Pome 1118

➢ “Sometimes I think we have to get out of this place!”𝀓

The motherland calls,

And now we’re using a code.

The silence of touch, the science of mode,

The science of making one’s morals align.

With the cold things done-for-dollars, in the absence of ethics,

Or the g-d head the divine𝀓

Oh, the things I might do! Oh, things that you do.

An animal’s logic of rough-handled thrusting,

Subsumes the illogic, or basic desire to woe or to woo.

“If I get on my back for an hour ortwo”,

I see your face.

Security, obscurity, can you lick something magic?

“Man, how many times did you die in disgrace?”

Frail little humans, trying to see a plot through,

black breaded blue black sky where every single star is a blessing,

A promise of pity,

“I didn’t ask what you’ve done lately,

So I probably only muse partly, rip off your dress, and we forget second-guessing.

on the things you still have to do.

a breathtaking ode to the half-naked goddess that’s you.

The thrusting of my logic dare outpace.

In the lack of a life we had picked out in earnest,

Hinting the the hilt of a gentleman’s saber? You hand in my face?

➢ the back-breaking ease of the thing we call labor,

The belt on the neck of the thing we call grace.

Abhorrent! On whose horse did you rode?

Morse code on my back, your fingers play piano.

Let the skill of your ill masquerading, let it lighten the load.

Let the lust that men drown in make it a new home,

Make the world implode. Make a world where it’s up to a partner to lighten a load.

We both have nostalgia for things that ignite,

A lust for a new kind of rule?

A list of words for the way that the body can gyrate,

and mix to a perfect soundtrack of the sage house abide or abode.

“Man, pretty cool.”

and then all things can explode.

Explode into opportune living of life spent in terror,

Life spent lacking free life, like the fairy tale ritual error.

The first time.

It was always still the very best time, the first time,

So close to your body,

A Look in the mirror of the look in your eyes.

In rented safe house attics suited for stealing, the petty theft of posture passion and wiggle thrust rhyme, silhouettes forming fantastic formations of fondle,

Pausing the clock for a sensual mime.

Physically speaking,

It was something divine.

But the next second time,

“We spoke candidly about the feelings on not having feelings, and escapading in Europe, and the subtle sublime,”

What a terrible habit, paying on the record,

Transferring rebels to camps or rubies for illicit moments of the financial district down climb.

Wasting the very last moments,

“Wasting one’s absolute time.”

For in arrest, for is your work working off the world of stress,

A test of the blessed, a test of the rest of the lifestyle, the bondage?

The work of the night and the work of the question, the imagined, the partially guessed. for the guess of an intention to blow or to be or to bless!

To lay even one more hand on your most amble chest.

I close my eyes, and we kiss harder than the press will later confess.

I sought out your confidence, I seek out your most costly attention, I believe you think in Russian, but that’s a soft guess.

I seek out something between total lust and a loyal affection,

I seek out writhing inside you and placing a kiss on every speck of your being,

What and how much am I after?

I don’t ask you to fully undress.

My love is something absurd, the uses of my love are anyone’s guess.

I ask you to weigh.

Do I have the talent and useful out lie of skills to back up all of the ludicrous things I might say?

Will all of the laughter outlay?

All the past hardships and tears?

It doesn’t matter the plot points that set out the setting,

I want to use (and to know) and be used near on next to your body for years!

Not just mere hours, in a state of total erotic orgasmic undress.

Speaking of evil and speaking of stress, please use me for fucking,

Please use me for parts.

Or for evil Jew medical legalish arts.

Floor boards are now creaking,

Shall we try and proceed under such flagrant duress!

Rustling now in the attic,

Erotica is what one is perhaps seeking;

Also, are you waiting? Chandelier spills of

For the end to come,

In a visitation, we commit petty crime.

In downtime,

Surround sound to fondle around time.

in up time, in emotional downtime.

In the placement of dispondant downtime,

You stroke the shaft of midnight off the layers of lime.

You lay me down, my face into a hole like a waterboard, I’m dripping.

You lay me down, your reflection an erotic silhouette of starlight,

Lip service for a hardcore lash or lock of further lipping.

Dasha, can you trust me yet?

Have we made love in other lives?

Dasha, can you ever fully trust me, get you happy, get you fully unhinged in upset?

A tall tale of too much turmoil, a rare form of Amerkanski.

You are well armed with your curvatures, your lips tight.

A lusty lap dance for a lingering servitude,

I’ve been to your safe house in Midtown.

Your goddess naked, curving silhouette is etched in my mind at night,

At first sight.

I want to render you completely naked,

And work very my sex on your very soul, lie where you lie.

A ride or a grip; or die for a try, par to the part of the whole,

with the ink of my pen, or the typing of sonnets that preferably never will get old,

and preferably never quite die.

Make you call out for me,

like I call out for you,

in the bellowing evilish New York dusk twilight.

I want to kiss your lips forever, or just for the rest of right now, can we try,

I have a half of a plan and I will show you how, how the last of us cry,

for as many hours as it is possible to imagine them entertaining me.

I want to roughly take you,

There were sneaking, creaking footsteps toward the rented safehouse,

There were mechanical noises in the dark sky above,

But perhaps in reality, just make noble love.

My hands as they grip your hips,

My tongue, when it lashes out, sips of fortuitous trips down the small of your spine,

And the arch of your back when you moan out for me.

Make you drip, you make me drip, you make me melt, you make me sip,

On the very most waters of want, on the lustiest thirst, on the thrown.

On the edge of reality’s grip.

I can’t do this whole night of class war alone,

I can’t write you too well from an ambulance late at night,

from the glow of making us less smart phones.

I can’t make love when your body is still something to buy or to own.

Are words purely worthless?

Is their weight to a promise. Is there weight to a stone?

Are we still having fun?

I want you to think of me kindly when we are all done.

I want your lips on my lips, I want your hips on my hips, I want my whole flesh inside you, writhing naked right back to where the romance begun.

When the traps are reset, and the web is unspun.

Where do I know your naked body from?

Where do I imagine this whole tryst can go?

Do you think of me ever when my existence is gone?

