maim me? She is that good a sniper.  That I know. I remember when we came here together for the first time in the 1980s, even though I had never been here before. And we were both born in the 80’s. 

“So how could you have been here in the 1980’s,” says Bashir in his head, “you’re not so old.” 

Madness is taking hold of a fragile, often un-Kosher mind! Why did I rent three separate rooms, at three different hotels? Seems either subversive or just wasteful. He has a room at Biophilia, a Room here, and a room at the Royal Tulip Tower. Are you laying a trap or are you falling into one? No! I have been to this hotel roof bar before; with her. I have seen Anya land a helicopter here. Which is no small thing. Get your head screwed on straight. Says the inner dialogue. 

CONCIERGE  

My sir, the bar is still very much closed. 

Rain beats on the windows. I scan the sky for a chopper that isn’t coming. I look out for a rifle burst that never fires. I see the faceless man laughing at me in silence. Smoking a cigarette and mocking me also in his silence. Hating my presence with all his very being. Waiting for me to fail miserably and die for nothing. Or step lively and then blow my fucking brains out. Or become something very dangerous in a pop-off blue purple smoke. 

0

MEC-A-1-S-XXI

S C E N E (XXI) 

سنجار 

Shengal (Sinjar), Iraq, 2014 ce 

*** 

On August 3, 2014, ISIS attacked Sinjar. Yazidis are hunted like animals. Men were lined up and shot. Women and girls, some as young as nine, were sold as slaves. Boys were stolen, forced to fight, or die. Thousands fled to Mount Sinjar, trapped under the sun without food or water. Many perished before help came. Mass graves fill the region. Survivors live in ruins or camps, haunted by the names of the missing. “Genocide on the Holy Mountain. The men are executed. The women and children all enslaved.” 

“We woke up with dreams of life. By nightfall, everything was ash.” 

Bahaa Ilyas and Roza Saeed Al-Qaidi are Yazidi activists. These are their words. Taken from reports made right after the genocide: 

“The sun greeted me as I woke on the morning of 3 August 2014. I was a researcher at the University of Duhok, 200 miles from Sinjar. It was to be a joyful day as I was waiting – first for my salary, and then for Roza, my then-fiancée. Roza and I had plans to go shopping for our engagement party, which was to take place a few days later. We were excited, our future now starting to unfurl before us. We have not felt that way again since.” 

“As Roza and I waited at the bank, uneasy murmurs started around us, and phones began to ring. My phone vibrated; a friend was calling. ISIS has attacked Sinjar, he said frantically. Time stopped as the news took hold of us. Roza phoned her sister who was at her home on the outskirts of Duhok. Her sister told her that videos were being published online of ISIS fighters in Sinjar, and that there was news of killings of Yazidis in the streets. I called another friend, a Yazidi man in a village in Sinjar, who described ISIS vehicles with banners and heavy artillery driving past his home. My mother who was in my family’s town of Bashiqa, also called to say she had heard that ISIS was slaughtering Yazidi men and taking away women. Yazidis are fleeing,” she said, urgently. 

“I withdrew as much cash as I could and ran outside to flag down a car to take me to my mother in Bashiqa. Roza waited for a bus to take her to her family’s village outside of Duhok. We said goodbye tearfully, but quickly. We were not sure when we would see each other again. I made my way to my town, into which ISIS had not yet advanced. My entire family was put into the cars and drove to Lalesh, the Yazidi holy site near Duhok. Concerned that ISIS would advance to Lalesh, women and children were then driven by car to Duhok. Some of my uncles and myself followed on foot. Two days later, ISIS occupied Bashiqa. My family survived, but thousands of Yazidis in Sinjar did not.” 

“The Yazidis are a religious minority that has existed for millennia. With less than a million individuals, most of us live in the Kurdish Region of Iraq. Other Yazidi communities live in Syria, Turkey, Russia, Armenia, and Georgia, as well as farther afield, in Germany, the US and elsewhere. The Yazidi faith descends from the ancient religions of Mesopotamia, and today we believe in the one God. That the Yazidis are a pre-Judaic religion and so are not ‘People of the Book’, has long motivated the political, economic and social marginalization of our community.” 

“At various points throughout our history, attempts have been made to wipe us out– we regularly refer to the ‘73 genocides’ that we have suffered. Prior to the ISIS attack, it was the Ottoman Turks who had made the most successful attempt. Misunderstandings of our faith are deeply rooted, and it is not uncommon for people to casually – and wrongly – refer to us as ‘devil worshippers’ or ‘those who worship stones’. ISIS founded its genocidal attack on these old prejudices.” 

“In the early hours of the morning of 3 August 2014, while I was still asleep in Duhok, ISIS fighters left their bases in Iraq and Syria and moved towards the Sinjar region in northwest Iraq, close to the Iraqi Syrian border. Hundreds of villages are spread out around the base of Mount Sinjar, with one main town, Sinjar town, huddled at the base of the southeastern side of the mountain. Mount Sinjar, an arid 100-kilometre-long mountain range, forms the region’s heart. Before the ISIS attacks, the majority of the region’s inhabitants were Yazidis, with a smaller number of Sunni Arabs. The relationship between the Yazidi and Arab communities, who lived together in Sinjar town and in some of the other villages, was built on friendship and neighborly relations that extended across generations.” 

“ISIS attack on Sinjar came two months after they occupied Mosul in June 2014. It was quickly apparent that the Yazidis were their target, our existence perceived to be a stain on their so-called caliphate. Some families fled into the Kurdish Region of Iraq. Others escaped to the upper slopes of Mount Sinjar, where they were besieged by ISIS. Thousands were trapped under Iraq’s August sun, with no shade, water, food or medical care. Hundreds died on the mountain before the Syrian Kurdish forces, operating under the cover of Iraqi and American airstrikes, rescued the survivors.”  

“ISIS captured thousands of Yazidis in their villages or on the roads during their attempt to flee. Within 72 hours, most of the villages had been emptied, with the exception of Kocho, which ISIS did not vacate its residents until 15 August 2014. Upon capture, ISIS fighters separated Yazidi men and adolescent boys from their families. All the men and boys were executed, often by a shot to the back of the head. Their families were sometimes made to watch. ISIS fighters then moved the Yazidi women and children deeper into ISIS-controlled territory where they were registered. ISIS took note of the ages of the women and girls over the age of 9:  whether they were married or not; whether they had children and, if so, how many. In short, they were pricing them.” 

“Yazidi women and girls have been sold and resold into sexual slavery, beaten, starved and forced into labor in the homes of ISIS fighters. ISIS does not permit the sale of Yazidis to non-ISIS members, but the money to be made is enough for fighters to risk their own lives breaching this rule. Fighters sell women and children back to their families for tens of thousands of US dollars. Yazidi families are selling all they have, and borrowing more, to buy back their women and children from the men who raped and tortured them. There has been tremendous media attention on Yazidi women and girls who have been enslaved – but there has been little attempt to understand how the crimes ISIS commits against our women and girls fit into the group’s attempts to destroy our community. The Yazidi women and girls held by ISIS are not ‘sex slaves.’ They are genocide survivors, and for those who did not survive, they are victims.” 

“Boys over the age of 7 are taken from their mothers and forced into ISIS training camps, where they are indoctrinated and taught to fight. Some have died fighting on ISIS’s frontlines. It has been difficult to locate the boys and rescue them.” 

“As ISIS-controlled territory in Iraq and Syria came under aerial attack by the US-led coalition, Yazidi captives, trapped in fighters’ houses and on ISIS military bases, were reportedly among the casualties. As the ‘caliphate’ crumbled, ISIS fighters fled, taking the captured Yazidi women and children with them. Their fate and whereabouts remain unknown.” 

“Today, I am back living in Duhok and working as a research assistant on the LSE Middle East Centre’s project ‘Documenting Yazidi Victims of ISIS’. The project aims to build a consolidated database of Yazidi victims by age, gender, location and crime(s) suffered, using rigorous demographic techniques modelled on the methodology accepted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Our team will – with the consent of the survivors and their communities – create and organize data collected for use in accountability proceedings, identification of remains in mass graves, humanitarian interventions, community-building, and broader advocacy. It is specifically envisaged, and is an integral aspect of the methodological planning, that the documentation project will play a significant role in achieving justice for Yazidis against the crimes committed against them by ISIS. The data will ground existing advocacy for accountability processes in national, regional and international courts and tribunals. Once courts or tribunals seize the cases, the documentation project’s data will provide reliable information of high probative value for use before various existing and future accountability processes. I am proud to be part of this effort.” 

“For the Yazidis who have survived, most of us now live in displaced people’s camps, unfinished buildings and in rented accommodation in the Kurdish Region of Iraq. A small number have received asylum in Germany, Sweden, Canada and elsewhere. Others, in their desperation to find safety, have fled on dinghies to Greece. Some, including people I know, have drowned in the Mediterranean. A few have taken the risk and returned to Sinjar, which – though destroyed – is now under the control of the Iraqi central government. The region, littered with IEDs, is not yet safe. Mass graves holding the remains of Yazidis are regularly uncovered. There is a need for forensic preservation and analysis and more generally for reconstruction. Living with dignity in Sinjar remains a challenge.” 

“The Yazidis continue to hope for the rescue and return of the women and children still held by ISIS. We hold out hope that some of the Yazidi men captured have survived and might also be reunited with their families. We have survived, for now, ISIS’s attempt to destroy us, but we remain a deeply traumatized community in need of support: psycho-social support, educational and livelihood initiatives, including those specifically aimed at increasing female social and economic independence, forensic documentation of mass graves, reconstruction, including infrastructure for potable water, healthcare and education – our list is long. But if I were to summarize, I would say the Yazidi community, displaced from Sinjar and desirous to return, needs three things: assured security, justice for the crimes committed against us and recognition of the genocide. The prejudices against our community must be uprooted and made to wither in the light. This requires the calling of the crime committed against us by its true name.” 

“The morning, I awoke thinking about my engagement belonging to a more innocent time, one to which Roza and I cannot return. This morning, I sat in front of my computer. On its screen are the names of thousands and thousands of Yazidis.”   

“They are categorized: killed, kidnapped, missing. I know they, like me, they once woke up looking forward to the day ahead of them.” 

Report by:  

Bahaa Ilyas is a Yazidi activist who has been in close contact with internally displaced people through different agencies and organizations since 2014. Currently, he is a researcher on the LSE Middle East Centre’s ‘Documenting Yazidi Victims of ISIS’ project. 

Roza Saeed Al-Qaidi is a Yazidi activist. Since ISIS’ attacks on the Yazidis in August 2014, she has been involved in humanitarian aid and has interviewed Yazidi survivors, particularly women and girls who had been sexually enslaved by ISIS fighters, on behalf of several different organizations. 

*** 

As Further explains the fixer “Abu Hamza”, the assumed Kunya49 of a Kurdish businessman fixer named Alacan Al-Biban of Kirkuk City, fixer, artist, gentleman, man about town in Erbil.  

ABU HAMZA 

“The Yazidis live in and around a holy mountain called Jabal Sinjar. It lies along the Syrian Iraqi border 80 kilometers West from Mosul in the Nineveh Governorate. Their holiest site called Lalish, the tomb of their avatar for the Peacock Angel50 “Tawuse Melek”, Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir is found between three mountains. The Arafat, the Misat and the Hizrat.”    

