Tanya

[PARADOJAS]

I got this email from a RW a while back. Sound familiar to anyone?

Hello my special man,

Your letter is light cloud of tender touches which surrounds me with its warmth.
Your words fly to me like white doves across space which separates us and nestle
on my shoulder to whisper sweet love words in my ears. My soul is deep and profound
like Russian history and culture from which it has sprung. It is reflected in poetry I write.
Soon in Moscow there will be grand competition for poets from all of Russia. I wish to
enter this contest and win prize money so that I will be able to contribute to my family's
welfare. Perhaps I make courageous words to you. Please do not think badly of me. I ask
of you $250 to help publish my poetry and enter competition. I am able to return money if
I am lucky and make first place. Tomorrow I will take train from Minsk back home to Moscow.
Is it possible for you to visit me there?

Kisses, Tanya
P.S. I miss you very, very much! 

[ECOCKS]

Hey man, I hope you sent that young poetess $500 so she could enter and really do her BEST!

If you didn't, how will you sleep at night now?

Seriously, if this is what you'd rather do than wash your hair tonight, send her a missive saying your heart yearns for her so much that you have begun saving to come visit her in Moscow and cannot send the money now. In only a few months your heart and souls will fly as one into the nethercleft of love.....soaring to heights whcih she has never dreamed possible.

Ah, I am beside myself.....

[Lily]

How careful and creative is the scammer in this letter. Wouldn't her or his epistolar efforts be worth $ 250,-? 

[PARADOJAS]

Actually ECOCKS, I was in Piter when "I" got that email. Also, I shave my head, so the hair washing wouldn't be an option. And Lily, I have to agree, it was quite the creative effort. But it was only after "I" traveled to Moscow until "I" saw just how creative Tanya was. BTW, I should mention before this goes any further, that I am reliving all of this vicariously through the eyes of a close friend, Wes, who was actually the one who got the letter and went to Moscow to see Tanya. Sorry, I got carried away in the moment...

[PARADOJAS]

Okay, Superbowl is over. More about Tanya:

As previously mentioned, my buddy Wes (not me) received that letter from Tanya. Wes and I hung together for a while in Piter.

Wes met Tanya at Peter and Paul Fortress. She was outside the fort leaning against the wall, topless sunbathing. She claimed standing up was the only way to get an even tan and that she absolutely abhorred tan lines.

She worked for some marriage outfit in Moscow called "Princess Olga's Marriage and Introduction Agency." She handled correspondence, and she told Wes that her true loves were poetry and dancing, but neither of these could provide her with sufficient income to sustain the lifestyle she felt she deserved.

Wes moved into her apartment near the Belorussky train station in northeast Moscow. This was the summer of 2001. Their cohabitation lasted two months before imploding. Google Princess Olga and you'll see part of the reason why.

[Jumper]

She handled correspondence, and she told Wes that her true loves were poetry and dancing, but neither of these could provide her with sufficient income to sustain the lifestyle she felt she deserved.

It wouldn't require much to understand *why*.. it imploded.....

*why* he would get involved seems the real question?
unless he was just looking for fun.
*shrugs*


Met in 2001?  when was this poetry competition letter?
this is some pretty dated material..
no pun intended.

[Faux Pas]

There's only about 300,0000 hits on google for Princess Olga. You might speed this along just a smidgen if you explained to us layman "Princess Olga"

Thanks in advance  

[Muzh]

Master, are you at it again?

[PARADOJAS]

Yup, Carlos, I'm at it again with an updated version. The story as taken on a life of its own with an inertia I can't stop.

Link to Princess Olga: <http://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/history-and-mythology/princess-olga-of-kiev/>

As to the story being a decade old, well my friends, some stories are timeless.

RJ

[PARADOJAS]

A letter from Wes to me (Mike is a psuedonym):

Thanks for wiring the money, amigo. I’ll try to explain what’s going on.

The woman I’m seeing, Tanya, is a complete paradox. Maybe that’s part of her attraction. Remember in Honduras what that scout from Matagalpa said? That the hardest sign to track is the trail across a woman’s breast. I keep thinking if I can pick up enough signs from Tanya, the trail will lead me to the essence of things...not only hers, but to the Russian psyche and to that most elusive of beings...the female mind. (I can hear you laughing eleven time zones away.)

Tanya works at that marriage agency I had you wire the    money to. I’ve met her boss–an Afghan war veteran. They’re running a scam over there at Princess Olga’s. Do you know where they got that name? Back a few centuries ago, after some tribal shah murdered the Princess’s husband, the shah sent emissaries to her to propose marriage between them. Considering she just lost her husband, the princess was very congenial. She    told the emissaries they had to bathe first, and then she would meet them, so a bathhouse, aka banya, was built. When the emissaries took off their clothes and went inside, the door was blocked from the outside and the banya was set on fire.                               
I think Princess Olga has returned with a vengeance. What better way to strike one for the Evil Empire and have a good laugh in the process, then to open the door to the website of romance and invite your marriage-minded former adversaries to enter. They see the beautiful photos hanging on the gallery walls. They are lured farther into the depths by the love words the agency divas sing. Once these internet Romeos are inside the banya of love and are stripped down to their naked emotions, you lock the doors behind them and walk away with what they left outside. You like those metaphors? I think I’ll save them for a book.                        

