Wick - The Omnibus Edition

by Bunker, Michael

  “I don’t need to introduce myself. You all know me. Every one of you. I taught you, and I probably taught your parents. What young Vladimir has said about me is mostly true, and the things that are not true are things about which I will not quibble. All of my adult life I have been a Russian spy, and for most of that time I have lived in America. Now, for a short time, I have also been an American spy, living in a little piece of the world that, for all intents and purposes, is Russia.

  “This place. Our place. Warwick.

  “In reality, though, I have no country, for I am a citizen of nowhere.” He paused for a moment, and his legs seemed to grow unsteady. He attempted to wipe his face with his arm but was unsuccessful, the chains preventing any such movement.

  “I am an old man,” Volkhov continued, “and old men learn things, and these things I will tell you.” He looked over the crowd and captured the audience with his steely gaze.

  “It is true. I did tell the Americans about the plans to destroy her; plans I have known about for twenty years or more; plans that existed even before I knew about them. I did so because I believe that a surprise attack on America, which is what we are talking about here after all, is a foolish plan, and a murderous idea.

  “It is the governments of America and of the Soviet Union that have been at war throughout this last century, and not the peoples of those two countries. Ideologies are at war, and not individuals. But ideologies do not suffer and die in wars. People do. And I have learned, because I have been on both sides, I have lived in both worlds. I have lived in both worlds and have been accepted in both worlds and have been rejected by both worlds, but mostly I have found a home. Like here, among you.”

  Lev Volkhov paused to let the crowd bathe in that thought. Clay knew that Alyona was still speaking into his ear and translating the old man’s words, but that reality faded and another, higher, reality emerged and he heard the man speak and as his mouth moved, Clay understood him and heard his voice and it was as if Alyona disappeared as Volkhov spoke directly to him.

  “…But there are no differences between the sides. We are talking here about a Cold War grown hot that most of the rest of the world has already forgotten. They’ve just forgotten it existed. America has never been at war with the Soviet Union, except by proxy… in Vietnam, and Afghanistan, and Nicaragua, and Korea, and a hundred other places around the world. Everyone is trained to think of these opposing forces as two sides, good and evil, light and darkness, right and wrong. However, as an old man I have learned that there are actually three sides. One side is always pitted against another, so that the third side wins.

  “Did you hear that? The third side always wins.

  “How do you know which is the third side? The third side is always made known by what actually happens. We are dealing with the age-old dialectic that everyone knows about and no one heeds and all of you were my students, and you should all know who you are…”

  He waved his cane at the crowd. They watched him.

  “… and what that means.”

  Silence.

  “In America, as we speak, Republicans and Democrats are at war, and neither side will ever win because they want the same things, only at different speeds and with different details. The third side will win, because there is not a dime’s worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats. Both sides will accept annihilation and totalitarianism because neither side truly wants freedom.

  “They are all statists. Do you know the meaning of this word? Yes, those of you who were my students…

  “I have learned this, so listen to me. The Russian and American people do not want war, but they will have it. Why? Because the third side wants it! The third side always wins!

  “I will give you a most poignant example. Black separatist Malcolm X and white separatists heading the KKK were both controlled by the CIA in the 1960’s.”

  Stomp.

  “Malcolm X admitted this in his autobiography! Why? Because democratic socialists in the government and around the world did not want fascism or communism, they wanted Martin Luther King.”

  Cough.

  “And if you want Martin Luther King—who would never have even been received by Americans willfully—you use The Nation of Islam and the KKK to frighten people into embracing MLK.”

  Wheeze.

  Aaahhrrggh. Clay felt as if he was going over. He felt himself dipping. He was sitting watching this old man seem to draw strength from the crowd and he began to feel as though the man drew even his own vital energy. He was growing woozy.

  “If you want democratic socialism in America, you do not just propose democratic socialism! You produce a far left Democrat party and a far right Republican party who both want statism regardless of what they say!

  “Do you know the word? Do you know that word? Statism?” He stuck out his chest and rose to the crowd. An angel floating over head at just that moment might have seen a giant magnet in the center of a box with a million tiny metal marbles spread around the walls of the box, just vibrating, ready to make their break. To run to the man. To freedom.

  Clay wondered how, if they did, if the crowd did surge forward toward Volkhov, he might swim through the crowd, through the chaos, to the door to the valley and make a break of his own.

  The man continued, but in a quiet, more reasoning tone, “They are all statists, only with different winners.

  “And the people will embrace democratic socialism! All of them will. Both sides. They already have. But you can never tell the people that, can you, because you see their lusts and their drive for comforts… you see… all of them are statists.”

  He let the word sink in.

  “They are all against real freedom.”

  He let that sink in.

  “Your political pundits, your crazy activists, your radio show hosts are all successful precisely because they do not uncover the real and simple truth. Do you hear me? The truth. As long as they stay away from the truth, and play their audience into the hands of the dialectic, then the money flows and they get to keep their seats in the game.

  “But the truth, perhaps that is too big to swallow entire. Let’s begin with a bite.

