Time of the Octopus: Based on the True Story of Whistleblower Edward Snowden

08:30 P.M._

The clock jingled out half past nine in the evening. Kold frowned.

“You don’t like loud sounds?” the Lawyer asked.

“Not when they are imposed on me.”

The Lawyer stood up, opened the clock and stopped the ticker.

“So what would you like to talk about, Mr. Kold?”

“What? I don’t know… Everything. Or more precisely, about lots of things. I am at a crossroads, a bifurcation point, and to me it is important… important to understand what is happening. Both to me and to the world, as melodramatic as that sounds.”

“You need to get it off your chest,” the Lawyer nodded. “Well, it is good. For us lawyers, the principal who makes contact is always better than those who stay tight-lipped. You know, I don’t like the word ‘client’, so popular with American lawyers – it always reminds me of a phrase from an old Soviet comedy movie: ‘The client has ripened’. What does that mean? Well, it’s a long story, and has no relation to our business. Would you mind if I turn on a voice recorder? Recordings can be useful in this work.”

Kold grinned, genuinely this time, and waved a hand around the room as if specifying some objects invisible to Lawyer.

“Of course, turn it on. At least, you do it openly.”

He waited until the Lawyer had set his smartphone up then started talking:

“You asked what I would like to begin with? Probably, with rats.”

“With what?” said the Lawyer, surprised.

“With rats. Rats, small animals, rodents. Grey backs, beady eyes, naked tails, you know? The omnivorous creatures that can get anywhere and everywhere. Those scurrying beasts that since time immemorial have lived near human dwellings, where life is quieter, more reliable and more nourishing. By nature, a rat is an egoist thinking only of its own benefit and pleasures. In a dense forest, in a dried-up steppe or in some tundra it doesn’t get to live, but merely survive, and the rat doesn’t like it. Are you already recording?”

“No,” The lawyer shook his head. “I will turn it on now.”

“It isn’t necessary. This is just a preamble, a prologue. When I give you a signal, then you can start to record, but now it isn’t necessary. So, about rats. The Ancient Romans, who were big experts in the destruction of civilizations, called rats by the short word ‘rattus’. By the way, contrary to popular belief, this has no relation to the Latin word ‘pirata’, though it seems conformable and, above all, similar in meaning. But I’m wandering off topic…

So…warm cellars, tasty garbage, darkness, silence – human cities became rat paradise. Especially tolerant people call it symbiosis, normal ones parasitizing, but, in fact, neither care much about nudicaudate rodents. They exist, and as long as they don’t transmit plague as in old times, that’s fine.

But everything changes when He appears. The Ratcatcher. Nobody knows who he is nor where he is. Nobody has seen him. Well, almost nobody. Nevertheless, the Ratcatcher is material, perceivable and corporeal. On the one hand, he is like time, existing regardless of our knowledge of him, and on the other hand, we, the people, we can observe the results of his actions, and empirically we watch the Ratcatcher carefully, framing conspiracy theories about him.

But while we are framing them, the Ratcatcher takes his pipe and he begins to play…

The sound of his music is at first heard only by rats. You can call it magic, neurolinguistic programming or exact calculation, but once they’ve heard the pipe of the Ratcatcher, rats begin to change. They leave their daily affairs, cares, entertainments and begin to gnaw…

‘Grrrum, grrrum, grrrum!’ This is not the shod boots of red-faced fellows in grey shirts clip-clopping on a cobblestone road. This is tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands of yellow gnashers piercing basements and foundations. Of history and culture, of family and practice, of belief and traditions, of literature and music, of architecture and painting. Of language. Of education. Of the memory of a nation. All of it turns to dust, to garbage, to slime, to mud and ashes.

Rats gnaw! Precepts and principles are subverted, heroes and feats are discredited.

Rats gnaw!! White becomes black, and black white. Everything is turned inside out, remade, upside down, back to front, simple becomes difficult, and difficult is simply destroyed. The truth is replaced by a lie. The truth is drowning… no, not in wine – but in the streams of this lie.

Rats gnaw!!! Sharpen, crumble, and grind to powder. On radio stations and TV channels. On pages of paper and virtual media. In blogs and social media postings. Every day, each hour.

‘Grrrum, grrrum, grrrum! Grrrum, grrrum, grrrum!’, in tune with the melody of the magic pipe. ‘The worse “the better!’, is the slogan of the rats. Or the Ratcatcher’s?

Ultimately it isn’t important. On a lovely day, the castle of civilization once so firm and unapproachable, long undercut by rats, suddenly begins to be unsteady, then cracks, founders and stops being a stronghold and a citadel. Walls and towers fall, buttresses turn into taluses of crushed stone, and gates turn into dust. And then no more rats climb into the breaches and holes, but in their place, the real predators, greedy and hungry, and after them come the night deathbirds, numerous and dangerous.

The rats become the first, easiest prey of the newcomers. Weakened, exhausted by gnawing, but still captivated by the song of the Ratcatcher, the rats can’t perceive reality adequately. They are devoured alive, even while they are gnawing to the last gnaw the already decayed and useless walls.

But the acts of the Ratcatcher aren’t at an end because after the rats, the turn of the children always comes.