Tanya is definitely a major diva at Princess Olga’s. She can sing those siren songs in three part harmony when she needs to. She hasn’t laid the full monte on me yet...but I’ve heard her humming a few bars. Somehow Tanya knew my dad’s name was Wesley and her boss knew I’m ex-military. Russians are savvy when it comes to internet espionage, and I get the sensation she and Sergei are feeling me out, testing me for something down the line.                
I’m set up at the agency as Leonard Cohen. He’s conversing with “Nina”. Nina’s last email has got Tanya’s syntax all over it...it’s her second letter, and she’s already pumping Lenny for English lessons. I need to send Nina photos of our boy Lenny. I already gave her Cohen’s physical description...guess who I used for a model? Dig out some pics we took on the boat last year. Make sure no part of me is showing in any of the photos. Tanya has gotten fairly familiar with my anatomy. Also go over to Cardiff and get a shot of you in front of one of those beach mansions. Lenny’s a rich lawyer who wants the world to know it. Send the photos to: princessolga@mail.ru and put “Photos for Nina Rubaskaya” in the subject box.

Lenny’s email is jeu_de_mots2020@yahoo.com. The password is paradojas. Write Nina a short note and sign off with “Paka, Lenny.” BTW, paka is Russian for later. Check out the emails we’ve already exchanged so you get some of the rhythm and flavor down.                            

Let’s run with this Mike and see where it goes. I’ve got to go outside and stoke the banya so it’s hot when Tanya gets back. I’ll let her go in first and keep myself between her and the door though, lol.

Hasta lumbago,

Wes

[Jumper]

Before someone mentioned youi wrorte a book about a western man in st pete..
it got to the point of publishing then they dint know how to marklet it?




so is this bit part of that  work of fiction?



or a game you and a buddy actually ran on an agency, and agency girl back in 2001?


no big deal either way, doesnt really matter, but if i'm reading , I  like to know the context.

[PARADOJAS]

Hey AJ,

A bit of both. As any good story teller will do, I've used some "artistic" license in recounting this story. When Wes realized he might be involved with someone who was scamming western men, he wanted to know for sure for several reasons.

1) He and Tanya (not her real name) were becoming quite intimate.

2) Wes had been hustled before by a woman in Piter whose "address" turned out to be Kresty Prison.

3) Wes met Tanya's boss--Sergei (not his real name) and a "mental' chess game developed.

Hence, Wes decided to write to The Princess Olga Marriage and Introduction Agency (not their real name) and pose as a potential client--one Leonard Cohen. What developed was a "virtual" online relationship between him and Tanya--who was posing as Nina Rubaskaya--while all the time Wes and Tanya were livng together.Everything changed though, especially after Wes met Vera.

RJ

[PARADOJAS]

A scene from Tanya's boudoir (BTW, Colter is Wes's last name):

                                    
The opal- and rose-colored walls of Tanya’s bedroom exhaled perfume. Sachets of lavender and orange blossoms hung from the bedposts of a cherry headboard, and a frilly homemade quilt covered a queen-size mattress. The quilt’s blue geometric patterns reminded Colter of the gingerbread houses he had seen in a photo book about Siberia. He swept his hands over the soft fabric of the quilt.                     

“My granny made it for me,” Tanya said. She turned the quilt over, revealing a two-foot slit. “You can put in stuffing to make it warmer. Even in winter I sleep naked.” She pursed her lips and walked over to an oak bureau. Several hand-painted icons of religious figures hung from a mirror mounted atop it.                

Tanya had told Colter she studied ballet for several years while living in Belarus, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union her parents could not afford private lessons. Nevertheless, Colter thought her years of training had been well spent as he watched her shed her clothing with a graceful flourish of arms, legs, shoulders, and hips.           

“Darling, you are good man so I do not want to make games. I make po dusham, soul talk with you. When we meet on beach, it is no accident. My girlfriends in Piter work in gift shop at fortress. Everyday I go to visit them and I see you running around fort. I think you are strong and handsome man, maybe you are from western country and have good finances too, so I decide to meet you. It is not so different from you.”      

Colter stared into the mirror where Tanya smiled at his reflection. “What do you mean ‘it is not so different from you’?” Tanya pirouetted, hands behind her back, and unclipped a black see-through bra.

“Darling, I do not think you decide to stop in front of me at beach to find pebble in shoe and admire fortress architecture,” she said, slowly peeling off her bra. 