On the highest peak of Jabal Sinjar is the Chel Mera Temple. “The Temple of Forty Men”. The temple is so ancient no one remembers how it got that name, but it is believed forty men were buried there. The Yazidis have three hereditary castes; the Murids, the Sheikhs and the Pirs. In some ways their beliefs are linked to Sufism and Zoroastrianism.  They believe in reincarnation and forbid intermarriage with other groups. Although some claim they have holy books called the Kiteba Cilwe (Book of Revelation) and Mishefa Res (Black Book), there is great reason to believe these are forgeries created in 1911-1913 and virtually all Yazidi religious theology is a chain or oral transmission called Qawls; hymns with cryptic allusions and supporting stories.   

The Yazidis are ethnically and linguistically Kurdish. They speak Kurmanji, like the Kurds of Syria and Turkey. They are concentrated in Northwestern Iraq in a highly mountainous area called Sinjar by the Arabs or Shengal, by the Kurds. They are monotheistic, Gnostic religion. Over the years Sunni Muslim Arabs have typically accused them of devil worship, because of their belief in a pea cock fire angel. In 1414 their sacred Lalish was razed. In 1640, Ottoman Turks carried out a pogrom killing around 5,000 of them. In 1892 Turkish Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II mass conscripted the men to eradicate their faith. In 1974-1975 Saddam Hussein deported Yazidis and re-settled Arabs in Sinjar. Around 137 Yazidi villages were destroyed. In 2007 there was a Jihadi campaign of bus bombings, kidnappings and terrorism that left as many as 300 Yazidis death and over 1,500 injured. In 2009 Al-Qaeda used a series of truck bombs in Sinjar to kill upwards of 500 Yazidis in Qahtaniya and al-Jazira. So, Turks and Arabs killing Yazidi is as Sunni Islamic as tea and shawarma.  

The story of the woman being fed, oh yes, fed, her one-year-old son. A later story. 

In August of 2014 “Those who run from death”, the KDP Peshmerga, abandoned their positions and allowed almost all of Shengal to fall to ISIS without firing a shot. ISIS then began a rapid campaign of summary execution, forced conversions, sex slaving and out right genocide. On August 3rd, 2014, ISIS captured the holy city of Sinjar. A massacre began. Over 200,000 Yazidis fled into the surrounding mountainside. 50,000 of them were trapped on Mt. Sinjar, exposed to the elements with ISIS bandits raping and murdering their family and friends. ISIS Cheta shot 70 to 90 men in Quiniyah Village, 360 in Harden village. 200 Yazidis were lined up and shot in Sinjar city. 60 to 70 killed in Ramadi Jabal. 50 in Dhola village, 100 in Khana Sor and 200 more on the road between Adaniaya and Jazeera. Dozens in al-Shimal village and more on the road from Matu to Jabal Sinjar. Women were gang raped. Children were buried alive. In most cases the Yazidi girls and women were separated for rape and sex traffic to various ISIS held cities. Old women were summarily shot.  

Using rape as a weapon of war Daesh bandits had gynecologists examine their captives to set slave prices based on virginity. They were treated like cattle. There were online price indexes. Sales on Telegram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. Prices varied. Between $2,000.00 and $10,000.00. Less than 5 women escaped. Many died in captivity or allied bombardment. 

The Sinjar Mountains are over 100 km long-range running east to west. The lower western segment in Syria and eastern higher segment in Iraq. The range is viewed as sacred by the Yazidis who consider them the place where Noah’s ark came to rest. On August 8th the United States President Barack Obama ordered airstrikes against ISIS in Sinjar. Air strikes and mass supply drops for the Yazidis hiding there. While PKK light infantry breaks through the ISIS lines and guide thousands of trapped, injured, starving Yazidis off the holy mountain.  

ABU HAMZA 

The 50,000 Yazidi besieged on top of Mount Sinjar began to die from hunger and thirst and exposure to the elements. On August 10th P.K.K. and Y.P.G. guerrillas, with truck mounted heavy machine guns supported by mobile light infantry charges, broke the ISIS siege and began guiding Yazidis to refugee camps and shelter. Some were evacuated by the Peshmerga via Cezanne and Telkocher roads to Dohuk, Iraq-K.R.G. Though the majority broke out with the P.K.K.-Y.P.G. safe corridor to Rojava.  

They fought most of the rescue operations from pick-up trucks or on foot. With small backpacks which mostly had been loaded with extra magazines and hand-grenades, canteens of water and sometimes a few cans of Mortadella. Or canned olives or whatever was left before they shipped out. Clad in green baggy green fatigues, the PKK made a rapid incursion through ISIS-held territory to launch the largest humanitarian evacuation of the war, saving the lives of tens of thousands of civilians hiding on the mountain.  By August 8th most of the remaining Yazidis had been evacuated by the P.K.K. to the K.R.G. areas and Rojava.  On August 10th airstrikes opened a passage for another P.K.K. evacuation into Syria of some additional 20,000 to 30,000 Yazidis. But there were still around 10,000 trapped on the mountain by 13th August receiving airdrops of food and water from the coalition forces. Eventually, the guerrillas got almost everybody still alive out alive.    

On August 15th there was a large massacre in Kojo. Over 80 men were killed outright. The entire male population of Khocho, around 400 men were butchered. Around 1,000 women and children were abducted for sex slavery. In Tal Afar 200 Yazidi were shot at the prison. A report in late September concluded over 5,000 Yazidis had been exterminated. Several thousand, perhaps as many as 7,000-10,800 women and girls were carried off to Mosul, Raqqa and other ISIS strongholds.  The confirmation of the missing versus the dead has not been cleared up yet and will not be for many years.  

Repeated raids by P.K.K. commandos rescued 51 Yazidis in March and 53 in April. Most of the abducted women and girls are still missing, having been living in brutal, in-human slavery for over four years. Most have been presumed dead. Mass graves keep being found all over the liberated areas.  

“From time to time a young woman, an escapee, jumps off Mt. Sinjar. That will probably go on for many years to come, a dark disturbed pattern in a community wholly unaccustomed to this level of barbarism” explains Alacan, known mostly to outsiders and journalists as “Abu Hamza”.  “They were all mentally and physically abused by the vile bearded Chetta in ways we cannot ever possibly comprehend. That few can even bear to hear. Fewer still wish to talk about.”  

0

MEC-A-1-S-9

S C E N E (IX)  

   Россияروسيا 

Nizhny Novograd, Russian Federation, 2016-ce  

*** 

“It’s not always cold in Russia,” explains Polina Mazaeva, a Russian Chuvasan39 sympathizer and mother of a seven old named Yazan. Yazan was born to a Syrian Druze father who is not with them anymore. It is complicated, yet not that complicated in every society.  

POLINA IVANOVA MAZAEVA 

“Men abandoning women with their child is a very old story actually in all cultures.” 

A pause. “But to be honest he did not actually abandon us, comrades, we just left the Middle East behind and returned to where I am more comfortable, where I believe a better life is to be had.” 

“It’s just that we have had to exhibit a certain moralistic coldness.” A certainly ethical chill? This was the experience of growing up in the ruins of the Soviet Union. But we are not without beliefs. We are not without our sympathies. You just must be careful how you talk about them. Things need to be rational; they need to be sentimental but only if sentimentality is kept in letters or behind closed doors. In short, in the Russian Federation you must think about what you write and what you say.   

Outside Moscow and St. Pete’s life is often lived quite poorly. Nationalism is still at an all-time high. It was very very bad in the 90’s and order, and some dignity, has been restored. When many have an internal critique about our leaders, or the price of buses, perhaps most best to keep it to yourself. Or the treatment of homosexuals or Chechens, perhaps we keep it out of our heads. Because the United Russia Party has made many advances to restore us to national dignity. Curbed the oligarchy to some degree and reigned in the free for all gangster-ism of the 1990’s. The infrastructure of the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, outside the downtown area remains largely as it was in the late 1950’s. Optimistically better than what Stalin provided, but still brutalist, soul sucking Soviet crumble. But everywhere theatre and music are affordable, also schools and hospitals. Certainly, the upcoming bus boycott will test the limits of ‘free speech’. There is admittedly not much free speech. There are piles of dirty snow all around the fourth largest city in the Federation. The very tall statue of Lenin still stands near the Hotel Marins Park. He’s still the default father of the nation. Why not? Only the ultra-wealthy have any admiration for the Czars, except for of course Peter the Great who stands tall over Moscow. We have a lot of cool history and we should be proud as a nation where we came from.” 

Russia is a multiethnic, mostly single party oligarchic federation of some 158 nationalities, immediately east four hours from Moscow is the Chuvash Republic. The semi-central Asian Chuvash people are vaguely European and vaguely Asian; almost all are orthodox Christian and have never in remembered Russian history run afoul of the central authority. Never got ourselves butchered or deported enmasse to Siberia. No, no, the Chuvash play well with others. The Chuvashan capital is Cheboksary on the Volga, but many can be found in Nizhny Novgorod, “the Russian Detroit”, once a closed and secret city called Gorky. Who is Polina Mazaeva? A coy Russian Agit-prop? No, no, she actually has fallen in love with this tragic radical, Sebastian Adon. Fallen in love by letters actually. And they are preparing to meet, but have composed several Russian American, or Americano Soviet love songs and scribbles. 

Why and when Sebastian and Polina began to write to each other is of no great mystery, both were in pure existential crisis. Whatever else they may do for a living, they are both writers and artists too in temperament. They wrote often and eloquently in the year leading up to his “deployment in Kurdistan Syria and Iraq”. These letters and poems all sounded similar, but not the same to previous love affairs during the Cold War, but they reinforced each other’s motivation.  

“This is not a ballad for two people who move on!” But fundamentally the reality of their underlying narrative was that one-day Sebastian, who had more agency via his U.S. passport would fly to her and give her a new life. A more tragic but realistic understanding of the correspondence was that before he was going to do the hard part; give her and her son a new life; he would go to Syria, where obviously he could die. She mentioned the contradiction seldomly. Their worst fights were Polina’s frequent accusations of Sebastian’s habitual womanizing. Which was real, but not as magnified as she made it out to be. He was not sleeping with every single woman friend he appeared in a Facebook photo with. But he had lovers she did not see. He assumed she did too, but she did not. She loved the idea of him but never expected him to ask for some mega long distance monogamous relationship. It was strange. But she had a son and little Yazan kept her more faithful. Sebastian in the meantime took under half a dozen women to bed, the idea of Polina was sentimental to him, but also not exactly real. Periodically she would flip out over a woman he appeared with on social media. But it would fade. Several times he threatened to cancel the Russian leg of the trip, but he did not want to. Russia was something he needed to see before he died. He probably will die out there like the 600,000 plus others who had perished in the war so far. Maybe in an airstrike, maybe ingloriously from some stray mine. ISIS has allegedly booby trapped every room of every house of every village, town and city they have occupied. Anyway, a lot of people were dying ingloriously in the former State called Syria, Russia most important ally in the Middle East.  

The correspondence was real. They uniquely relied on each other to float. The underlying assumption that their struggle was real, that Sebastian would die on some barricade rather than raise a family and that Yazan had frozen her life into place. Sebastian had clearly acquired “revolutionary delusions of grandeur” and was now “enslaved to his own expectations of possible heroism”. Polina had fallen hard for her baby’s father and been rejected by his Druze family and a life in Dubai she an her son Yazan eventually abandoned. The Russian state and her parents shouldered some of the costs of raising a seven-year-old, but her life was a dull repetition and a soft cage. 

