The Traitor Brothers

By Darvin Babiuk

Similar in family background and education, from different cultures but the same generation, working at comparable levels for their respective governments, one born in Soviet Russia, the other in Imperialist Japan, two iconoclasts dedicate their lives to improving life in their countries and not just following  orders or improving their personal positions. They  come together at the United Nations in New York in the 1950s, later again in Far Eastern Siberia, and finally in Japan in the early 1990s as the Soviet coup d'etat against Mikhail Gorbachev threatens to undo their efforts to improve lives in both their countries.  

 

Recent political events from around the world have shown us what happens to Foreign Service Officers, public servants and patriots when they act with integrity and dedication towards the best interests of their fellow citizens instead of their putative "superiors."

 

Russia has once again thrust itself onto our collective consciousnesses and it might be informative for people to see how we got here and the kind of people we need to get us out!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Darvin Babiuk
• Release date: Jun 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223272854

Darvin Babiuk

Author of his own misfortunes, Darvin Babiuk writes history, novels, short stories, translations, articles, shopping lists, and has more than once been considered a write-off. He hopes to be around to write his own obituary. Friends and relatives say he has never been the same after the tragic incident at the Moose Factory 47th annual Dmitro Petrycyshyn Pickerel and Perogies Cribbage tournament. His turn-ons include women with mustaches, Men Without Hats (The musical group, silly!), honey Dijon mustard and leopard frogs. If he were a vegetable, he'd be a beet, pithy but misunderstood. He wishes he could write like Scarlett Johansson's voice sounds. He has lived and worked in a number of overseas locations in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Book preview

THE TRAITOR BROTHERS

The Tanuki and the Bear

Although some of the characters in this book are real people and at times their actions reflect the true lives of their real-life counterparts, the story is fictional. My account of the incidents of their lives is not intended to be a reflection of their characters and is to be considered only as a work of the imagination.

Copyright © 2023 by Darvin Babiuk

For three of the great influences in my understanding of the culture and societies of Russia and Japan:

1) Miyuki Nakamura, who was instrumental in providing me an understanding of the rhythms and structures of everyday Japanese life.

2) George Jerzyk Urbaniak and George Ted Orchard, whose teachings not only provided me with much of my understanding of the history of Russia and the Soviet Union but, more importantly, taught me how to think of it critically and place it within the larger overall world picture.

The Tanuki

The tanuki, or racoon dog, is the national animal of Japan. Neither a racoon nor a dog, tanuki are 1.5 - 2 feet long, with a tail about half a foot. They are more closely related to wolves and coyotes than racoons or dogs. Their fur is yellow-grey to reddish-brown. Their shoulders, tip of the tail, and legs are black. They have facial markings similar to a racoon’s, including the characteristic black mask, making them look like a trickster or bandit. They can weigh from 8-22 pounds.

Tanuki have a long history in Japanese folklore. Legend bestows them as having supernatural powers, masters of illusion, bawdy pranksters with enormous scrotums, able to shapeshift into the form of everyday objects, other animals or even human beings. They have a reputation for bestowing humans with good fortune and prosperity. Accordingly, tanuki statues with playful smiles are often placed at the entrances of restaurants and bars to welcome customers.

The Bear

Russia’s national animal is the most widely distributed bear species in the world and one of the largest living terrestrial carnivores. The normal head-and-body length for a brown bear is between 5 - 9 feet, with a shoulder height of 2 - 5. They routinely tip in at over 500 pounds. Adult brown bears are powerful, top-of-the-food chain predators, but much of their diet consists of nuts, berries, fruit, leaves, and roots.

Brown bears are extremely intelligent, omnivorous, solitary and aggressive. They have one of the largest brains of any carnivore relative to their body size and have been shown to engage in tool use, which requires advanced cognitive abilities. Despite their enormous size, they are extremely fast, having been clocked at speeds of 30 miles per hour.

THE SINGLE UNIT IS ZERO

The Individual: who needs him?

The voice of one man is weaker than a squeak.

