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"The struggle of today, is not altogether for today--it is for a vast future also." "You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves." "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition." HI HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO HI HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO HI HOOOOOOOOO hi ho, HI HOOOOOOOOO hi ho Hi ho, hi ho, Hi ho It's off to work we go.............. Shit. I could never whistle. Some people don't have any problem with the whole concept of forcing air between the lips, bending it to their will to make pitches and tones. Hell, some people make a career out of it, like the nameless man who whistled the Andy Griffith Show theme. I'd like to think the poor bastard made a killing, but in all reality, he probably didn't. Probably some poor schmuck under the studio blanket doing his job, never for a minute realizing that every kid in America was going to pucker up and try to blow that fucker, off-key and squeaking on the high part, on their way to class, to the store, to the mall, maybe even to the fishin' hole, like Andy and little Ronnie Howard in the opening credits. Poor bastard. He probably blew his brains out. God. Sometimes I'm overwhelmed with how much I love this country. I feel this lack of ability to "pucker up and blow". It gets in the way with the song currently racked up on my own personal jukebox in hell, that's been playing endlessly on a perverse mental loop since I woke up this evening. Sometimes I think about those little men, so diligent, seeking diamonds deep in the earth, buried and cloistered like medieval virgins. All those little dwarves marching merrily in line, swinging their axes, putting their proverbial noses to the animated grindstones. Their only thought is to listen to their own endless tape reel playing: to work to work to work to work to work. Hi ho. Work. It's just work. Lately, there's been a need to remind myself of that. My professional life has taken on some sort of odd momentum. If I didn't have my remaining hand firmly caressing the emergency break like one of my dead lovers, I might lose some sleep over it. It's a dilemma. A conundrum wrapped in a mystery wrapped in my own personal packet of will. Or, as my grandmother would have said, "Alexi, eta dvai ya gznieh". Roughly translated: Alex Krycek, it is just your life. Most people, when they go to their place of business, wear a suit and tie. They leave their homes, nap on trains, grab a cup of voltage loaded espresso and enter a glass and steel Mecca with other people dressed like them. I did that once. Others go up on high steel beams, to begin a daily pas de deux against the elements, trading tuna fish sandwiches at lunch for lewd comments with mutually hard-hatted, rough skinned companions. There are those that start their day with a hum of a terminal, a baby's cry, a starting bell. In the wide diverse Western world, one thing brings all these people together, makes them unconscious brothers and sisters in living. They believe they are contributing. They believe their efforts will make a difference. Russians aren't like that. The people of my heritage are different. Maybe it is because they cut their first teeth on black bread instead of soft, white gluten. Wonder Bread would be inconceivable to my ancestors. It would be like a bubble of air to them, unfulfilling in its blue, red and yellow pliability. It would leave the taste of "empty" in their mouths. Soft people eat soft bread, they would think. And who's to say? They could be right. When I was young, to my parent's private horror, I used to live for peanut butter and strawberry jelly sandwiches on Wonder Bread. My mother told me that when they first came to America, they were floored that average people bought white bread as in Russia, it was a luxury only for the very rich. My parents used to tell stories of how as new émigrés, they'd wander the American grocery stores, holding hands like Hansel and Gretel lost in the woods, heads spinning like Alice through the Rabbit Hole from the sheer variety of affordable food available to them in this new country. The choices in pastry alone were mind boggling. By the time I came along, my mother ignored the voices of her grandmothers and found the courage to buy Wonder for her American born son. She never ate it though. Neither did my father. I miss them. It is just my life. Washington D.C. is a shit-hole of iniquity. There is no denying that. But, at as the sun goes down on the Potomac, she rolls over, stretches her long limbs around your heart and shows you her hidden face, all aglow with patriotic fervor. She is the most beautiful and seductive of women at night. It's the best thing about this, particular, meeting place. The view from my customary chosen step is phenomenal after