Take you hard on a floor roughly, or a gentle, long kiss good night in a hotel bed, can you want me like a lover and still profit from a John?

Русский (рифмованный) перевод

«Иногда я думаю: нужно бежать отовсюду!» —
Зовёт нас родная земля,
Мы пишем шифром, в немом переулке у чуда,
Где такт прикосновений заменяет слова.

Наука того, как мораль подчиняют расчёту,
Холодным делам “за доллар”, без духа, без Бога в нутре.
Что я бы сделал? Что делаешь ты в поворотах?
Животная логика тел, уступающая логике тьме.

«Если лягу на час-другой» — вижу снова твой лик.
Безопасность, туманность — лижешь магический штрих.
«Сколько раз ты погибал позорно, до криков и рвот?»
Хрупкие люди ловят сюжет,
Чёрный хлеб, чёрный небосвод,
Где каждая звезда — благословенье,
Обет жалости,
«Не спрашивала я, что ты делал вчера —
Мне хватает лишь жеста,
Рву твоё платье — и нет больше бегства,
Есть только тела, и их высота, и последняя нежность».

Полунагую богиню продумывает мой стих,
Дыханием споря с твоей красотой.
Мы жили бы лучше — но путь был другой, нас увёл…
Твой жест — будто эфес от сабли был поднят над мной.

Тяжёлое и лёгкое, то что зовётся “трудом”,
Ремень на шее “грации”,
Где потеряно всё. На ком твой конь взлетал галопом?
Твой Морзе на моей спине —
Ты играешь, как рояль в темноте.

Пусть ложь твоих масок хоть как-то снижает саван заботы,
Пусть страсть, где мужчины тонут,
Станет домом в сердечной пустоте.

Мы оба скучаем по искрам, что жгли до зари,
По страсти, что строит законы и миры.
По словам, что описывают танец тела,
По музыке мудрых стен, что хранят ордена и тайны квартиры.

«Чёрт, круто же было».
И всё может взорваться —
Взрывом удачи,
Жизни, где страх — и любовь, и попытки восстать.

Первый раз —
Всегда лучший,
Так близко к тебе — словно зеркало глаз.
В мансарде секретной, где время крадут,
Где позы, касанья — изгибы страстей,
Где тени сплетают узор из тел,
Где вздох — это музыка,
Пауза — сонм нежных ролей.

Второй раз мы говорили честно
О том, как не чувствуем чувств,
О Европе, её авантюрном искусстве,
О тонком, почти бестелесном «вдруг».

О, ужасная привычка платить,
Переводить бунтарей и рубины
За тайные встречи на дне делового квартала.

Тратили последние вдохи,
«Тратили время — финальный товар».

Арест ли спасает?
Работа ли держит нас в мире, где боли — товар?
Ночные вопросы, оковы, догадки,
Где благословляешь удар.

Положить бы ладонь
На грудь твою — в пламени странных начал.
Я закрываю глаза — и мы целуемся так,
Как газеты потом не напишут.

Я искал твою уверенность,
Прошу твоего дорогого внимания,
Мне кажется — думаешь ты по-русски,
Но это лишь нежное предположение.

Мне нужно меж похотью и верностью
Узнать твой предел и твоё доверие,
Обнять каждую точку тела,
Не требуя даже раздеться.

Моя любовь абсурдна,
Её смысл — загадка и жест.

Скажи, есть ли талант
Удержать все нелепые фразы, что скажу я всерьёз?
Перекроет ли смех
Все прошлые слёзы и боль?
Неважны сюжетные трещины —
Я хочу быть с тобой
Годы, а не часы,
В оргазмическом, бешеном, нежном,
Беспамятном наголо-снятом тепле.

Говоря о зле и о стрессе —
Пользуйся мной,
Пользуйся частями,
Пользуйся “еврейской медициной и правом”,
На полу скрипят доски —
Но мы продолжаем.

В мансарде шуршат тени,
Ищут эротики,
Ждут конца,
Как визита небесной беды.

В паузах — преступленья малы,
В минуты простоя —
Ласка,
В часы разлада —
Тоска по ударам судьбы.

Ты кладёшь меня вниз лицом,
Как на водную пытку, —
Струится пот.
Ты кладёшь меня под свет звезды,
И губы твои творят
Служение боли и ласке сверх меры.

Даша,
Ты мне доверяешь?
Мы любили друг друга в иных мирах?
Даша —
Сможешь когда-нибудь верить,
Сбывать мои страхи,
Безумие вытравлять?

Ты — тень небесной работы,
Американский мой миф и бред.
И армия линий твоего силуэта
В ночи гремит.

Я был в тайном убежище твоём,
Где тело твоё — как статуя яркого тлена,
Где я хотел снять с тебя всё —
И душой, и рукой,
И стихом, где ни строчка не стареет,
Где слово не умирает порой.

Хочу, чтоб ты стонала так,
Как я стону по тебе
В злорадно-чудовищный сумрак Нью-Йорка.

Хочу целовать тебя вечно —
Или хотя бы до утра.
Есть план — и я покажу,
Как плакать вдвоём,
Как тянуть наслаждение часами,
Как разгораться в безумных играх.

Хочу взять тебя грубо,
Но в ту ночь
Казалось — вокруг механический шорох,
И шаги по лестнице,
И звёзды гудят.
Но на самом деле —
Это была любовь.

Мои руки на бёдрах,
Мой язык вдоль твоей спины —
И мир тает,
И таешь ты.

Я не выдержу этот классовый бой в одиночку,
Не напишу тебя с “скорой помощи”,
Где свет смартфонов гасит нас в ночь.
Не могу любить,
Когда тело — товар,
Когда любовь покупают за наличный вздох.

Есть ли вес у слова?
Вес у камня?
Всё ли нам в шутку?
Я хочу, чтобы ты вспоминала меня
Добро — когда всё кончится вдруг.

Хочу твои губы на губах,
Твои бёдра на бёдрах,
И тело твоё вокруг —
Как начало романа.

Когда ловушки сброшены,
Когда сети порваны —
Откуда мне знакомо твоё нагие формы?
Куда ведёт эта связь?
Думаешь обо мне,
Когда я исчезну?