Who will listen to it? Not even a wife.

The Party is the all-encompassing hurricane, fused from voices, soft and quiet.

Misfortune befalls a man when he's alone.

Grief comes to one man, for one alone is not a warrior.

Every pair is his master.

Whether sturdy, or even weak . . .

The individual is nonsense,

The individual is nothing.

—Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, (Moscow: Sovetskaya Press, 1981).

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Other Works by This Author

PROLOGUE

CHERNOMINSK, THE UKRAINE

AUGUST, 1928

T o sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards out of men.

—Ella Wheeler Wilcox

It looked like a good harvest. For the first time in Yuri Scherbak's long memory there were no marauding armies to feed; no Reds, no Whites, no Greens, Germans, Japanese, Czechs, Poles, Austrians, Moldavans, Americans, French, or British to rape the bounty of the land. Better yet, the starving hordes in Kalinin, Kiev, and Kaunas had finally learned the trick of feeding themselves by producing something worth offering in return for Yuri’s life-giving wheat. Best of all, there were no loutish cockroaches from Moscow sniffing around to cart it all back home. They were too busy killing each other off since Lenin's death to worry about a poor farmer in the Ukraine.

Rain had been early and plentiful, frost light and late. There'd be enough grain to feed them all this year, even the baby, Boghdan. It was the first time that had happened since the emancipation of the serfs seventy years ago when the family had first received the farm from Tsar Alexander II.

It was a good thing, too. Besides Boghdan, Yuri had eleven mouths to feed. And that was just the children. There were relatives, too. They were a varied lot, happy and close; speaking Byelorussian, Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian; living on farms that took in the borders of the four nations. No matter how governments tried to classify them according to nationality, to them they were just Scherbaks. Borders came and went, but families stayed the same.

Their patriarch cast a practiced eye over the waving heads of wheat that stretched into the distance, as far off as the newly formed Liberation Through Work Collective Farm that bordered them on the West. Chernozem, soft black earth, rich as honey. It was difficult living now, he thought, but when hadn't it been? Ninety percent of what you were told was a lie, but the lies had become more familiar than the truth, so you believed them. Since the Communists had come, the lies were predictable at least and if you mouthed them faithfully, the Bolsheviks would leave you alone. Serfdom, emancipation, Lenin's New Economic Policy, and now the collective farms: farming in the Soviet Union was an ideological problem, not an agricultural one. Call it what you want, in the end there was the land.

Not that it was easy. After the Revolution everyone had started out equal, given the same small plot of land. But the Scherbaks were doing too well and all their hard work had earned them was the expletive "kulak" from less industrious neighbors. It was all too easy to denounce them to the men from Moscow going around the countryside looking for Communism's latest threat, the new bourgeoisie.

Despite all that, it looked like it was going to be a good harvest. Better not to say anything. This storm, too, would pass. In the end, there'd be the land. He had little Boghdan and his brothers and sisters to think about.

Eleven children who were to grow up alone.

Yuri Scherbak, the man who'd survived the Tsar, Revolution, Lenin, Reds, Whites, Greens, even foreign armies and collectivization, found he could not survive success. As he stood there rising above the black earth, one of the kholkhoz's men slipped up behind him and, using Yuri's own scythe, relieved him of his life. The tallest blade of grass had to be cut down.

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Meanwhile, halfway around the world, Masaichi Shimizu was just as good at keeping his mouth shut as he literally froze his ass off in a valley that had no value whatsoever to the Fifth Regiment of the Japanese Army Imperial Army as they prepared for war with the USSR

TŌKYŌ

AUGUST 18, 1991

Some days you get the bear. Some days the bear gets you.

—Proverb, origins unknown

CHAPTER ONE

. . . except that they do not walk on their heads instead of their feet, there are few things in which they do not seem to have been impelled in a perfectly opposite direction.