dark. I sit here and wait for the appointed hour, letting my inner and outer battle scars allow me to pass as a straggling youthful vet. Lost? Yes, but not from the Vietnam memorial down the way. I come to these meetings early to savor the sight of the reflecting pool, the Mall doubly dotted with stone Greek laurels to heroes gone past, one in water one in reality and then Arlington, rising in the distance. It's so beautiful you could cry. When I first came here as an academy recruit, I wondered if the designers of this shrine didn't have a secret laugh while they positioned Lincoln's gaze straight towards Robert E. Lee's beloved homestead in Virginia. Of course they did. A simple placement of a building was a union's final jab at one of its greatest military minds, a well-respected man of uncompromising honor whose singular sin was in siding with the losing team. Poor Lee. He worked to protect what he loved. He was doing his job. I can get behind that. Anyway, it's good the view doesn't suck. Sometimes it's the only thing that gets me here. When the call comes, I've learned to focus, to start to savor the anticipation of these alone moments. These quiet moments that taste so good, just like chopped tomato and a whole dill pickle on a stadium hot dog. They take me back to the taste of residual cherry lip gloss on my high school sweetheart's lips during a slow dance under a mirror ball in a gymnasium. It was a lifetime ago, but it is just my life. It's a big flavor from where I'm sitting. The flavor of patriotism and high ideal, sweet as homemade strawberry ice cream and American as, well, apple pie. Everywhere you turn, everywhere you look, you can see the bravest we've been. A person looking out from these steps is surrounded by the best we've ever had. And here I sit in the middle of it all, like a blood stain on a perfect white sheet. How...fitting. How American of me to provide such diversity. It has to be here. You can't budge him from that. He says it's convenient. He says it's easy and unsuspected. He says it's impossible to bug. He says the traffic works in our favor. He says, he says, he says. Hell, he has more justifications than there are stars in the sky why we two should come here and have our dark tete-a-tete's. The irony is completely lost to him. Not me. I get it completely. In fact, it wakes me up from dreamless sleep to talk to it, keep it from being lonely. It taps me on the shoulder, curls up against me, breathing hot on my neck, threatening gently, "pay attention, Alexi, pay attention, if you are what you do, then this is your life. If you are what you believe, then this is what you have become". Alexi: it is just your life. I hear my grandmother say it like it was yesterday. Russians have always liked to erect statues of their political leaders. My grandmother's philosophy was the people liked to have a visual reminder, something firm in the ground to remind them who was responsible for their current state. I find it odd to go there now, since Communism was killed and left out back on the woodpile to rot. During the huge backlash of anger towards another regime gone sour, all the statues of former Soviet leaders were ripped down in fits of political ecstasy, thrown on trash heaps, dismembered like their demise would bring back the millions killed by their real life counterparts. The whole face of the cities has changed. Moscow, especially, seems empty for the loss of its thousands of pounds of cast iron and bronze. I wandered Red Square last time I was there, searching for familiar metal landmarks, but the figures of bravado and political importance have been erased. I guess they figure if you take the face off evil, then perhaps you can convince yourself the evil never occurred. The selective memory of the Russian people is more powerful than nuclear fusion. The two countries I hold dear are night and day in this respect. The thought of something similar happening here, to the Memorials dotting the Mall, all the cool white marble savagely dismembered under the hands of this country's own inhabitants is unthinkable to the average Bubba Joe of the U.S. of A. In Russia, it's a matter of course. But then life is no great deal to the Russians. Americans endeavor to preserve their quality of it. Russians don't even think about quality. They are perfectly satisfied to get through life alive. My appointment will be here soon, although it will be some time before we actually begin. He has his ritual to perform. I've grown used to watching it by now. I find him entertaining in his predictability. First thing, the old bastard doesn't smoke when he comes here. It's not that he can't, it's allowed outside, he just won't. God, it hurts him. He wants to smoke so badly, but under the shadow of the columns, his cigarettes stay firmly in his jacket pocket. The most he'll do is