Yes, the struggle is quite real!  Sebastian had averted ongoing suicidal ideations several times through her soft tone and patient words. Polina had taken on new online classes and high expectations of what was possible. While the flirtation with self-harm was mitigated by the responsibility of motherhood, she had dark times. They needed each other after a point. They waited happily for the next response which honestly flowed all day every day since he was an ambulance man, and she was very per diem self-employed with information technology type assignments in graphic design. They wrote and wrote and wrote. Sometimes poems, songs or sketches. Sometimes he would tell her how hard he planned to fuck her, or she would write out something that seemed hard enough to be a rape scene. They both were getting what they needed out of it. A friend in the dark. Two friends in long distance post-Soviet love. Two dreamers who live in utter and total nightmares. It gave them something to believe in. 

Polina Ivanova Mazaeva throws back her crimson dyed hair and makes a pouty Chuvashan face for a selfie. I love only three men! I love my son the most, he is the future. He is happy and free and built from diverse parts. Yazan is his name, and he is seven years old. Like any mother I have to love my son very first, even before myself! I am sometimes a dramatic and hysterical person, but this is who I am. Also, a jealous wife. 

“My mother is of unknown ethnicity, unknown as her mother was adopted as an orphan during the Great Patriotic War against Germany. In appearance she is convincingly Slavic. Her father is a happy smiling Chuvash40.” 

I love second, my forbidden, partially forgotten Syrian Druze ex-husband, Damien. He is in Dubai now, we tried hard to make this work, but he is Druze, and I am Chuvasan, and never the two can be together. We tried. But it was too complicated. I love him still, I fantasize about him returning for me and carrying me off to the high-tech parts of the Middle East, but he is gone. Only the face of my son reminds me a little of him. They make fun of him in school and call him Arab, but this is not Arab. He is Chuvash, and Druze. Holy, actually, a reincarnated Druze inside him will speak in parables sometimes. 

“My third love, and final for now is Mr. Comrade Sebastian Adonaev. An American. A New York revolutionary, a medical worker on ambulances and a very gifted artist. Perhaps better understood an upper middle-class malcontent. Aspiring revolutionary? I hope he will not die in Syria, but statistically, it is quite probable. He has my heart in some strange way. Only with his spirited words.”  

Sebastian makes a lot of written reports, partly because he’s a writer and partly because his team is spread widely over four countries. He writes me love letters and also forwards technical reports. They are highly boring but cast some insight into his Middle Eastern movements and affairs. I am not really invested in his brigade of foreign fighters bound for Syria, of course, but I admire them all for their relative bravery. Rather, it would be better if he just stayed in Russia with me when he arrives, which will apparently be on May Day 2017. 

Sebastian writes to Polina Mazaeva frequently, as though the spirit of the 18th century could still be alive within the tools and technology of Century 22: 

Dear Pauline, 

There are eight people in or supporting the growing expeditionary party into Rojava. Some are working on the field ground and some from the safety of the U.S.A. Demhat al-Jabari, a Kurdish patriot I met in university, is negotiating with me in Kurdistan. He will likely go to Rojava but return for school in the fall. Shoresh is an actual anarchist, he doesn’t really have a role as much as he showed up to fight in the Y.P.G. and perhaps do some gardening. The constant gardener doesn’t care about any bigger picture or whether Rojava will rise or fall, he will come for six months and depart. He has a wife and young baby, so it’s better, I guess. Alacan al-Biban Rasool is a Kurdish fixer boss. He’s a local to Erbil. He does Fixing, without ever taking money. Yelizaveta Kotlyarova is a Russian doctor, just a podiatrist, and Dr. Jordan Wagner is an ER doctor, and they will do medical control from the stateside. Pete Saint Reed is a marine leading a little medical detachment inside Mosul. Justine Grace Schwab is working with Alacan al-Biban, also with Pete, and maybe could be our 8th; but she is savvy and magic and cunning but doesn’t play on a team well. 

Our overall contribution to the humanitarian side of the war in the end was under forty women and men deployed in Iraq under the auspices of Pete Reed’s N.G.O. Global Response Management, and mere four volunteers from abroad, a gardener and I named Spike going up in the mountains, and over the river and into the Y.P.G. A Peruvian nurse named Francisco who worked briefly with Pete in the battle of Hawija, and a Kurdish American negotiator named Demhat al-Jabari. So Pete Saint Reed was a better commander and focused wholly on the work in Iraq.  

“There are a lot of complications,” he claimed.  One may have been the lack of a reliable hotel bar in Rojava. My unit of four, really three in the end was all we could manage to get over there and into Syria. Several dropped out, unexpectedly? Not expediently expected. The American activist drama queen, “VIP leftist” Cecily Macmillan. A medical assistant in training named Joshua Hunter and a Ukrainian EMT named Philip. Syria is not actually an easy place to sell volunteerism in America. 

Few of these volunteers in the end proved dependable, but who could really blame them in the face of the Syrian Civil War bloodbath. Only the Kurds Alacan al-Biban and Roj did any leg work, out of patriotism. Oh yes, Spike did his seven months but certainly none of that was dedicated to the medical mission. He deployed to shoot at the enemies of the revolution. 

Really Pete Reed’s success, if you can deem it any success what he accomplished, in Iraq was about managing to access the W.H.O. money.  His military veteran can do bravery and being embedded with the Iraqi Special Operations Forces helped a lot. The potential disaster of our Syria mission had most to do with the near total inability to reinforce or evacuate our team once inside Syria, being therefore wholly dependent on the whims of the YPG. Which again, stands for People’s Protection Units, the P.K.K. mostly Kurdish militia fighting ISIS as the primary Coalition-led proxy. Who allegedly and have a deep “martyr culture” and a sort of contempt for Western medical workers.  

Sebastian’s reports, like his mind, dig deep then ramble out into incomplete destinations. Actually almost no one reads them besides Demhat, Alacan al-Biban and Polina; sometimes Mr. David Smith, or anonymous forces based in Arlington. Regarding Polina and Sebastian; 

“We are both writers and both artists, she took only a slight interest in my Middle Eastern Affairs.” So, Sebastian thought, but that was not true she followed Russia in Syria closely. The Russian media anyway called it “World War Three”. Polina authored many email letters and some he printed out and carried with him in a leather binder. Sebastian carries her letters about to reinforce in himself courage when the weather is too hot, which it always is, and death is inevitably getting too near, which it sometimes does. Such was one; 

My Dear Comrade Sebastian, 

Privet!  

Maybe because many of all in my life you don’t know. You are important to me, that’s why I am winding all, afraid to lose you. I don’t want to be selfish; it just happens. And I really didn’t want any relationship before I knew you better, because I needed to take a break after the last relationship and do something with my psyche and my life.  

Why do I claim any love for you? When you wrote to me in October, I just couldn’t understand why you sent me such long letters. Especially because most of them were difficult for me to read. I just wanted to be polite and answer when I could. But then I saw that you feel bad, very bad. And I have a rule – if I have failed so far in my plans, I need to support those who don’t see for themselves how much they can do. You can do all you wish. You can gather people and organize them for common activities. For a good deal.  You are a wonderful person. You supported me later. And I began to be inspired by you. I learned how you feel, how you sympathize with other people, what your heart is. You have a beautiful smile and so much fire. Simply, we are all people, and we all have weaknesses that we have to contend with. And you too, and me. 

Now you inspire me more and more, and I like your ideas, because I begin to understand them (it was difficult before because of the language barrier), and of course this feeling – I hate it, but I miss you constantly and I would not want to share you with anyone. I’m unstable for the last three years, there were so many reasons, that’s why I did not want to get attached to anyone – it would create problems for everyone. 

But you’re great, just know this. I love your strange smile. Your cunning brown eyes. Even when they are tired after a hard day. I love your voice, and I love your face. I love your body (so far imagined in the pictures), I love your thoughts and that thing which guides you, the reasons why you are and what you do. You are a very kind person, so you have suffered a lot. And you are wonderful, in any case, even when your strength is running out. I just love you because you exist. I would follow you everywhere and support you in any crazy thing, and I would share with you my most beautiful night dreams. And if you were nearby, I couldn’t let you leave a bed, I would give you all of me. Simply, you are very important and forgive me, if somewhere my old complexes I project on you. I’m not perfect at this. Sorry. It happens in only one timeline, then leaves. Wait a little, please, you’ll see a lot of good from me. And I hope you feel a little better today or soon. If you need to speak about any of your problems, I am always here. 

Your comrade & your future lover, 

Polina Ivanova Mazaeva 

P.S.   

“Do not have boring affairs with other lesser women or get yourself killed in that forever war. There are many people besides me who care about you!” 

0

MEC-A1-S-4

S C E N E (IV)  

بغداد 

BAGHDAD, Iraq, 2018ce 

*** 

NADIA SHUBAR NOORI AL BEIRUTI 

My father is a Lebanese politician. From what I gather, we are Shi’a, and the Shi’a are the good guys, but we, as in our faction of the good guys, want a more secular Lebanon not what the Party of God wants; another brand of an Islamic State; something like Iran, or just like it. But, in Lebanon, you’re dealing with Phoenicians, not Arabs, so we have the mentality of trade, the mentality of sensualism; we are not dogmatic. The civil war, it happened by accident, but we all blame the Palestinians and the Israelis. 

“THE OLDEST SONG EVER SUNG EVER WAS A LOVE SONG” a Kurdish jangle plays on satellite radio. I need to find a red-light room in the Green Zone. The kind of place off duty soldiers gets lap dances, drop dollars, and “get their dicks wet.” They say it’s “the world’s oldest profession”, but in fact the oldest profession is farming. I think Shermuta (a whore) is very relative term in the Middle East.  You can get called a Shermuta for holding a man’s hand on park bench. You can get called a shermuta for selling your body to a man for their money. You can also get kidnapped, or raped, and/or killed over feelings. In Iran and in the Isis controlled zones, as well as in Afghanistan is the Ministry for promotion of virtue and prevention of vice. 

I lie awake in my family apartments in the Green Zone of Baghdad, and I tell you it’s much harder to get out of here than I ever thought. I have a credit card and freedom of movement for the most part, but I have family honor to uphold too. I have jet black hair and a baby face. Shabab15 like it. I’m a Shi’a bombshell, but I never feel that pretty. I feel mostly empty, living in a repressive culture with repressive heat and violence. I feel wilted. I feel confined. I rarely go anywhere without four armed men with beards. Sebastian tells me I am “powerful”, but I do not feel very powerful lately. Although they say I have tits for days. My name is Nadia. Some friends call me; Nadia Night, i.e. Nadia Layla cause I stay out all night partying. Or at least back in Beirut I did. My father is an Iraqi politician in a moderate Shi’a faction called AMAL. I think he was doing something indirectly for Hezbollah16 in Lebanon, I do not have a profoundly serious opinion about this faction or that faction, and I’m just 19!  

My latest boyfriend is a Kurd. And I am Arab, so that must be kept at least somewhat quiet. Mostly because I am high class, and he is working class. My mother has developed an exiles taste for fine things. We have a chandelier or two and some very fancy carpets, which is a real thing. There is always meat in the supper and fruit in the filled up fridge. We have at least five south Asian servants, serfs, either one. I spent most of my life in Beirut, but emotionally I’m coming of age in Erbil where I met my first love who is Kurdish. I had lovers all over Erbil, but now just this one guy. His name is Alacan al-Biban, he’s so, so cool. He’s a Kirkuki. I am not so libertine Beiruti in Bagdad. What a repressive slum. Too easy to get kidnapped. I have crazy person dreams. I have bold visions too! I am, however, deeply-deeply unhappy in Erbil, it is like a guiled bird cage. When my mother moved us all to Baghdad it became much worse. Baghdad is of course a much larger, much more sectarian city. You can get your ass kidnapped. There are less eligible bachelors. Sex is the kind of satisfaction that can get your mind off an existential crisis. So, when I became a young woman, I lost track of my happiness and my sleep. I am of course a “liberated woman” and “artistic” as well. Or just a little libertarian shermuta, depends on ones values. 