Взять тебя жёстко на полу
Или нежно —
Ждать рассвет.
Быть любовником
Или стать для тебя
Очередным, кому платят за след.

November 26, 2025 0

MEC-A-1-S-XX

S C E N E (XX)

نيويوركغراد

NEWYORKGRAD, USA, 2017-ce

***

As told by Heval Goldy. Some parts have been blacked out by the state censor.

A begrudging Russian sympathizer to our cause now held in a small, electrified cage in Midtown West. A gated community for the ultra, ultra-rich. A place called Hudson Yard. They call her “Goldy the very expensive goldfish.” Of course that is not her real name at all. Her name at the agency is Sussudio. Her real name in Russian, it means “rich soon”.

“All of the buildings appear to be very, shall we say, forever. Permanent. Almost invulnerable, blyat. These elegant high towers of blue and black, glass and steel, towers built in defiance of gravity and common sense. Like mega sculpture, like a love song to the invisible hero called American Capitalismo. You look down at all the city, even all Downtown and Midtown and imagine all the utter debauchery other people are having at your expense. Well anyway I have my name on my own little cage here. So, I too can say “I have made it in New York City.” “So maybe I’ve made it here in America!” In the background, a saxophone cacophony erupts! There are more brothels than bars and coffee shops in all Newyorkgrad, but the quality and the pricing vary markedly. Sex work is hard work. It may not be the world’s oldest profession as they say blyat, but it is the oldest trusted way to get information from one’s enemies.

She states in letter:

“I live in a tall residential tower complex in Western Midtown in a costly new development named the Hudson Yards. Right in the very heart of success. A tower complex built in recent years above the train yards of west 34^th street. I work my sweet ass off to keep that apartment rent free. The game I am playing with this chubby Indian Brahman venture capitalist roommate, is eating off his plate without him imagining he’s becoming my patron. Drain the clock, not his cock as they say. But really, he annoyingly proposes marriage as often as my Sergei had. And the others. And the other. I am waiting for a Russian Jewish doctor. He will love me again. I know it. The stars say as much. As for Sebastian. I think he’s calling himself Kawa now.” We all have all kinds of names.

“He mostly writes to me. I mostly do not write back to him very often,” I would later tell the FBI, or the CIA, or the Police Dept. and the Department of Homeland Security or whoever else I was being forced to talk to. But I, of course blyat, I do write him back, I’m his muse. He creates well, though most of it is chaos. Much of it very much misses the mark, as it were. I once remarked to Oleg the Bear, a common friend of ours;

“A relationship with Comrade Adonaev is like a roller coaster. Extremes of ups and downs, drama and thrills. But like all such thrill machines. You can tolerate it only in increments; you must step off and stay off. Sometimes for many years.”

My blonde hair is convincingly dyed from light brown. I told Sebastian that once and he said I was beautiful either way but should try brown hair like him. I don’t actually hate him, though he has cost me time. I just prefer not to have him around, thinking he can save me, heal me, change my life. No working woman ever needs that shit. Get me to higher ground on his terms. I told him go to law school and stop fucking helping the Kurds. I just don’t like giving him hope that we have a future of any kind. I’ve always been adamant about that. Sometimes against my better judgment, I’ve kissed him, and those kisses gave him way too much hope. He in fact wrote me over 100+ poems of Russian theme and a door stopping nearly 800-page novel. Which is kind of about me, but also about terrorism being justified. Or so my friend Alana interpreted. That he can save his money up somehow, get it together in the brain, and “save me”, he just can’t. I’m a kept woman now. That comes with a price tag and comes with responsibilities. Like sex on demand. I’ve told him that, but I’ve told him many also not so true things so maybe he can’t put it all together. He thinks it’s love. It’s maybe some kind of fucking weird 18^th-19^th century muse lust love, blyat, but it’s really a product of his mental illness, not my encouragement. His writing is prolific. To be fair. Some of his paintings are very unique. Overall, he is impressive as an American, just not the horse I need to bet on right now. He’s not patron or paperwork marriage material, as he is always nearly broken, or often fully broke.

But like it or not an artist gets only one truly great muse, and I am his. Russians, we are known for our loyalty and being indomitable. Putin says we also make the best whores. Well anyway, I know what I came for when I arrived in Newyorkgrad lost lonely and lethal at age 19, and I am a full-grown asset, a woman with expensive tastes. Not that into long board walk walks and art making and picnics with stupid couscous and over spiced chicken blyat with no value. The long, I mean Russian long book and paintings he has made for me do not help my mom immigrate to the U.S.A. Or get me a euro passport, for that matter, now that it is looking like my special marriage hasn’t resulted in anything useful for papers.

“Let me roll up my sleeves and my skirt, a little! Look at me in the eyes! I have all my teeth to bite. So sexy and educated and multilingual. What a catch to catch if you can. I am a wild debutante, elusive and amazing. I am a graceful fighter of course, forced to pour men off shots in a tavern downtown.”

“Zdrastvistia! The purpose of my sponsor is to buy and sell luxury carrots. Also, a flying carpet to get you home after all the bullshit we will make you sit through telling Russian American tales. Also, to warn you about Chechens and to distribute out a phone number where slaves with abused lives can get J 1, S 1 or go to college. There is so little time for singing and poems. We will try and pour you things called Vodka, but it’s not Vodka. To us it’s like water for wound care.”

“Good and bad men went to war and women also went to war, and Americans and Russians watched out of the corner of the newspaper or on the telescreen. And of course, we both supplied the arsenals and the airstrikes to our proxies. But ultimately it was a faraway spectacle happening far from both empires. At least until Ukraine.”

“The papers called them “the New Chechens” because when the war kept going, people came back trained in G-d-only-knows how much carnage capability. The war I’m referring to is the Syrian Civil War/ the Revolution in Rojava which was a phantom menace to all. But it was more a dark dream based on improbable odds. Chechens are in fact a very real jihadist menace that fought us to the last bullet in Mosul, Raqqa and Deir-A-Zor. They brought their whole families into their fun little Jihad. These re-moniquored “Chechens” aren’t like them. They were secular and young, and mostly on the Kurdish or Shi’a side, or the Peshmerga. They all left our families at home. There were plenty of war path teams and factions, mine/ ours was the most moral, but lived in a state of total delusion. They were following a pudgy faced aging man in Turkish solitary confinement. We thought breaking rocks was a useful form of soliloquy.”