absentmindedly caress them through the fabric, as if even touching tobacco here would be sacrilege while he stares up at the great words and marble likeness of our 16th president. He touches his smokes the way I remember touching Marita. It's fuckin' creepy. Then, he has to go inside for a while, pausing in the entry, almost physically shrinking from the residual weight of the long dead Commander in Chief's grave responsibilities. Often, he'll walk around, reading the quotes on the walls like they held the answer to all the questions ever asked or considered. He finally ends up standing in front of the stone seat, looking up into Honest Abe's features, a blend of firm and tired, of marble and cream colored light. My summoner stood there 45 minutes once, transfixed, pupils dilated, a slight smile on his face, as if he was trying to get the rock mouth to speak or will the sculpted eyes to blink. When he finally stops his tour of high sentiment and comes out to start our meeting, he's flushed, glowing as if some inner fire of his has been stoked. His step is firmer than before and as his fanaticism rises to the top of his brain, he gets this weird glow in his eyes. He looks like a man possessed. Then, following the pattern of every meeting prior to this one, he asks me to do something for him, to further the purpose, to act as an exterminator to preserve the greater good. He used that phrase once. "You realize that what I ask you to do is for the preservation of humanity's greater good? Think of it not as a man's life or a bureaucratically driven decision. This...obstacle must be removed so that change can be affected. Change for the good." He reached up and twiddled with his cigarettes. I had to stop myself from shuddering. "You and I, Krycek, are the facilitators to bring around the next great age of this planet. We are in a real sense, the next incarnation of the Knights Templar. The chosen guardians of mankind." Then he asked me to kill someone's grandfather. It hasn't been the same since. I always liked the chosen victim. A pure gentleman, that one. His British sensibilities kept my current employer under tight rein. Still a believer in the Rules of War, he kept his enemies close. I believe he really was, like Lee, doing his duty for what he thought was best. I thought they all were. Although my recruitment was...enforced instead of solicited, after working with the group for a while, I began to think I might have sided with the good guys after all, with the next incarnation of Jeffersons and Adams. If I stuck with them, I might be able to join the greater Western collective at last. I, Alex Krycek, could make a difference. But things changed. I shouldn't have been surprised. It is just your life. I agreed to plant the explosives in the car. I guess I wanted to believe in his tarry convictions that time, that there was an enemy from within. I wanted him to be right. He was so firm, here on the steps, hands steady as iron although he hadn't smoked in over an hour. It would be for the best, it would get rid of people that wanted to stand in the way of right and true and good. It would be *THE RIGHT THING TO DO*. For once, my own cheeks became flushed with fervor. My step grew firm as I headed out into the night. That one time, I believed him. I believed IN him. I really did. I don't like to go in the pavilion. The steps do for me. I can see the great seated figure, feel his stone eyes penetrating into the back of my neck, bringing goose bumps to my remaining arm. It's such a powerful feeling, sometimes, I think I feel my missing appendage's skin freeze and prickle under the gaze of the Great Emancipator. I've often wondered if I'd have the same reaction elsewhere, say at the Wall or at the huge stone tribute to patriarchal society, the Washington Monument. Personally, I think I'd feel more comfortable at the Jefferson Memorial. Jefferson was a revolutionary of sorts. He would have understood. Which is more than I could say for my grandmother. I don't think she would understand this at all. She was my instructor in all things Russian. When it became apparent that my parents would prefer to forget their Motherland, she took the sacred duty upon herself to make sure I remembered the place where, except for great luck and chance, I should have been born. She remembered every one of her life's experiences, played them over in her mind again and again until she could practically make me breathe the salty air outside her Uncle Sergei's summerhouse by the Caspian Sea or taste the tea from the family samovar, left behind with her sister, Natalia. Her memory's attention to detail was so great, it allowed me on my first trip to Russia to travel her St. Petersburg, re-named Leningrad, like I had lived there all my life. As my parents endeavored to let me grow up in the "American Way", with all privilege