Moskau

by G. Zotov

  Here, time had frozen, congealed like stale honey. Life stood still, unchanging. How had the Russlanders overthrown their last Emperor? Nicholas II was at the frontline of the Fratricidal War between Russland and Greater Germany — while in Moskau and St. Petersburg soldiers’ wives fought in queues over the rations of rotten herring as there’d been no bread deliveries for two weeks. At the same time, the Yar, the gaudiest restaurant in Moskau, had been serving desserts of naked girls – smeared in cream and decorated with fresh fruit — to stinking rich war suppliers.

  Feasting at a time of plague was Moskauers’ signature character trait. The Triumvirate knew how to distract them from their discontent. Recently, Viking TV’s presenters had planted a new idea in their viewers’ minds: of Moskau proclaiming its independence from the Reich Union. The commotion it had created! All the online hoo-hah! Shogunet forums had exploded with ecstatic discussions complete with references to the prosperous lifestyles of Manchuria and the California Republic — the two other independent states – and how cool would it be to have one’s own money, laws and beer brands. Forum tittle-tattlers had chosen to ignore the fact that it was the Japanese Ambassador calling the shots in California while the Manchurians obeyed orders from the Head of the Kwantung Army[xxvi].

  The moment the Reich Union collapsed, Moskau would tumble like a house of cards. The Triumvirate was up to their eyeballs in debt to the Nippon koku; without Japanese money injections, they would soon be forced to declare Moskau insolvent. Then the true owners of the city would crawl out of the woodwork and restructure Moskau life like they’d already done in South-West Asia. The entire country would turn into the Nippon koku’s resource colony. The whole of Moskau would become one large work camp until the Japs squeezed it dry.

  Pavel had spent enough time in the Nippon koku to know its population’s opinion of the citizens of the Reich. Basically, they viewed the latter as a useless pile of shit.

  Blood trickled from his left nostril. Pavel pulled out a handkerchief and wiped it away.

  Radiation. Was this why Moskauers were in such a hurry to seize the day? They knew they would die soon anyway, their lungs exploding in bouts of coughing. Ever since he’d been a child, he’d always wanted to live abroad. Funny his dream had come true.

  The Japs were really stupid. Twice they’d tried to stop him thinking that the trigger agent would corrode the Third Reich from the inside in less than twenty years, ridding the Nippon koku of its sole competition. They hadn’t even bothered to ask themselves where the said trigger agent had come from.

  How totally naïve. Had the contamination affected the Reich alone, dissolving it bit by bit to nothing, Pavel wouldn’t have been so anxious. Cynical but true. If your shack has been destroyed by a tornado, you can always move to another one. This wouldn’t fill your heart with a mind-chilling horror, making you toss and turn through the night while staring sleeplessly at the ceiling. Everything was much worse than the Japanese thought.

  This wasn’t the end of the Reich. This was the end of the world. The end of planet Earth.

  The world was about to crumble, turning into a sand-like substance, then dissolving into thin air. Tokyo’s turn might come later but it would come nevertheless. The contamination ignored territorial borders. The Japanese curved-roofed houses, their dazzling city towers and even Mount Fuji itself would evaporate just as the Kremlin or Unter den Linden would.

  But until it started, the Japs wouldn’t lift a finger.

  Not that he cared, really. He’d been warned of the Japanese looking for him. The Reich Security office didn’t even know he was in Moskau which meant that the Japs’ mole wouldn’t be able to warn his employers of his arrival. As for Pavel, he knew where the trigger agent was going to strike next.

  He peeled himself off the wall and headed for the bathroom. He had to try this homegrown Führerjugend weed. He’d lock himself in the cubicle, roll a cigarette and take a deep draw. It had been a while since he’d done that, hiding from his Lebensborn teachers.

  No, he hadn’t followed the priest and Olga to their destination. After a three-hour meditation session, he could sense them both now on some other continent – possibly, in California. As he’d meditated, he’d clearly seen tall buildings topped with fancy towers and a sunlit street lined with palm trees.

  Luckily, he’d also sensed something else. Something that now filled his heart with calm expectancy.

  He didn’t need to follow them. They were coming back soon.