On the ashes, on waste grounds and heathlands, among crumbling gravestones and fallen statues, children dance wild dances to the music of the Ratcatcher, and around, in the darkness, predators and deathbirds whirl. From time to time, they rush in on the dancing children and drag away a prize which cries out in horror through the darkness, but the cries cannot be heard by the rest since their ears are ringing with the sound of the Ratcatcher’s pipe.

The finale of the Ratcatcher’s symphony, the end of his time, comes when nobody is left on the ruins, either children or rats. Fields grow with tall weeds, sand skims marble steps. Where life once thrived, wires buzzed, and the pulse of steel hammers roared, now wind whistles through bare branches and wild dogs prowl. This is what I wanted to tell you before you turn the gadget on to record!”

Kold was walking up and down the room for a long time, and as he finished his speech, his hands were shaking. The Lawyer looked at Kold if not with amazement then with considerable surprise.

The usually pale face of Kold turned red, and his nose fluttered a little. But noticing the Lawyer’s surprised look, he smiled simply, with a guileless smile, took a seat on the chair and almost cheerfully waved a hand.

“Turn it on, come on!”

Lawyer turned the smartphone over in his hands thoughtfully and found himself recalling Brodsky, from ‘Letters to a Roman Friend’:

Kold was confused, but in his eyes something doglike flickered, sad and fateful. But there was no turning back now; recording had begun.

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“My childhood was spent in the State of North Carolina. I was born in Elizabeth City, but we moved to Wilmington, where the Cape Fear River drains into the Atlantic Ocean. Yes, there still is a cape, and it is indeed called Cape Fear and somewhere in these regions in old times pirates earned their living, with Edward Teach the Blackbeard at the top.

The coast here is extraordinary, with vast sandy beaches, dunes and old boarding houses and tourist hotels. If you’ve seen Scorsese’s movie ‘Cape Fear’, you can imagine what I’m talking about. But the cape doesn’t get its name from the movie, of course. In the 16^th century the English seafarer Richard Grenville – he was a corsair, I think, and a friend and accomplice of Francis Drake – well, he nearly went down with his ship here. Then, my father said, such places were called the graveyard of the Atlantic. It’s easy as pie to run aground even now, and in those days when seamen were guided only by compass, sun and stars, they were wrecked in great numbers here, so you really should call our beaches ‘The Skeleton Coast’.

North Carolina is quite a remarkable state, if you don’t know. Many key historical events happened here. For example, there was nearly a thermonuclear Armageddon. I learned about it when I worked in the Agency when the information was strictly secret, though now it is available to all ( This is the crash of a B-52 carrying two 3-4 megaton nuclear bombs at Goldsboro, North Carolina in 1961. Documents released in 2013 revealed that with one of the bombs just one of the four arming switches prevented it detonating. If that last switch had gone the result would have been catastrophic. The bomb disposal expert there, Lt. Jack Revelle, said “As far as I’m concerned we came damn close to having a Bay of North Carolina. The nuclear explosion would have completely changed the Eastern seaboard if it had gone off.” Each bomb had more than 250 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb, with a 100% kill zone of 23 km.).

I know it’s kind of strange to be proud of their homeland for such a reason, but you need to understand that American patriotism has a rather different flavor from, say, European, French or English.

It’s like with Italians when they are proud of something – maybe some quaint local pub called ‘The Cheerful Guinea’ where a moustachioed Giovanni makes delightful pizzas with no less delightful mozzarella.

Why? Because the entire ground in the neighborhood of ‘The Cheerful Guinea’ is larded with historical relics – because in the house opposite Pope Saint Leo I stayed and in the belltower next door Leonardo da Vinci made sketches, and down the same road Hannibal’s elephants walked.

For locals, all this is not just a reason for pride; it attracts tourists, too, like honey attracts bees. But of course nectar is also needed for honey, and that’s where moustachioed Giovanni with his pizza comes in.

But in America – not only in North Carolina but all states – there are occupation layers where you find charcoal from a fire the Apaches started no longer ago than the 18^th century. So in effect, we are like immigrants to another planet where there was no human history before, only Martian, vague and little understood.

Probably, if the Lord had done things differently – if the Mayan pyramids stood in the State of Washington, and Machu Picchu was in Boston – then we too might be a little different. But our ancestors had only the ‘five civilized tribes’, and all the rest were ‘savages’. Yes probably not such blood-thirsty devils as they’ve sometimes been painted, but still savages.

However, even this Indian component was enough for us to make a cult of it. White boys and girls ran with plastic tomahawks, wearing carnival costumes of Indian chiefs, and on Independence Day they shoot bows in the park at targets stylized as pumas and bisons.

It is natural that in this earth, poor in historicity, then in each state, in each county and each district there are constant searches for something that can be lifted on to the board of the imagination and proudly proclaimed: ‘Here, look, we are also a part of world historical process!’

And so the ‘Mayflower,’ ‘the pilgrim fathers’, ‘the Salem witches’, ‘the Thirteen Colonies’, ‘the Boston Tea Party’ and others have become symbols of real resonance, and Trenton, Princeton, Yorktown and Saratoga are revered no less than Waterloo or Austerlitz in Europe.

Of course, sometimes these desperate searches for reasons for pride get rather comical, and you’ll find a set of attractions like ‘The biggest cord hank in the world’ in remote places in America, monuments to ‘The most gigantic teflon frying pan’ or ‘the house museum of local hunter John Smith who killed the largest beaver on the planet.’