that came along with that phrase, my grandmother followed her own agenda in order to make sure I never fully rooted in this new soft world's soil. I was fifteen at the time of her death and although I was American by birth, through her teachings and strength of will, she alone had made me, in spirit, a child of Russia. Her name was Maia. That's what she wanted to be called by all. She was small, but substantial. When she walked into a room, you could feel her presence reaching out to make you stand straighter, the sheer power of persona adding 120 extra volts of energy to an already well-lit room. The only other woman I've met that could compare to her in that regard is Dana Scully. I think it every time I see her. She should be flattered. My grandmother was the greatest lady I've ever known. She came with my parents when they, against all odds, got out of the former Soviet Union. The forgery costs were expensive to someone who made the equivalent of 10 U.S. dollars a month, but they were able to produce well made, official looking papers that proved that my Grandfather, since deceased, was a dissident and a Jew. It's funny. Even though religion was abolished by the State, if a person could show proof of Jewish lineage, it was reason enough to let the faceless men masquerading as the Fates draw back the Iron Curtain long enough to kick you and yours right through it. No Jews allowed at the Communist's party. They could soil the state linen and leave crumbs on the red floor. Maia learned only a little English in her 17 years in the Western Hemisphere, however she never found it a hindrance. She was more than capable of communicating her needs to any non-Russian speaking clerk, bank teller or pedestrian she felt needed talking to. English was a bother and puzzlement to her. Until the day she died, she could never fathom the verb, "to be". To be. Such small words with such a great burden of responsibility. The Russian language doesn't contain the verb "to be". Translation dictionaries will give you alternate words, but there is no conceptual way to communicate "I AM". You can only make direct statements, like, "Ya Alexander Michelivitch Krycek." I Alexander, son of Michael, Krycek It's direct. You cannot hide behind "am" in Russia. It's just you. It's just your life. Maia Petronova, daughter of Peter, taught me well. Made me practice my Russian until I sounded perfect and spoke with fluent idiom. She dragged me back inside history with her, taught me to see how things were when she was a girl, living in Perm, subject to a Czar that lived a world away in Moscow. She actually remembered seeing his train go past once when she was 8. Her entire family went. The Imperial transport was scheduled to race through a nearby village and all the local residents had gathered for the momentous event. Of course, the train itself didn't stop. There was no president aboard to solicit votes, to be a servant to the "press the flesh" disciplines of democracy. Only a man and perhaps his family on board (Maia swore she saw a swirl of princess-golden hair at one blurred window), people blessed with divine right of kings for another 2 short years. Nicholas' empire was in decline by then. Already the famine and decay touched everyone my great grandparents knew, even way out in the sticks near Perm. But, it wasn't enough for me to simply be able to regurgitate facts about hard times and falls of empires at my self-appointed tutor. It was imperative to her I understood the implications of it all. Maia would grab my face and clutch it hard, look me straight in my eyes, vehemence radiating from her like a furnace. Her voice would lower to a Slavic growl and she would slowly say, like I was a mental deficient in need of the simplest of terms, "It would have been better. Can you understand, Alexi, pricrasnie mouchina? It would have been better to starve to death under Tsar Nicholas and that German dog he married than to have to endure what came for us next." She meant Stalin. Stalin set Russian to bleed. She never spoke his name. Unlike "to be", Maia had full grasp of what these two little sounds, drenched in a river of Russian blood could conjure up. Best not to invoke them. Any historian would say the residents of volatile countries expect periodical and occasionally radical changes in government. What they should tell us, stress to everyone in this whole wide world, especially here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, is to remember no people ever expect the next memorable figure in their beloved homeland's history will be an Inquisitor. Or a Joseph Stalin. The possibility of it should make die hard atheists fall to their knees and pray. My grandmother was a survivor, although she would have slapped you if you dared to call her that. She learned to play it smart, to be as safe as she could in a world