[PARADOJAS]

A scene from the banya at Vera's dacha in Peredelkino:

In the next room, half an hour later, steam rose from the rocks, filling the bathhouse with a eucalyptus scent. Colter lay on the lowest bench, bathed in sweat while Tanya crouched by a bucket. She squirted drops of oil into a ladle of water then splashed it onto the rocks. The steam rose toward the roof and dissipated while Tanya ladled more water onto the hissing stones.                             

“Pushkin wrote banya is second mother to Russian people. It is necessary to make good bath to protect oneself from unknown elements. This is called venik,” Tanya said, parting the steam with a birch branch. “When skin is whipped with it, blood is brought to surface and rid of poisons. Also it will make you cooler.”

Colter twisted his head to face her. His sweat trickled into pools spaced along the wood plank below him.            
“What is it with you Russians…Are you all a bunch of sadomasochists or something?” Colter asked, after expelling a lungfull of hot dry air.              

“What is this word, sadoma…”                   

“Sadomasochists. They’re people who enjoy suffering and inflicting pain.”      

“Russian people have experienced much suffering and pain. I do not think we enjoy it,” Tanya said, the golden light from the lamp highlighting her slender shoulders.      

“Maybe it is subconscious enjoyment. Suffering is something you Russians have known for so long you begin to identify with it as part of your psyche and ethnic heritage. You take it as a point of pride as to how much suffering you can endure and...”      

“Maybe, but what about other part...about...”                  

“Inflicting pain? Tanya, despite what you think about your godfather, Stalin was the granddaddy of all sadists, and he’s not alone. There’s no way a system like the gulags could have continued unless there were plenty of sadists to prop it up and...”         

“Always you make Russian people to look like evil ones!” Tanya shouted. “You should think what your country has done to Indians and black people. Maybe your George Washington is sadist too!”                        
“Okay…okay, let’s change the subject. How’s the poetry contest going?”          

“Poetry? You wish to talk poetry now? I show you poetry. Here is famous western poet Joyce Kilmer,” she cried, thrashing Colter with the birch branch.           

“Wait...stop it. Kilmer wasn’t a sadist,” Colter laughed, raising his forearm to block the birch blows to the back of his head and shoulders. The venik assault subsided, and Tanya drew in a breath.                         
“Maybe he is sadist and maybe not. I think that I shall never see…a poem as lovely as a tree,” she said, bursting into laughter and waving the birch branch in his face.    

[PARADOJAS]

When you are cold and hungry                                      
lost on some alien sea                                   
with darkness all around you                                      
and rocky shores nearby,                                                
you whisper out my name                                   
and just like the Morning Star,                             
I will rise up shining                                     
with love to fill your sails.                                                

Tanya’s words pulsed in rhythm with his meter-long strides, lulling Colter into reverie then pulling him back into honed awareness. Two days ago at Patriarch’s Ponds, the possibility that Bulgakov’s Devil had resurfaced in Moscow, causing mischief again, seemed entirely possible. After Tanya pointed to the contents of her pouch and said she wrote fairytales to finance her lifestyle, Colter asked to read a sample of her work. She hesitated, and then placed the pouch on the curved wooden bench. The plastic zipper had separated less than six inches of the black bag when a squall materialized on the pond, gusting across a grassy area to where they sat, snapping tree limbs and overturning trash barrels. They retreated to the shelter of a café before returning to Tanya’s apartment, neither of them mentioning the incident until the following day.                

Earlier that morning, while Tanya called a taxi to take her to work, Colter bought bread at a corner kiosk. When he returned to the apartment, a note leaned against a mug on the kitchen table. It asked him to meet her that evening at Zen Coffee, a café a few blocks from Tanya’s office. The eight-line poem lay next to the note with: "To my darling man love and kisses, Tanya" scrawled at its bottom. Colter read the poem several times while eating a breakfast of black bread and tea. Then he glanced at a map one final time.      

Although Sokolniki Park lies just three miles from Tanya’s apartment, it took Colter forty minutes to run there, navigating through a maze of side streets north of the Kremlin. Entering the park, he felt it well worth the effort. Emerald trails wound through wooded thickets, around wind-shimmered ponds, and over grassy hillocks. The arching  maples, birches, and elms carried him back to his years at the University of Vermont where he studied Russian literature and skied and ran on trails not so different from those at Sokolniki. It was at UVM, twenty-five years ago, that he became fascinated with Russian culture. What Colter sensed from the start was Russia and its people were a paradox, and his experiences during the past month had done little to dispel this view.        

All that internet propaganda about traditional Russian women. Tanya...a traditional woman? Colter laughed aloud at the thought. She could be a poster girl, her and the Queen of Spades riding on a float in the Rose Parade, stepping out of a peeled onion, Miss Ambiguity written on diagonal ribbons across their breasts. She reveres both Bulgakov and his censor Stalin. How does she reconcile that?               