  Textbook #3

  A History of the Reichskommissariat Moskau

  The fake scholars of days past, all those Kabbalist plutocrats, concealed Russland’s true past from its people. Finally, using the declassified chronicles and first-person accounts that they had kept under wraps all this time, the Ministry of Public Education could compile new history books, free of Bolshevik fabrications.

  The rulers of Kievan Rus were Scandinavian Aryans who founded the Rurik dynasty. Research conducted by Professor Friedrich Königshof of Heidelberg University has proven that the population of Kiev between 862 and 988 AD spoke Old German and worshipped Norse gods. Only later, bribed by the Greeks, did the Aryan princes betray their people by adopting Christianity.

  The 1242 Battle on the Ice[xxvii] was a terrible act of fratricide. False accusations cooked up by the local Semitic community and Lithuanian plutocrats forced the Russlanders and the Germans to turn their swords on each other. Contrary to earlier fabricated evidence, the Germans won the battle, decimating the Russlanders’ army led by Prince Alexander Nevsky. The Prince himself fled to Novgorod, promising never to fight Aryans again. The Teutonic army left the battlefield and received Alexander’s capitulation in writing.

  The 1380 Battle of Kulikovo when Moskau’s Prince Dmitry Donskoi defeated the Mongol hordes led by Khan Mamai is another prime example of such fabrication. Prior to the battle, on an initiative from Lidwig Archbishop of Hamburg, all the churches of the Holy Roman Empire held a service to pray for the success of Russland’s army and to inspire Aryan warriors to battle. Unfortunately, the manuscript containing the full text of the service was later destroyed by Hamburg’s Semitic shopkeepers assisted by some unidentified plutocrats. The latest DNA tests show, however, that the Russian champion monk Peresvet who slew the Tatar champion Chelubey in personal combat before the battle was in fact a purebred Aryan.

  (When teaching Russland’s history to Tatar students, it is strongly advised to use A History of the Reichskommissariat of Turkestan textbook which states, in part, “Archbishop Ludwig prayed for Khan Mamai’s victory” and “the Tatar champion Chelubey who slew Peresvet was in fact a purebred Aryan”.)

  The Time of Trouble of 1604-1612.[xxviii] It has finally come to light that Tsar Michael Romanov could only ascend to the Moskau throne thanks to an army of German mercenaries who defeated the Polish invaders. The story of “Russland’s liberators Minin and Pozharsky” was a propaganda myth spread by the untermenschen striving to bury the evidence of the military solidarity of Aryan nations.

  Russland’s Golden Age under the rule of German monarchs. The reign of Peter the Great had started an era of prosperity even though no one at the time dared to admit that it was Germany and its best minds that had become Russland’s greatest acquisition. Peter the Great, the orchestrator of the Great Aryan Revolution, turned Russland into an exemplary German princedom complete with pipe smoking and coffee drinking. He was so eager to be German that in 2004, the Moskau Triumvirate decided to grant Peter’s biggest dream by issuing him a posthumous Blood ID. His reign, followed by the regency of Duke Ernst von Bühren[xxix] and the wise rule of Empress Katharina the Great turned Russland into the richest country in the whole of Europe. The latest research conducted by the Reich’s historians has proven that Katharina the Great never killed her Emperor husband Peter III in order to usurp the throne: the unfortunate Emperor fell victim to a Semitic conspiracy which used his blood for their Kabbalistic rituals.

  The 1812 war on Napoleon. It
was in fact Napoleon’s Prussian troops who turned their arms against the fabled French Emperor, thus saving Russland from being occupied by foreign heretics. To celebrate this joint victory over France, a monument has been erected in the Third Reich Square depicting a Viking handing a spear to an Aryan warrior clad in medieval Russlandish armor.

  The Great Fratricide of 1914-1918. A terrible disaster which brought about the collision of the million-strong armies of Russland and Greater Germany. Betrayed by Rasputin’s Semitic lobby, our Aryan brothers were dying for the profits of British industrialists, Wall Street traders and French black marketeers. In 1917, Russland’s progressive forces stopped the bloodshed by making a separate peace with Greater Germany and handing over the Baltic and the Ukraine. By doing so, they saved thousands of lives. Unfortunately, the Bolshevik cannibals took a rapid and treacherous advantage of the truce.