—Sir Rutherford Alcock, first British diplomat to Japan (1858-64)

Getting to Tōkyō is easy. Getting there from Chernominsk—a tiny farming community 1,150 kilometres southwest of Moscow on the Ukrainian Steppes and 8,700 kilometres west from Tōkyō—is not. It had taken fifty-nine years, three continents, a checkered and varied career in the Soviet diplomatic service, disgrace and internal exile in far Eastern Siberia, followed by unlikely political rehabilitation, for Anatoli Scherbak to get there.

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The second the airplane doors opened on the runway in Narita airport, a wall of thick, dense, muggy air grabbed him by the throat and threw him back gagging against the airplane’s bulkhead, leaving him no more time to watch the horse mackerel jump for their lives in the bay below. He couldn't wait to get back to Chernominsk in January and the snow. Chernominsk: wide-open spaces, black earth, trees. Cold, clean air that hadn't been breathed and re-breathed by everyone since the time when dragons roamed the earth. Shaking his head in a vain attempt to try and clear it, Anatoli knew he’d have to dig deep if he wanted to live longer than the horse mackerel destined to end the week on sushi tables in the fashionable districts of Ginza and Harajuku.

Traditionally, Russian and Soviet diplomats have not fared well in Japan. Take Tsarevitch Nikolai in 1891, for example. On his trip to Japan, a policeman had taken it upon himself to whack the future and last Russian Tsar across the head with a sword. Luckily, for the state of Russo-Japanese relations, the Tsarevitch survived. Survived that and Russo-Japanese war in 1904. It took Bolsheviks, not Japanese, to get rid of a Tsar. Just like they might get him, Anatoli thought, if he was successful at his job of negotiating the return of four small islands to the Japanese in return for economic credits at the exact same time current Soviet leader Gorbachev was in dire danger of being overthrown by his own Bolshevik party and the new leaders came looking for the man who had given away the Southern Kurile islands to the Japanese. The islands, known as Hoppō Ryōdo here in Japan, had been seized by the USSR at the tail end of World War II as Japan lay supine and on the verge of surrender after the nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One would think a small grouping of islands less than 6,000 square kilometres in area out of the Soviet Union’s 22-million square kilometres in total wouldn’t be deemed important. One would be wrong. The islands were the only safe access point the entire Soviet Navy had to the Pacific Ocean and thus of vital military and strategic global importance.

Japan, for Anatoli, was like a woman. One he could live neither with nor without. Fifty-nine years of being immersed in the history, language, and culture his mother had steeped him in as a child, combined with his subsequent graduate studies at MIGMO—Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Russia’s most revered educational institution—had left him more than familiar with Yamato thinking, what the Japanese parochially called the essence of their Japanese superiority and exceptionalism. As the Japanese proverb—Shu ni majiwareba akaku naru—went, Mix with vermilion, and you become red. What worried him was just exactly what kind of red. He didn't want to follow Tsarevitch Nikolai's fate. The state of the health of his head was already in bad enough shape without it getting whacked with a sword. He knew there were people gunning for him both here and at home.

Nado zhits. You had to live.

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Anatoli Scherbak did not look like a revolutionary bomb-thrower. With his sandy hair and startling lapis-lazuli blue eyes, he looked like everybody's favorite Dutch uncle. If one had a palette, the instinct would have been to paint him in subdued shades of olive and grey, catching the width of his shoulder, his tired eyes, heavy heart and hands. His hair, parted on the left and hanging over his eyes, needed cutting and the slant of his eyes hinted at an ancestor who'd been a bit slow in avoiding one of the periodic waves of Asiatic invaders. A Krokodil and Argumenty i Fakty reader, Anatoli’s nose was his most prominent feature. It came from his father. And his mother. There was enough nose on him for all three of them. Aside from treason, he had no personal vices. Vodka couldn't be considered a vice in Russia.  In Russian the very word, "voda," translated in meaning to both water and life. Without it, you might as well curl up and die.

Anatoli almost had until he’d given it up. Vodka, that is.