Colter exited from a thicket of conifers into the sunlight. Off to his left the antenna of the Ostankino television tower levitated over seventeen hundred feet into a boundless cerulean sky, tickling the underside of a billowy cloud.                 
That white cloud like a sail, blowing across the Aegean, “lost in some alien sea”...like Ulysses, Colter thought. That’s what I am...a modern day Ulysses on a cerebral voyage in the land of enigmas. But I’m not trying to get away from it, the enigmas are pulling me in. Nobody ever wrote a poem like that for me. But what’s in that black bag I bought her? Letters to customers of her marriage agency? Emails asking for money like what she wrote to me?   

[PARADOJAS]

Riders on the storm                                          
riders on the storm.                                          
Into this house we’re born                                       
into this world we’re thrown,                           
like a dog without a bone                                      
an actor out alone                                                                       
riders on the storm.                  


The flat forested land punctuated with faded villages unfolded before them as the truck sped down the two-lane highway. Sergei lowered the volume on the CD player.      

“Jim Moryson is great poet, I think rooskee blood runs in his veins. It is true CIA kills him?” He looked over to Colter, who only shrugged his shoulders. “I think they kill John Lennon too. Why they do not like these men who tell truth?”            
Colter thought back to his dream of a few nights before...to the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam who had been sent to his death in Eastern Russia by Stalin. He glanced at Sergei and grinned. “I guess the CIA was just trying to keep up with the KGB.”       

Sergei’s puckered lips relaxed into a smile as his eyes focused on the road ahead. He had borrowed a small delivery truck, and he and Colter drove back to Moscow from St. Petersburg. Computers, monitors, keyboards, and printers filled the nondescript white truck. Colter jerked his thumb over his shoulder.                    
“If you don’t mind me asking…how did you get all the computer stuff?”         

“You remember night when you go to dance instead of strip club? I make very good business at Shah Mat, a kilo of caviar for everything. I love new world economy. It is even better than old black market of Soviet times,” Sergei said, choking back a laugh.       

They approached the city of Tver, about ninety miles northwest of Moscow. At intersections with rural roads, people stood along the two lane highway at thirty foot intervals...tires, car parts, clothes, food tins, vegetables, and eggs piled around them. It was a familiar scene on provincial roads throughout Russia. Due to a lack of hard currency, factories and farms paid their employees in goods, and the workers sold or bartered these goods for cash or other merchandise. Sergei swerved to avoid a small pig that had escaped from a roadside entrepreneur in high heels...a young woman with black mascara eyes and ruby red lips.                             

“What is this sh*t?” Sergei yelled, slowing the truck. Up ahead, knots of militia and traffic police strutted behind barricades thrown across the road. They waved glowing rods and pointed to the side of the highway.                     
“Eto–what’s this?” Colter asked.                             

Sergei fished for some papers on the dashboard. “It is nothing. There is most likely festival in city tomorrow. Russian people make many holidays, and now militsiya make money to buy vodka and celebrate. That is all.”               
The truck came to a stop. Two ox-like men in faded blue uniforms and with short hair bristling below caps too small for their heads advanced to the driver’s side. Sergei handed one of them the papers and a brief discussion ensued; it ended with the militiamen shouting to a stubby, broad-faced officer with dark Asian eyes. The captain sauntered to the truck and took the papers from his subordinate. After giving them a cursory inspection, he pointed to Colter.                     
“Who’s that?”                             

Sergei spewed out a stream of Russian, and after topping it off with a few profanities for emphasis, they both laughed. He turned off the ignition then handed the captain the keys. The three militiamen walked behind the truck where they opened the rear doors and removed two cardboard boxes. A minute later Sergei, Colter, and the computers returned to the highway, headed toward Tver. After three kilometers the truck veered left onto a side road where potato fields and wood-plank houses replaced birch and pine forests. Sergei cranked the CD player’s volume. Appropriately enough, Jim Morrison was singing “Back Door Man,” and Sergei sang in time with the music:      

“What a pity the captain and his men...had to settle for Stolichnaya...instead of the good Hunter’s vodka...we drank last week...”

[PARADOJAS]

Veronica Victorovna had worked at a variety of institutions that housed social orphans...abandoned children with at least one living parent. In her seven years of working at such places, Vera saw the number of these orphans steadily grow. The social crisis brought on by the privatization of the state economy only worsened the situation which already existed in the latter years of the Soviet-era. People were thrown out of work, paychecks delayed, and the ruble devalued. With decreased buying power many Russians found it harder to provide basic needs for their families. Parents unable to feed and clothe their children dropped them off at state-run homes or baby houses. They told their children, the institutional staff, and themselves that as soon as they were back on their feet, they would return. Most never did. Newborns were sometimes abandoned at birth...often because parents were told by doctors their babies had serious birth defects and should be institutionalized. And finally, there were the runaways who were taken to children’s homes, often after fleeing an abusive parent.                