However, the story of the North Caroline Armageddon has no relation to this provincial exotic. It is real and awful because of its reality.

What I’m talking about is the so-called ‘Goldsboro accident’ or ‘the crash over Goldsboro’. It occurred in 1961, on 23^rd January. I remembered this date for life thanks to Pa, who once said:

‘Josh, all residents of our state have to consider this day our second or maybe our main birthday.’

My Pa would never speak frivolously, he wasn’t that kind of a person, and for this reason 23^rd January was etched in my memory forever.

1961: it was a hard and heavy time. The CIA had tried an invasion of Fidel Castro’s Cuba which ended in humiliating failure. A year later there was the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which both the USA and the Soviets, as the journalists say, ‘developed muscles’ as they limbered up for World War 3.

B-52 bombers with nuclear weapons on board were constantly plying the East coast at that time. In the event of armed conflict and attacks by Soviet ships, they had to destroy them in the ocean away from the United States.

I read the secret report prepared by Parker Jones, an employee of the Sandia national nuclear laboratory who headed the department to ensure operational safety of nuclear weapons. The report was written on the basis of a thorough investigation of the incident. It said that all of us, I mean the United States, miraculously managed to avoid a ‘catastrophe of monstrous scale.’

At first, there were no signs of trouble – the B-52 rising from the Seymour Johnson base near Goldsboro, made a planned flight along the coast and circled back to its turn point, ready for mid-air refueling. On board at the time were two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs with a capacity of four megatons each.

During refuelling the patrol-tired crew lost control of the huge plane, and as a result the B-52’s wing came off. Still flying at high speed, the bomber began to fall apart. Three of the eight crew members were killed instantly, and five escaped by parachute.

Both hydrogen bombs dropped right out of the bomb bays and plummeted to earth. One fell on heathland near the settlement of Faro without any harm; but in the second one detonation mechanisms activated.

A special landing parachute had deployed over the bomb. The surviving pilots, seeing it, begun to pray – they were sure that in several moments there would be a vast explosion.

In Parker Jones’s report, it is stated that three out of the bomb’s four safety mechanisms failed, apparently because of the concussion of the crash. So when the bomb hit the ground near one of the neighboring farms, a detonator activated and the process to detonate the bomb’s core was almost launched. Millions of lives were saved only by the last, fourth, fuse, the so-called low-voltage switch.

One can imagine what the locals thought when they saw the crash of the B-52, and then the descent of the bomb on a parachute. At that time in our country there was real hysteria – they were all afraid of Soviet attacks and nuclear war. People dug shelters, stored weapons, daily necessities, and other things. But they just didn’t know enough about the consequences of a nuclear explosion– many hoped to go into the forest, into remote areas and thus survive.

Perhaps farmers, seeing the bomb on the parachute, took it to be the first signs of a Russian invasion. Maybe they thought of gathering their relatives, maybe, even their cattle, and heading for the trees, without even suspecting that if a nuclear device activated, they wouldn’t outrun the blast wave even in racing cars.

The Mark-39 hydrogen bomb was, of course, not as powerful as the Soviet AH602 ‘Tsar bomb’ with which Khrushchev threatened the whole world. The power of ‘Tsar bomb’ was fifty eight megatons, and the Mark-39’s only four – but even this four was two hundred times more than the power of the atomic bomb which destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.

And if the Mark-39 which fell near a North Carolina farm had blown up, not only would numerous villages and towns nearby have been destroyed, but also Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and even New York. The report’s author estimates that the number of dead would rise beyond one million and if you add the wounded and the victims of radiation, then there would have been tens of millions of casualties.

Naturally, all information on the incident was at once coded. The Mark-39 was deployed five more years, despite its unreliable system of protection against accidental triggering of the detonators. This, I found out, was down to the fact that at that time we just had no other powerful nuclear bombs.

However, all this was long before I was born and is now ancient history.

Because Wilmington stands between two rivers flowing into the ocean bay, there are many channels , islands and moorings. From the windows of our house, especially from the second floor, you could always see ships sailing past Cape Fear and they constantly reminded me that everything in this world is changing, moving – that nothing is permanent, except time, which, as I said, exists regardless of our knowledge of it.

I was very fond of this house and everything around, and I want you to know – America is a great country, and I never betrayed it. On the contrary, it betrayed others, those who fed the octopus with human flesh. I’m probably speaking a little chaotically, but you will understand later. Now I come back to my childhood.

I remember one time when I was about eight or nine. It snowed – and snow is not the most frequent winter guest in North Carolina. The snow fell hard, forming real snow drifts, like in Canada. And, of course, everyone was delighted, children and adults, and for all the town it was like another Christmas, especially since it was Sunday.

That day Pa had a day off, and we all ran out into the yard and began to play snowballs. We didn’t just throw snowballs at each other, though; we imitated the assault of Umurbrogal mountain on Peleliu Island during the fight for the Palau archipelago (The Battle of Peleliu is the World War 2 battle of late 1944 that is featured in the video game Call of Duty. It was a controversial engagement because of the high loss of American lives for no huge strategic advance. Moreover, Major General William Rupertus, (USMC commander of 1^st Marine Division) promised it would be over in four days – it lasted over two months) !