My latest “patron” is in his mind a Brahman, which is something pretty fucking fancy in India. He’s a tech guy but looks and acts more like a Wall Street guy. He’s just too fucking rough on me. It has a lot in common with rape in my own home. He goes deep up my ass too often. He is pulling my hair and slamming me against the bar. He punches me in the head as hard as he can. He gets what he pays for. He slams me for about five minutes until he cums. Like Quisling and snorting pig. I am the star of a very private show! Recently, “I fell down some stairs”. He paid for surgery. I don’t remember things like I used to.

Sebastian wrote to me the other night to go down memory lane and formally tell me he is off for Syria soon. Well, this is the end of him finally. I do not feel that bad, or much of anything. He wants to end it like this anyway. He is living up to his expectation to die a martyr, that is up to him. In my mind, somewhere, is the understanding that if I had given him more rope, he could have hung himself here, but who doesn’t like a motherfucking show. Am I right. My patron climbs off me eventually. Eventually, they all must.

A lot of meat to him, I will need to stretch it out. Jon isn’t just a John; he’s unfortunately often my roommate too. He’s the one paying me to live somewhere nice with him. A Brahmin. They do what they want. Including fuck my asshole on a Tuesday afternoon. Am I fucking to not pay my rent? Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I wish I had something better, someone better to do but I don’t. The Russian doctor, well he said I was “a little too high maintenance.” Sergei flipped his shit when he found a pile of Sebastian’s letters. Poor form on my part, perhaps, too sentimental. No, I will just say lazy.

I have not seen Comrade Sebastian Adonaev since the end of the summer. The time when we gave it another sad go, the poetry making for some light kissing. The hopeless romanticism in him. Well anyway he’s the exact same man and I’m the same old gal. He’s still broke and still just a shiftless adventurer, romanticizing the Chornay. He once wrote an 800-page book for me, yet I’ve only read the first couple chapters. He wrote me over 100 poems, but they all sound about the same. Words rhyming about love, hate sex and devastation in Angliski. He painted and framed a painting in Brighton and bought a gold frame for it. It’s still up. I was dating a doctor, but he left me, as I said. I was dating a corporate lawyer, but it was never so serious. My original patron cut me off over my first Adonaev affair. Now I’m fucking the so-called roommate to cut down on my business here expenses. Well anyway “my roommate” has a big Indian style Xanny Kama sutra cock. He manages some tech finance derivatives schemes in L.A., which could be anything. I must disassociate a lot. What was I saying, that’s right, something about my mother getting her paper. Something about the mark.

Later, in around a year when I am arrested by the secret police and they demand that I tell them about what Sebastian was doing in Syria, honestly, I didn’t even know that much. I wasn’t that interested or directly invested in it. He is climbing a mountain, to prove to himself to win me, that sounds like a good take. He periodically would send me all these highly miserable looking, often bloody war photos, but I didn’t want to see any of them. He would beg to be allowed to see me. But in reality, I wanted very little nothing to do with him. I live my own life. It’s mostly mine. I chose it and made all the bad decisions! Later, I’d sometimes message his WhatsApp and tell him to ‘Come home now please’ ‘before you die’. But I didn’t mean come home to me. He will probably survive the war. He has strong luck. He is tough in his own strange way. Incredibly lucky. The roommate, comrade Brahmin patron, he likes to choke me. I need a new living situation. Or should I just pay cash, every hole, is too many holes. I’m working on a possible new patron with a place by the beach in Miami. I wasn’t raised stupid, or lacking morales. So how have I gotten stuck here in this loop? I should move to Miami, where it’s warmer. I remember thinking only a little bit about his strange Syria objective.

What I failed to see, through Sasho, our old boss and roof explained it to me, was that he was going to Syria to impress me. How ludicrous, nothing could be further from impressive to me. He was going to live, I was sure. But to-do-what with himself? Live to be a mentally broken person that I could never imagine how to heal. From Miami, when I get there, it will all take the form of a brightly colored dream.

We had some fun but also some very messy history Sebastian Adonaev and I, blyat, but I think going to this evil little war was the stupidest thing he ever did, far worse than the exploits in Haiti, worse than loving me. It was hard on me anyway. I will certainly not be meeting him at the airport, should he survive the war. I am tougher than he, but it’s still not nice to make a person watch unwillingly your attempt at self-murder. Functionally speaking that man is dead to me. I must insulate myself from mad men seeking high publicized means for suicide. The man just wants to die in a meaningful way, but that doesn’t help my situation at all! Yet, I still have all his letters, I still have the two published books about me. I still have the gold framed multi-color pornograph on the wall. When the secret police dragged me in to find out where Sebastian went, I told them:

“He is probably still in Havana…”

“He’s definitely not in Havana, toots.”

“Don’t fucking call me toots, blyat.”

They then did pretty nasty stuff to me, just to punish him, maybe. Or maybe just because I don’t have any actual papers? Or maybe because degrading a Russian blonde is as American now as apple pie. They eventually bent me over and just took turns fucking me on the interrogation table. Good times. It’s really not that “free” a country. Once the surface gets scratched enough. Eventually, my Brahman patron bails me out, somehow. He lectures me about “pussy footing around with terrorists that don’t have my best interests at heart.”

“Well, where is that motherfucker? Where is your useless Jew Chechen now?” My patron asks me.

“He is climbing up Holy Mountain, blyat. In his mind anyway. Thinking of me the whole entire time.”

“But low and behold here you still are. Locked in a fishbowl with no passport. With one to help you besides me and your Serge,” the patron replies, “And like a goldfish, I can do whatever I want, and you will not remember it 8 seconds later. He punches me in the face and rapes me on the table.

“Dumb bitches always thinking things are free,” he says. But nothing in Russia or America is free. Old Russian saying, “The only free cheese is in a mouse trap.” Which is infact an actual Old Russian saying.

September 15, 2025 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 8^th; 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!”