In the summer of 1991, with the USSR in its final days, Vera worked at a dom rebyonka or baby house. Unwanted children were held here until the age of four, at which time they were evaluated. If they were found to be educable, they were transferred to a children’s home. Those children diagnosed as retarded went to an institution for children with disabilities. Here they would remain until they were eighteen, then either released to the streets or sent to another institution for the rest of their lives.                                                  
                                     
The criteria for determining the disability of a child can be quite arbitrary, and when Vera questioned those criteria, she was fired. She had already been placed on a blacklist by the Ministry of Labor and Social Development for complaining about corruption and abuse committed by directors and staff at one of the homes where she had worked. It was hard enough for Vera to witness monetary and material donations from western charities being skimmed by institutional personnel. But observing small boys drugged with tranquilizers and restrained in cloth bags tied at their necks and naked girls haltered to radiators in a cold dark rooms as punishment for being overactive? That exceeded Vera’s endurance. The incident that eventually caused her to be terminated was a complaint she filed concerning the misdiagnosis of a boy she had become attached to.    

An alert and quiet four-year-old with curious brown eyes, Misha’s only disability was a club foot. But after a half-hour evaluation, and three questions to Misha, a group of bureaucrats and doctors determined the boy’s reticence was indicative of retardation, and they sent him to a mental institution. Vera knew this was a probable death sentence: overcrowding, inadequate medical care, and a lack of healthy food would weaken his health, and the continued lack of stimulation would further stunt his mental development.      

After her dismissal Vera had little problem finding a job. It was the summer of 1993 and the state-run economy was morphing into a free-for-all quasi capitalism. The bonanza had commenced, and foreign companies began their exploratory operations. They set up offices in Moscow for contact with newly appointed financial and economic officials and former ministers who had overseen the USSR’s vast wealth of natural resources. Despite the economic chaos and deteriorating job market, Russians fluent in English were in high demand. An American oil company vice president hired Vera after a three-minute interview.                                                                                             
Ordinarily, Vera would have gone to another level of the Dobryninskaya station and waited for a train headed south. Instead she rode the escalator to the street, away from the artificial light and constricted atmosphere below. She wanted to be in the sunlight and open air, giving free rein to her thoughts. Exiting the station, Vera looked south in the direction of her apartment, then up at the hazy pale blue sky before turning around. She ignored the pedestrian underpass and crossed over a busy boulevard, walking north on one of Moscow’s oldest roads, Bolshaya Ordynka.

In the sixteenth century artisans and merchants had built homes and churches here in the maze of tree-bordered streets and lanes south of the Kremlin. Zamoskvareche or “beyond the Moscow River” remained mostly untouched by Stalin’s massive reconstruction projects that demolished half of the architectural heritage north of the river, and Vera relished the old-Moscow atmosphere of Zamoskvareche. Black and gold onion domes poked above roofs to her right. On her left the red bell tower of Kadashi stood in sharp contrast to the green domes of the Church of the Resurrection. Her mind weaved in and out of the narrow side streets, and through the centuries, imagining life here in the past. She soon found herself under a white stone archway, staring at a small castle-like structure of simple design. Thick white walls surrounded narrow, vertical windows, and the building’s squat tower mushroomed into a black dome. The five structures in the enclosure were a resurrected convent that dated to the early 1900s. It was Vera’s most cherished spot in Moscow.            
Until 1926 when the convent was shut down by the Moscow police, it operated as a hospital, soup kitchen, and shelter for girls, students, and workers. The convent was founded by Grand Duchess Yelizaveta Feodorovna, sister-in-law of Nicholas II, last tsar of Russia. After the assassination of her husband, the Duchess gave up a life of privilege and used her jewelry to purchase a tract of land in an impoverished area of southern Moscow. She became Sister Yelizaveta, and a martyr and canonized saint after her murder by the Bolsheviks.                            
Although not a religious person, Vera possessed the qualities of compassion and fortitude which Sister Yelizaveta exemplified. Just as the Duchess derived strength from the grief she experienced upon the death of her husband, Vera spiritually dedicated herself after she lost the only man she had ever loved. She found physical and emotional solace beneath the convent’s leafy birch and aspen trees, both as a refuge from the afternoon heat and as a sanctuary for her heart.               

[PARADOJAS]

Moscow, 1991                                    

One August evening as a column of Soviet tanks rolled past the Moscow Zoo on their way to the Russian White House, a group of Afghantsee celebrated in the basement of a seven-story apartment building in a northeast suburb of the city. The war veterans weren’t listening to renditions of Swan Lake which traditionally aired on Soviet radio and television during a political crisis. Rather, they played guitars and sang songs from their days in Afghanistan. In the end it made little difference whether the coup to unseat the newly elected Russian Parliament succeeded and communist hardliners or democratic reformers would rule the day. The veterans were a law unto themselves. Attired in military and civilian clothing, they toasted their most recent success: the sale of twelve tons of military hardware to an Azerbaijani businessman.             