Pa had often told us about this operation in World War II in which his father’s elder brother took part – and always quoted vice admiral Sherman (not the one who used to beat confederates, another one). He learned Sherman’s words from school: ‘The steep slopes of this hill were broken up by strange edges and spokes, and marked, like a grid, by a system of caves. Our foe had used the area with devilish ingenuity and created such a strong position that the American marines still hadn’t managed to take it. Among the maze of rocks the distance moved by the army in an entire week was measured in yards and feet.

On these islands, thousands of Americans died because the Japanese had created such tough fortifications here. They’d dug through the earth and rocks, made caves into bunkers, set guns and machine guns everywhere, and were so prepared it was as if they wanted to beat off the army of the Apocalypse. All the same our marines managed in the end to pick the Samurais out from their holes and dens and set up the American flag on Umurbrogal’s top.

The role of Umurbrogal was played for us by an old pickup truck filled up with snow. Pa got inside and became all the Japanese at once, and the rest of us – Mom, Judith and me – were our marines, attacking in three parties. It was terrific. I even had a flag to raise! A real American flag, though not very big.

Gee, it was so tough breaking through to that pickup truck! Snowballs flew. Everybody was covered in snow. There wasn’t a dry place left on me, nor the others. Pa was standing in the truck driving us off like a multi-armed Shiva god, laughing at the top of his voice with horrible samurai laughter!

But then finally he gave us a chance to get closer. And as we moved in we managed to plaster him in snow and tumble him in a snowdrift. Then I solemnly set the American flag on the pickup roof. We started singing the anthem, and Pa climbed out of the snowdrift and joined in.

But right then I burst into sobs. Real hysterics. I cried in great spasms. Mom stroked me in the face, and Judith wet my head.

Everyone thought that it was because in the middle of the fight Pa had caught me on the nose so hard with a snowball that my nose started to bleed. But no, I endured that bravely and Pa even said I was a real soldier, that I was no worse than the heroes of the fight for Palau and that he was proud he had such a son.

But actually I was crying for another reason. If Pa hadn’t given in, we would never have captured the pickup and set the flag on the roof. So it turned out that our fight for Palau was won not by America, but Japan. At that time, this idea was for me simply impossible and even intolerable.

I can’t even imagine what it feels like for people of countries which have lost a war, been occupied or lost independence. To be a citizen of this unlucky country dooms you to a sad existence, to become an outsider, and with no way to improve the situation quickly.

In sport, even if you or your team lose, there is always a chance to strain muscles, to gather your will in your hands and to achieve a new result, to achieve a victory. We are taught this at school from the earliest age. To be successful, to be a winner, is the ultimate goal in life – only this way can you become the master of your own fate.

For this reason, I am grateful to God that I was born in the United States – in the richest, happiest and safest country of the world. Naturally, I love my country. That’s not sentimental at all. I don’t understand how it could be any different and I was actually surprised to learn that in other countries there are people that despise their Homeland.

It wasn’t for nothing that the Lord granted human beings freedom of choice in everything in life – everything except for the three things given us from above: country, family and race. They can’t be chosen. These are the choice of God and people have to be proud of His choice whichever it is. Only like this can you live constructively and work.

Work – in particular, hard work – built a small group of settlements into the strongest and most powerful state on the planet in two hundred years.

Work, money and capital are the basis of freedom. Only a wealthy man is really free. The pitiful runaway and the poor derelict without a cent to his name will be slaves forever. The beliefs of the pilgrim father’s told them: ‘Work, create, fight to find your house and to become the owner of it!’ They trusted, they worked, they fought…

But I got it. Americans are essentially immigrants – and they include many who came to the States to work for a better life. And these Americans have become the ones who worked, who believed in freedom and were ready to make any sacrifice for the sake of it.

Of course, if you think about it, it’s all completely logical and corresponds to a success algorithm – people with initiative aim for a beacon of success and prosperity just like moths are lured to a light.

Anyway, the USA is a unique or rare phenomenon on our planet. Once again: I want everyone to know, I am proud of the fact that I am an American and that I am honoured to fight to make my Homeland an even more free and happy country.

When I was a child, we often played Elvis Presley’s recording of ‘America the Beautiful’. I remember the lyrics so well:

I am ready to stand by every word in there. That’s all. Enough of that.

My first and probably only early childhood friend was Ron Stout, though nobody called him that. To residents of Elizabeth City where we lived then, he was known as ‘The Iron Hand’. No that’s not an Indian name at all, though there were enough of them in North Carolina in earlier times.

The truth is Ron’s father was a mechanic, or more precisely, the owner of an auto repair shop attached to the gas station, you know, just an ordinary gas station with a big Shell banner over the entrance. So he had a big tin shed, with lots of machines, devices and tools. And, well, Ron had spent all his time there since childhood, tinkering with all these pieces of iron, always twisting something, soldering, drilling and welding. And once he made an iron hand for himself as the Terminator in the old movie, and even went to church with it – where he ripped the deputy mayor’s new suit when it got hooked. That’s why ever after Ron was nicknamed The Iron Hand.

We were pals even before school. Well, companions… We sat together in preschool in the sandbox under the supervision of Mrs. Boyd and we wouldn’t give this ‘Galactic Star’ cargo spaceship to fat McFlynn. Then the other McFlynns always came – three brothers – and took over the box and chucked sand in our faces.

