The next day, some meek payments from some poorer publisher arrived in the mail, but no summons to the EXTRA term.

  I made my way to the neighborhood of the university.

  I equipped myself appropriately for the mission at hand.

  I took three differently calibrated screwdrivers, two large, folded drawing boards of sufficiently thick, gray packing paper, a few meters of string, scissors, as well as a white medium-sized frette towel, one of those that I always took along with me.

  Everything was meticulously folded up and fit in the inside pocket of my English officer’s Burberry coat.

  On the way I also picked up a half a liter bottle of vodka.

  I opted for the more expensive 45% blue label. I counted on making a good impression.

  Western cities have this going for them.

  When through a larger one a river ran, then it was full of various channels, artificial offshoots, water reservoirs, locks, bridges, sluices, barriers and ditches.

  Not all like in the East, where the cities did for themselves and the rivers did too.

  I walked the length of a relatively substantial, deep cemented channel, separated from the street by some ten meters of width, overgrown with wild terrain.

  From the surface of the deep running water, the concrete walls could be some three or four meters and were perpendicular to the water.

  The channel itself wasn’t wider than five to seven meters.

  In a certain place the river forked around an island, in a shape close to a drop, but a drop swimming as if against the current.

  The drop—the island—could be about a hundred thirty by forty-five meters.

  A two storied stucco nineteenth century mansion stood in the widest part of the island, meaning at the front of the current.

  Its walls had numerous signs of cannon fire and bullet holes, as, after all, all the walls in this long besieged city had.

  Despite this, the mansion was still in pretty good shape, with a driveway for cars and from the years, of course, for carriages.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  There were visible signs of a large, circular flower-bed directly ahead of the entrance, on which at this time four long-maned, probably Soviet, horses freely trotted. Three chestnuts and a bay.

  Somewhere lower than half-way down the island there was one small bridge, across which a Soviet guard with a machine gun of the type PEPESZA strolled back and forth.

  For many years the sight of such a soldat would fill me with considerable fear.

  Now I felt sure of myself, strong, and, thanks to Plebanczyk, well trained and well-schooled.

  I knew perfectly well that in a matter of seconds I could drop this guard, together with his PEPESZA, and with a heavy back injury send him to hell.

  But of course, only for the glory of his fatherland would he fall into the idyllic-romantic stretch of deep channel under the bridge.

  Whatever the propaganda tried to instill in me on the matter of the Soviet Union and the Soviet people, I always knew the truth. Who, for example, was responsible for Katyn.

  And for me they were simply mentally degenerate, uncivilized, antipathetic, dangerous brutes.

  Of course, sometimes you’d hit on someone like cultured Dmitri Shostakovich, the cultured Sergei Eisenstein, or the very cultured Semyon Budyonny, but these exeptions proved the rule.

  My entire family had taken active part in the 1920 Bolshevik war.

  From early childhood they fed me blood-curdling tales of the horrific things Red Army soldiers were capable of during that war.

  As a child, for almost the entire first two years of the war, I lived under Soviet occupation because at the moment of the war’s outbreak my mother and I were unfortunately vacationing in the Eastern region of the country.

  Miraculously, we held on to our lives and now we and many who found themselves in a similar situation, knew exactly what kind of crowd this really was.

  Before the war, and really through most of its history, my nation did not find itself among the community of the most civilized European nations.

  For example, in the year 1863, during the time of the January insurrection, when the nobility, led by Romauld Traugutt and Artur Grottgerr, tried to fight the Russians in the forest roads and terrain, and in the manors the ladies and the unmarried women, discretely singing Moniuszko, were nonstop busy in the mass production of antiseptic rags for the growing number of injured January insurgents, in this same year, in the year 1863, in a country like England there was already serious thought of football leagues.

  Despite the shortcomings, between my country and the invaders from the East, the gap in civilization was gigantic.

  Absolutely no civilization was present there.

  I offered the soldat the vodka.

  -Drink a little bit first, you look like imperialist spy, he said, handing the bottle back to me.

  I took a swig, and then so did he.

  He patted his pockets for a pack of cigarettes, and I offered one of my own, Camels.

  -Oh, you definitely spy. What do you want?

  -I wanted to pick myself out a chair, I explained.

  -We have a few chairs, he said, pointing to the mansion on the island. Go there and choose yourself whatever one you want. The doors there are open.

  -When you find it, whistle, he continued. I’ll give you a sign when you can get out. I’m standing here until four, he said, looking at one of the three watches on his left hand with pride.

  -What time? Moscow’s, or ours?

  -Your time. In Moscow, he said, looking again at the three watches on his wrist, it will be six. Now go away. If you’re late, then the soldier who will take my place might shoot you.

  -Just don’t smoke there, he said, patting me on the back as I went to cross the bridge onto the island.