July 21, 2025 0

MEC-A1-S-XVIII

S C E N E (XVIII)

نيويوركغراد

NEWYORKGRAD, USA, 2017ce

***

As told by Heval Goldy.

A begrudging Russian sympathizer to our cause now held in a small, electrified cage in Midtown West. A gated community for the ultra-rich. A place called the Hudson Yard. They call her “Goldy the very expensive goldfish.” Of course that is not her real name at all. Her name at the agency is Sussudio. Her real name in Russian, it means “rich soon”.

“All of the buildings appear to be very, shall we say, forever. Permanent. Almost invulnerable, blyat. These elegant high towers of blue and black, glass and steel, towers built in defiance of gravity and common sense. Like mega sculpture, like a love song to the invisible hero called American Capitalism. You look down at all the city, even all Downtown and Midtown and imagine all the utter debauchery other people are having at your expense. Well anyway I have my name on my own little cage here. So, I too can say “I have made it in New York City.” “So maybe I’ve made it here in America!” In the background a saxophone cacophony erupts! There are more brothels than bars and coffee shops in all Newyorkgrad, but the quality and the pricing vary markedly. Sex work is hard work. It may not be the world’s oldest profession as they say blyat, but it is the oldest trusted way to get information from one’s enemies.

And she states in letter:

“He mostly writes to me. I mostly do not write back to him very often,” I would later tell the FBI, or the CIA, or the Police Dept. and the Department of Homeland Security or whoever else I was being forced to talk to. But I, of course blyat, I do write him back, I’m his muse. He creates well, though most of it is chaos. Much of it very much misses the mark, as it were.

I once remarked to Oleg the Bear, a common friend;

“A relationship with Comrade Adonaev is like a roller coaster. Extremes of up and down, drama and thrills. But like all such thrill machines. You can tolerate it only in increments, you must step off and stay off. Sometimes for many years.”

My blonde hair is convincingly dyed from light brown. I told Sebastian that once and he said I was beautiful either way but should try brown hair like him. I don’t actually hate him, though he has cost me time. I just prefer not to have him around, thinking he can save me, heal me, change my life. No working woman ever needs that shit. Get me to higher ground on his terms. I told him go to law school and stop fucking helping the Kurds. I just don’t like giving him hope that we have a future of any kind. I’ve always been adamant about that. Sometimes against my better judgment, I’ve kissed him, and those kisses gave him way too much hope. He in fact wrote me over 100 poems of Russian theme and a door stopping nearly 800-page novel. Which is kind of about me, but also about terrorism being justified. Or so my friend Alana interpreted. That he can save money up, get it together in the brain, and “save me”, he just can’t. I’m a kept woman now. That comes with a price tag and comes with responsibilities. Like sex on demand. I’ve told him that, but I’ve told him many also not so true things so maybe he can’t put it all together. He thinks it’s love. It’s maybe some kind of fucking weird 18^th-19^th century muse lust love, blyat, but it’s really a product of his mental illness, not my encouragement. His writing is prolific. To be fair. Some of his paintings are very unique. Overall, he is impressive as an American, just not the horse I need to bet on right now. He’s not patron or paperwork marriage material, as he is always nearly broken, or often fully broke.

But like it or not an artist gets only one truly great muse, and I am his. Russians, we are known for our loyalty and being indomitable. Putin says we also make the best whores. Well anyway, I know what I came for when I arrived in Newyorkgrad lost lonely and lethal at age 19, and I am a full-grown asset, a woman with expensive tastes. Not that into long board walk walks and art making and picnics with stupid couscous and over spiced chicken blyat with no value. The long long book and paintings he has made for me do not help my mom immigrate to the U.S.A. Or get me a euro passport, for that matter, now that it is looking like my special marriage hasn’t resulted in anything useful for papers.

“Let me roll up my sleeves and my skirt, a little! Look at me in the eyes! I have all my teeth to bite. So sexy and educated and multilingual. What a catch to catch if you can. I am a wild debutante, elusive and amazing. I am a graceful fighter of course, forced to pour men off shots in a tavern downtown.”

My latest “patron” is in his mind a Brahman, which is something pretty fucking fancy in India. He’s a tech guy but looks and acts more like a Wall Street guy. He’s just too fucking rough on me. It has a lot in common with rape in my own home. He goes deep up my ass too often. He is pulling my hair and slamming me against the bar. He punches me in the head as hard as he can. He gets what he pays for. He slams me for about five minutes until he cums. Like a Quisling, snorting pig. I am the star of a very private show! Recently, I fell down some stairs. He paid for surgery. I don’t remember things like I used to.

My patron climbs off me eventually. Eventually, they all must.

A lot of meat to him, I will need to stretch it out. Jon isn’t just a Jon; he’s unfortunately often my roommate too. He’s the one paying me to live somewhere nice with him. A Brahmin. They do what they want. Including fuck my asshole on a Tuesday afternoon. Am I fucking to not pay my rent? Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I wish I had something better, someone better to do but I don’t. The Russian doctor, well he said I was “a little too high maintenance.” Sergei flipped his shit when he found a pile of Sebastian’s letters. Poor form on my part, perhaps, too sentimental. No, I will just say lazy.

I have not seen Comrade Sebastian Adonaev since the end of the summer. The time when we gave it another sad go, the poetry making for some kissing. The hopeless romanticism in him. Well anyway he’s the exact same man and I’m the same old gal. He’s still broke and still just a shiftless adventurer, romanticizing the Chornay. He once wrote an 800-page book for me, yet I’ve only read the first couple chapters. He wrote me over 100 poems, but they all sound about the same. Words rhyming about love, hate sex and devastation in Angliski. He painted and framed a painting in Brighton and bought a gold frame for it. It’s still up. I was dating a doctor, but he left me, as I said. I was dating a corporate lawyer, but it was never so serious. My original patron cut me off over my first Adonaev affair. Now I’m fucking the so-called roommate to cut down on my business here expenses. Well anyway “my roommate” has a big Indian style Xanny Kama sutra cock. He manages some tech finance derivatives schemes in L.A., which could be anything. I must disassociate a lot. What was I saying, that’s right, something about my mother getting her paper. Something about the mark.