Later, in grade school, we were joined like salt and pepper – always going everywhere and sharing breakfasts. We did just about everything together, and even fell together into an old maintenance shaft – that’s the kind of friendship we had.

When the war against Iraq started, the first, Operation Desert Storm, Ron’s father hung out a poster saying ‘I Do Not Serve Militarists’ over the entrance to the auto repair shop.

Pa, I remember, got really angry, and his friends too. They considered that ‘Old man George’– that’s how they called President Bush Sr. – is doing everything right, and Saddam needs to be punished for his friendship with the ‘reds’ and his aggression against tiny Kuwait. Generally, they thought: ‘Go ahead, sons of America!’

Once my old man and Ron’s began to argue about it ferociously in the street. My Pa shouted that an American can’t go against the president, because then he is not an American any more but a pathetic turncoat and a sluff. Ron’s Pa shouted that it is all about oil and those babblers on television had just filled the heads of people like my old man with guff.

Well, and then the auto repair shop suddenly burned down, with Ron in it. Police officers said he was making something in there, maybe a new iron hand and couldn’t get out – he’d inhaled smoke and poisonous fumes and then the roof had collapsed. Only bones were found.

After that Ron’s family left the city, and we left not long after too because Pa’s reassignment took us to Wilmington. But in Wilmington, I had no real friends, only occasional playmates.

Maybe of all the people I met in childhood besides my parents, Mr. Stanford, the history teacher at our school, was the most interesting. He was tall and grey-haired, with the ruddy face of a Santa Claus and a wrinkled neck. He invariably wore an American flag on the lapel of his no less invariable striped jacket. He constantly joked around with us, set up voluntary groups, took us on excursions, told us about things.

Once he took thirty or so of us little ones to the USS North Carolina. That was the name of a huge battleship that had been laid up at a pier in Wilmington in 1961. We just called it ‘Ship’, with a capital letter. ‘Let’s meet opposite Ship’, we’d say, and everything would be clear at once.

The USS North Carolina was an impressive construction. As a child, it seemed to me that it was no less than a mile long, and its steel masts looked taller than the skyscrapers of New York. Then I looked up the true dimensions of this battleship, and its length was actually 728 feet – which is still, you must admit, considerable. And I still remember the massive, just incredibly massive, guns with barrels so big an adult could climb inside.

There was a museum on the battleship, and Mr. Stanford led us there to tell us about the fighting history of the USS North Carolina. This steel monster was constructed in 1942, and more than a thousand people served on it. In the war, he told us, Japan attacked us and their planes bombed our ports and cities all the time, and their troops occupied all the islands in the Pacific Ocean and were coming for California and Portland. Then all the American people followed president Roosevelt’s lead, and said in unison: ‘We can!’, and we began to build new ships and planes.

The USS North Carolina and other cruisers, battleships and aircraft carriers sailed out into the ocean and began to attack Japanese military bases and ships, and assist landings to free the cities and islands.

I am telling this now as I remembered Mr. Stanford telling it – vividly, his arms swinging, acting out all the parts – wise president Roosevelt, the blood-thirsty Japanese, our courageous seamen, and even the storm and fog that lead the ships towards the enemy.

The USS North Carolina did a lot of fighting, together with the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Saratoga – and then received a torpedo hit from a Japanese I-15 submarine.

Only two seamen died but the forward part of the battle ship together with a main gun turret were damaged, so it was withdrawn from military operations and was sent to Pearl Harbor for repairs. Once repaired, the USS North Carolina was in the war for a long time, reached Japan and Okinawa, but this isn’t interesting.

What’s interesting was that those dead seamen became ghosts!

Mr. Stanford always told us about this down below, in the dark cramped space beneath the front gun turret, and in such a sinister voice that some of the little girls began to squeal in fear.

The first time ghosts were noticed on the battle ship was in 1961 when the money was raised locally to redeem the battle ship from the Navy and it was towed to Wilmington to make a museum from it.

That’s when everything began! Every year, it seemed, somebody managed to imprint on a photograph a blurred silhouette in some corridor or doorway, while awful groans and a lingering howl were repeatedly registered on tape recorders – and everyone could listen to the recording for twenty five cents at the cash desk of the museum.

I remember all this distinctly because I have always had a very good memory for information. In Elizabeth City, I was even called a marvel.

Once, I memorized twelve pages of the Gospel of Luke for a bet and didn’t make a single mistake when I repeated the text aloud. I can say it all even now.

But back to the museum. When he spoke about the ghosts, Mr. Stanford transformed himself, turning into an infernal creature. He lowered his voice to an ominous whisper, cried out as if he was attacked, distorted his face into horrible shapes and grinned like B.B. King.

The unfortunate sailors from the USS North Carolina were soon joined in his string of narratives by European ghosts such as the Canterville Ghost and the White Lady, and by the Salem witches and spirits of Indian leaders and shamans.

If Mr. Stanford hadn’t been a teacher, he would have been a preacher or a salesman. He was the kind of guy who could persuade any American to believe in anyone or buy anything.