Perhaps that is why Immigration and Customs let him through without checking the felt lining of his briefcase carefully. Perhaps it was the Diplomatic Letter of Transit his boss, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, had prepared for him. Perhaps it was his worn and well-thumbed passport that had stamps from all the world capitals. Soviet, it identified him as, but with his suit and impeccable manners it could have just as easily said French. Or Italian. Only a thickness in his waist from a childhood of too many potatoes gave him away. Whatever the reason, they allowed him to get through un-hassled, Anatoli’s contraband diamonds safely hidden from prying eyes.

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Finished with Customs and Immigration, Anatoli and his diamonds walked out of the airport to the ground transportation area of Narita. Getting the diamonds through Customs had been no problem at all. Getting into Tōkyō was going to be. No one had arrived to escort him into the city. No one from the Soviet Embassy. No one from the Japanese Foreign Ministry. No one from the non-existent consulate for the Russian Federation. Not even a complimentary shuttle bus from the budget hotel he’d been booked into. He doubted he even had enough spare bills to afford a taxi for the sixty-seven kilometres from Narita into the metropolis. Anatoli sighed and picked up his bag. Not being an official diplomat, Anatoli was on a very tight per diem. That left him only the Keisei Skyliner shuttle train as a way of getting into the city. Anatoli was used to it. It wasn't the first time he'd been left to get by on his own.

He swore under his breath as the train turned up precisely on time, then smiled as the orderly queue turned into a rugby scrum as the doors opened, leaving several of the little old ladies, mockingly called yen-finders at the Embassy due to their bent backs, standing. It was nice to see that even here there could be disorder.

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After seventy-four years of uninterrupted butchery, genocide and tyranny, the current Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev was struggling to restructure the USSR with all the grace and dignity of an aging, ungainly circus bear. On one side of him were the old, hardline Soviet diehards, desperate to return to the glory days of Stalin and totalitarianism. On the other side were reformers who wanted to do away with the USSR altogether, led by the Russian Federation President, Boris Yeltsin and the leaders of roughly a dozen other Soviet Republics.

Anatoli was Yeltsin’s man, not Gorbachev’s, and with the entire Soviet Union holding its breath across eleven time zones until it became clear which side of the blini the caviar would be plastered on, Russian or Soviet, authoritarianism or freedom, both were currently on the menu. The smart money was betting on the status quo and the Bolsheviks. Seventy-four years of success against counter-revolution, foreign intervention, Civil War, invasion, containment, and sanctions tended to do that.

Not even anyone in the USSR knew who was going to come out on top. Why should the Japanese government be any different? Anatoli had no official diplomatic status here. No one wanted to be seen backing the wrong side. If Gorbachev was bridegroom, emcee, and guest of honour all rolled into one every time he went on a foreign trip, his own boss, Yeltsin, was awarded the kind of treatment hillbilly relatives are when they crash a wedding.

His job? Just save General Secretary Gorbachev's ass with the bundles of yen he was ordered to bring back to the USSR. That was rich. Yeltsin's man, he was here to save Gorbachev. No, scratch that. Save the reforms. And the country. From dinosaurs who wanted to drag them back into the ice age and Cold War. Anatoli was no more Yeltsin's man than he was Gorbachev's. He was his own. And all he had to offer in return were four small islands off the coast of Hokkaido that he didn’t have authority to give up anyway.

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Thirty seconds after the train doors hissed shut, the jewelled greenness of the countryside rolled by, belying Japanese complaints that they had no natural resources. Anatoli knew farmers who would kill for water and soil like this. He'd never cared for mountains and hills as much as the steppes, though. There wasn't enough space to think in.

There was even less in the suburbs of Tōkyō, as the farms gave way to rows of ferro-concrete housing, pachinko parlours, and car-lots packed together like dominoes. The train rocketed along inches from houses, shaking crockery and allowing split-second snapshots through open windows into closed lives. This is the system we communists had been trying to build all along, he thought: communal, efficient, aloof and inhuman. Hell. He needed to get out to the countryside. Where the real Japan was.

