The streets of Beirut throb with life as the sun sinks into the Mediterranean, casting the city in bruised shades of gold and rust. The air is thick with the scent of roasted meat, cardamom coffee, sweat, exhaust, and the faint sting of tear gas that never seems to leave the city entirely. Vendors shout above the ceaseless din of traffic, cars blaring horns like beasts competing for territory. Somewhere a muezzin’s call echoes, almost drowned by the wail of sirens far off. Beneath this living chaos, in the belly of the city, another kind of chaos is being written.
In a windowless room reeking of smoke and damp concrete, they gather. Men with hard faces and dead eyes, their features obscured by shadow and grime. Among them sits Kaveh Atatable Ashuri, the architect of nightmares, a man whispered about in markets and barracks, the kind of name spoken only when certain no informant is listening. His voice cuts through the haze, low and deliberate, each syllable weighted like a bullet: “We need something big. Something that will bleed fear into their veins. Something that makes the fat cats choke on their own silk ties.” His eyes gleam with fanatic calculation. “We will take the marrow out of their bones.”
For hours they argue, voices clashing like knives in the dark. Options rise and fall, names of potential targets whispered and dismissed. Finally the plan hardens: Banque du Liban et D’Outre Mer—BLOM Bank—the fortified jewel of Beirut’s financial elite. Its reputation is myth, its security described in the same reverence as fortresses. To strike it is not simply robbery. It is sacrilege, war declared on the city’s gilded arteries. Kaveh smiles faintly when the decision is made. “We will make them watch their walls burn,” he says, and no one doubts he means it.
Dawn bleeds into the city on the chosen day, but by afternoon Beirut feels wrong. An electricity crackles in the air. In Mar Elias camp, whispers crawl through the alleys: something is about to happen. By evening, the storm arrives. Gunfire erupts in the heart of Ras Beirut, splitting the noise of the city like lightning splitting a tree. Masked figures pour into BLOM Bank’s marble entrance. They move with the clinical precision of soldiers, but their violence is savage. Guards fall before they can even raise weapons, throats opened with knives, skulls cracked by rifle butts. The robbers’ boots trample across sacred lobbies of finance, glass shattering, marble streaked red.
Inside the vault corridors, silence reigns only for a moment before steel doors scream under shaped charges. Smoke, fire, alarms howling like banshees—yet the men move in rhythm, cutting through locks, dragging sacks of currency into waiting duffels. Piles of lira, mountains of paper that once symbolized wealth but now barely equate to dust. A hundred million notes that might buy a family dinner, or might not even cover bread tomorrow. Still, the symbolism matters. The vault is raped, and the city bleeds.
Outside, the streets convulse with panic. Sirens converge. The robbers burst from the bank like specters, masks reflecting gunfire, their weapons barking indiscriminate death. Bullets stitch the air, shattering storefronts, chewing flesh. Bystanders scatter, trampled beneath stampeding feet, screams colliding with the metallic staccato of automatic fire. Police cars skid to a halt, sirens wailing, officers leaning from windows only to be cut down in sprays of red mist. Beirut becomes a killing ground, traffic frozen, engines burning, glass raining down like holy ash.
The robbers leap into their getaway vehicles, tires shrieking as the chase ignites. Engines roar through clogged streets, bullets chasing them like hounds. They weave with animal instinct, ramming aside cars, clipping buses, sending metal shrieking against concrete. The police follow, relentless, their guns blazing from windows, sirens a constant scream. Every intersection becomes a kill zone. A taxi is ripped open by crossfire, passengers spilling onto the street, bleeding and howling. A child screams for her mother while cars burn behind her. Beirut becomes a theatre of the damned.
Kaveh drives with one hand steady on the wheel, the other gripping a pistol he fires casually out the window at anything in pursuit. The man laughs, a hollow sound that chills even his comrades. “They cannot cage us,” he snarls, his teeth bared, eyes wide. The others are silent, faces pale beneath their masks. They have crossed the threshold, and there is no return.
They break from the main road, plunging into the cramped labyrinth of Mar Elias camp. The alleys devour them, walls pressing close, the city replaced by a hive of cracked concrete, hanging wires, and desperate eyes peering from darkened doorways. Here the state’s grip falters. Here, history’s refugees scavenge survival. But the camp is no sanctuary for outsiders.
Gunfire erupts from balconies. Youths, half-grown boys with old Kalashnikovs, rake the convoy. Bullets spark against walls, tear through tires. Residents—furious at the chaos invading their fragile world—hurl stones, Molotovs, even boiling water from rooftops. The robbers fire back, mowing down anyone who dares raise a hand. Women fall in the alleys, men clutch bleeding stomachs, children scream. Smoke coils above the camp like a funeral shroud.
But the robbers push through, savage, desperate. Their bags of cash leak notes into the mud, green and red bills trampled beneath fleeing feet. Word spreads at the speed of breath: money has come, money fallen from heaven into the camp. Men and women surge into the streets, clawing at the scattered notes, fighting one another with teeth and nails. Hope, hunger, greed—all combust in an instant.
Through this human tide, the robbers claw forward. They follow Kaveh into a final narrow artery, an alley that twists like the throat of a dying beast. Behind them, police vehicles crash into the camp’s periphery, soldiers pouring in, rifles raised, vengeance in their eyes. Ahead, the alley opens onto the city beyond, the light of freedom like the last candle in a collapsing room.