By the way, Mr. Stanford’s second favourite topic after ghosts was Indians. He knew everything about the history of development of our state and the Indian wars which Cherokee, Croatoan (those said to have slaughtered the ‘Lost Colony’ on Roanoke Island), Maskoki, Chickasaw and others, those ‘red-skinned devils’ who were moved on from the Indian territory to beyond the Mississippi letting us, in a sense, more civilized people, live settled lives.

Mr. Stanford never stinted on color, painting vivid pictures for us school students of the awful atrocities done by Indians on our unfortunate ancestors who brought the light of civilization to these savages. Once the pilgrim fathers landed on the East coast, Mr. Stanford said, there was nothing else to do but exterminate them entirely.

The sad story of the colony on Roanoke Island, he told us, is one of the best confirmations. The slaughtered colonists carved the letters ‘Cro’ on a column to identify their ruthless murderers, the Croatoana, who painted themselves with black and white paints. But other tribes were no better, killing colonists in ambushes, attacks on farms, burning houses, and cutting, forcing and tearing off scalps.

And to the glory of our great, courageous and generous ancestors, Mr. Stanford said, they managed to curb the damned devils, beat the tomahawks from their hands, and then humanely move them to a place where they threatened nobody. To Oklahoma, for example.

Then, much later, I read the documentary book by Dorris ‘Dee’ Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, in which I found out the real history of the Indian people and understood that Mr. Stanford had lied. Lied – deliberately and insistently – because it is simply impossible to be so mistaken. Of course, it was ‘the children’s lie’ because we simply wouldn’t understand the truth.

Maybe I’ll come back to the Indian topic later and for another reason. But here I’d like to tell you about the Cherokee because this tribe, one of the five so-called ‘civilized tribes’, always seemed to me that part of ‘the real America’ which had to be in the present United States.

And so the Cherokee somehow managed to create a small, but quite real state, the Cherokee Nation, with its own parliament or tribal council, a constitution, written laws and a nationally elected president referred to as the ‘Great Leader’.

By this time, the end of the 18^th century, they had already become Christians, led a settled life, lived in houses, cultivated plantations, raised cattle, and even had black slaves – in a word, they were no different from their white neighbors.

And from bad to worse: it was the Cherokees who, for the first time on the continent, created a free school system, with more than thirty schools, and their president Sequoya, named in English George Guess, created the special Cherokee alphabet in which even a Cherokee newspaper The Cherokee Phoenix was issued in 1828.

The Indians had a newspaper, do you realize? If Mr. Stanford was to mention it, he’d probably say it was a forum for discussing scalping techniques and how to cut the hearts out of white men.

Our ancestors didn’t like the competition with the Cherokee. Civilized Indians threatened the existence of the young country which not so long before had achieved independence.

And everything ended in 1838 when, under The Law on the Removal of Indians, the Cherokee were sent on a ‘Trail of Tears’ to a new homeland in the desert valleys of Oklahoma.

On the road more than half of the tribe died of cold, hunger and disease.

Interestingly, their black slaves, and even some whites living in the Cherokee Nation, moved with the Cherokee. And so our ancestors breathed a sigh of relief, having finally got the lands belonging to the tribe.

Just to say a few words about scalping, since this is considered a purely Indian atrocity – ripping skin with the hair off the head of an enemy. I deliberately checked on it, and it seems to be nothing of the kind.

Scalps were remove by ancient Scythians, who hung up triangular pieces from the heads of killed enemies on the reins of their horses. The more of these leather fringes there were on their reins, the more their owner was respected.

In the Dark Ages, according to various chronicles such as that of the 9^th century abbot Emmanuel Dominic, Anglo-Saxons, and Goths and Francs, all tore off scalps.

Then when the war of independence broke out on the territory of the future USA, the English Vice Governor Henry Hamilton declared that he would pay any person for a killed American immigrant. And how would you prove the murder has happened and the white person was killed? Ingeniously simple but nasty: with a piece of skin and the lock of hair cut from the head!

Soon Hamilton received the nickname of The Famous Hair Buyer among trappers and Indians. Scalping became a very convenient way of reporting on killed enemies and during the Frontier wars with the Indians and, during the Clearing of the Great Plains, our civilized pilgrim fathers counted killed red-skins by scalps. Thousands, tens of thousands of scalps, men’s, women’s, children’s…

But I learned all this much later, after college, and for me as a child, Mr. Stanford was a real idol. Lao Tzu was right when he said that an eloquent person is often false whereas a moral person is usually not eloquent. But Mr. Stanford then could compete in my eyes for authority with Pa or Aunt Prist.

Damn, I had totally forgotten about her! When we still lived in Elizabeth City, I liked to visit Aunt Prist.

She was not really my aunt. She wasn’t a relative at all. It’s just that when grandpa, my pa’s father, employed her as a servant, it turned out that she saved his and all the family’s lives.

She noticed two robbers climbing into the house at night and called the police. The robbers were caught, and it turned out that they were in fact ‘the Black Devils’, a couple of cold-blooded murderers who sent to glory nearly thirty people in four states down the East coast.

They got into houses at night, killed everyone in the house with a gun with a silencer, then quietly took away all the valuables and slipped away before dawn. Needless to say these devils were called ‘black’ because both were Afro-Americans.

So, Aunt Prist received an official message of thanks from the police department, an award from the state governor and a tidy sum of money from our old man.