  The Liberation War of 1941-1984. Finally Russland’s centuries-old dream came true as all Aryan nations united into a federation of Reichskommissariats, prosperous under Greater Germany’s guidance. The Führer and his followers broke the back of Bolshevism, freeing the world from the danger of the Red Plague and liberating the Slavs from the combined yoke of Semitic capitalists and British colonialists. The day of July 25 1984 celebrating the fall of the Bolsheviks’ last stronghold in the Urals has been made an official public holiday.

  Approved for publication by the Ministry of Propaganda and Public Education, the Reichskommissariat of Moskau.

  Chapter Seven

  Isonomy

  Los Angeles. Meiji Hotel, Floor 9.

  I CAN’T SAY I’M SHATTERED by what I’ve just learned. Shocked, yes. But not swallowing-sedative-by-the-handful shocked. Not shocked enough to faint with the news. As I’ve already said, there’ve been too many inexplicable things happening around me just lately, most of them of the most nightmarish or, should I say, mind-fucking kind. Normally I don’t use this sort of language: the priests of my rank take pride in their truly Scandinavian reserve. But I just can’t put it any other way. This brain-searing information fits the crazy sequence of recent events stretching from Moskau to Uradziosutoku and on to LA perfectly.

  Olga has a point: I have several potential courses of action:

  To blindly believe everything she says.

  To admit she’s a schizophrenic in remission.

  To visit a psychiatrist to have us both diagnosed with the same.

  Ignoring the orderliness of the place, we lie on top of the fancy orange bedspread in Doc’s bedroom. We haven’t slept all night, too busy talking until we’ve poured our respective hearts out.

  I don’t even know what to ask her next. “Haven’t you ever felt this wasn’t normal?”

  “Of course I have. When it first happened I thought I was losing my mind. The easiest explanation I could find was that I was hallucinating. I thought it was caused by too much work and not enough sleep. Or just simply having a mental disorder. I read at least a ton of psychiatry books, I think. Did you know you can have tactile hallucinations? Because that’s what I had. I could sense everything. I could shake a ghost’s hand. I could run my hand against a phantom wall and feel its roughness. I could smell burning. After it happened five or six times, I realized I wasn’t hallucinating. What I saw was real. And I couldn’t even talk to anyone. Even Sergei, my best friend, would have thought I was losing my marbles. They’d simply fire me and ship me to Africa.”

  She was dead right there. Personally, I’d have her shipped to Africa right away. “Do you still remember anything… from that period?”

  “Very little. I feel I’m a child… about three years old, probably. I had a rag doll, Nana. Her hair was made of straw. I also had some painted wooden tablets I used as toys. I can vaguely remember a woman who picked me up in her arms… probably, my mom. I remember stroking a kitten… hiding under some large leaves in the garden… I remember eating raspberries. My cheeks were red with their juice. I hated red for a long time afterwards. The sight of it made me panic. I found it disturbing, frustrating even. For years afterward I saw the same scene every time I closed my eyes: a soldier in a field-gray uniform emptying his gun into my mother. Red spots on her chest. Raspberry color. As if she’d pressed a handful of berries to her dress.”

  I knew what she meant. I’d have found it disturbing too. “And that’s when it happened?”

  “Yes. I saw a flash. A blinding light. And a terrible roaring sound. I thought my ears would explode. Screams. Everything around me blurred, disappearing in a wall of flames. I fainted. When I came round, I was somewhere else. I didn’t recognize the place. It looked weird. I kept crying and screaming until I was blue in the face. Then I fell asleep.”

  She paused, staring in front of her. “Later my adoptive parents told me what a shock it had been. In the morning they’d left for work as usual, and when later that evening they’d come back, they discovered a three-year-old girl sleeping on their lounge rug! They were religious. I mean, they were Christians. Nothing to do with your Valhalla thing. So they thought it was a miracle. They didn’t have children of their own, you see. All foundlings had to be surrendered to Lebensborn but my parents were well-connected enough to keep me. Mom was a TV makeup artist and my Dad designed uniforms for the Ministry of Propaganda and Public Education. The DNA test proved I was Aryan, the rest was paperwork. They might have greased a few palms or called in a few favors… no amount of Third Reich laws can wipe out the Russlandish ‘scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ mentality.”