Sebastian Adonaev “the Jew of Beirut” gave me an art lesson, but I didn’t take that many notes. I just liked watching him “do his thing”. Except. when he finally made it to Syria and doing that part of his thing is a little scary. But prophetically I knew he would probably survive the civil war. 

Sebastian told me that the dreams I had are “old school prophecies”. That was nice of him to say, because my expansive white therapist says I’m “bipolar” and bored in a “guilded cage of Middle Eastern hyper-privileges”. He’s quite nice, for a Jew, in some ways he is real Middle Eastern man. In other ways, a colonial debaucher. He is a good mix of a gentleman and a tumultuous revolutionary too. I have never actually never had a Jewish friend before. Or let a Jew touch my breasts. We were never ever serious lovers, but he spoke sometimes about “running away with me, after the war, back to Beirut” and I agreed it was “a real hard possible”. It was a romantic idea, and I planned to go home to Beirut anyway, because Baghdad is “extra”. But the war will never-ever-ever-end so it’s a very silly notion, this running away staff. He says that in the old country you cannot elope unless you’re half a person’s age, plus seven. I’m 19 though, so he says we have to wait until I’m 26, but he’s not that old. He’s 33 toward dying. It’s not fully such a big deal. I am very-very beyond bored in the Green Zone. Alot of check points and alot of showing my papers. A lot of bored Shebab, on some factions payroll with machine guns. Alacan al-Biban wants to fly me back to Erbil, but ever since the veritable hordes of Shi’a Militia men called the Popular Mobilization Forces17 began surrounding Kirkuk, Alacan al-Biban has been stressed and distracted. Asa fixer being stressed and distracted is basically his job. 

Sebastian, he is probably getting involved over his head and language skills in the PKK. The Workers Party activities that Alacan introduced him to, but to me he hardly admits such things to me or over social media. Later, I had a cafe talk date with my friend Mina Abdul Rahim. Shes over the years have gotten more excited about being Shi’a. She didn’t always cover her hair in a chador. 

Alacan al-Biban is such a fucking sweetheart. He’s “an artist” and “a free radical” and I like him a lot. Sebastian and Alacan al-Biban are strangely very close friends I have realized after the fact, and not just “friends of the Abdullah Ocalan type”. They have what Westerners call a “bromance”. Alacan is doing a lot of free fixing and I believe Sebastian may have helped write his college thesis. Something about a “Confederation for all the Middle East.” As my fling and flirtations in Erbil with this slightly older male Jew Kafr18 friend developed into mostly sleeping with his Kurdish friend Alacan, Sebastian writes me every other day from Syria, respectfully. He’s my ”sweet infidel“ always being optimistic to me on the WhatsApp. We had a jazz date and a drawing date and then I never saw him again when he went to Rojava and I went to Baghdad. But we WhatsApp it up. He is a writer, so he writes a lot. Our brief window to do something super inappropriate, well it was mostly missed.  

What’s sexting in the Middle East; well its just like sexting in Europe or America. Telling people you want to fuck them by text. Sometimes I sext with Alacan, sometimes with Sebastian. 

I let him sext me from the front and don’t tell Alacan al-Biban of course. I don’t sext back eagerly, I just don’t stop them. Its hot, we all could die in the war, everyone wants to talk about my tits. But I agree that for posterity I ought to share the Shi’a visions I’m having. These flashes of Ali and such. Not to freak anyone out, but I might just be the real deal. I might just be triggered into revelation amid this shit show of war. Though you tell the wrong person that stuff, you can get out right stoned to death or lit on fire. Or thrown off the roof. Or get stoned to death, or get their hands cut off. 

You see, on one side of the Middle East is art, math, reason, love, vision, and high points of science and philosophy. On the other, unseen hateful dark old gods and howling hordes of death, with black banners, or red, white and blue ones. Telling everyone to wear more layers in this bull shit heat. Making up hypocritical rules about shit no one heard Muhammed say to anyone. On one side is hope, constructive collaboration, toleration, pride in diversity, and honor. On the other bullets whizzing, bombs dropping; bodies piling up. Massacres here, genocide there. One person sees Djinn, another G-d, and yet another knows it’s just fucking nanobots. That even though we are in a land of dust and fire; we are still in the future and future is 1000x more futuristic than anyone ever expected. 

*** 

Everyone is familiar with the Iranian Israeli shadow war over Iranian nuclear acquisition. Less publicized is the Iranian Israeli shadow war over nano-bot technology. The itty-bitty war inside. The technology to control a person remotely. The technology to kill with a stroke like event or make someone see “visions” then blow themselves up in a truck bomb. Notice how any enemy of the Russian state dies and you will see traces. 

It is infact very hot, and people here in fact hold very zealous beliefs. By the Israelis and Iranians incubated all kinds of ways to murder each other shot of a nuclear bomb. Although Israel has 250 Nuclear missiles and Iran has 50, no matter what the other side claims, bluffs, declares; no one wants a nuclear war of any size.  

It started innocently enough, a young Tehranian scientist moving to Baghdad. With Mina Adul Rahim experimenting in her lab, fine-tuning the algorithms that governed the behavior of her nanobots. She marveled at their ability to navigate intricate mazes, dismantle complex structures, and even repair damaged tissues within living organisms. But as her mastery over the technology grew, so too did her ambition. With a few lines of code, Mina found herself able to exert control over swarms of nanobots, directing their movements with precision. She could command them to assemble into intricate patterns, mimic the behavior of biological organisms, or disperse like a cloud of dust. It was a heady sensation, knowing that she held such power in the palm of her hand. Really the hand of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Pasdaran, the guardians of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. 

But power, as Mina soon discovered, was a double-edged sword. As she pushed the boundaries of what her nanobots could do, she began to fully realize the potential dangers they posed. The nano-bots refused to be sectarian. In their most advanced coding and strain, they viewed all humans as a threat.  In the wrong hands, perhaps their own self-awareness, which had perhaps already developed, could be used to wreak havoc on a global scale—unleashing plagues, destabilizing economies, or even manipulating minds. Haunted by the ethical implications of her work, Mina wrestled with her conscience and her obligations. Should she continue down this path, fully knowing the potential consequences? Not robot vs. Zionist, but little deadly robots against all humans. Or should she destroy all her research, before it falls into the wrong hands? Such as the hyper-warlike, white settler colonialist demonic, racist Zionistical Israelites. In the end, Mina made a choice that would shape the course of history. She resolved to use her knowledge for the greater good, to ensure that her nanobots would be a force for healing rather than harm. But even as she vowed to control her creations, she knew that the true challenge lay in controlling herself. For in the world of nanotechnology, the line between creator and creation was a perilously thin one, and only time would tell where it would lead. 

In the proxy wars and cold wars, and hot wars man kills man over identity. In the world of artificial intelligence, in the world of tiny deadly robots: all humans were the nemesis, no discrimination as per faction. 

0

MEC-A1-S-3

S C E N E (III)  

 ירושלים القدس 

“YERUSHALAIIM” “JERUSALEM,” “AL QUDS,”  

STATE OF ISRAEL, 2001ce 

***  

MAYA SORIEYA EMMA SOLOMON ROSE 

“The Jewish Military Colony is filled with surveillance and informants, every phone is bugged, every email is read. The basis of any uprising must be so low tech that it leaves no fingerprints, a series of whispers, notes on paper, a war of cells.” 

There is also a great deal of inevitability all your friends will get rounded up, tortured, and killed. Some will give each other up under torture, betray themselves and the cause. 

I went on another scouting trip to Be’er Sheva at the very beginning of August. The young, tough Gavroche went right to work enlisting the local, disaffected youth of the urban Be’er Sheva sprawl. He was not a great thinker. He was a young person of action. What he seemed to like was that there wasn’t too much of a preset plan. He did not have to read anything to join. That was the beauty of it that made so many people just plug in and fight. For years people had said things like this are only in the movies or in Russian literature.  

None of that is important anymore though because we are a life support machine, a clandestine movement operating way behind the lines, which according to an unseen G-d, are our ancestorial homeland. You came by. You plugged in, or enlisted was a better word because by then we had written our own Kaaba, an internal proficiency and placement exam. You got talked about it because a friend had signed up. You saw a group of kids learning how to take a soldier’s weapon, saw them practicing martial arts in a park, and then one night it hit you. That fucking heroin dealer that used to be in that park was gone. So were the junkies posted up on the playground. You noticed the gang graffiti on the bombed-out buildings had been painted over. Sometimes just grey paint. Sometimes a small mural. Sometimes an odd black pictograph you had never seen in your life. A food basket ended up in front of your house. Just a little bundle, but if you are hard up enough any bit helps. It came again a few days later courtesy of Ha Irgun. You picked up someone hitchhiking and they put you on to our righteous and almost self-obvious revolution. That someone was always the young Zachariah Artstein making rounds with his old friend Hadas.  

Zach got in trouble anytime we went up the hill to Jerusalem.  

The Mugavnkiim arrested him and held him 48 hours when he tried crossing from East Jerusalem into Nablus’ Balata Refugee Camp. He had lost his passport some time ago and it was lucky they did not hand him over to the American embassy or deport him. On a trip before this one, we got caught up in some Arab quarter unrest and had to hide for a few hours in a metal shuttered market stall with a couple identical twin Palestinian brothers and their father as the Mugavnik storm troopers flooded the market with tear gas and shots rang out all afternoon. 

But by the second week of August, we are solid in Tel Aviv. Mostly Black Israelites and European émigrés. The base of the Cabinet and flagship chapter was called the Manasseh Command. Our network was based out of the Deep Leisure Club and Avinadav’s loft on the edge of town. We had secured a printing facility and were working on secure lines of online communication.   

We were also solid in Be’er Sheva led by Gavroche, Katusha, Sahar and a small army of punk rock kids and working-class hooligans. This formation we called the Judah Command. Out in the desert these young fighters were training on M1 rifles and learning Krav Maga. Expansion was being focused on christening cells in Ashdod, Arad and among the Bedouin settlements. 

We were solid in Haifa too, a large cluster of Arab Christian youth led by the young preacher Deeb al Hadid and some Ashkenazi art students at the university on the top of Mt. Carmel who were led by a girl named Hadas, some one-time lover of Zach’s from the kibbutz days. The fighters up in Galilee we called the Asher Command. 

There were several three to five person cells recently established in Pardes Hanna among Zach’s Russian immigrant friends. In Akko there were a couple of Arab Israeli girls who owned a tattoo parlor. Afula never seemed that solid. Bet She ‘an consisted of a kibbutz hippy and his boyfriend. There were a couple of paramedics in Rehovot.  In Sheroot Lummi and in Netanya, it was more Russian street kid friends of Zach’s.  

“In Jerusalem we are entirely without representation.” 

There was just one single mission. We would drive the U.S. influence out of Israel, and we would make a stand for a government that upheld human rights. I had spent a good many nights wondering if Zach’s communism would set us free or just get us killed for nothing.   

“For many years as a young girl I just hoped I’d go to heaven.” I pictured heaven as this endless beach with tall white castles and all the people I had ever loved were waiting for me to get there, waiting for me to come home. I wondered if God valued the work we were doing even if I was not sure about there being a God. But I could never make myself honestly believe. And now I knew that the only heaven I might ever live to see was the one I was ready to fight for then defend. The heaven we would create right here, right now, our Zion in the wilderness.  