The laundry and futons hanging on the balconies were more in line with a foreigner's concept of Tashkent than Tōkyō. If you looked closely, you might assume that the entire population of Japan was male. There was no female underwear to be seen. What hadn't been stolen by panty fetishists had been hung inside to dry in fear of the same. As they passed through a long underground tunnel, Anatoli turned his face from the window to watch his fellow passengers. It was amazing. More than half were asleep. The Japanese could drop off anywhere: on the train, in a meeting, at work, and no one seemed to mind. A few were slurping iced coffee out of cans and reading. He glanced at the title of the comic of the man next to him: Rapeman, downtrodden schoolteacher turned super-hero, complete with cloak and costume, naked from the waist down. Only this super-hero served his clients by raping women and putting them in their place. Each instalment was named after a victim, and after first struggling, the women were shown enjoying it. Anatoli turned back to the window, disgusted.

A small truck cruised by, no larger than the wooden toys he had played with as a child, pointing out the contrast between the Japanese and Russian characters. If the Japanese were obsessed with the detailed and minute—baseball, bentō, bonsai—Russians glorified the grandiose: ballet, ballistics, and Bolshoi. He reminded himself of some of the more striking Soviet monstrosities: huge Kama trucks with radiator caps higher than a man could reach; massive red stars on top of prefabricated skyscrapers; one-hundred-and-sixty-foot-high statues of Lenin striding confidently to the future.

He sighed and glanced at the couple across from him, newlyweds, probably just back from their honeymoon. A slight frisson of small delicate sparks was building up in Anatoli’s brain, gathering themselves to coalesce and shoot out at would undoubtedly be the most inconvenient time, just like they had as he had stepped off the plane. The best Soviet doctors had told him there was no treatment for the condition. All he could do was simply endure.

Obedient consumers, a foreign honeymoon had become de rigueur in Japan, almost as much a part of the wedding ceremony as the ritualist cup of sake. Forced to spend days of intimacy together for the first and perhaps last time in their married lives, there was a special phrase for the stress it induced: Narita rikon, or Narita divorce. More than a few newlywedded couples’ marriages never lasted longer than the return flight to Tōkyō’s largest airport.

The couple was arguing. Not with voices, no angry words, just tight, ugly faces full of hatred. Neither violent nor loud, they seemed to be hurting each other badly. He wondered what the man had done wrong. Probably bought the wrong present for his mother-in-law. It always came down to something inconsequential like that. 

Frustrated, the man gave up, pulling out a magazine that specialized in the underwear of junior high school girls while he laboriously sucked the salt off each and every one of the dried squid in the jumbo bag he'd bought from a stand at the station. Anatoli's luck was certainly holding. All bad. He hated people who made noise with their bodies.

Slowly, Anatoli became aware that a man had got up to stand beside him. Hello, he kept repeating, hoping to practice his English, until Anatoli turned around and swore at him in Russian. The man blinked and asked him if he was Brazilian. He must have mistaken it for Portuguese. The government had been allowing South Americans of Japanese descent into the country on two-year guest permits to work three K jobs: kitsui, kitanai, and kiken. Dirty, difficult, and dangerous. The ones no Japanese would ever do.

What are you, a cop? Anatoli asked him in labourer's Japanese. When the man shook his head no, he told him that he guessed it wasn't any of his fucking business then. Rather than be offended, the man smiled and got up for a seat on the other side of the train. He'd gotten a look at the foreigner's bag. Dirty and half-broken, he wouldn't even have picked it out of the garbage. Just as he thought. Japan was best.

Anatoli had been lucky to find an empty seat at all. The train was packed, white-gloved attendants having pushed the throngs on the train platform into the cars in order to make room for everyone. Honeymooners stood beside businessmen, vacationers next to those commuting to work at the airport. Women were crushed in between male teenagers who had their noses happily pressed up against their breasts and taller adult males whose genitalia were almost thrust into their faces.

