Devastated was the word.  Yes, it fit.

The night before found her restless and fitful,  up and down, churning, besieged with scattered thoughts. Noisy chattering, fragmented bits of fear, hurt, shame, regret, disappointment and judgement, all jostling with one another, all scrabbling like jackals to be the first to gnaw on her bones.

Why was she carrying the full burden of shame? Had he not shown his flaws?

But as the indignation rose,  the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn  wept through like an Artesian wellspring of wisdom reminding, "But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

"WAIT JUST ONE MINUTE HERE, AL!" she protested.
crickets
"Oh no!" says she to herself,  as she dusted off her Ouija board, "You will come back here!"  

Nervous fingers and shaky vocal chords work together in a synchronized effort to pull him away from his glass of fermented potato and there he was, a bearded wild haired man with an intense stare that left her wriggling under her skin. But she was on a mission and she would not be deterred.

Clearing her throat, she began, "Mr. Solzhenitsyn ---"
Aleksandr raised his hand up  in a gesture to stop her
His heavily accented English softly penetrated the air.
"Pебенок, tell me, what do you need?"
"I need to understand."
"Tell me why." he pressed.

"Why?"  She forced her words past the hurt that sat lumped in her throat,"I'm trying to make sense of betrayal. How can people insist they truly love even after lies have been uncovered?"
"Tell me Кэтрин, would you agree that morality can often be found to be at odds with passion and desire?"

She nodded.
He continued, "And that good intentions are often found to be at odds with unconscious motivations?"
"Yes." she whispered

Aleksandr sat thoughtful for a moment, then gently and softly spoke. "You understand Кэтрин, your problem is, you want too much from understanding. It cannot turn shadow into light and it cannot right wrongs. So, no Pебенок, you are not in need of understanding. What you need is to accept that a thing is what it is."

He drew on his pipe and smiled tenderly. 
 "And you need to make a decision.
You must decide if your wounds have made you more ... or have made you less."

i only started collecting a library, because, would you believe it, my local library was a pauper in rags and tatters; apologies for omitting necessary diacritic marks, the whiskey was ******* on icecubes to a shrivel.*

ernest hemingway, e.m. forster, mary shelley,
aesop, r. l. stevenson, jean-paul sartre,
jack kerouac, sylvia plath, evelyn waugh,
chekhov, cortazar, freud, virginia woolf,
philip k. ****, dostoyevsky, aleksandr solzhenitsyn,
oscar wilde, malcolm x, kafka, nabokov,
bukowski, sacher-masoch, thomas a kempis,
yevgeny zamyatin, alexandre dumas,
will self, j. r. r. tolkien, richard b. bentall,
james joyce, william burroughs, truman capote,
herman hesse, thomas mann, j. d. salinger,
nikos kazantzakis, george orwell,
philip roth, joseph roth, bulgakov, huxley,
marquis de sade, john milton, samuel beckett,
huysmans, michel de montaigne, walter benjamin,
sienkiewicz, rilke, lipton, harold norse,
alfred jarry, miguel de cervantes, von krafft-ebing,
kierkegaard, julian jaynes, bynum porter & shephred,
r. d. laing, c. g. jung, spinoza, hegel, kant, artistotle,
plato, josephus, korner, la rochefoucauld, stendhal,
nietzsche, bertrand russell, irwin edman,
faucault, anwicenna, descartes, voltaire, rousseau,
popper,  heidegger, tatarkiewicz, kolakowski,
seneca, cycero, milan kundera, g. j. warnock,
stefan zweig, the pre-socratics, julian tuwim,
ezra pound, gregory corso, ted hughes,
guiseppe gioacchino belli, dante, peshwari women,
e. e. cummings, ginsberg, will alexander, max jacob,
schwob, william blake, comte de lautreamont,
jack spicer, zbigniew herbert, frank o'hara,
richard brautigan, miroslav holub, al purdy,
tzara, ted berrigan, fady joudah, nikolai leskov,
anna kavan, jean genet, albert camus, gunter grass,
susan hill, katherine dunn, gil scott-heron,
kleist, irvine welsh, clarice lispector, hunter thompson,
machado de assisi, reymont, tolstoy, jim bradbury,
norman davies, shakespeare, balzac, dickens,
jasienica, mary fulbrook, stuart t. miller,
walter la feber, jan wimmer, terry jones & alan ereira,
kenneth clark, edward robinson, heinrich harrer,
gombrowicz, a. krawczuk, andrzej stasiuk, ivan bunin,
joseph heller, goethe, mcmurry, atkins & de paula,
bernard shaw, horace, ovid, virgil, aeschyles,
rumi, omar khayyam, humbert wolfe, e. h. bickersteth,
asnyk, witkacy, mickiewicz, slowacki, lesmian,
lechon, lep szarzynski, victor alexandrov, gogol,
william styron, krasznahorkai, robert graves,
defoe, tim burton, antoine de saint-exupery,
christiane f., salman rushdie, hazlitt, marcus aurelius,
nick hornby, emily bronte, walt whitman,
aryeh kaplan, rolf g. renner, j. p. hodin, tim hilton... etc.