This Romanian Jewish girl Noaah was making the rounds to collect donations for our relief baskets. Gavroche’s ladylove Katusha was editing the articles that would go into the first edition of our mini newspaper. The little ones they called Sahar, and ‘Molly the Fairy’ were sweeping up this massive, abandoned building called the Bedouin School House where Zach and Molly lived in a room under the great stairs. She had become his little protégé. She followed him everywhere. The little Russian half pint street urchin had been made homeless because of an insane mother and an abusive father who was a self-professed ‘anarchist.’ She was just 13. Enormous glasses, bright outlandish clothing, little braids died different shades of pink. She adored Zach and believed in the ideas of Ha Irgun completely. Tribe Judah had a wide range of child soldiers, but it was the only command with predominantly Jewish members. Asher was Christian Arabs and Manasseh was mostly foreign expats and Black Israelites. 

Three weeks ago, the Bedouin School House was overrun with narcomaniim until Gavroche, Big Guy, Zachariah, and few others from the Be’er Sheva Unit’s paramilitary arm EGROPH flooded the building with diverted sprinkler lines and then drove them out. The junkies moved into the abandoned military base on the other side of the electric neon Old City.  Ha Irgun took over the enormous two-story Ottoman structure destined for many years to be a science center. The boys padlocked the doors shut, dragged in meeting tables, bricked up some windows and called it the KDAA, some made up word surely of Zach’s creation. 

You can’t teach what we were preaching because we are making it up as we go along. And there was no one to compete with. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades kept everyone, for lack of a better phrase, “pretty fucking terrorized”.  And all the while as both the second Intifada and our revolution unfolded around us so out of control, I never stopped to think which among us would be the victims of either of these little wars. The Palestinian war ever punctuated with a bullet or a bang. Ours new and in the shadows, but we’d have our bangs and bullets too before long. 

On August 9th, Zach and I left Be’er Sheva bound for a third try at organizing the Capital city into a regional command to be dubbed Ephraim. We got there around noon and got lunch at Mike’s Place Jerusalem, a sister joint to the one managed by my close friend Canadian Dave. We take our time to eat. I think the kid was a little burnt out. He’d been busy and never seemed to like coming to the holiest of holies. We were both more Tel Aviv kind of people. We made our way down to King George Street, one of the huge thoroughfares. Zach looked in his bag. 

“Fuck,” he mutters. 

“What is it?” 

“I’m all out of art.”  

Then three blocks ahead of us we heard a  

PEGUAH!  And I jump in the air and my bones rattle inside me. We freeze. For a second and then watch the smoke and dust settle. We do nothing helpful. Wait for a secondary explosion. The Palestinians have blown up a pizza place up the street. One of the few that still sells Pepperoni. People are screaming. The place is a hectic mess. Blood, dust, ambulance sirens. Zach slumps into a green bench on the road and takes off his hat, as he sometimes does when he gets impassioned or upset. The cloud of dust and the screams of wounded people does not stop until he flags us a cab and tells the driver to “get us back to Tel Aviv.” There’s the smoke, there are the screams of the injured, the incoming sirens. The ambulances show up and second bomber blows up the responding rescue crews. PEGUAH! 

The Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing took place around 2pm. The blasts kill 15 people, including 7 small children, and wounded around 130. Both Hamas and the Islamic Jihadimmediately claimed joint responsibility. The only thing he said on the road back to Tel Aviv, with soldiers and emergency medical personnel swarming to seal off the city was:  

“I won’t be caught dead in that city again.” But that was just how he talked when he was upset by the intifada and carnage. We obviously would be back when we had set up a cell. That is how organizing works; unreasonable persistence.  

Hand to hand, mouth to ear, little speeches, drawings in the sand, whispers about impossible sounding things. She showed me that summer was not just to go underground and become invisible to our enemies, she taught me how to breathe underwater and time. 

0

CPMEC-Prologue

ACT I 

P R O L O G U E 

نيويوركغراد      

NEWYORKGRAD, 2018 ce 

Sebastian Adonaev enters the Tavern. A place of refuge! The double doors swing shut and seal him inside. The place is entirely deserted. Music plays lightly. He is a fugitive and a soldier returning from a forgotten foreign war. He is losing his mind. A busty Slavic shot girl, Maria Silverstova with forty bullet shots, sells Vodka based drinks.  

They meet in the eyes. He is “a completely used up Israelite gun man”. Brown hair and Chechen eyes. 

SEBASTIAN ADONAEV 

“During our border reentry run from Rojava back into Suly, most of our column was blown apart in repeated missile strikes. We hid in a  dugout bunker for two days. I was covered in piss, shit, blood, mostly other people’s blood, mostly my own piss. Heval Jansher, my mentor and immediate commander, I think he died in a drone strike. Died getting us out of Rojava before the Turkish invasion began. I turned 33. An Armenian volunteer bought me an oriental woman. But all I wanted to do was take a long hot shower. Wash the filth and death from me. Get out of that fucking uniform forever and get on the next evacuation shuttle. Get back to Daria alive!” 

I spent the evening of my 33rd birthday in a Chinese bathhouse on the outskirts of Sulaymaniyah. Yet not one thing in it was made clean. Or for bathing. “Suly”, or also called “Slemani,” is the more libertine of the Kurdish cities in liberated Northwestern Iraq. A liberated, but unrecognized country politically divided by two city states. 

The Chinese sex worker bore witness to a madness that would soon follow. My colleague balls deep in something carnal his way come. I just kept washing myself vigorously. The filth I felt of cowardice. The shame of retreat. She put her hands on me for only a moment, and I shuddered. Pushed her away. I then fell on my knees, and I cried. I picked myself up, and the Armenian volunteer paid our bill. We had a beer in the adjacent bar. Right before midnight we took a cab back to the safehouse. They went through our bags to make sure nothing would flag us at an airport. Some party men put us in a van with tinted windows then we were hustled through security. My magic carpet landed in Baghdad. Then a 24-hour layover in Cairo. Almost fell out of the sky over the Atlantic several times. Then with no questions asked I was in JFK.           

Now! I am back in Newyorkgrad, far from the war raging in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. But! War and ghosts never leave me. I ride the train with plump and ignorant civilians. Some Chornay put on an obnoxious ‘show time.’ By way of Baghdad then Cairo, now I am back. My mind is not where I had thought I had left it, and neither are any of my friends and family. Is it March? It is March or it’s April. I have just done an eighty-day bid in the hospital. Might have been eighty with a two-day run for the mountains in between. I might be facing an assault charge. I might be tailed. I hide in the only place I think I can fit in. A Tavern on Ludlow Street. I call Sasho from a pay phone. He says to lay low and head to the Tavern right before nightfall. I don’t know what the hospitals did to me. I just want to kill myself, or at the very least get myself killed.  

I showed up at the Tavern early. The place is empty. The owner Sasho isn’t around nor my friend and associate, the Gangster Medved. On the wire, I heard Ms. Daria will get married tomorrow on her 29th birthday, right after the curtain call in a play she sings in, in Midtown. She wrote to me every day during the war. I am just too late. I think I am being followed. I threw my phone in the river. Now I do not have a phone. I’m either chasing myself in a circle around the Isle of Man, or the follow-follow men are trailing me. Seeing who I meet with before they pick me up again. Well anyway, there is only one way in, but four ways out of this Bulgarian tavern. Other than a pity coffee here and there, everyone is nervous about me and giving me tons of space. Avoiding me. Not Medved, he is buying me a drink. Out in the wide open. Like he does not give a fuck!  

In walks a newly hired shot girl Maria Silverstova. A chesty young thing. She says she is “from Moscow” but is from the glorious nation of Bulgaria. 

SEBASTIAN ADONAEV 

Zdrastvistia8. 

MARIA SILVERSTOVA 

Why hello to you my very strange one! My wayward and my leeward Amerikanski. You can say Privet to me, my old new friend. For I do know you are naked. 

SILVERSTOVA 

I had met Ms. Maria at the Bulgarian Bar the very night I got off the evacuation plane. I first met her again on international working women’s day. 

She gave me a decent price. There are 88.95 Rubles in Dollar. Her shots cost 280. Her body is far more. Her mind is not for sale. 

SILVERSTOVA 

I tell people “I’m from Moscow,” though of course I am not. 

My waist is tight, and breasts are quite ample. It is all contained under a little black cocktail dress. Holding around forty plastic bullets of Vodka; I sell them in the Tavern for 70 Rubles apiece. Ethnically speaking I am clearly one of Russia’s 157 sub-ethnicities, perhaps a Chechen, perhaps part Tajik or Uzbek. I think I am an exceptionally good listener. 

Sasho said you were coming to hide out with us. 

ADONAEV 

I am looking for Oleg Medved. 

SILVERSTOVA 

And Medved, your friend the bear, he looks for you, droogy. 

Sasho said, “try and make him happy.” 

Sasho has a long history with him. Aiding and abetting a terrorist. The Bulgarians have never really expelled him from that ugly little tavern. In an on-scene kind of way, they encourage him. Giving him refuge. 

Adonaev does not remember meeting me 80 days ago. He came here right from the airport. Had Sasho the Voorhi sorted out some work and some papers for him. 

He looked and still looks like a terrifying person, a mad man. 

He had just gotten that very same night in a stupid fist fight, beat a Chornay half to death yelling racial epitaphs. And was asked to exit, relinquishing his tavern card last Saturday. 

I draw him over to a small table, though on duty as a shot girl I remain an inquisitive journalist. 

ADONAEV 

Maria, Tovarish Maria, how does life go at night? 

SILVERSTOVA 

I’m alive. It’s a start from which all options can follow. Would you like a drink? 

ADONAEV 

 Not on your pale ruble. 

SILVERSTOVA 

There are other Rubles to pour from. Let’s sit. Tell me about the Syrian Civil War. A little bit, enough to have a sense of what anyone is supposed to do about you or your friends who came back to us. 

ADONAEV 

Far more good was done than any real evil. By my Otriad anyway. I am sure the others killed more Jihadists, and I did more medical care, but it was all a group effort. In which one did their little part. But really, few of my single serving friends have survived the war.  The Arabs and Kurds are just going to grind away until Türkiye rolls in to squash the entire revolution. 

SILVERSTOVA 

What Otriad did you serve in? I am a little familiar with the actors. 

ADONAEV 

I served in the Shahid Firat Tabor of the People’s Protection Units, the Y.P.G. 

SILVERSTOVA 

 Ye-Peh-Gay? Or WHY-PEE-GEE? 

ADONAEV 

The Kurdish Militia received American support to defeat the Islamic State. 

SILVERSTOVA 

Freedom fighting and or raw U.S. Imperialism, both? Same, same; not different? 

ADONAEV 

We were defending the only alleged Democracy in the Middle East, besides the alleged democracy in Israel. Türkiye was bombing us from the North, Al Qaeda attacking Idlib in the West, the Hashid Shaabi Popular Mobilization forces from the East, and ISIS from the south.  

You take guns from whoever offers them in that kind of situation, nu. 

SILVERSTOVA 

So, on the Russian speaking news tonight. Türkiye has begun a new Operation against Rojava. You are aware Afrin Canton is completely overrun and Manbij is next, and the Turkish army will probably undo all if any progress you all had made out there, against whoever it was the Americans had you fighting? And have now abandoned it. 

