“I’m sure you will, my young friend. I’m sure you will.”
And with that, Pyotr smiled and blew out the light.
CHAPTER 13
Solzhenitsyn once wrote that the only substitutes we have for experiences that we have not lived ourselves are found in literature and art. While we may take his point with the consideration it requires, it is reasonable to object that, on this one point at least, the great man was partly wrong.
In dreaming, there are no boundaries of perspective or expectation. The uncontacted native in his hut hidden along the thickly-forested Amazon dreams with the same wild unconsciousness as the Queen in all her splendor, once they each gird their loins and dive into that deep, encompassing darkness. In dreams are found the ferocious beasts of our primitive nature and the angelic wings of our best aspirations. Though dreams are fueled by our waking experiences, in the netherworld of sleep, like death, our minds become universal.
Vasily, worn out from the turbulent day and night before, had fallen into a fitful sleep that quickly dipped into chaos and light. He dreamt of long, slow walks along Elysian streams, and then of plummeting, headlong flights through air as thick as water. He gripped himself and passed into a seamless world of dark foreboding. His unshackled mind flashed to beasts of burden in neon glow being torn by jaws of fury, and this he left unconsidered, as we often do in dreams, and instantaneously he passed through infinite waves of sound until he found a still, small island. There, he swam in the love of women he’d never met and basked in the praise of men who despised him.
In his physiological response, he merely laid on the thin mattress in the dark and his eyes fluttered under their lids while his muscles twitched on their stems. But in the caverns of his mind, he was magical and golden, not a soul tied to a body, but a star burning bright in its firmament. He slept the wondrous sleep of saints who have passed through the gates of hell to find their rest in the bosom of plenty.
If the young man’s sleep was a dream, the town of Warwick found itself waking at that very moment to a yawning, terrible nightmare. After Vasily had slept for only a couple of hours, the sun rose over the hidden valley, and with it, the world opened wide underneath him.
With the dawn, the sleeping animosities that had been whispered in the darkness of the previous night burst out in full-throated alarm into the full light of day, and the townspeople of Warwick began to gather in groups of like minds, wherein they convinced themselves to take up arms and begin a struggle. The spark struck, the long line of woven animosities had ignited, and the resulting conflagration had begun.
Civil war in this wick began as it does in all such conflicts, with physical violence initiated almost as an afterthought. Men, enraged that their rights had been taken, and women, inflamed that their futures were dimmed, lashed out in the only way they knew how. During the night there had been only rumors of war, but, illustrative of the age-old proverb, people had gone to bed with their anger only to find it more wicked and volatile in the light of the morning.
The sudden blinding clarity of long-held ideologies came into sharp (if deluded) focus as the people shook the cobwebs from their heads and wiped the sleep from their groggy eyes, and as they filed into the streets, their usual morning greetings simply retreated behind threats and assaults, as if the nighttime had spread a virus of war, and as if subtle and as yet undefined hatreds had become the currency of the realm.
While no one could have answered, if they had been pressed to do so exactly what those ideologies and threats and hatreds fully entailed, there was a palpable animosity that swept through the population of Warwick, driven by instinct and history and hate. It suddenly seemed as if lives too dangerous to be free had become too unbearable to live any longer. It was as if a political storm had arrived on the heels of the two very real storms the people had just experienced, and the townspeople had no recourse to shelter.
There was the matter of the overthrow of power. There was the reality of the remembrance of promises not kept. Something simply had to be done. It was conviction. It was destiny. No one could go on living this way, the town was heard to say in a collective and contradictory outburst. “To arms!” the townspeople shouted. And they grabbed their pitchforks and burning torches and rifles and hammers and knives, and marched into the street to vent their spleen on the “others.”
****
The first shot in the battle for Warwick roared forth from the barrel of a Spetznaz rifle on a group of young men near the church. It was not some kind of planned thing. A soldier had ordered the young men to disperse while they were standing around and developing their arguments, and they had simply refused, thinking that his order had been a request.
One of the youths, alive with revolutionary fervor, turned to the soldier and told him to go back to wherever he’d come from, and then turned back to the group of his peers in order to revel in their laughter. It was an understandable boast, perhaps, the young man’s reply. There had been an air of lawlessness in the town since it had been overrun by the gang from the prison. However, in the un-codified law of unintended consequences, those consequences likely became inevitable in the face of anarchy, distrust, arrogance and fear.
Until this morning, the Spetznaz soldiers had seemed somehow unreal, merely props in a movie that the people had been rehearsing for all of their lives. When the young man told the soldier to get lost, he was merely feeling the vigor of youthful rebellion and was attempting to clear his throat using rebellion’s howl. Intentions and motivations aside (because who among us can completely judge those?), the facts, as they are wont to do, reasserted themselves. The gun had been pointed into the crowd and had barked its reprimand, and the offending youth from Warwick’s last generation had fallen silent before he had even entered the debate.
The shot rang out across the hamlet, and the sound of it congealed in the air as a confirmation to the various sides that the time had come to fight. And within moments, like the bursting of a dam, the town’s fury was unleashed, and the citizens of Warwick did fight.