After that she worked for us a long time and when she became old and our own family affairs went downhill, she lodged in the neighborhood. My sister Judith and I often dropped in on the old woman, and she always treated us with gingersnaps and tea like in England.

Aunt Prist loved everything English, except their movies. She watched American films, but old movies, not color. She had a big player for videotapes, apparently, in a format called VHS, and her TV was old too, with a picture tube, with polished wooden sides and a convex screen.

She often showed us her movies while we had tea and dangled our legs under the table. They were mostly comedies about a little man with a short moustache and a ridiculous gait. He was called the Tramp, and he constantly got into some silly situations. Ju and I laughed loudly as crumbs of gingersnap fell from our mouths.

Then for some reason Judith stopped going to Aunt Prist, so I watched the movies about the Tramp alone, while Auntie knitted in the corner – she knitted all the time with a smile in the corners of her wrinkled mouth – and glanced at me over her glasses.

Of all the movies I saw at Aunt Prist, the two I most remembered were Modern Times and The Great Dictator. Well, the dictator was Hitler, that was clear there, and in Modern Times the Tramp kept going to prison because he couldn’t fit into the conveyor of life, though once he even was drawn into a huge car factory.

Then he fell in love with a poor orphan girl and tried to arrange her life for the better, the girl got arrested but he saved her. There was a lot about the Great Depression, about strikes and the people’s fight for their rights. Anyway, the Tramp and the girl were forced to leave the city to look for happiness in another place.

Of course, I didn’t understand at once what this movie was about. I watched it absolutely as a child, but once, when I was six or seven, I suddenly realized that in order for people to be happy, you need to break all these cars and factories, and then everything will be good.

I went and told that to Father. Pa… he, well, let’s say didn’t approve of my idea and… And he called Aunt Prist the old hen. My Pa is in general a severe person – I’ll return to this later.

So I didn’t tell Pa about The Great Dictator. And I started going less often to Aunt Prist so that Pa didn’t see me going, because if something or someone isn’t pleasant to him, and I am on friendly terms with them, then that could only bring further trouble.

Then Aunt Prist died. She had no children and no relatives, and was buried at the city’s expense – so we, in a sense, our family, allocated something.

She bequeathed all her property to our family, but Pa gave the order ‘chuck this stuff out.’ So workers in blue coveralls came, took out all her furniture, threw many things in sacks and took it all away on a big truck. All that was left was on a windowsill – some flowers in pots and three rows of those big videotapes. I grabbed my two favourites, The Great Dictator and Modern Times and took them away home. We had nothing to watch them on – we already had a DVD player – but I kept those tapes until Pa noticed them by chance.

‘What shit is that?’ he asked, shaking The Great Dictator. “What’s it for?”

‘For memory…’ I mumbled.

‘Memories are here!’ Pa tapped himself on the forehead with his finger. ‘And this is rubbish and shit the red madman made for fools and idlers. Throw it out at once!’

I threw out both tapes. Because if Pa called someone ‘red’ things looked bad.

Charles Chaplin was indeed red, or more precisely, or most likely, a socialist in beliefs, but my Pa used the word ‘red’ not only in the ideological sense.

‘Red’ for him was first of all the enemy of all that he loved, appreciated and protected. Of all things American, correct and true. ‘Reds’ wanted to destroy them all, to delete, wipe out and if possible erase them altogether.

There was a time Pa was in the CG – that’s the Coast Guard – and on Fridays over beer they’d all discuss ‘reds’, and it was better not to get involved. Everyone was subjected to severe punishment – both ‘stupid Chinese’, and ‘narrow-eyed Viet Congs’, and ‘hairy Russians’, and ‘whacked out Latinos’, and even ‘the mumpish Brits’ which welcome ‘dirty Muslims’ and had ‘strongly reddened’ in recent years – just like ‘those French frog-eaters’.

I should tell you about my father. His name is George. George Alan Kold, his full name. He is a real American – strong, energetic, self-assured in his person and what he does. Always so sure. I remember, since I was an infant, he would say:

‘Josh, if you want to achieve something in life, never doubt yourself. Doubts are like fear, and for a man there is no worse accusation than cowardice.’

Once I asked him:

‘And what do you do if you aren’t right, Pa?’

‘Stand your ground!’ he answered firmly and thrust his chin out. It was his habit at every trifle to thrust his chin out and to look with a squint as though he wants to hit you.

‘Even if you’re not right at all?’

‘Precisely, Josh, quite so. Even if you did something wrong, you behave as if you won the biggest discount at a sale. People love confidence and can’t stand doubting whiners. And remember, little Josh: if you do something, never be afraid of a result, do not be afraid to finish your deed, you understand? Like President Truman with the Japanese. The weed must be weeded out with its root! If Kennedy hadn’t tucked his tail between his legs in ’62 and had instead given the reds in Cuba a big thump on the head, he’d be alive, and the world would be absolutely different.’

‘How?’

‘Entirely American!’ Pa’s chin thrust even higher. ‘Nowhere would have stayed red and the whole world would live like us. That means right and happy.’

Pa’s friends were like him. They called themselves ‘the real guys’. Not all of them were from the Coast Guard. Big Bruce, for example, headed the fire team, and bald Walter served in the police.