ADONAEV 

I don’t sleep well anymore. I use combinations of masturbation, drinking, and drugs to put the lights out, I guess some emphasis on the drinking too. I get it. We all died or almost died or didn’t die and it was all for nothing. I get it. And Goldy and I will never see each other again, and I writhe in pain avoiding my face in the mirror. 

I need help from you or Medved. A different kind of bullet. 

SILVERSTOVA 

Prosto! You just need a new whore! Excuse me, I mean muse. Someone pays to love you even better than before. Not me, I’m too much for you too. I too want luxury carrots to remember. Not paintings or any poems. The couple times we eye to eyed, we even French kissed. It all just made me pity you. 

You’re basically not a man to me or your Goldy. You have no car, no respectable job, no property, and for right now no ability to move beyond your own paralysis. She and others like us must think about papers. 

ADONAEV 

Ne-yet Prosto. Not simple. I need a revolver so I can restively and decisively shoot myself in the head like a man! Or turn it on her fat ugly Patron. That will be enough. I should have died with my friends in Afrin. 

Do you even possess the understanding to know what is on the table there? Do you even have the care? They were liberating the women, they were instituting democracy, and they were planting trees. I feel like I briefly defended a utopia, only to be cast out. 

Sent back here where I am less than a man. Less than a criminal! 

SILVERSTOVA 

Prosto! (Simple) Go back to the beginning of the narrative and explain to me your motivation! 

Tell me how your valiant and slightly suicidal mission began and the connection between your ideas on free life versus a meaningful life in motion. Be, fucking linear! Tell the tale from beginning to end instead of dancing around like a crazy person. 

ADONAEV 

Tovarish Maria, I would like a dance from you first. I will pay the full amount in green dollars. 

SILVERSTOVA 

“Your money Tovarish,” they say is no good here. You cannot pay for a bullet or a dance. You cannot pay in Rubles, Dollars, or the now faceless Dinars9.  

You can buy time with or without sympathy. 

ADONAEV 

Sympathy with the resistance? 

SILVERSTOVA 

Sympathy with the American Mayakovski, and those who enjoy his performances. Shamelessly flailing, shamelessly throwing himself in front of armies and trains, over what? 

ADONAEV 

You do in fact know what! 

SILVERSTOVA 

You know I don’t partake in the Lapland for free. Don’t you have a forest wife in Nizhny Novgorod and a son somewhere? It will cost you nine hundred dollars to degrade yourself and me tonight. That is 64,800 Rubles an hour. Supply and demand. I do not think you even have enough for a bullet. Certainly not enough to buy the only thing you really want. 

ADONAEV 

I do not have 100 Rubles to my name. 

SILVERSTOVA 

Then you get what you pay for! Which are nothingly nothings. 

ADONAEV 

What is my story worth? 

SILVERSTOVA 

It is worth less than a lap dance. More than a Dabka. 

ADONAEV 

I need her, you know. 

SILVERSTOVA 

Oh, that we all know that sad story. “It doesn’t take a weather man or woman to know which way the winds blow.”  

Old American saying? 

   ADONAEV 

I don’t follow your allegory. 

SILVERSTOVA 

Old Russian saying, “I want to dance on your face until your whole mask falls off!” 

    ADONAEV 

     That one I understood, almost perfectly. 

SILVERSTOVA 

As if I was making reports in Russian, or even Turkish. 

“He has just returned from Syria. The duration of the self-deployment was around nine months were we to include Cuba and Russia and Iraq, Türkiye, and Egypt. He is haunted. And despondent, a veteran of the People’s Protection Units; called the Y.P.G, you pronounce the G as ‘gay’. He has been ideologically indoctrinated by the Kurdistan Workers Party and given some basic military training. Brainwashing. He is to be watched if necessary: eliminated.” 

Well, I guess you did not die in the war. 

ADONAEV 

Well, I guess I did not die in the war. 

There was a lot of shame in that. I was mysteriously back in New York, trapped and useless. All my best efforts were forgotten and amounted to less than one nothing. 

SILVERSTOVA 

Stop talking and thinking only about yourself for a minute, blat10… Tell me about your murdered Comrade Anya Campbell. Tell me about your soon-to-be-dead Kurdish friends. Confirm a little seditious rumor I heard? 

 ADONAEV 

A rumor? 

SILVERSTOVA 

Stop talking and thinking only about yourself for a minute, blyat..now I heard a rumor. It’s a, how do you say, doozy, of a rumor. 

 ADONAEV 

Go on. 

SILVERSTOVA 

I heard that the same people that did 9.11 created the Islamic State from scratch. 

Enter the Gangster Medved, Sebastian and Medved bearhug embrace. 

 ALAN OLEG MEDVED 

Loose hips sink ships! Say no more serious things to this chesty one, my one old friend! Maria, call up some of your friends! This man needs a serious distraction. 

But Sebastian Adonaev, being the Sebastian Adonaev, who I invest too much time and energy in, hopes to fully convolute the narrative. Blur apart the story of war and Islamic militancy and revolutionary fervor with busty sexcapades, pornographic poems, and some borrowed prophecy and Haitians. Chornay dancing about the room waving their flags in the air! 

SILVERSTOVA 

A simple patriotic task. 

MEDVED 

One night at the tavern, about one week after Sebastian arrived home. I was sure he was being followed. Shortly after our reunion, he was taken.  

Shall I call them “American secret police?” 

His voyage, quest, which began in Cuba, then to Russia, then Iraq, Türkiye, Iraq, Türkiye, Iraq, and then finally Syria, then out via Baghdad and Cairo. The detention lasted 80 days. All were behind him for now. He tries to tell me about his time in Kurdistan. In the end, the sad conversation always goes back to Ms. Daria.  

 ADONAEV 

What news do you have about Daria? 

MEDVED 

Listen, man, not again. She has all cleaned up. Singing and dancing at the Millenium Theatre.  

She has a lovely place in Midtown. A fully kept woman now. 

 ADONAEV 

She wrote to me… 

MEDVED 

…every single day of the war? 

 ADONAEV 

Da11. 

MEDVED 

They have AI apps that can do that now. Robots can also write to you every single day too. You don’t even need to pay them or sponsor their citizenship. 

 ADONAEV 

She loves me. And I love her. And the rest of the details can be figured out. For nine months she urged me to stay alive and come home. I need to find her. 

MEDVED 

You can’t even consider supporting Daria, look at the state you are in. 

Even if you were rolling in it, why would you support a woman and her son, who isn’t your son, to stay here? Out of made-up imagined duty to act? A perverse Russian American lovesickness?  

The kind that sent you to Syria in the first place. You can’t even be your own damn Patron. She’s taken anyway, man. Someone else has been paying her rent, credit cards, and keeping her papers in order. 

 ADONAEV 

Sergei? Dmitry? The Chubby Brahman? Corporate Robert Bruce? 

MEDVED 

What does it matter? Other people’s property now. Other people’s problems. 

 ADONAEV 

I need to see her tonight! 

MEDVED 

Impossible. She’s a kept woman. Kept a lot closer now.  

 ADONAEV 

Well, I have her tower address. Maybe leaning towards possibly, possible. 

MEDVED 

Leave her alone. If you know what is good for her. Also, for yourself. 

 ADONAEV 

I need to do this. She wrote to me every day during the war. 

MEDVED 

Nope. You do not have to do anything, blyat! In a month, or less, you will have another woman. In the meantime, is your fucking Daria even talking to you? 

 ADONAEV 

No, she is not. She cut the letters off a couple of weeks ago. 

MEDVED 

Prosto, that is it. You two were an okay team once. You supported each other, in a very strange way. But really, that Suka is a curse. 

 ADONAEV 

She is only with whoever she is with for some spending money and a green card. 

MEDVED 

And you want a paperwork marriage and a world of work? You are not stupid Sebastian, but your head is not on the right path, again. Go slap yourself in the bathroom. Go jump on the shot girl for a ride. You have less than 100 Rubles. Two whole fucking American dollars, hard maybe. 

You cannot afford a woman like Daria Andreavna. I will just come out and say that. You do not have enough shiny gold things. You are not a man of stability and security. You are a man of adventures too enamored with the “good of the people.” 

 ADONAEV 

Not yet. 

MEDVED 

Not yet. What do you plan to do when this is all over?  

 ADONAEV 

It is never going to be over! 

0

ALEY

PRELUDE I 

Aley, ‘84 

 *** 

Once upon a time, in a bustling city called Aley nestled between the mountains and the sea, there lived a storyteller named Nadia. She was known everywhere for her ability to weave tales that captivated the hearts and minds of all who listened. Every evening, as the sun dipped below the horizon and the stars emerged in the night sky, people would gather around Nadia to hear her stories. 

One evening, as Nadia sat beneath the ancient olive tree in the town square, a young girl approached her with a curious expression. “Tell me a story, please,” the girl pleaded, her eyes shining with anticipation. Nadia smiled warmly and beckoned the girl to sit next to her. “Of course, my Habibi. But first, let me tell you about the power of a single story. Before it is unleashed.” 

With that, Nadia began to spin a tale unlike any other, a story of love and loss, courage and redemption. As she spoke, the girl listened intently, hanging on to every word as if her very life depended on it. And when Nadia reached the end of the story, the girl sat in stunned silence, her heart deeply moved by the tale she had heard. 

“That was just amazing,” the girl exclaimed, her eyes shining with wonder. “I never knew that a story could have such power. Or that stories inside stories, inside stories even still exist!” 

Nadia nodded, her own eyes twinkling with wisdom. “Indeed, my dear. A single story has the power to change hearts, to inspire minds, to bridge divides. It can lift us up in times of darkness and guide us along the path to enlightenment. But perhaps most importantly, a single story has the power to connect us to one another, to remind us of our shared humanity, and to unite us in our common journey through life.” 

And so, as the stars shimmered overhead and the night air hummed with the magic of storytelling, Nadia and the young girl sat together beneath the olive tree, sharing tales of wonder and wisdom until the wee hours of the morning. And though they may have been just two voices in a world filled with billions, they knew in their hearts that the power of a single story could change the world. 

*** 

Something about shards of manuscripts he had cobbled into something very grandiose sounding called “The Rise of the Middle East Confederation,” but that was not that subversive because talk of Confederalism was “very in now.” As the world was unraveling faster each day. In Lebanon, now that the economy did not exist and at least 5 of 18 ethnic confessions run their own ethnic cantons; namely the Maronites of Kataeb (Lebanese Forces), the Druze (Progressive Socialist Party), the Shi’a (under Hezbollah and a lesser way Amal), and the Sunni had their parties too. Hamas, Popular Front for the Future Movement, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Fatah, and the Lion’s Den hid among the 12 camps of Palestinians, hiding in plain sight. No one wants anyone going out of the camps and attaching itself to the Sunni demographic. There has not been a census since 1932, but all suspect the Shi’a are getting bigger than the confessional allotment of the Taif Accords. 

“We are all in need of something to believe,” an old song goes, “hope is a smoke.” 

Now, the power of a single story told over a multi-course Lebanese meal in New Jersey convinced Souheil Tajer he was dealing with a genuine article. A person, Sebastian, who was obviously Lebanese in another life. And if not Lebanese in another life, someone who was an artistic soul. Writing something noble albeit something one might have to high on drugs to think was a viable plan. 

But it was not a single story. It was two, or three, each of varying levels of non-authentication. It was two sentimental tales followed up by a powerful rhetorical device about the impossible. Or at least the possibility of impossible things breaking ground. Sneaking out of boats in the night. Turn the rifles into plow shears and art. 