With the departure of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in the spring of 1988, the waning of Soviet dominance intensified, encouraging independence movements throughout the Russian empire. The USSR was crumbling, and those in positions of wealth, power, and know-how would be the ones to gather the largest pieces and assemble them into their own private fiefdoms. Former members of the military and security forces were especially situated to take advantage of the political upheaval. One such person was Colonel Vladimir Vorovsky.               


Colonel Vorovsky had been selected from an intelligence unit in the KGB to serve as an adjutant in charge of weaponry for airborne assault units in Afghanistan. But he spent his time there in the mountains, not behind a desk, and his body still retained the lean, angular hardness of his war years. Like many of his generation he once was honored to serve his country, and had seen it as a solemn duty to defend it from capitalist interlopers. While he despised the reformers and yearned for a return of the Russian empire, Afghanistan had changed him. His patriotic idealism, and two of his fingers, lay buried in a mountain valley in Central Asia.                     


As the vypivka entered its fifth hour, a dozen crew cut men sprawled atop dirty mattresses and leaned against wooden crates stacked along the walls. Plates of herring, mushrooms, and salted cucumbers competed for space with vodka and beer bottles on a plywood table under the smoky haze of a naked light bulb. More liters of vodka passed hand to hand, and empty bottles and cigarette butts littered the basement’s cement floor. The veterans were in the midst of a ten hour drinking party, reminiscing of their time in Afghanistan, when someone brought up the name of Ahmad Shah Massoud. The room quieted, and only the sound of bottle contacting glass could be heard.              


Massoud had been the leader of the most effective Mujahideen force in Afghanistan. His use of guerilla tactics–most notably allowing the Soviets to penetrate his lines, then isolating them with light artillery and land mines–had gained him the fear and respect of Soviet soldiers. From 1980 to 1985 the Soviet Army launched nine unsuccessful offensives to eliminate Massoud and his followers.               


“My partner and I…we almost got him just before Christmas in ’84. We had intelligence he was in Mata, so we set up in the hills above the village with a sniper rifle. Massoud was there, but we never got a clean shot. Vasiliy was one hell of a marksman. If anyone could have gotten him...” Sergei’s words faded into the cigarette smoke.         

A blonde, bull-necked veteran, wearing a blue soccer shirt stretched to its seams, turned toward Sergei. “You’re talking about Vasiliy Valdrykin.”            

“That’s right. We didn’t get Massoud, but we knocked off two of his lieutenants.”      

“Then you’re Sergei Zherkov–you guys are legends. You captured the first Stinger in the war,” a swarthy figure squatting beside a guitar said.                
Sergei nodded. “To Vasiliy Dmitrinovich.”                   

“To Vasiliy Dmitrinovich,” the men repeated, raising their glasses.                                             

Sergei had been recruited by Vorovsky in the winter of 1988-9 in the steam room of a sports club: Vorovsky was building the nucleus of his organization, and Sergei still searched for a creative outlet to replace his heroin addiction. Sergei quickly established himself as a valuable asset, and he rose to a position of chief lieutenant. Vorovsky had utilized his army and KGB connections to develop an international black market for military hardware. Weapons at deteriorating storage facilities in Russia and countries of the former Soviet Union (FSU) sold to the highest bidder as sentries who had not been paid in months turned to theft and smuggling. Alarm systems at armories often did not function, and chain-linked fences surrounding the weapon depots gaped with holes large enough for trucks to pass through. The FSU’s borders were equally porous. Ethnic and religious conflicts in the Middle East and Central Asia ensured a steady demand for what Vorovsky had to sell. It was a natural fit, and the Vladimir Vorovsky Gang flourished.      


By 1994 the law and order situation in Russia resembled a fusion of two of America’s more infamous eras: the Wild West and Prohibition. More violent, less disciplined gangs began to proliferate. Composed of men from a younger generation, they lacked the honor codes of older syndicates. Using ex-KGB thugs and former athletes as enforcement and security, the new gangs preached the principal of bespredel...no limits. Extortion, assassination, drug production and distribution, and the international trafficking of women and girls for prostitution enabled them to expand their wealth, power, and territory at the expense of more traditional organizations that relied on smuggling and black market profiteering. For gangs like Vorovsky’s to compete in the new world of bespredel, a change of tactics and principles was necessary.                                