In moments, the air was punctuated by the sounds of smallish clashes that grew into the ageless clatter of revolt. There was the sound of footsteps in the street and the sounds of anger in the peoples’ voices that always follow the first sign of battle’s confusion.
Excitement and release of pent-up frustration is always the first cause as well as the first casualty of war. In Warwick it was no different. Anger, like opportunity, came knocking at the door and, after waiting a perfunctory beat, had decided to kick the door in.
We should mention here that in most civil wars, with few exceptions (and most of those are Russian), tangible lines that can be seen and felt are established almost at the outset. The people divide themselves to the north and to the south, or perhaps it is to the east and to the west… or maybe they are bifurcated along racial, religious, or economic lines. This civil war, like most things Russian, was not as simple as that.
Mirroring the growing battle they knew not of, one that was at that very moment just beginning to rage outside the fences of Warwick village and across the whole of America, in this civil war it was much harder to tell the players without a program. Opinions, motives, hostilities, and friendships were more fluid. There was a loose and undefined picture of those who might be considered pro-Russia, and those who could, so long as details were not discussed, be considered anti-Russia. But, even within that false dialectic, there were conflicts and boiling volatility. As Malcolm X said, when you fill your house with barrels of gunpowder, and you play around with things that spark, it is very likely that your house will explode. Warwick was a house filled for generations with gunpowder, and the sparks were now beginning to fly.
****
Vasily had continued in his slumber as the earliest stages of the battle formed in ever-widening circles, but when it did widen, his dreams became more intense. He saw the oceans filled with lava and smelled air filled with sulfuric explosions.
His sleep, confusing
the beginnings of actual sensory intake with the unreality of his dreamlike state, filled in the details of the clatter with a wild and fanciful narrative. Had it been possible to enter his dreams and shake him out of his slumber at that moment, one would have found the mind of Vasily Romanovitch searching for a shelter from a hailstorm of meteors. One would have found him climbing through the rubble of destruction, calling out into the darkness for a friend, any friend to whom he could cling.
In his dream, he happened upon a hill piled high with ashes and cinders, and he scrambled up the hill in order to get a look at the surrounding landscape. As his feet slipped through the ashes, and as he fell into pile upon pile, he came to taste the ashes in his mouth, the grit filling into the spaces between his teeth, and his calling out for help became choked and muffled. Then, in that micro-instant before he awoke, with a crashing of noise emanating from the street and resounding through his wall, he suddenly saw a brightly-plumed Phoenix rise up into the sky like a capsule lifted aloft by a great balloon, and it began to spin like a whirling dervish.
Heart racing, and in the gray middling between wakefulness and sleep, he clawed to the summit of the ash heap. He spit out the ashes and felt his eyes burn. In that particular way that the helplessness of dreams inspires, he tried to wake himself fully, to connect his dream to his body. He tried in vain to raise his arms from his side. He tried to force the sound from his lungs.
It was in that moment that his eyes popped open, and he sucked in his breath in a gasping lunge. His body shot upright and out of bed, and he suddenly became aware of the knock at the door.
****
Pyotr had risen at the first sounds of conflict and had begun to busy himself around the house, making coffee in the slanting early light that peered from behind and around the curtains. As he did so, he listened to the growing sounds of mayhem, and he wondered at the state of his world.
He heard people come out of their houses, and he made out the rough substance of their shouting and imagined the violence of their movements. He listened to the scuffling from between the houses near his own and sat quietly as neighbors set upon neighbors, and siblings attacked their parents, as the proverb manifested itself in Warwick that a man’s enemies were often those of his own household.
As the coffee reached its boiling point, he quietly slipped into his clothes and looked at the pictures on his mantle. He remembered the day now twenty years past when he’d said goodbye to his family as he secreted them out of the town on a truck that he’d arranged with the help of his uncle. He looked at the stove and listened to the street and wondered whether his family was still alive and whether he would ever see them again.
Pyotr Bolkonsky had always been a quiet man, rarely letting people into his thoughts, but as he sat and listened to the growing chaos from the street, he wondered aloud to the point that he blushed at the immediacy of his thought. “How can these people fall upon their neighbors in this way?” he wondered. “I would give anything for a moment to be with my loved ones.” As he thought this, he heard stirring from down the hall, and he walked over to the stove and poured two cups of coffee.
There is a contradiction in the Russian soul, Gogol and Turgenev identified it, where a man both accepts his plight dutifully as payment for his sins, and rejects all of the individual elements that make up that reality as products of chaos and evil. As Pyotr brought his coffee to his lips and poured the burning liquid down his throat, he thought of this contradiction.
****
As is the case in peculiarly Russian civil wars, and as has been mentioned previously, in the earliest moments of the conflict, it had been unclear where the battle lines were bound to be drawn. The war that was raging was not two dimensional, but it jutted into the third dimension, and intersecting axes of conflict could probably only be seen and understood from space… or heaven.