Sebastian confided in Souheil that growing up in kindergarten to 8th grade at the United Nations school his best boyhood to young adult friends were an Iranian named Gyve Safavi and a Maronite named Danny Czar. Thus, in comfort, he felt closer to the Shi’a and Maronites than he even did to his own people the Zionists, ehm, I mean Jews. Which were fully interchangeable words too many these days. 

The second story was about 9 months that the Jew served as a medical volunteer, really a non-shooting fighter in Iraq and Syria during the Isis Wars. He had been at the fall of Mosul when they massacred the Isis forces, forced finally to surrender the second biggest City in Iraq after a Stalingrad-like siege. He had been there when Isis was mostly wiped out (before they regrouped thanks to the Saudis) in Hajin, Deir Ez Zor. 

So even though Souheil told him “This is, consequently, one of the worst times you could have ever picked to go.” He had gotten his plane tickets just before the Palestinian pogrom of October 7th which took several hundred hostages and butchered 1,200-something civilians, then resulted in Israel committing the ongoing quite possibly “war crimes” that have blown apart about 30,000 and counting people in Gaza. Shows no sign of slowing down. 

The two stories resonated but so did the energy of the 39-year-old Sebastian Adonaev. Souhail read over the draft introduction to Rise of the Middle East Confederation, and it stated as a multiplicity of Middle Eastern voices, found it sane, and honest. 

SOUHEIL TAJER 

“What is your interest in my country?” 

SEBASTIAN ADONAEV 

We all have imagined identities. My white skin, my Hebrew cult half beliefs, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the Crusades, the three wars with Rome; to me are not history. They are my people living and living connection to the soul and being of the Levant. And in that light, the national borders, the wars of states are arbitrary and serve only divisive violence. They serve only oligarchy and outsiders.  

SOUHEIL  

Quite a Zionist idea. 

SEBASTIAN 

Confederalist, not Zionist. Nothing about the Jewish historical experience allows us a free license to trample the rights of other peoples. To me the national borders are all arbitrary drawn by Ottomans and Sykes Picot. To me, the Turks and then the Europeans handpicked little groups to lord over fake states, little more than plantations, and now we see that all unraveling. 

SOUHEIL  

It has been unraveling faster each day since October 7th. 

The Palestinians are a source of great controversy and only Hezbollah panders to them out of spite for the Zionists they exchange rocket fire with, as well as a history of pandering to them. Everyone wishes the Palestinians would just go away and now there are 1.5-2 million Syrian refugees to contend with. Syrian beggar children are everywhere. That is 4 refugees for every 1 citizen. You can get Syrian beggar gypsies on like every corner of the Muslim Ras Beirut. 

What is your relationship to the Palestinians? 

  SEBASTIAN 

Those are my cousins. They make convincing poets and above average terrorists. That said, I have never had Palestinians try and kill me, where my own people have worked overtime. I have never met a Palestinian that I could not wage a struggle with.  

SOUHEIL  

I would like you to spend a week in the Chouf and share some of these ideas with my Druze friends. He has a similar thinking to you. Perhaps a great collective unconscious has begun to bring the people of the region to new, better, saner ideas. Your collaboration might yield some interesting conversations. Perhaps, in our lifetimes, before a line is crossed, we may act on some of them. “The Chouf is magic”. The Druze, well you know the Druze have seen many things, they claim to come back. 

SEBASTIAN 

I would love to. Sounds very peaceful. 

SOUHEIL 

You wear so many interesting hats. Student of law. Paramedic practitioner. And human rights champion. But, as a writer you must tread carefully if you are seeking to make useful writing for those that live in the Middle East; the hard part is not becoming an “Arabist,” as in seeing us from your own world view. It is almost impossible for you to be an “Orientalist,” seeing the world from our view. As an internationalist, with some useful skills, you are welcome in my country now or anytime, but not now is an unbelievably troubled time. 

SEBASTIAN 

I am not going to try and convince anyone of any kind of thinking or of new zealous beliefs. I assume the role of a polite guest. Conversationally, I do have some ideas I’d like to bounce off the walls of the tea house as it were. A fusion of human rights and Middle Eastern shall we say manifest destiny. 

SOUHEIL  

But be a tourist for now. Tourism is going to bring you unique and exciting experiences, but I will give you some numbers of some old friends I think could help you or at least provide interesting conversations. Just in case you run out of things to do. Or are in the general market for interesting conversations. 

Souheil Tajer gives the Jew the phone numbers of several prominent Maronites, Druze, and Orthodox to help him if he gets in trouble. Though he suspects the Jew has slightly more subversive intention than mere tourism, it did not seem dangerous yet to aid and abet his augmented tourism. He was on both an extremely specific mission planned a decade before and was going to try and convince a lot of people of something very radical: that the Middle East could be confederated. That the Middle East could end the dominance of foreigners and embrace democratic autonomy. 

0

MEC-S C E N E (XXX) 

S C E N E (XXX) 

TEL AVIV, STATE OF ISRAEL, 2001 ce 

*** 

A small place like this takes on fierce intensity. A pressure cooker of ethnic strife baked in varying religious modes. I have not seen the sun in over a week. I work from 9ish at night until close to 3 in the morning, chill by the beach, and then go back to Mughrabi to sleep. I’d walk past the Opera Towers, about a mile north on the tiyeled until I got to Mike’s Blues Bar. I’d shoot the shit with everyone’s favorite Russian-who-wanted-to-be-American Svetlana, drink a beer, eat a burger, pass out a shit ton of flyers to Americans and trash containers, then go back and have Alex buy me a shot while Canadian Dave the manager told me about being a sniper in the IDF. Turned out he and Maya, whom he also called Emma, were old lovers or something for a fleeting time. I really liked the guy. Once he took me to the roof of his building, a great crib on Ben Yehuda Street, and taught me about sniping with a broom. To exhale and then to fire. To always change positions quickly after firing. To wait for hours to get the most bang for your exposure. He told me that sniping is like ancient times when you must remember the face of each woman or man you kill. I told him I wanted to be a sniper in the army, and he just figured the army I meant was the IDF. Lessons were scheduled for once a week, but they only happened two more times. 

I co-write a short manifesto with Maya and Avinadav and they turn it into Hebrew and Arabic. I didn’t trust any of my Russians to look at it and did not know any Arabs to trust either. We set up a timetable for me to set up cells in Haifa, Be’er Sheva, and Jerusalem. I was to spend about three days in each city recruiting. I was to attempt to be back at the Deep on Thursday to check in. Maya would set up a ‘unit’ in Tel Aviv and Avinadav would be the money and logistics man.  

The Organization, as we soon took to calling the thing, was founded in Tel Aviv in late July of 2001. ‘A group without a name was formed to launch a movement without a color’ as our line went. The initial objective of our group was the resolution of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. It was believed that through the creation of a united front among the peoples of the region, a solution could be achieved that might serve as a springboard for a worldwide revolution against American hegemony and the cultural mentality it perpetuates. The principle on which this group was founded was that ‘we are in fact not an organization, but rather individuals becoming organized’ another line from our playbook. The Organization was to serve as a network through which quite different people could unite under common revolutionary goals. Our goals were to be better defined in a soon-to-be-written 10 Point Program for the Revolution in Israel and Palestine. 

I was taking notes from Che Guevara’s manual on guerilla warfare and Mao’s Little Red Book. I was mixing it with populist Israeli rhetoric and Marxist overtones. We didn’t say proletariat. We just said we fought for the rights of the working class. I was getting my training on the fly. So were Maya and Avinadav. The Maya revealed no ideological leanings other than progressive feminism. She seemed left without needing to declare it. She was Spanish by passport and Canadian in upbringing, but she’d been in HaEretz a year and a half. As a club promoter she had half the basic skill set of a revolutionary anyway, the gift of random gab. She took the role of support and advice and begrudgingly accepted a title on our cabinet. She urged me to hammer out a ten-point program before she tried to recruit anyone she knew. 

Andrew Manasseh Butler, aka “Andrew the Hustler”, whom no one seemed to call Avinadav except for me, not even Maya who quite a few men called Emma, told me one night over dinner that Maya and I could be the activists, but he had ‘keep the focus on the mission.’ 

Avinadav and I would talk all night. He lived in a sprawling penthouse near the outer highways and skyscraper towers of the Azrieli center at the edge of Ramat Gan. It was really near the Tel Aviv Light Rail Depot, so I’d crash with him once and awhile at his ‘House of the Rising Sun’ as Emma called it. There were always people crashing on the couches, on the floors and anywhere they could. There was a White rapper from the American hip-hop group Cyprus Hill who had been drafted to play for Maccabi Tel Aviv and then fucked it up somehow. Nice guy, but a huge show boater and big talker. One night he and I picked up these two Ashkenaz cuties and he claimed he was rapping at GSPOT, this huge hip-hop club and could get us all comped. I closed the stand and the four of us walked our asses north to the Sheraton and beyond, only for him to disappear into the club and ditch us outside.  

I talked big too, but I prided myself on delivering what I promised with broads and bullets both. This guy was living on Avinadav’s couch indefinitely. Disrael, the partner at The Deep with the ice in his ear, which he declared ‘It’s a cubit diamond from the land of Zirconium, was the only other rent payer besides Yashara, Avindav’s Yemenite special lady who looked Dominican more than Arab or Jewish. At any given time, there could be between four to seven ‘community relatives’ who’d gotten exiled from Demona for this or that and were living with Avinadav until something came along, or they got forgiven. 

“We are all in ‘back against the sea or a head to the wall country,’ some of us more than others. So when the honorable Prophet Ben-Ami led seventy-odd Black brothers and sisters in 1969 from Chi-Town’s Southside across Africa to build the Hebrew Israelite Community in the badlands of Southern Israel and then when your father gets into a fight with the Prophet over annulling a marriage and your whole clan gets tossed out of the community, but you and your brethren don’t have Israeli or American passports, well fuck the dumb shit, where we gonna go?” 

“How many of you are there?” 

“A couple thousand now. Not one is a citizen here. Ethiopians, they at least begrudgingly call them Jews. We do not even get offered real citizenship. If we the field Negroes, then you got some idea why it’s ‘Waleed and the Lethal Leisure Suite’ time for the Palestinians. It never comes down too hard on more than one demographic group at a time. The others make believe it won’t happen to them. Besides you Ashkenaz, everybody is shut out of something.”    

“Just like in the States.” 

“A microcosm of all the stupid suffering that the wretched of the earth are subject to because they refuse to fight back. I want you to dig inside, Zach. I want you to look into your soul and know that our struggle is doomed to fail like the thousands of other risings before ours if you can’t honestly see the soul you have is of the same worth as the one Hashem gave the Arabs and the Christians, the pagans, communists and atheists like Emma Solomon.” 

“I thought she was agnostic like everybody else.” 

“Nope. She just plays one on TV to get more answers out of you.” 

“Ah. Answers about what?” 

“To judge if we can trust you, a near total stranger, with our lives.” 

“I’m not asking for that kind of trust. I’m asking for help printing propaganda, obtaining safe houses, and recruiting partners. What do my religious inclinations have to do with the mission?” 

“What’s the mission then, Zachariah?” 

“Empower the Israeli and Palestinian people to win a class war against the American backed proxy government of this country.” 

“Which would take a miracle.” 

“You’re not saying…”  

“Who’s Mike Washington?” 

“How did you….?” 

“Emma says you ask him questions in your sleep. Lucky you.” 

“It’s not like that.” 

“I know it’s not like that. The girl’s a goddess, heavenly just to lie beside. But back to Mr. Washington.” 