so you end up reading a book review,
about the mad myth-makers of mother russia,
the Kremlin is in thrall to men once seen
as ideological crazies: black wind, black snow,
pristine glitter of the western hemisphere:
if you regret having a conscience,
blame someone else not having one either,
motto no. 1...
Euro-Asian in russian politics:
Leicester City F.C. owned by a Thai...
mongols mongols everywhere! and not
a german to converse with! rant of the ancient
mariner... rereading, plagiarism and cheap humour;
anna akhmatova's son lev gumilev
chopping his leg along with firewood in a siberian
goo goo (dubbed the prison of the wingless
anchor of national sentiment, i.e. an eagle, quasi),
why is language to be or become an IKEA
(Sweden, Abba, great meatballs)
of putting together a table, a chair, why not take
stance with Burroughs and Tzara and make it
random? a few pedestrians along the way,
you never know when such randomness might convene
you to talk Taj Mahal postcards.
the fiend from KGB riddled east Berlin...
coca-colonialists - cola-nationalists, bought
Alaska, sold three-quarters of America to China...
#loveyourimperfections... selling love is not
like selling perfume... the thing you're selling is
an an Ayers rock sized ****... thing stank so much
you're welcome to see one bush in an acre
that's the outback...
orthodox christianity? didn't get it...
catholicism is too bureaucratic...
the Koran contradicts the genesis story of
a fire that's flameless, as the Israelites marched
a fire ahead, smoke behind them erasing tracks,
the Iblis of the Koran...
da, smert! it's all coming together like
an over-fried egg... with aleksandr dugin,
a guitar-strumming russian beatnik (
hard to be a beatnik in plateau without angry
Brooklyn streets) -
(ras)Putin based upon max stierlitz, KGB-backed
t.v. from the 1970s... or Hans Kloss,
limanov co-founded the national bolshoi party
along with behemoth (the alcoholic cat
who played chess in the Master and the Margarita)...
you've not been given any instructions,
you're already fazed with advertising interludes
changing your attention like looking into
a kaleidoscope between your favourite program...
16 years in Dresden, 22 years in England & Scotland...
but if you spent that same amount of time,
either 16 or 22 years, you might have
come across accounts of German girls after
world war ii... in the book we, children from station
ZOO by a Christiane F. (Christine F.) -
how the three allied powers were supplying
******... teenagers on ******... the western powers...
the new treaty of Versailles... teenagers on ******...
the western powers... east Berlin waited and waited
and got the emergence of Rammstein;
o.k. fair enough, teenagers overdosing and dying
but at least three world cup titles by FRG...
and GDR doing the doping rounds of revising
world records in sprinting and acrobatics at the
Olympics... in unison the chemists just say:
please use our compounds, our additives, dope up,
all the civilians are using recreational drugs
at some point during the week, please let the
olympians use our talent to increase their potential!

The theory of communism may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. — Karl Marx, 1818-1883, German philosopher

"Everyone may be called 'comrade,' but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades." — Thomas Sowell

​If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.— Karl Marx, 1818-1883, German philosopher

“Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.” — Frank Zappa (1940-1993), American musician

The left claims that the guilty party in a conflict is not the one who wants to take another person’s goods, but the one who defends his own. — Nicolas Gomez Davila, 1913-1994, Colombian writer

The whole secret of the campaigns unleashed against Spain can be explained in two words: masonry and communism...we have to extirpate these two evils from our land. -- Francisco Franco


“I see in Communism the focus of the concentrated evil of our time.” -- Whittaker Chambers


“Communism destroys democracy. Democracy can also destroy Communism.” -- Andre Malraux


“For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.” -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn


“My grandparents and my mom came from Cuba back in the '60s because they were fleeing from communism and Castro. I wouldn't be here otherwise.” -- Lauren Jauregui

“I have taken an oath in my heart to oppose communism until the day I die.” -- Eldridge Cleaver

“Let's not talk about Communism. Communism was just an idea, just pie in the sky.” -- Boris Yeltsin