WANTED: YOUNG ATTRACTIVE SINGLE WOMEN                        
EARN TOP SALARY WORKING IN CLUBS IN EUROPE ASIA AND THE MIDDLE EAST            
AS WAITRESSES AND DANCERS                                         
PHONE–689 70 56


The ads appeared in a dozen newspapers and on message boards and light poles at universities, markets, and metro stations. The allure of foreign travel, in addition to an imploded economy, ensured scores of applicants in Moscow. The response in rural areas doubled that of the capital. Bribes to underpaid immigration personnel guaranteed travel documents were fast tracked or counterfeited: the women’s passports taken from them once they arrived at their place of employment. The dancers and waitresses were housed in communal apartments and kept under constant surveillance. They had entered the world of international prostitution, and they would not be permitted to leave it until they paid off the brothel owners who had purchased their contracts.   

[PARADOJAS]

Okay ladies and gentlemen, I need a little feedback. Should I continue with this saga or call it a day? I'm dishing out excerpts from my novel. It's all be copyrighted, BTW. I'm just giving snippets and don't intend to give too much away. I'm still trying to get it published and am using this thread as a sounding board. Any criticisms welcomed...

RJ

[mies]

Okay ladies and gentlemen, I need a little feedback. Should I continue with this saga or call it a day? I'm dishing out excerpts from my novel. It's all be copyrighted, BTW. I'm just giving snippets and don't intend to give too much away. I'm still trying to get it published and am using this thread as a sounding board. Any criticisms welcomed...

RJ

even though it looks like you've got too much time on your hands... I think you should continue writing and finish the story. I enjoyed reading it, and would love to read the rest.  

btw, what is chaga?

[Jumper]

I enjoy reading it as a work of fiction ,
 that could easily have happened.
if it was published i'd buy it and read it out of curiosity.. and maybe because it brings back some memories of past adventures..



like i said earlier, i just wanted to know the context.

I've had no comment to make on the story itself, but yes have been reading its installments..

[PARADOJAS]

Touchee, Mies...

Chaga is a mushroom that grows on birch trees. Russians (among others) have been hip to its powers for thousands of years. You can make a tea by boiling the whole conk or grind it into a powder. It's extremely high in anti-oxidants, boosts the immune system and there is a lot of evidence that it helps to contain cancer. I provided some links over at the "Odds and Ends" forum. The tea has a vanilla flavor. I drink it before working out and sometime as a pick-me-up in late afternoon. I don't advise drinking it too late in the day as it might keep you up past bedtime.

As to the story...my novel is titled: THE LYING DOWN ROOM. A lying down room is a place where "throw away" children under the age of four are sent. It's run by the state and the children usually have some sort of physical or mental disability. Colter, the protagonist of my novel, goes to such a place halfway through the story, and it is here where he undergoes a catharsis. As I wrote before, I'm not going to give the story away, ie, tell how it ends or give away any ironic plot twists. It's also a three-hundred page novel, so I'm only posting short passages that pop into my head.

[PARADOJAS]

The odor rocked Colter backward when he first entered the room. Now he stood stunned with only his head moving in a slow short arc that swept his eyes from wall to wall. Twelve cribs arranged in four evenly spaced rows occupied most of the twenty-five-foot square room. When the door opened and the light switch snapped on, Colter had heard a faint rustle and murmur of weak cries. For the room’s occupants, raspy hinges and two overhead lights were the only stimulus they had: it meant food and the human touch.


Colter moved aside to allow two women pushing laundry carts to enter; their hair was tucked beneath white cloth hats like those a pastry chef might wear. After placing towels and disinfectant in the carts, the sanitarki worked with robot efficiency. The children were naked from the waist down, and after each was cleaned, the rubber mattresses were wiped free of urine and excrement. Occasionally the women would praise or admonish a child in a voice one might use when speaking to a household pet.             


Once the shock wave passed and his eyes focused, Colter looked at the children. Hollow listless eyes and shaved heads dominated elfin bodies and matchstick legs. He was told the girls and boys in this lying down room ranged in age from one to four years, but Colter could see no child who looked older than two. In the crib closest to him sat a small girl with dark blonde hair, brown eyes, and a cleft lip. Other children appeared to be victims of cerebral palsy, and in the rear of the room he saw four kids with Down’s syndrome. For a room of twelve children it was eerily quiet.               

Colter felt himself transported to the nineteenth century–to the kind of institution Charles Dickens had written about. A feeling of helplessness enveloped him and his eyes welled with tears. He felt compassion for the children and revulsion for a system and a world that allowed such a situation to exist. But looking again into the brown eyes of the little girl who first attracted his attention, Colter became aware that what at first he thought to be a vacant stare, was a plea to be touched and to be held. The attendants gossiped in the far corner as they folded towels. Colter stepped to the crib, picked the girl up, and cradled her to his chest. Her upper lip was completely separated, the two parts funneling into her left nostril. The corners of her mouth slowly turned upward, and with her smile Colter’s helplessness disappeared. He did not know what it was that he would do, only that he would do it. The catharsis Wesley Colter had hoped for had arrived.   