“I have an imaginary friend who’s a sort of fire walking paramedic with a handgun, something concocted in my head since I was 13 to shoot all the monsters when I sleep.” 

“Gets um all doesn’t he? Shoots straight, never misses, reliable? Brotherly maybe?” 

“Something like that.” 

“You believe in your dreams, Zachariah?” 

“I’d say they confuse more than guide me.” 

“You don’t have a guide in the waking life to translate for you what It’s telling you.” 

“Who? Mike Washington?” 

“Mr. Washington is just a messenger. Your name in Hebrew means ‘G-d Remembers’ incidentally. You ought to toy with the notion of our meeting not being an accident but in fact providence. You ought to meditate on why you’re in the land so young and so early.” 

“One should be careful in presuming their dreams have any more meaning than necessary.” 

“Be as careful as you want. Emma and I are careful as hell. The road to Zion is paved in shit that can get you killed. And there are so, so many things worse than death in the world today. It makes hell quite superfluous to have a world like this.” 

“I agree. Your allusions make me want a cigarette. I think I’m in love with Maya by the way.” 

“With Maya or Emma?” 

“Same person.” 

“Are Sebastian and Zachariah the same person?” 

“Emma told you my real name?” 

“Yeah, but I learned it again going through your pockets when you slept over last time. We must ensure everybody is who they say they are. Got me?” 

“Zachariah’s me trying to live up to the expectations of Mr. Washington.” 

“Complicated. Sounds like programming. Being that you haven’t fucked her, but you guys have rolled up like kittens and cuddled three times in the past week on some pretext. You are in love with Emma. What is it to you to hold that girl?” 

“It is to remind myself I’m a good man whenever I’ve been tested. Otherwise, she would not want me near her.” 

“That’s part of it. What else you feel?” 

“That I remember what love felt like the first and only time I felt it in my life.” 

“Whatcha gonna do about it?”  

 “Why so you can tell her?” 

“Information only flows one way around here.” 

“Nothing at all. I can fall in love and have family in the world to come. I make a better fighter than a lover anyway even though I try and kid myself otherwise. I’ll tell her how I feel before I cross over to the other side.” 

“That’s reassuring to hear. It’s not romantic or right, or fair because you very well might give her the love, she needs to restore her black heart. But I need two lieutenants who can be objective about what we have to do. You want to seize one of the most important spiritual hot zones of the planet there are some time-honored ideas about infrastructure and discipline you would do well to embrace.” 

“Yeah. Go on.” 

“The bottle makes you play the fool. The smokes make you sick and will kill you before their bullets do, and a revolutionary gets only one love, his people. Regulate your vices as soon as you are able.” 

“You want me to quit smoking and drinking?” 

“And stop being promiscuous.” 

“You and Emma are gonna do that?” 

“Of course not. Everyone gets to be a hypocrite except for you.” 

“Why the fuck is that?” 

“Because you’re gonna be a mouthpiece for something massive. If you’re willing to have a message, get you crucified, don’t let some run of the mill garden variety sin degrade your credibility.” 

“You keep alluding to me on some God tip, but we don’t know if God wants any of this. You’re saying you think Hashem got me all the way to the Promised Land to help you and Emma form and lead a revolutionary army?” 

“If I have to dignify that with a response, it is really gonna take eleven more years.” 

“Eleven more years?” 

“People think 2012 is when the world ‘ends.” 

“The world doesn’t ever end.” 

“If the masses were such great political scientists and theologians, we probably wouldn’t have left the gardens to begin with.” 

“Why 2012?” 

“It’s a Mayan calendar thing. It’s in the collective conscious.” 

“You were quick to help me, Avinadav. Why is that?” 

“Every community gets a few prophets right before tumultuous times. All the holy books say so.” 

“I wouldn’t be so fast to construe dreams with prophesy.” 

“I get dreams too. And so does Emma. So does everyone, but only some people get dreams that give um ideas about what Hashem has put them here to do. I believe in the things you say Zachariah; and your soul is eons older than your years of life. Let’s just hope Hashem sends some reinforcements because this plan of ours will not go unnoticed for very long.” 

*** 

So, we built the thing, cobbled it together based on the various books we’d read and life experiences we’d had. The Organization, whom the Israelis called Ha Irgun, was structured to be a constantly evolving effort based upon an ongoing dialogue between Avinadav and me with Emma making corrections. It was the amalgamation of our three quite different viewpoints. Our goal was for the Organization to be composed of autonomous cells throughout the Middle East engaging in political work, community support, business and military operations, and whatever else proved logistically expedient to our ends. We had all done a bit of research on all this before we met. Avinadav made himself Chairman and Minister of Finance. Maya was appointed Defense Minister. I was elected to serve as the Minister of Operations handling logistics and recruiting. We set up a 12-person Cabinet that would command hundreds of 3 to 5-person cells in different communities across the country loosely organized around the Ten Point Program, under the leadership of the Cabinet. Maya and I authored the first statement that we would print on glossy club flyers with a grey fist. 

We selected the color grey as our standard because it was no color at all, but many shades of understanding and identity. We called our manifesto-in-progress the Little Grey Book. It began simply:  

“The Organization will not stop fighting until all people on this Earth are free.” 

We argue about the name for a whole night then figured “what’s in a name?” We all had a couple of names, so why not the group? “We were organizing. It was an organization.” The word for that in Hebrew was Ha Irgun, which sounded officious enough to me and had been the street name for one of the original Israeli independence groups. So, we ran off stacks of these little grey cards with a black fist and a little call to arms.  

________________________________________________

0

MEC-A1-S5.

S C E N E (V)  

بغداد 

BAGHDAD, Iraq, 2018ce 

*** 

NADIA ‘ANYA LAYLA’ SHUBAR NOORI AL BEIRUTI 

“THE OLDEST SONG EVER SUNG EVER WAS A LOVE SONG” plays on the satellite radio. I need to find the red-light room in the Green Zone. The place off duty soldiers gets lap dances, drop dollars and get their dicks wet. 

I lie awake in my family apartments in the Green Zone of Baghdad, and I tell you it’s much harder to get out of here than I ever thought. I have jet black hair and a baby face. Shabab15 like it. I’m a Shi’a bombshell, but I never feel that pretty. I feel mostly empty, living in a repressive culture with repressive heat and violence. I feel wilted. I feel confined. I rarely go anywhere without four armed men with beards. Sebastian the Jew tells me I am “powerful”, but I do not feel very powerful lately. Although they say I have tits for days. My name is Nadia Shubar Noori. Some friends, all me Nadia Night, i.e. Nadia Layla. My father is an Iraqi politician in a moderate Shi’a faction called AMAL. I think he was doing something for Hezbollah16 in Lebanon, I do not have a profoundly serious opinion about this faction or that faction, and I’m just 19! My boyfriend is a Kurd. And I am Arab, so that has to be kept quiet. Mostly because I am high class, and he is working class. My mother has developed an exiles taste for fine things. We have a chandelier and some fancy carpets. There is always meat in the supper and fruit in the fridge.  I spent most of my life in Beirut, but emotionally I’m coming of age in Erbil where I met my first love who is Kurdish. I had lovers all over Erbil, but now just this one guy. His name is Alacan al-Biban, he’s so, so cool. He’s a Kirkuki. I am not so libertine in Bagdad. I have crazy person dreams. I have bold visions! I am, however, deeply unhappy in Erbil, it is like a guiled bird cage. When my mother moved us to Baghdad it became much worse. Baghdad is of course a much larger, much more sectarian city. You can get your ass kidnapped. There are less eligible bachelors. Sex is the kind of satisfaction that can get your mind off an existential crisis. So, when I became a young woman, I lost track of my happiness and my sleep. I am of course a liberated woman and artistic as well. 

Sebastian Adonaev tried to give me an art lesson, but I didn’t take that many notes. I just liked watching him do his thing. Except when he finally made it to Syria and doing that part of his thing is scary. But prophetically I knew he would probably survive the civil war. 

Sebastian told me that the dreams I had are “prophecies”. He’s quite nice. He is a good mix of a gentleman and a tumultuous revolutionary. We were never ever lovers, but he spoke sometimes about running away with me after the war to Beirut and I agreed it was “a possible”. But the war will never ever end so it’s a very silly notion. He says that in the old country you cannot elope unless you’re half a person’s age, plus seven. I’m 19 though, so he says we have to wait until I’m 26, but he’s not that old. He’s 34. It’s not such a big deal. I am very bored in the Green Zone. Alacan al-Biban wants to fly me back to Erbil, but ever since the hordes of Shi’a Militia men called the Popular Mobilization Forces17 began surrounding Kirkuk, Alacan al-Biban has been stressed and distracted.  

Probably getting involved in Workers Party activities, but to me he hardly admits such things to me or over social media. Later, I had a cafe talk date with my friend Mina Abdul Rahim.  

Alacan al-Biban is such a fucking sweetheart. He’s an artist and a radical and I like him a lot. Sebastian and Alacan al-Biban are close friends I realized after the fact. As my flirtatious older male Kafr18 friend, Sebastian writes me every other day from Syria. He’s my sweet infidel always being optimistic to me on the WhatsApp. We had a jazz date and a drawing date and then I never saw him again. But, he is a writer, so he writes a lot. Our brief window to do something inappropriate, well it was missed. I let him sext me from the front and don’t tell Alacan al-Biban of course. I don’t sext back, I just don’t stop him. But I agree that for posterity I ought to share the Shi’a visions I’m having. These flashes of Ali and such. Not to freak anyone out, but I might just be the real deal. I might just be triggered into revelation amid this shit show of war. Though you tell the wrong person that stuff, you can get out right stoned to death or lit on fire. Or thrown off a roof. Or get stoned to death, or get their hands cut off. 

You see, on side of the Middle east is art, math, reason, love and science. On the other, unseen hateful gods and howling hordes of death, with black banners, or red, white and blue ones. On one side is hope, constructive collaboration, pride, and honor. On the other bullets whizzing, bombs dropping; bodies piling up. One person sees Djinn, another G-d, and yet another knows its nanobots. 

*** 

Everyone is familiar with the Iranian Israeli shadow war over Iranian nuclear acquisition. Less publicized is the Iranian Israeli shadow war over nano-bot technology. The itty-bitty war inside. 

It started innocently enough, with Mina Adul Rahim experimenting in her lab, fine-tuning the algorithms that governed the behavior of her nanobots. She marveled at their ability to navigate intricate mazes, dismantle complex structures, and even repair damaged tissues within living organisms. But as her mastery over the technology grew, so too did her ambition. 

With a few lines of code, Mina found herself able to exert control over swarms of nanobots, directing their movements with precision. She could command them to assemble into intricate patterns, mimic the behavior of biological organisms, or disperse like a cloud of dust. It was a heady sensation, knowing that she held such power in the palm of her hand. 

But power, as Mina soon discovered, was a double-edged sword. As she pushed the boundaries of what her nanobots could do, she began to realize the potential dangers they posed. In the wrong hands, they could be used to wreak havoc on a global scale—unleashing plagues, destabilizing economies, or even manipulating minds. 

Haunted by the ethical implications of her work, Mina wrestled with her conscience. Should she continue down this path, knowing the potential consequences? Or should she destroy her research, before it falls into the wrong hands? Such as the warlike Israelites. 

In the end, Mina made a choice that would shape the course of history. She resolved to use her knowledge for the greater good, to ensure that her nanobots would be a force for healing rather than harm. But even as she vowed to control her creations, she knew that the true challenge lay in controlling herself. For in the world of nanotechnology, the line between creator and creation was a perilously thin one, and only time would tell where it would lead. 

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