Engines roar. Tires spit mud and blood. They surge toward escape. Behind them, Beirut howls—a wounded city, a city watching its own entrails spill into the gutter. The robbers burst free of the camp, their bodies slick with sweat and powder, their eyes hollowed by the violence they have unleashed.
They have escaped—for now. But the hunt has only begun. Beirut will not forgive. The city will choke them in its labyrinths or swallow them in its endless wars. They vanish into the night, leaving behind money soaked in blood, a camp torn open by greed, and a city reminded that fear is the only true currency.
We enter the mosque compound at twilight, though twilight itself seemed reluctant to fall. The call to prayer still echoed faintly from the minaret, a broken ghost-sound caught between heaven and stone, though its muezzin had long since fled or fallen—whether butchered or swallowed in the tide of war, none of us knew. Dust hung heavy in the air, congealing with the sharp tang of gun oil smeared across my hands and the dried blood caked beneath my fingernails. We moved with the YPG unit like shadows masquerading as men, our boots whispering across sacred carpets long since ripped open and blackened by fire. The mosque had been a sanctuary once; now it was a slaughterhouse with gilded walls.
They were waiting—Daesh, black-clad, statuesque, crouched like carrion birds behind shattered columns and prayer-stools. Their rifles rested on Qur’ans, defilement turned into ritual, eyes void of mercy, void of thought, filled only with the endless hunger for death. The first shot did not thunder; it whispered. Then the chamber of the mosque exploded in carnage. Muzzle flashes stuttered like lightning storms against the calligraphy-laced walls, sacred verses flickering with each round, the names of God trembling as our blasphemies carved themselves into stone. I returned fire without feeling, a machine in flesh, squeezing the trigger again and again until the rifle jammed, heat and smoke choking my lungs. I collapsed behind a marble pulpit as though it were the ribs of some ancient saint, hoping the stone would hold while lead sang against it.
Beside me, Heval Kamal was struck. The bullet punched through him with the elegance of inevitability, a red flower unfurling across his chest. His lips parted, a scream forming but drowned in blood, his lungs drowning him quicker than the enemy could. He fell without grace, spasming, his eyes begging for air, for rescue, for God. I did not mourn. There is no space for grief in the iron rhythm of battle. My hands tore his rifle from his still-warm grip before his last twitch had passed. Forgive me, brother, I thought, though I spoke nothing. Your bullets are more useful than your prayers.
The dome above us wailed with fire. Smoke poured through holes carved by rockets, shafts of dying orange light filtering in like the fingers of a cruel deity. I saw one of them—young, beardless, his face twisted between terror and rage. He couldn’t have been older than nineteen. For a heartbeat we locked eyes, and I saw a cousin, a neighbor, a boy who might have played football in some forgotten street. Then I shot him twice in the chest, precise, quick, watching him fold against the mihrab as if surrendering into a lover’s arms. His blood smeared the sacred niche where thousands had once knelt. I felt nothing. Or perhaps I had felt everything so many times that my soul had calcified. Somewhere back in Raqqa, or maybe in some trench months before, time had stopped mattering. The clock rusts inside your chest when every day is measured in bodies.
When the shooting ended, silence staggered back into the mosque. It came limping, dragging behind it the stink of powder and iron and meat. We walked among corpses like pilgrims at a grotesque hajj, our rifles drooping with exhaustion, our boots splashing in what once passed for men. I pressed my palm against the bullet-pocked wall, fingers tracing Arabic calligraphy shredded by shrapnel, and whispered an apology to no one in particular. To Allah. To the dead. To myself. To whatever remained listening in this void where even God had turned His face. The only faith left in that ruin was the brotherhood of ash-coated, bone-weary men too stubborn—or too damned—to die.
Every time we crawled out of a firefight in Rojava with our skins intact, a price was exacted all the same. The internationals especially carried it raw in their eyes. They had just killed someone, maybe for the first time. Or had watched a man they’d eaten bread with choke on his last breath. Or maybe their bullets had torn through someone who wasn’t strictly a combatant at all, just a body caught in the blind frenzy of battle. Some had been awake too many nights in a row, fueled by cigarettes, adrenaline, and the conviction that tomorrow might not exist. After their first blood baptism, they drifted for days in a fugue, phantoms wandering the outpost. Some said nothing, as though words were another luxury they couldn’t afford. Others muttered nonsense, speaking in half-dreams, voices cracking like children’s.
“He’s lost the plot,” Heval Erdal, a British comrade, used to mutter, shaking his head at those glassy-eyed stares. He’d laugh when he said it, but the laugh always caught in his throat. The plot was easy to lose out there.
Years later, after the fires of Rojava burned down to embers, those who had survived staggered into other wars. Statistically, one in ten internationals died on that soil, their bodies buried in Kurdish earth far from the countries that had birthed them. Four of ten died later, either by their own hands—noosed, overdosed, revolvers pressed to temples in kitchens at dawn—or vaporized under Russian rockets in Ukraine. They migrated from one doomed battlefield to another like moths drunk on the flame, unable to live in peace, unable to stop killing, unable to stop dying. The war never left them. It only traded flags.
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. Shabab15like 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 Kafr18friend 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.
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?
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.
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 