Later, in around a year when I am arrested by the secret police and they demand that I tell them about what Sebastian was actually doing in Syria, honestly, I didn’t even know that much. I wasn’t that interested or directly invested. He is climbing a moutnain, to prove himself to himself to win me, that sounds like a good take.

He periodically would send me all these highly miserable looking, often bloody war photos, but I didn’t want to see any of them. He would beg to be allowed to see me. But in reality, I wanted very little nothing to do with him. I live my own life. It’s mostly mine. I chose it and made all the bad decisions! Later on I’d sometimes message his WhatsApp and tell him to ‘Come home now please’. But I didn’t, mean, to me. He would probably survive the war. He has strong luck. He is tough in his own way. Incredibly lucky. The roommate, comrade Brahmin patron, he likes to choke me. I need a new living situation. Or should I just pay cash, every hole is too many holes. I’m working on a possible new patron with a place by the beach in Miami.

I wasn’t raised stupid, or lacking morales. So how have I gotten stuck here in this loop? I should move to Miami, where it’s warmer. I remember thinking only a little bit about his strange Syria objective.

What I failed to see, through Sasho, our old boss and roof explained it to me, was that he was actually going to Syria to impress me. How ludicrous, nothing could be further from impressive to me. He was going to live, I was fairly sure. But to do what? Live to be a mentally broken person that I could never imagine how to heal. From Miami, it will all take the form of more of brightly colored dream.

We had some fun but also some very messy history Sebastian Adonaev and I, blyat, but I think going to this evil little war was the stupidest thing he ever did, far worse than the exploits in Haiti, worse than loving me. It was hard on me anyway. I will certainly not be meeting him at the airport, should he survive the war. I am tougher than he, but it’s still not nice to make a person watch unwillingly your attempt at self-murder. Functionally speaking that man is dead to me. I have to insulate myself from mad men seeking high publicized means for suicide. The man just wants to die in a meaningful way, but that doesn’t help my situation at all! Yet, I still have all his letters, I still have the two published books about me. I still have the gold framed multi-color pornograph on the wall.

When the secret police dragged me in to find out where Sebastian went, I told them:

“He is probably still in Havana…”

“He’s definitely not in Havana, toots.”

“Don’t call me toots, blyat.”

They then did pretty nasty stuff to me just to punish him. Or maybe just because I don’t have any actual papers? Or maybe because degrading a Russian blonde is as American now as apple pie. They eventually bent me over and just took turns fucking me on the interrogation table. Good times. It’s really not that free a country. Once the surface gets scratched enough. Eventually, my Brahman patron bails me out, somehow. He lectures me about “pussy footing around with terrorists that don’t have my best interests at heart.”

“Well where is that fuck? Where is your useless Jew Chechen now?” my patron asks me.

“He is climbing up a Holy Mountain, blyat. In his mind anyway. Thinking of me the whole entire time.”

“But here you are. Locked in a fishbowl with no passport. With one to help you besides me and your Serge,” the patron replies, “And like a goldfish, I can do whatever I want, and you will not remember it 8 seconds later. He punches me in the face and rapes me on the table.

“Dumb bitches always thinking things are free,” he says.

But nothing in Russia or America is free. Old Russian saying, “The only free cheese is in a mouse trap.”

December 18, 2024 0

MEC-A1-S-XV

S C E N E (XV)

TEL AVIV, State of Israel, 2001 ce

***

Friday arrives and I catch the last bus out before sundown and head south. Sundown on Friday is when they shut everything down, everything except parts of Tel Aviv. I need eye candy and attractions. I need to sell some art because I am completely out of cash. It was a two-hour trip to get from Afula to the Boardwalk. That night far out pacing any records set in London. The tiyeled is packed. The strip is lit up brightly. I feel good about getting back to this city. I moved through the crowd impressed with how quickly I’d made my first 200 shekels. This equivalent of nearly $50 was chump change except on a kibbutz. Tel Aviv is geared to be one of the most expensive cities on earth.

I can smell the perfume of the Russian frehhote. Many of the young Russian men had bleached their hair like Eminem. A salsa band was playing, and an Argentinean Jewish woman was dancing and singing through a Madonna mike surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. Everyone was clapping to the beat. A group of Arab Israelis was hawking watches, lighters and bootleg L & M smokes from a foldout table. Some rough-edged Romanian hustlers and their friends were taking money off stupid, shit-brained cocky American Yeshiva boys in games of three-card Monty. On the beach I saw the flash of fire poi whirling in the night. The Opera Towers looked huge. I could see a security guard patting down Yemenite Jews because they look Arab while he let the paler Ashkenazim in without any trouble at all.

Canadian Dave who is the bartender over at Mike’s Blues Bar gives me a bunch of flyers to hand out. They take up half the space in my bag. He gives me fifty sheks and a hamburger with frenc fries to hand them all out. I got this gig through a girl I drew on the tiyeled a week ago. There are several big parties tonight. I offload flyers to anyone who will take them at drop spots along the way to the Dolphinarium. The Dolphinarium beach-bar-restaurant complex, which houses a mega club called Pacha. Built near the Dan Hotel where the boardwalk hits the Turkish Fort at Yafo, Jaffa, the old Arab port that was here before the Zionists did all this building. No one I give flyers to will actually go to Mike’s because it’s an Americanized tourist jump-off right next to the American embassy.

It’s 10:40 pm. I make my way to Abulafia for a couple of mini pizzas. Abulafia is a 24-hour bakery that sells mini pizzas and pita soaked in olive oil with zaatar, a green fragrant spice that tastes like Palestinian oregano. The place has non-stop business especially around sunrise when it gets swarmed with club goers on the way home. That is when the fights break out between the Russians and Arabs or the Russians and the Ethiopians. It’s always the Russians and someone else. The owners of Abulafia seem to have a lot of sons and nephews named Muhammad. They do good business. One of them tells me they live in Yafo, the Old City, the Arab Quarter. It was the Arab port of long, long ago. The Yafo-Tel Aviv border is near the Dolphinarium and near a huge Ottoman prison that now apparently houses a sex club called the Dungeon.