  She took a drag on her cigarette. “For years afterwards I would wake up in the middle of the night, screaming and in tears because I’d been dreaming about that soldier and other creatures in field-gray uniforms. My parents didn’t want to take me to a psychiatrist. Had he confirmed this to be schizophrenia, no amount of connections would have saved me. My parents loved me too much. They spoiled me rotten. Like many Moskauers at the time, they both died from leukemia when I was twenty.”

  She reaches for another cigarette. The ashtray is already overflowing.

  “Do you remember your real name?” I ask her.

  “No. When I turned fourteen, that’s when my teleportations got really out of hand. I kept finding myself in different time periods and spoke to different people who always told me the same thing: the village of Alexeyevskoe had been burned to ashes. No survivors left. Apparently, it had been an SS punitive operation as retribution for partisan attacks on their patrols. They shot all the adults, then locked the children in the only remaining house at the edge of the village and threw grenades into the windows. All the children died. Well, almost.”

  My heart clenches into an icy-cold fist. “I saw it, too. Soldiers wearing gas masks. They were shooting at everything that moved. There was rousing music playing… a march of sorts… The gunner was laughing. But I thought I was sick and hallucinating.”

  She shakes her head, then lets out a few smoke rings. “You weren’t. You saw what really happened. Through my eyes. This was another war raging in another world, simultaneously. Gosh, it was scary. I’d sit at home reading a book and then I’d be pulled out into a different time and place. And you’d never know whether they’d bring you back or if you’re supposed to perish in there. I tried to find out what it was that was happening to me. I looked for books to read up on it. It was Democritus — the Greek philosopher — who finally opened my eyes. You see, the Ministry of Public Education still isn’t sure whether Greeks can be considered Aryans. At least they don’t ban their books in the meantime. So it was Democritus who first suggested that there were other worlds coexisting with ours in the void of universal chaos. Some of them may be similar to ours, others totally different, but they all coexist, this is the main principle of the Democritean universe. Isonomy in its initial sense means equal opportunity. In other words, the very existence of our world means there’s bound to be another one out there somewhere which looks just like ours — but whose history might have run a different course.”


  She cast me a sideways glance. “Sometimes I stayed there for a few days. A week in one case. As I wandered through space, I had to do something with myself so I started looking for their books, especially schoolbooks. And I’ll tell you something. Their Germany lost the war. The allied forces of Russland, Britain, France and the US accepted the Germans’ capitulation in Berlin. They besieged the Führer in his bunker where he shot himself.”

  I still have the impression she’s rambling, delirious. “Listen, Olga. This, of all things, couldn’t have happened. At the time, Germany possessed by far the best army in all Europe. Its troops had trampled the soldiers of France, Poland, Yugoslavia and Greece into the ground. Operation Typhoon which saw the storming of Russland’s capital had been conceived by top German generals trained and hardened under von Moltke the Younger! Moskau was doomed from the start.”

  She flicks off the ash and shakes her head, insistent. “No. It wasn’t like that at all. Germany was defeated. It didn’t start any more wars after that. President Truman dropped two A-bombs on Japan, forcing Emperor Hirohito to surrender to the US. Mussolini was executed by Italian partisans who then hung his corpse upside down for everyone to see. The Reich’s entire leadership was tried in Nuremberg. Most of them were hanged, apart from Himmler and Goering who killed themselves with cyanide. In that other world, the Nippon koku is the land of tourism and electronic revolution while Germany is forced to buy gas from Russland.”

  On this I beg to differ! Germans dependent on our resources? Yeah right. Still, it’s not the right moment to argue with her.

  “Very well,” I interrupt her. “Then how do you explain your coming to our world?”

  She throws her hands behind her back and shifts her body, making herself comfortable on the orange pillow. “I wish I knew! I thought my brain would explode. Having done all the research I could on psychiatry and Democritus, I turned to physics. I tried to understand why this was happening to me. I might have accepted my being constantly pulled out of one world and thrown into another, but why those two? Why wasn’t I teleported somewhere else? There must have been hundreds of parallel worlds, according to the theory!”