Sitting on the other side of Anatoli, two high school kids began a running gag – in loud uncensored Japanese, all Japanese blithely assumed no foreigner could ever speak their language—on how dangerous it was to sit next to a foreigner. If he was American, he might shoot them, and if he wasn't, he probably had AIDs. Still, one opined, maybe the size of the guy's penis would rub off on them and they'd get laid for a change. Everyone knew foreigners were hung like horses. Anatoli said nothing until the train stopped in Ueno in central Tōkyō. Then, he got up, undid his fly, and poked little Anatoli out the zipper.

"Hora, mite. Amari ōkiku nai," he said in Japanese before disappearing out the door.

No, it was not very big at all. The size of his balls was another matter. Once, forced by a group of drunken businessmen to kneel and apologize for Hiroshima on a Tōkyō subway platform, he'd informed them he was Russian, not American, and stood to his full six-feet, four-inches to announce he had a few scores to settle of his own. They fled without waiting to see how serious he was.

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At Ueno Station—downtown Tōkyō—the train doors hissed open and Anatoli fought the temptation to step back into the air-conditioned car. The cold wasn't natural. All it accomplished was making him sick. He had taken to wearing a clove of garlic around his neck to ward off the inevitable air-conditioner colds. When it happened, he had the sure-fire cure, better even than a shot of sake mixed with a raw egg, which the Japanese swore by. No, there was only one way to cure a cold and that was chili vodka. You put some chili peppers in a bottle of vodka and allowed them to sit till the alcohol was as hot and spicy as the peppers. Then you drank it the Russian way, exhaling and knocking it back from a shot glass. If it didn't work, you tried again. Back when he lived in Koriak, anyway. When alcohol was the only thing left in his life worth living for.

Anatoli hadn't always drank. Had hated it, in fact. Then came New York and exile and disgrace as one of the dead souls in Koriak. Siberia. The Far North. Most Russians regarded it as a cultural void, far removed from the rhythms, joys and gratifications of normal everyday life. Anatoli thought that was being too kind. From his point of view, the void was total, not just cultural. Like many other things there, he'd learned to drink to survive. Without the booze to dull his rage and help him forget, he would have put a pistol to his temple years ago. Now, however, rehabilitated as Yeltsin’s man, he was a teetotaller again, with eleven thousand five hundred and ninety-seven days in his current account. He wouldn’t be curing his colds with either the Russian or Japanese home remedies. Garlic was his new friend.

Anatoli was getting tired. The bags were heavy, and the doctors had warned him about overexerting himself. He stopped in front of a vending machine and fed it hundred-yen coins until it coughed out a can of iced coffee. He stood and drank it there, rather than being rude enough to walk around as he chugged. Japanese custom forbade eating or drinking while walking. Shu ni majiwareba akaku naru: Mix with vermilion, and you become red. Aping proper Japanese behaviour was the least he could do. Somewhere along the line in his studies and briefings, he'd fallen half in love with the country. Now, even that was starting to fade at a rate commensurate with the growing arrogance of the Japanese officials he was forced to deal with at the Ministry.

Never let it be said that Anatoli Scherbak never did the least he could do. He tossed the empty can of iced coffee into the recycling receptacle provided and promptly collapsed to the ground, a jagged bolt of electricity shooting down from behind his right ear, down his arm and toppling him from his feet.

A small attack, perhaps slightly stronger than normal. Anatoli stayed down on the sidewalk. He could use the break from the mugginess anyway. It had been dogging him from the second the airplane’s doors had opened, where the wall of humidity had rolled up the plane's walkway, clinging to him like a wet sponge through Customs and Immigration, over to the luggage carousel, onto the shuttle train platform, a brief respite on the air-conditioned train, then smacking him in the face again as he got out of the train here in Ueno, where, finally, he'd given in and collapsed.

He was lying there, gasping for breath, when he saw the truck. More speaker than car, the roof-mounted monstrosities almost dwarfed the Rising Sun flags, lurid signs, and men in brush cuts wearing khaki slacks, each and every one of them threatening violence against the very thing Anatoli was there to do.