***

A man disguised as Orthodox Jew in a cab is approaching the Dolphinarium. He is wearing a club suit and carrying a guitar case that covers a payload of ball bearings and nails. He thinks nervously,

‘It is too heavy. They will notice me as soon as I step from the cab. This vest and jacket are making me sweat.’

He looks out the window. The driver seems nervous. The man doesn’t say much. This is not a situation for small talk. He looks at his watch. It’s 22:53. He observes people strolling on the tiyeled as the cab speeds by. The cab passes the Sheraton Hotel. The man wonders if one day all this will be returned to his people. He wonders when these Jews will be driven back to Hell. It’s 22:57. He takes a deep breath and tries to come to terms with the fact that he will be dead within the hour.

***

Roman is standing outside the Pasha Club in the parking lot talking to his friends. He thinks, ‘Fuck this place. Fuck this place big time.’

Roman is of regular build and is wearing a tight black T-shirt and FOXX jeans. His shoes are polished. There is gel in his hair. He speaks in thickly accented Hebrew. He mixes in Russian words. When he gets angry, he stops speaking Hebrew altogether. He never goes anywhere without his cell phone, which seems to never stop ringing. All his friends are from the Ukraine. They are racially Slavic and technically Jewish, which is to say that they have a Jewish grandparent. This doesn’t change the fact that they go to the Orthodox Church.

This is his third time at the Pasha Club. He wouldn’t normally go to this venue, but the girl his friend has fucking dragged them along. Her friends are Russian origin, and they act like whores when they drink like most Russian girls he knows. One of them is Georgian. Her family is using Israel as a halfway point between the former Soviet Union and the US. Like most of the olim hadashim from that part of the world, they have no intention of staying here too long. Roman hopes his family get their U.S. visas soon because the Arabs are going crazy and he’s about to get drafted into the IDF.

The line is always too long. The Dan Hotel is across the street. Its plaza is large and white. He’s never stayed there, but he imagines it’s rather decent. When he gets to America, he’ll stay in a hotel like that. Or maybe even own one if he works hard.

***

I remember the basic joy of walking in the damp sand by the water with no shoes. Zachariah and Sebastian equate this with happy childhood memories so it’s pleasing to see the body they now share.

I finally break free from the crowd as I get to the end of Jerusalem Beach. I deliberately walk on the sand even if it means no people take flyers. I can see Yaffo in the distance. Compared to Tel Aviv it is ominous and lower key. I’m wearing my khaki pants with the tan button-down work shirt that says Mike on the left breast and has a Drop Kick Murphy patch sewn on the right.

I pass out most of the flyers for Mike’s Blues Bar to groups of arsim and frehhote. They ask me questions in Hebrew or Russian, but I hardly speak either language well enough to know what they are asking me.

I reach into my pocket and pull out a crumpled pack of Noblisse cigarettes. There are only three left.

***

The waves are crashing against the levy. The rocks extend out into the water, and you can walk along them toward the end, which is as good a place as any to smoke hash. The levy is on the sea side of the Dolphinarium. This section of the Beach is called Tiki Beach. During the day people play Congo drums and an outdoor café serves overpriced beverages with a scenic view. There is a private club next to the Pasha and a barbed wire fence prevents people from climbing from the levy into its outdoor section. House music is blaring from Pasha.

Slightly removed from the chaos, Ze’ev and his friends smoke a joint of tobacco mixed with hash. Ze’ev knows he’s a scumbag. The girl he and his friends had been gang-raping in his car had been left slumped against the rocks down by the water. They had pissed all over her before they left her. They’d slipped her a ‘knock out’ in the last club.

***

The man in the lethal club suit is approaching Target B in the cab. He had three targets to pick from. He had rejected the other two as unsuitable. He thinks, ‘I have never been to this part of the city before.’

He removes his wristwatch and places it into an envelope in the front seat. The envelope already contained his wedding ring, his wallet, and other petty personal effects. The only thing that remains is a small snapshot of his son and roughly 2 pounds of military grade plastic explosives. He begins a silent prayer, ‘My G-d is merciful, and all good things come of it. I will be your sword, my people’s sword against the Zionist dogs who killed my son and stole my land. Amen.’

***

I finally arrive at the Dolphinarium with no flyers to hinder my game and my two-step. Long lines had formed to get into the club. Its clientele are mostly underage Russian immigrants. Dave doesn’t need or want this demographic at his bar, but fuck Dave. What’s twelve dollars and a beer. Absolutely nothing. I should just dump the damn flyers in a trashcan and rattle off some tourist spots I magically hit up.

There are arsim everywhere. The word is sort of like the Bridge and Tunnel Crowd of Israel. A little meaner actually. They are dressed pretty much the same. Tight t-shirts, jeans, hair gel. They all reflect the same mannerisms and mentality. They always give me shit everywhere I go in the country while I’m selling art. My style is way too different for them. When they want me to draw something, it’s always crude and they never pay. They might sit and watch me draw and then wander off like crack heads with ADD. They are the club guys of the Middle East, the socio-economic equivalent to a mix of Jersey Guidos and ghetto Blacks coming to Manhattan clubs with a hard-on and a roofy. They love the ultra violence. Most of them aren’t from Tel Aviv. They just come here for the clubs and the tiyeled. Packs of them will follow groups of girls around propositioning them until a rejection or a hook up or rape. They take Ecstasy. They are offensive to everyone. They frequent bad clubs and get into fights. Not unlike the Jersey Guidos, they thrill me. Racially they tend to be non-Ashkenazi, Romanians, Russians, and the Yemenites who live in Israel’s smaller, rougher cities like Bat Yam, Rehovot, Peta Tikvah, and Pardes Hana. I watch young, stupid people try to get laid after they wait on a long line for a high-priced bottle of poison. The Russian immigrant girls look blazing. They are really loving this whole free market thing and are waiting eagerly to get visas for the US or Canada. In the meantime, they’re made up as hell even when they are only going to the store for laundry detergent.

