They hated me, and their hatred was shown at every opportunity. Pa guessed that something was wrong for me at school, but all his advice came down to ‘if you clench your fist right, a punch won’t break your fingers’ or ‘if your opponent is taller or heavier than you and has big muscles, hit him in the throat and in the balls, where there are no muscles’.
Well, I didn’t graduate from school. Are you surprised? Actually, I was surprised too, but on the other hand, I now think that the ‘whiggers’ were sent to me by God so that I could reasonably and legitimately get rid of Mr. Isenberg with his sweet cologne and infinite stories about disembowelment, dismemberment and ‘Saint Augustine’s tie’.
Pa, to my surprise, did not really react. I told him that I would finish the last grade externally – that I intended to enroll in a college and that I had a lot more important things to do, much more important, than stay in the company of morons like our ‘whiggers’. Actually, the relations between Pa and Mom were by then so thoroughly messed up probably just didn’t give a damn about me.
But I wasn’t lying about things to do. From an early age I’d been drawn to computers, game consoles, electronic gadgets and other cyber-thingummies. It was my world, a world run according to exact and strict laws without emotions, without excess and unnecessary words.
Bytes, kilobytes and megabytes of information were carried away in a split second over vast distances, converted into text, into pictures, into moving objects. With their help, it was possible to operate all kinds of processes and mechanisms – and even launch ballistic missiles.
It was real magic, scientific magic, and it attracted me much more than riding a bicycle, inhaling dust on a basketball platform or cuddling schoolmates at a dance-party.
I was fond of programming. I played games. I tried to make my own, unpretentious working toys. Computer systems seemed to me a real leap into the future, something like a fairy tale in reality, and their era had come with the advent of the internet. Here everything fell into place: it was mine, it’s what I was born for.”
09:08 P.M._
Kold became silent. His eyes dimmed. The Lawyer switched off the recording. The silence was thick, deep and impenetrable. It was clear that Kold regretted his frankness or wanted to pretend so to make an impression on his interlocutor. This thought came to the Lawyer’s mind and seemed to him not entirely baseless.
“Communicating with people like Kold, you always need to remember that they aren’t so simple as they seem at first and even second glance,” he thought, then said aloud:
“All this is very interesting, but maybe you wanted to speak about something else?”
“Do you want some coffee?” asked Kold instead of answering. “Two coffees and a couple of hamburgers? Ok?”
“I won’t refuse. It’s warm here, but kind of…dampish, isn’t?”
“I set the climate control thermostat at nineteen degrees. And that isn’t just about my surname,” Kold smiled. “Just my brain melts if it’s too warm. Figuratively, at least.”
He got up and vanished behind the door. No more than a couple of minutes passed during which the Lawyer checked that Kold’s story was safely recorded and the battery on the smartphone had plenty of life, and then the inhabitant of A Bunker returned with a plastic tray with a glass coffee pot, a carton of milk, two cups and a plate with sandwiches.
“Please!” Kold put the tray on a table, pulled up a seat and started eating.
“And still…” After taking a sip of coffee, the Lawyer looked at Kold closely. “Something oppresses you… besides your own fate. What?”
“‘Nature never hurries, but everything is accomplished.’” Kold ate a sandwich, drank his coffee and then put the cup aside.
“Lao Tzu again? Are you fond of the Chinese culture?”
“Yes, but most of all Taoism.
“Then Zhuang Zi also has to be close to you. I always liked his directness. ‘Small swindlers in dungeons; large in the throneroom’” the Lawyer smiled.
“It seems that all Russians must like this statement,” Kold smiled too.
“Do you consider that human nature is identical only between modern Russians and the Chinese in the fourth century B.C.?” the Lawyer responded ironically.
“No, of course, not.” Kold sighed. “But if you remember Lao Tsu, then ‘the great person holds on to the essential and lets go of the inessential. He does everything truly, but will never be guided by laws’.
“We have a national expression in which this thought is expressed more simply,” Lawyer said: “‘The winner isn’t judged’.”
“Was it created by the people?” Kold asked. “Then your people learned Tao.”
“No, of course. It was said by the empress Ekaterina the Second when with just 800 soldiers commander Alexander Suvorov conquered the Turkish Turtukay fortress garrisoned by 4000 -against the orders of his commander Count Rumyantsev. Suvorov was to be judged by court-martial and sentenced to penal servitude or even to death, but the empress intervened…”
“Was that the great empress?” Kold asked: “I know so little of Russian history.”
“Not so little,” Lawyer nodded. “She came to the throne by chance and she was German, but… but finally deserved the honourable title of ‘Great’.”
“So, she was Taoist precisely!” Kold solemnly raised a forefinger and both of them burst out laughing.
Suddenly, the Lawyer’s phone began to vibrate. There was a call from the office. His secretary reminded him that on the Russia Today channel a broadcast of a press conference with the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency Michael Wyden was about to start.
“Mr. Kold, would you mind if I turn on the TV?” the Lawyer asked. “We can watch a program you might find rather interesting.”
“Go ahead,” nodded Kold.
The press conference had already begun. The smiling face of Wyden appeared on screen. The former director of the most powerful intelligence agency in the world resembled a Baptist preacher or a paediatrician from a prestigious clinic speaking at a charitable meeting.
“… He is definitely not a hero. At the same time, I don’t think that he fully fits the definition of ‘traitor’ as it is formulated in our Constitution. But with his actions he has undoubtedly caused huge harm to our country and he, most likely, has a major problem with his mentality. So the truth, most likely, lies somewhere in the middle,” Wyden said. The Lawyer smiled and looked at Kold.
“He thinks you are loony.”
Kold squirmed:
“I’m not interested in what this person says.”
“Why? He was your immediate superior and is still a very influential figure. I think Washington is speaking through his mouth now.”
“That’s not so,” Kold rubbed his chin doubtfully. “You see… Wyden reminds me… of your leader Gorbi, Mikhail Gorbachev, yes. Look, he even looks like him, only there is not a birthmark. And he is the same… a demagogue. Blah blah blah is his power. You listen!”
Kold took the remote control from the table and put the sound up. Wyden was answering a question about how he would behave as head of the NSA if a young specialist came to him and told him that they had problems with the BRISM program:
“And that is where the shoe pinches! Exactly. This is what most disturbs us – why didn’t Kold act this way? If someone wants to be a real whistleblower, then in a similar situation he is obliged to go to the chief, to the chief of the chief or to address a general council of the department or the General Inspector or even a Congressman to state his claims. Our country has a certain hierarchy allowing him to do this.”