“Communism brought out the worst in human nature and crippled people's ability or ambition to participate in a market economy.” -- Thomas Woods


“I have lived under totalitarian Communism, so I prize freedom as much as anyone and have long fought for freedom of conscience and speech.” -- Os Guinness

“Communism didn't work because people weren't ready for it, it was corrupt, and because it squelched individualism.” -- Tom Shadyac


“We need the private sector to create jobs. If the government could create jobs communism would have worked, but it didn't.” -- Tim Scott


“In communism, we never had any freedom -- of movement, of speech, of press. We didn't even make own decisions for our lives, our future. We were human robots.” -- Lee Hyeon-******>

“Technology helped end communism by bringing in information from the outside.” -- **** Walesa

“From a monarchy followed by suffering under communism, Ethiopians must be given the opportunity to flourish under the greatest of systems – democracy.” -- Jack Kingston

“Communism is in conflict with human nature.” -- Ernest Renan


“During my childhood in the Cold War, my family saw America as a great ally in our common struggle to keep back Soviet communism.” -- Gavin Esler

“It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.” -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn


“The real evil of the Russian communist state is not communism. It is the secret police and the concentration camp.” -- John Boyd Orr


“Communism feeds on aggression, hatred, and the imprisonment of men's minds and souls. This shall not take root in the United States.” -- Emanuel Celler


“Communism was meant to be an alternative religion.” -- David Miliband

/i keep forgetting that, whenever i slip-tongue some deutsch... it's not because i had some germanophilia... after all, Northern english, Scot and Welsh in terms of dialect, and other grammatical "unicorns" is not unique to tue British Isles... although,  as islanders, a tinge of solipsism and a uniqueness-complex tends to hold sway... unless the ***** tourism in Mallorca... then of course: let the cattle in... no... the kuriousrushenzunge is more or less correlated to the dialect of Silesians, and Kashubians... but that's just one thought: i can't imagine a poet, who ever didn't want to mature into a chicken-scratching scribbler... well... there is the persistent novelty of making expressions terse... since, however great a book will be... there are volumenbindung moments in, "serious" literature, which appear, as a sort of writer's phobia is writer's-block... somehow a space needs to be filled, no minor details being omitted... volume-binding... and you know that Faust was german... but primarily a chemist... when a German writes a word, or compounds, the late saxon has to hyphenate the compound... too much of a headache to read words compounded so... but look at any chemical name... you'll still find the sleeping saxon,  in the anglosphere... e. g.? PCTFE: polychlorotrifluoroethylene... now... a dreaming saxon wrote that, given less technical words are congested like that in common german... less shrapnel,  and certainly no hyphenation exclusiveness... so much for studying chemistry, when the study of diacritic came as a natural consequence of returning to the humanities... syllable premeditation: remnants of German in English... are still lodged in chemistry.

to be honest, i had my hopes set too high...
the only reason i read H. Sienkiewicz's
Ogniem i Mieczem (with fire and sword)
was because of the goosebumps
i was injected with
     upon listening to a track from
the soundtrack - husaria ginie
(the hussars die) - by Krzesimir Dębksi...
the book read itself, while i was
spreading butter onto a
kaiserbrötchen...
             or perhaps that part of history
interested me more,
than what i was about to embark on...
also by H. Sienkiewicz,
   krzyżacy (knights of the teutonic
order)... i can't say that it's a boring book,
or a tedius book...
    albeit so far into volume one...
not that many teutonic knights...
but primarily the protagonist,
a hot-headed eighteen year old of minor
nobility... and... too much character building,
that gets wasted on the vigour
of youth, and no real Dostoyevskian
depth...
              but the occasion  calls for it,
plus i've been dying to see the wonder of
the teutonic order for some time...
odd, but it would appear,
that simple stubbornness,
and an inability to leave a book
partially unead can't be measured by...
a persistent, "neurotic" or
        "o.c.d." compulsions,
since, no one would know, except me...
and cheating the book
by watching the Aleksandr Ford
   adaptation... would be a minor bypass...
rarely has a book actually forced
me to go somewhere,
in relation to its content...
      St. Petersburg would have resonated
if i visited it during autumn...
   yet can you do...
      if a visit, to see the teutonic capital
at Marienburg is what i'll have to do,
to read the book without inviting
in the remotest a tedium,
    a reader's lethargy...
               then a trip to Marienburg
has to happen...
                       two birds with one stone...
remotely, as if through a dream,
     visiting Danzing as a szkrab
   (schkrab / kleinkind)...
                apparently you can't do
one without the other.