Japanese land for the Japanese! the truck speakers were blaring, intimidating anyone within hearing distance to listen to their demands for the return of the southern Kurile Islands, the Northern Territories as the Japanese called them, the Hoppō Ryōdo, from the Soviets to Japan. Drive out the foreigners! At this rate, it might be a good thing he had eleven thousand five hundred and ninety-seven days because he'd need each and every one of them to get his job done, which was to someone turn an incomprehensible Japanese psychosis for four small specks of land in the northern Pacific into massive aid and restructuring to rebuild a Russia coming out of a seventy-five-year coma.

The sound truck tortured him, Anatoli unable to move from the pain, loudspeakers droning on, intimidating anyone within hearing distance into accepting their position that the Northern Territories needed to be returned to Japan.

No one complained. Why should they? This was Asia and in Asia it was always the same. You were never alone. Once, he'd taken a train the entire length of China and there had not been a single moment when there was not another human being visible through the window. Even here, in capitalistic Japan, it was impossible to escape from the collective. No chance to feel the power of solitude in their soul like someone who'd spent long periods alone on the steppes of the Ukraine or the ice and taiga of Siberia. He supposed only another Northerner like a Canadian or a Lapp could understand the attitude of being truly one and alone in the world. He closed his eyes and thought of herds of caribou, hooves so loud they sounded like thunder, air condensing in the cold above them like a cloud and falling like rain. Thought of salmon runs on the Amur, fish so thick you couldn't see to the bottom of the crystal-clear water. Eagles waiting for them like vultures on the birch branches hanging over the water. Mushrooms so plentiful they covered the forest like a carpet.

The hypocrisy in life was just too great. The attacks brought on by his strangled spinal chord they brought on were just one more thing to try and forget. What he wouldn’t give to be back in Chernominsk. Here, all there was was the infernal heat. The shooting pain in his head. The resulting confusion and cognitive impairment. Heat and crowds. An impossible task commanded by a demanding and unrealistic boss.

My name is Anatoli Scherbak and I have eleven thousand five hundred and ninety-seven days, he mumbled to himself lying on the ground. If this was New York, he could have found a church or soup kitchen and strengthened himself in the comfort of others who were too weak to have stayed on the wagon half that long. How did they put it at the meetings? One drink was too many and a thousand not enough. That was it. It had all been so long ago. Of course, he hadn't been drinking yet then either. That came later, with his disgrace and exile into the ice.

First, however, he had to find a way to pick himself off the pavement.

We'll change history ... he had told Norio in Siberia thirty-two years ago. Was history really changed that easily? For some people, maybe. Hitler considered the right version of history worth ten divisions. Stalin bent it and molded it and discarded it like Play Dough. But his ... his story ... was still secret and not worth a damn. If there was one thing he'd learned in fifty odd years of living in Soviet Russia, it was that secrets were like acid. Strong enough to eat their way through anything. If they could eat their way through a criminal partnership with a yakuza Madame, a coterie of corrupt Soviet officials, the Russian mafia, and a lifelong friendship with an absolute friend like Norio, why not a country? A revolution? A life, even.

He was a boob. He should be lying in a bed in Chernominsk, not here banging his head against a wall. The doctors had warned him that too much stress might bring the attacks on again. Lying on the pavement with the pain shooting from his right ear down his arm, leaving his diamonds lying there sewed under the lining in his dropped briefcase for anyone to steal, he waited for someone—His Embassy? The Japanese Foreign Ministry? Norio?—to come and get him. Luckily, this was Japan, not Russia. All they stole were bicycles here.

And hope. Whether it was the heat, his head, or just the dread of flailing away at his impossible task that brought on the attack, Anatoli couldn't say. All he knew as he listened to the truck blaring was that he could use some help. He had travelled to seven other Asian nations and never felt so alone. Because it wasn't just the language, food, and customs that set Japan apart. Not even the state of not understanding. What it was, was the blank stares. Women crossing the road to get to the other side. Friends making reservations for three people and a foreigner. Closed, empty smiles.

How things had changed, he thought slowly. There had been a