[PARADOJAS]

The next day in the early morning sunlight, Tanya leaned from an opened window, her hair a radiant yellow-gold, dark-green ivy framing her and the window.    


“If I live million years I never understand how man from technological advanced society is not able to use hoe. You are ripping up beets and carrots instead of weeds.”        


Colter straightened and turned toward the ivy-covered white cottage. “Maybe you should come out here and give me a few lessons, city girl.” Colter removed his bush hat, wiping sweat from his brow with a forearm.             

“Let me change into work clothes then I show you Russian people are true peasants of earth,” Tanya said, shaking her head to emphasize her words before disappearing from the window.                           

While Colter waited he surveyed Vera’s dacha. The weathered white clapboard cottage looked as if it had been uprooted by a large wave and set down in a sea of green. With the exception of an outhouse, tool shed, and banya, almost every square foot of ground was occupied by green living things. Above the cottage’s corrugated metal roof tall pines and silver-leafed poplars framed a cumulus cloud with their swaying tops. A narrow dirt path bordered by orange-flowered shrubs, fruit trees, and vegetable gardens led from the cottage’s front door to a gate cocked downward from its hinges. A wood picket fence separated the sea of green from a dusty dirt road just wide enough to accommodate two small cars. Only the barking of an awakened dog or the deep-throated growl of a chainsaw suggested Vera’s dacha was not alone in the ocean of vegetation.       


Passing between rows of carrots and beets, Tanya appeared almost the way she had the first time Colter saw her in St. Petersburg: sandals, thong bikini, silver earrings, and Yankee baseball cap. “Please give me hoe, Wes. There is old saying here–‘women do everything, and men do all the rest.’ You become more like Russian man everyday.”              

“Oooh-wah! I like your work outfit…but why are you wearing a top?” Colter asked, the weathered wood shaft sliding through his fingers as he passed Tanya the hoe.       


“You already are not mindful of work. Look, you have begun to tear up beets and carrots,” she said, poking with the hoe’s business end. “Any more distraction and your weak mind will next destroy onions and cabbage. Then you must answer to Vera.”      


“Speaking of Vera, how did she come to own this place? It’s obviously been here for a few years. I thought during Soviet times, except for the bigwigs, private property wasn’t allowed.”                              

Bending at the waist, Tanya gripped the hoe at its mid point with both hands. Her back to Colter, she worked her way down the garden row, the hoe in constant motion, ripping up weeds and root balls, pushing dirt back into holes, and smoothing and trimming around the raised beds. Colter eyed her technique studiously.          


“After Stalin becomes our leader he starts writers’ colony here in Peredelkino. Famous writers like Boris Pasternak and Kornei Chukovsky are given dachas here by government. It is all administered by Writers Union who wish to make quiet place for Soviet writers. Vera’s grandfather is writer and poet, so he moves here before Great Patriotic War...”                              

“World War II?”                            


“Yes. After grandfather dies dacha becomes property of Vera’s father. Vera is only child so when also he dies some years ago, dacha becomes property of Vera.”      


“Then the Soviets only allowed certain people to own property?”          


“You are not capable of working and talking at same time, Wes? Rake is over by potatoes. Throw weeds in…that thing,” Tanya said, turning around and tilting her head in the direction of a wooden wheelbarrow.                        

“Has anyone told you how beautiful you are when you get angry?” Colter asked.        


“Many times I am told this, even Pushkin writes poem about it.” Tanya stood at the far end of the plot, smudges of sweat and dirt on her arms and legs, a wake of green weeds and brown roots behind her. “What is it you ask me before?”             

“I was asking about the communists only allowing certain people to own property.” Colter turned in a circle, scanning the garden plots all around him.      


“Six sotokee.”                              


“Six sotokee? What’s that, the name of Pushkin’s poem?” he asked, waving his hands over his head.                               

“Sotok is equal to one hundred square meters. After great famines of 1920s government permits people to have property to grow food. Six sotokee is what average citizen is allowed. Now there is even magazine about dacha life called Six Sotok. In it you will read such interesting things as how to recognize potato plants and how to keep biting flies away. Waving hands over head is not advised.”

[SANDRO43]

Okay ladies and gentlemen, I need a little feedback. Should I continue with this saga or call it a day? I'm dishing out excerpts from my novel. It's all be copyrighted, BTW. I'm just giving snippets and don't intend to give too much away. I'm still trying to get it published and am using this thread as a sounding board. Any criticisms welcomed...

An interesting read, although I think our FSUW ladies are more qualified to judge how closely it depicts early post-1989 Russia - it 'sounds' realistic to me, FWIW.

I'd encourage you to continue your efforts to find a publisher . Did you try in the US only, or also in some other English-speaking country?