  “Every false conflict is precipitated. Think about it… Every false dialectic is put forth by someone… someone…”

  He let the statement hang in the air.

  “… because the third side wants something that the people will not freely give. If people wanted freedom, they’d turn off their televisions and move from the cities and grow their own food and just say ‘NO.’”

  “Did you hear that? No.”

  The crowd sat in silence.

  “No, to everything that is contrary to their freedom. No. Simply… Not marching, or petitions, or voting, or organizing, or gathering signatures… Just No.

  “It is hard to believe, but sometimes just saying ‘No’ is a revolutionary act.”

  Absolute silence.

  “But they do not want freedom. The crowd. They want peace and safety and comforts without cost.

  “In America tonight people are fighting one another in the streets, and people are burning down businesses, and people are shooting one another at the gas pumps, and the economy has plummeted into the abyss. Why? I will tell you why. Because in the last century or more, so-called ‘patriots’ and so-called ‘communists’ have whipped the people into a frenzy and given them the false idea that ‘voting’ is the only arbiter and guarantee of their peace.

  “And now… now… now some of them believe that ‘voting’ has been taken from them. Their only hope. Their great ‘god’.”

  Clay wondered at the oddness of the talk for a moment. He was beginning to come back to his senses after the fainting spell and he was listening to the man enough to have picked up that many of the things he said sounded familiar, but in a far off kind of way.

  “We all only have one inalienable right. Only one! It is not the vote. It is not. It is, instead, the right to say ‘NO’ to all of this manip
ulation.

  “And then we must be prepared to accept the consequences of that singular, valorous, and revolutionary act.

  “But that is the one thing that modern people just will not do.”

  He let that word sink in. Will.

  “We are enslaved by our possessions, and imprisoned by our wants.

  “I am just an old man. I’ve lived my life without a country. I have made a lot of mistakes, and I’ve caused a lot of pain and even death no doubt. But I have learned something. I believe that all of this, every bit of it, is about power. Power is the ability to coerce others to do what they would not otherwise do.

  “All of history is a lesson in the third side using lies and wars and manipulations to get what they want. The Russian people do not want war.”

  The crowd shuffled their feet on the floor. They looked at him.

  “But the third side does. So we will have warfare.

  “The American people do not want war, but the third side does, so we will have warfare.

  “The powers-that-be finance both sides of every conflict, and the third side profits, and the people don’t care as long as they are comfortable and well fed and have some neighbor to hate.”

  He paused again and let that sink in.

  “Let me ask you a question, those of you who condemn me for switching sides—which I did not do, by the way—but if you say I did, well… there is always the public’s opinion. But let me ask you a question. Why, if I switched sides as you say I did, isn’t America moving to stop what I told them is going to happen? Or why didn’t they listen to Golitsyn, or Stanislav Lunev, or Vladimir Bukovsky, or any of hundreds of other men just like them. You know these names. I have taught you all of them.

  “Defectors. Dissidents. Refuseniks. Risking life and limb, leaving family and home, to go off into the wilderness of public opinion… and to freedom. Why, if I have switched sides, do the Americans treat us defectors as defective?

  “I told them that my country planned to destroy America within a quarter century of 1992. And to what end? Did they listen?

  “If the-powers-that-be in America had wanted it stopped, then they could easily have stopped it. Could they not? But why, then, did they not?”

  He swallowed, and let the crowd wonder.

  “Just Golitsyn’s testimony alone ought to have been enough to convince them. It has been estimated very conservatively, and yet, even in that tentative suggestion, it has been argued persuasively that almost all of his predictions, almost all, have been fulfilled. And most of them by 1993!

  “Trotsky, in The Revolution Betrayed, predicted that just such a thing may have to come to pass in order for the worldwide revolution to take place. Are you telling me that the American leadership never read Trotsky!?”

  Not since Marc Antony stood before the Romans, had a crowd been more receptive, more quiet and attentive, more thriving with pent up energy.

  “But I am not here to say that Russia is our enemy! No! WE are our enemy. We who will not unplug from the dialectic and refuse to participate are the enemy. No! Refuse. Never again. Not anymore! No. Simply, No.

  “I did not betray my country. I betrayed a handful of wicked men—some Russian, some American—who want to annihilate the world…

  “…so that they can have their worldwide revolution.

  “America has always been the only bulwark against that worldwide revolution. And whatever side we are on we must admit that. So, no, I did not betray America. I told them the truth about what was about to happen, not because I love America—”

  He paused.

  “—but because I love truth.”

  Volkhov looked around, worn out from speaking, and his eyes seemed to close as he glanced at faces he knew around the room. “I’m tired,” he said, “and I don’t care if these young boys shoot me now. I’ve said what I had to say.”

  The old man slowly moved back to his seat and sat down, ignoring the thunderous applause and some boos and hisses from the gathered villagers. Mikail stood and once again froze the commotion with his icy stare.

  “Nice speech old man,” he said with no hint of affection or emotion. Then he raised his voice to silence the crowd. “I wanted everyone to hear his confession from his own mouth, and he did not disappoint me. Now, I told you that one of the men up here will die, and I am a man of my word.”