whose rules changed randomly all the time. In the light of self-centered despots posing as patriots that came into power throughout Bolshevik Russia and then through the iron fist of Stalin and his terrors, my grandmother could see that caution should be more than a wise idea. It had to become a lifestyle for her and those she loved. My grandfather did not understand this. I was named after him. As I sit here on these steps, I surpass my father's father for I fully understand what he could not. All my grandmother's teaching comes to fruition in his namesake. There were two of us in the alley that night. Two of us assigned to a job of such importance. It turned out to be a wise thing too as the Brit managed to kill the other one, the driver. It left me no choice. It was my turn. It was my kill-shot. Just a push of the button and BANG, the explosives I had tended as carefully as a hothouse orchid a few hours earlier dispatched him officially out of the way of the White. I thought I was an emissary of good. At that moment, I wanted with all my heart and soul to be a hero. Like any other soldier. My grandfather was one of the top professors of mathematics at the University of St. Petersburg. It was one of the finest centers of higher learning in Mother Russia at the time. Alexander Pietrovitch Krycek was proud of that fact. He was proud of his position. So proud, that in August of 1947, against all warnings of his sensible wife, in a well-publicized open lecture, he refused to call his place of employment by it's new and improved State sanctioned official name, the University of *Leningrad*, named to honor the glorious leader of the revolution, long may his name be praised. Word traveled fast. My grandfather's invitation to the party was withdrawn the next day. He was abruptly shot at point blank range in the head when he answered the door of his house, in front of Maia and my then 8 year old father. The nameless soldier turned on his heel and walked away, mission completed, leaving my grandfather's brains to dry on the entryway hall, Maia's screams fading with every step he took. I'm sure the soldier was just doing his job. He probably sang a Russian version of the little dwarf song on his way to the impromptu execution. He was cleaning the system of dissidents. He was a Knight Templar. In murdering my grandfather, he was a hero. Hi ho. I read in a brief after the fall of the KGB, they confirmed that 47 million Russians had died as a result of forced collectivization and Stalin's purges. 800,000 people died in the years of the terrors alone. Alexander Pietrovitch Krycek was one of them. I pray sometimes to ask that Maia be unable to see me. If my prayers go unheard and she is watching, I hope that she will understand. Maia, it is just our lives. Revolution and Intrigue are weird relations. They're like sisters, both dark, wild and periodically inviting. I've slept with them both now. I've had my way with them, trying to bend them to my will, yet they thwart me every time, leave me panting and straining, throbbing with effort for little, if no, gratification. These are girls that know their ways around dark alleys. These are girls you would not take home to mother. Their cousin, Heroism is different. Heroism is the girl you want to marry. She's expensive and magnificent, she can cost you all you have, but ultimately, she's worth all you give to possess her. The granite man behind me courted her and got shot in the head at close range for daring to kiss her, for daring to call her his. I'm quite sure he would have felt it an appropriate price tag. It was just his life. I made a vow that day, standing in the alley, watching Fox Mulder run away from the flaming car that this would be the last time I would try to kiss such an elusive beautiful woman as Heroism. Since I could not get out, from then on, it would just be a job. A way to get paid well. A way to stay alive. From then on, the only causes I'd serve were ones that came from me. Still, as I sit in these silences of memorials dedicated to truly great men, I'd like to know that my decision to ride this delicate rail of middle against both is right. I'd like to find the way to be certain I am a Jefferson or an Adams and not just a dirt encrusted blade, wielded by a potential dictator. I'd like to be able to go to sleep every night knowing that day, I aimed at being an Archangel and not a dark horseman heralding the rumblings of cigarette smoke-stained Apocalypse. Most of all, I'd like to be certain that Maia would still love me for what I have become. Ya Alexi Michalivitch Krycek. I am Alex Krycek, son of Michael. Ya Amerikanski Ruski. I am an American Russian. Ya Krycek. I Krycek. This is just my life. He's here. Let's start this hootenanny. finis Peace, gentle readers. Thanks for making it all the way down here. |
Native Sonby M. Sebasky |