I see my friend of three weeks, Roman, talking to former Soviet girls. The Israelis are curvier and less made-up. I walk over to give him a pound and he introduces me to several of the girls whose names all end in ‘a.’ They, of course, don’t speak any English. They are maybe Russian but could be from Kazakhstan because they look a little Asian. I have no idea what they are trying to say to me. Roman’s English isn’t too hot either. We mostly communicate through gestures and the occasional sentence or two in Hebrew. He is excited to have ‘an American friend.’ Like most of the Russians I’ve met, I have only the most basic knowledge of who Roman is as a person. I’ve known him for less than three weeks. He was the first person I met in Israel and when I’m in Tel Aviv he always quickly visits to get his lady friends to buy sketches off me. Then we party in broken Hebanglish.

***

Ze’ev wonders what that American asshole is doing here. He remembered how the guy looked at the girl he was with last week when he met them for the first time at his stupid hobo art stand. Ze’ev thinks he dresses like a hobo. I should tell my friend not to let that American hobo into the club. Nobody looked at his girls like that. Ze’ev wasn’t some little punk lookout anymore. He was moving pills and would soon get a piece of Jerusalem beach to milk or bleed.

Ze’ev knows everyone worthwhile in the Tel Aviv club scene. It’s all he’s been doing for the past four years. He gets comped at most of the low-end joints and a few of the mid-end. He’s still too young for the real hot spots. He does not like the niggers so most of the hip-hop venues are out. All the bouncers know he deals and that he’s affiliated so he gets in quick if the spot is Russian.

He wonders why those girls are flirting with the hobo. It’s because he’s American and they want to get to America by using him. It’s the only explanation. His pictures are stupid and communist.

***

The human time bomb steps out of a black cab.

As he surveys the scene, he thinks, ‘I’m so close I can smell them. These Israeli girls smell like whores. It’s the scent of my enemy. They all look so young. I don’t see any soldiers. My lieutenant gave me orders, ‘Take from them their young as they do to us.’ In a few years they’ll all be in the army killing my people anyway. One of those girls is giving me a funny look. They know I’m an Arab and I’m wearing a suit that’s too bulky.’

Quick thoughts race through his head.

He thinks about his son. He thought about his people. He thought about the land that they stole from his people. Someone points at him as he edges near the line. He tugs the ripcord at his sleeve.

“Salwa, I rejoin you,” he whispers to his long dead wife, “Palestine will be redeemed!”

***

I’m chatting up one of the Russian girls when I realized I was out of cigarettes. I told the girl to hold on for a second. I asked Roman if he had one. He told me that he did not. Everyone smokes, but I really want a Noblisse. They all have L&Ms or worse. I didn’t want to stop talking to the Kazak girl, so I asked Roman if I could toss him some loot to buy me a pack. He didn’t pick up the phrase ‘toss him some loot.’ He looked at me like I was crazy.

I look at my watch. 11:31pm. I hopped the barrier and was about to cross into the parking lot. I don’t even know if the kiosk is open across the street. I look back to see if the girl is still. . .

B O O M !

***

Ze’ev is telling his friend about ‘some chick that gave him head on the beach.’ That chick is a 16-year-old that he and three friends raped. She is lying unconscious face down in the sand by the water. He tells them he came all over her

B O O M !

What the fuck was that he wonders. It came from the street by the club entrance. Of course, he knows what it is. This is Israel after all.

***

Roman is on his cell phone. It’s hot as hell here, even in the night. He looks up and sees a quick bright flash before he dies.

B O O M !

***

I’m on my knees half deaf. I hear a terrible ringing in my head, but I can’t hear anything else. There are tiny droplets of blood all over me, but I don’t think any of it’s mine. Dozens of people are screaming, slouched on the ground. Some of them don’t look like much more than bloody bundles of tattered flesh.

There’s blood on the ground and there’s blood in my hair. I don’t really know what to do. I am slumped down facing what was once the outside of a popular nightclub. I reach into my pocket to pull out a smoke and I realize it is the fucking cigarettes that just saved my life.

My first suicide bombing. Saved by a fucking pack of cigarettes. There are a lot of dead bodies less than twenty feet away from me. I see the lights of the paramedic trucks and hear the sirens through the cluttered tunnel of my inner ear. I see people trying to pick themselves up and help the wounded. I’ve never seen so much real blood. Not in real life anyway. Everything I thought I knew about anything was ripped to shreds in a fiery burst of nails, ball bearings, and sharp things flying through the air. Violence looks so cool until you meet him in person. Then he just looks like the Angel of Death.

I try to stand up. I can’t. I am a coward in the face of it all. A part of me is thinking: So that is what a suicide bombing looks like. And another part of me realizes: Holy fuck! I just got all blown up. And another part of me, the part that has my undivided attention, is asking where the fuck our god was tonight!? Twenty-one victims are dead. Most of the dead are teenage girls from the former Soviet Union.

December 4, 2024 0

MEC-A1-SX

S C E N E (X)

Россияروسيا

Nizhny Novograd, Russian Federation, 2016ce

***

POLINA IVANOVA MAZAEVA

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

A pause.

“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.

Outside Moscow and St. Pete’s life is often lived quite poorly. Nationalism was at an all-time high. When many have an internal critique about our leaders, or the price of buses. 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. Curb the oligarchy to some degree and reign in the 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. Certainly, the upcoming bus boycott will test the limits of ‘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. Only the ultra-wealthy have any admiration for the Czars, except for of course Peter the Great who stands tall over Moscow.”

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 themselves 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. 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. 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.

She mentioned the contradiction only seldom. Their worst fights were Polina’s frequent accusations of Sebastian’s habitual womanizing. Which was real, but not as magnified as she made. 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, but from a mine. ISIS had allegedly booby trapped every room of every house of every village, town and city they had occupied.

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 a revolutionary delusion of grandeur and was now enslaved to his own expectations of heroism. Polina had fallen hard for her baby’s father and been rejected and 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 several times averted ongoing suicidal ideations 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 very most, he is the future. He is happy and free and built from diverse parts. Yazan is his name, and he is seven. 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.

Only the face of my son reminds me of him a little. 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 probable. He has my heart in some strange way. Only with his spirited words.”

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 21:

Dear Pauline,

“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 actually 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.

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

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!

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 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 affairs with other lesser women or get yourself killed in that war. There are many people besides me who care about you!”

November 27, 2024 0