  He turned on his heel and walked over to where Clay was sitting, right beside Officer Todd Karagin. He stood over Clay and indicated to the officer with a wave of his hand that he wanted him to hand over the pistol from its holster, snapping his fingers at Todd as though he were a dog. Even Pavlov couldn’t have asked for a faster reaction, and Todd complied, handing the pistol, butt first, to Mikail who made a display of examining it to make sure it was loaded. He checked to see if there was a bullet in the chamber and that the safety was released and then he walked around Clay ominously, peering into his eyes and looking into his soul.

  Clay’s pulse had been racing dangerously ever since Mikail had repeated his statement that one of them would die. But now, as he looked into the eyes of the man who was menacing him, he suddenly felt a calm come over him. He felt at one with his surroundings. He looked into the tough exterior Mikail was putting out and he saw a pitiful vulnerability. He thought of the look in the eyes of the red haired man on the bicycle as they’d parted, and the eyes of the young man named Vasily from his cell when they first met. He then watched as the sad vision of Mikail turned around and confronted the room full of peasants, by waving his loaded gun. The impotent threat of the thing. Clay had decided that such a threat could have no long-term hold over his soul anymore. He watched and he felt a surreal sense of calm flood through his body. Is this it?

  He tried to think of everyone he loved, but now, with death staring him in the face, he could not. He really could only think of what Volkhov had said, and that he had also been a pawn and a prisoner in a system of lies that his own lusts had enabled. All of this, this microcosm of world conflict and agitations playing itself out in a gymnasium in a little town in New York, was all engendered by his own lust for comforts and stuff, and air-conditioning, and cheap gas, and gadgets, and the soul-killing desire for more. That was the root and the base of it. That was the prison he’d tried to escape when he left Brooklyn. Everything else was just theater. Perhaps dying is the only real freedom. His interpreter had moved away from him and, after pausing for a moment, had returned to her seat. Poor girl. She doesn’t want to get shot by accident. I don’t blame her. He saw her looking at him and he nodded his ‘thank you’ to her.

  Mikail spoke again to the assembled villagers, but Clay could not understand him. Suddenly Mikail was walking very rapidly towards him. Clay closed his eyes and bowed his head and he heard the deafening shot from the pistol.

  But he didn’t feel anything,

  His heart raced again and his eyes opened and his breath caught in his chest.

  Looking up, he saw Mikail walking by him and out the door with the pistol still in his hand.

  ****

  What happened? He looked up and saw the crowd and they were all frozen in shocked disbelief and there were screams and a few people fainted. Clay looked out over the crowd, his ears still ringing from the blast, smoky confusion rising in the air.

  He scanned the crowd with his eyes and suddenly felt the thick, wet, fluid seeping into his prison jumper. He thought it might have been urine at first, but then he reached down with his hand and wiped the viscous stuff from his arms, and realized he was soaked in blood. He instantly came into awareness of the people rushing to the figure beside him and he looked to see if Volkhov had been shot, then saw the blood seeping underneath the old man’s chair. Without any particular notion of volition in doing so, Clay stood up to see where Volkhov had been shot.

  But Volkhov’s eyes met his and they both looked down into each other’s souls and they confirmed in that look that they each were still alive.

  ****

  The body of Off
icer Todd Karagin was writhing on the ground. He had been shot in the head.

  It looked like the old man was going to collapse, and Clay motioned to him and Volkhov stood up and they both backed away from the body as it kicked and twitched there on the ground. A young boy came up—he could not have been more than fifteen—and he pulled the trigger on his machine pistol hitting Todd’s body three or four more times and eventually, after an agonizing few seconds, the writhing stopped and Todd’s blood ran into the hardwood of the gymnasium in Warwick.

  The crowd watched the frenzy at the podium in silence and no one even noticed the weary, haggard traveler helping the old bearded saint off the podium and into a chair at the edge of the crowd.

  CHAPTER 9

  An hour later Clay and Volkhov were locked in a cell together. Not the cell Clay had been in earlier, not the Tank, but one of the cluster cells where the young boys had been held prior to Clay’s arrival at Warwick Prison.

  Clay and Volkhov talked, but only after a moment or two of silence. Upon entering the cell, they’d sat quietly, collecting their thoughts and breathing. Then they had talked. Clay heard more of the old man’s story and he told a bit of his own. They clung to one another in the exhaustion and euphoria that grips two people who have temporarily escaped death together.

  Clay did not know Lev Volkhov, but in a strange way, he felt a kinship with the old man. Somehow he even had affection for him, this man he did not know. Like everyone else in America, Clay had been trained to call every idea that flew in the face of the collective talking points a conspiracy theory. But he’d identified with Volkhov’s speech to such an extent that, except for the details about spying and such, the old man could have been reading the text directly from Clay’s heart. This is not merely to point out that Clay felt at peace with the man; it is to notice the more important fact that Clay felt at peace within himself in the man’s presence.