There were bubbles of conflict that developed in the street, only to drift until they burst, spilling their contents into the wider community. Men who had no interest in the fight suddenly found themselves engaged in fisticuffs because they had happened to be wearing red, or blue, or yellow when they left their homes that morning.
Women, who were making their way to the market as they might have on any other day, were accosted in the lane for their opinions, or lack thereof, and were immediately drawn into the heat of battle. One might easily pass a neighbor on the street only to decide at a glance that he was not with you (or that he might become one who is against you), or one might remember that an insult had once been received at the hands of a friend and use the war as cover for revenge. Reason had taken flight with the dawn and had left behind only brute and animal feeling. Actions may speak louder than words, but reaction speaks loudest of all.
The personal combined with the political, and both were soon lost inside the immediate. It was dangerous to walk outside of the house, and in some homes it was dangerous to walk outside of one’s room, and truth be told, even in one’s room it had grown perilous to climb out from under one’s bed. There was simply no telling who stood where in those early moments of societal rage.
The people who raged in this battle, the townsfolk of Warwick, could not have known that in the America outside the wire, the microcosm of their struggle had followed an identical course, and the seeds of it had taken firm root. In both cases, like two twins who are separated at birth only to be reunited later in life to find that they have the same taste in food and the same interests in music, the town of Warwick and the nation generally had become inflamed by the threat of collapse. In both cases, the people had been blinded to this reality by the immediacy of their comforts, and by the seeming reality of their delusions. Now that comforts and reality seemed to be lost to the reign of chaos, everything changed.
It was surprising to find, therefore, that passing through the growing chaos in that earliest light of morning was a specter of nonviolence in the form of a soft young man with a secreted supply of reason and a critical eye. He wove in and out of the pockets of turbulence around him like an aircraft passing through a storm looking for good air. He slid by the commotion at the bakery, and walked straight through a crowd fighting at the bank, bumping shoulders with the combatants as if he were one of them, all the while not catching anyone’s attention. He moved toward his destination with skillful avoidance of the crowd, becoming lost in plain sight like a benign and pleasing blip on the radar. And all the while, as he piloted through the crowd, he watched with a watchfulness that was complete, as his sister followed along in his slipstream. The two were going to the house of Pyotr Bolkonsky.
****
Kolya and Natasha Bazhanov ascended the steps of the winding garden, being careful not to attract any unwanted attention. They knocked at the door and were immediately let in by the large burly man in the faded khaki hiking gear. The door shut immediately behind them, and they stood in the hallway and stomped their feet. They took off their thick winter jackets before offering a quick exchange of greetings.
“Hello, Pyotr. It’s good to see you again,” Kolya said cheerily. “Perhaps you know my sister, Natasha. We were told that this is the place to meet Vasily.”
“Yes. And hello to you both. Is the situation out there as dire as it sounds?”
“Yes, well, you know. The fog has descended. Brother against brother, that sort of thing.” Kolya waved his hand dismissively, paused, and took in the room and its surroundings.
Vasily stuck his head out of the door down the hall and called, “Kolya, is that you? Good. Hello, Natasha. I am just getting out of bed, give me a moment and I’ll be out to see you.” He nodded good morning to Pyotr, and went back inside his room to get dressed.
Pyotr spoke. “Natasha. Vasily told me that you were coming along. I see that you and your brother have come dressed for a hike. Excellent. I cannot tell you how ill-prepared some people can be when setting out for a journey. This is good. We’ve a long road ahead.”
“Yes, Pyotr, we’re grateful for the opport
unity to get out of Warwick at last. My brother here was so excited that he never even went to bed,” she smiled.
Pyotr looked over at Kolya, who had now bowed his head as if he were in solemn reflection, and his hand rubbed his pudgy chin, and his brow was down in honor of his thoughts.
“Well, we’ll find a place after a while where we can hunker down and get some rest. I don’t know what Vasily told you, but there is likely to be an electro-magnetic pulse event tomorrow that will be terrible in its extremity. Given what we already understand to be the social disruptions in the eastern seaboard, it will be a shock to the system that will likely never be overcome. Did you hear my uncle’s speech?”
“Yes, sir,” Natasha replied respectfully. “We paid close attention. But we weren’t sure what could be done about it, with all the guns surrounding this place. Honestly, Kolya and I had essentially decided we would just gather whatever information we could glean and then either hide out in our house or make some kind of desperate suicide run for the fence.”
Pyotr nodded his head, and as he looked over to Kolya again, he noticed Kolya looking at the blank spots on the wall where the holy ikons had been.
“Suicide is exactly what it would have been. Uncle Lev told me that Mikail will never let anyone escape as long as he has influence over the Russians.”
“As long as he is one of the Russians,” Kolya corrected him, without glancing away from the wall. Pyotr looked at him, not certain whether he appreciated the correction, but understanding its point.
“Yes, well, anyway, I have go-bags in the basement—packs prepared for a long journey. We’ll go down shortly and prepare for departure. Would you like some coffee to warm you up?” He walked into the kitchen and took down a couple of additional cups. The cabinet doors thudded with a light finality, emphasizing not the warmth of the coffee, but the word departure.
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