On Fridays, as I said, they gathered either in a bar on the embankment, or at our place, drank beer and discussed any news and problems, and the next day, on Saturday, they went to a shooting range because all were members of the National Rifle Association.

Of course, all these ‘real guys’ voted for elephants, that is the Grand Old Party, and hated donkeys, that is the democrats, for their liberalism, cleverness and love for any strange minorities.

Perhaps from my story you might get the idea that my Pa and his friends were gallant soldiers who enjoyed singing the national anthem and marching on Independence Day, and spent the rest of their time in a bar or in front of the TV or shouting at the wife?

Well, no, my old man was not that way at all. He read much, especially magazines on the military and history and he regularly executed tough work. The Coast Guard in Wilmington doesn’t catch Mexican smugglers like in California or on the beaches of Texas, but there are plenty of real problems on the Eastern coast, especially during the storm season, and Pa had several commendations for excellent service.

I was always proud of my old man and I am still. He is a very good person. Yes, his character is no bowl of cherries, but it depends how you carry it, doesn’t it? At least, a lot of what is in me is down to Pa’s strengths. He taught me to be a real American, and I always remember him when things are hard or I need to make an important decision.

Maybe you’re surprised that I still haven’t mentioned my mother? Well, of course, Judith and I have a mother; we aren’t orphans! And Mom is a remarkable woman – kind, lovely, and we love her…

But somehow when I was a child she spent all her days at work without a break. She’s a lawyer, and I can’t remember ever seeing her on weekdays – during the week Pa often stayed at home because he was on day duties, and two days he had a rest. So I remember Pa, but Mom – no.

During week-ends, of course, like any real American family, we gathered round the dining table, prayed, ate, discussed things, but I remember that during these family lunches it was Pa who always led everything, and Mom only smiled.

I can’t tell even now whether she had the quality of brevity, rare in women, or just didn’t want to talk to us – or rather, didn’t see the point or wasn’t interested. Anyway it’s hard for me to understand what united her with Pa – they weren’t just different, but like entirely separate physical particles.

They divorced soon after I left school. Judith was already in college by that time and, remarkably, studying to be a lawyer. Mothers and daughters seem to know better how to pull together. Psychologists may say it happens the other way – that fathers gravitate toward communication and affection for daughters, and mothers towards sons, but in our family Pa was lukewarm with Judith. Frankly, she didn’t like his morals and his categorical way of making decisions, and he… well it seems to me that he doesn’t really believe in natural equality, but that’s only a politically incorrect guess.

Mom works in the Federal Court of Pittsburgh now… Or Baltimore? We sometimes correspond by e-mail or exchange calls on Skype, and she always sends a big paper card with spangles on holidays.

Well, that’s all I can tell you about my family and childhood. Well no, of course, there were many different situations, both ridiculous and sad. Once, for example, there was a fire at our house and Pa and I and the neighbors had already put it out by the time Big Bruce’s firemen arrived.

Or there was the seasonal sale in Nordstroms – when we arrived during the night to grab first place in the queue. Pa always loved to be first in everything – but it turned out that nearly half the city were already there!

And one day on TV it was declared that the wreck of the ship of the notorious pirate Edward Teach the Blackbeard, full of treasures, had been found on the North Carolina coast, near our city (The wreck of the Blackbeard’s ship The Queen Anne’s Revenge was first discovered in 1995 off Beaufort in North Carolina, where it went down in 1718. But it wasn’t until 2011 that it was finally confirmed to be the real thing). So Pa and I and one of his friends, red-nosed Rick, went out there on a boat to have a look at what was what, and, maybe, try our luck. But of course we were intercepted by the Coast Guard from the next base who mistook us for marauders. Who knows what would have happened if uncle Ric hadn’t had acquaintances among this Coast Guard.

I never loved school, mainly because of the teachers. Not all of them were as eloquent as Mr. Stanford. Some couldn’t even connect two words, and there were those who didn’t teach us anything, but derived pleasure from their power.

We had Mr. Ivan Isenberg, the owner of a very extensive bald head and the academic degree of the doctor of philosophy in the field of applied informatics. Now I think that if someone with a PhD is working as a schoolteacher, there’s something is wrong with him, and it seemed to us that Mr. Isenberg was a red terrorist fascist who just hadn’t been finished off by our heroic soldiers in Vietnam or in Iraq, or The Maniac and Dr. Evil in one package.

He was average height, always dressed in a faultless suit, always shaved – and always scented with sweet cologne, so sweet it seemed like a perfume for women. Like all the other teachers, he liked us all to do everything similarly – similar dress, similar studies, similar behaviour. ‘Similar’, in a word, so nobody needed to be individually catered for – so convenient!

But, unlike other teachers, Mr. Isenberg called this similarity ‘standardization’, which he thought was necessary for children. He was like some ancient paladin, a gallant knight whose sole purpose was to eradicate the sedition of originality and dissimilarity in erring, innocent youth.

He had many methods of eradication, some trickier than others. ‘Collective education’, for example, was when all the class suffered because of one pupil. If someone was five minutes late for a lesson, say, then all of us would have to stand up and stand till the bell rang. And so, during the break, the exhausted classmates would become brutes and give the late student a ‘friendly chat’ to make he was never late again. During this chat, they usually beat his legs and stomach so there was no visible bruise. And Mr. Isenberg spurred them on.

He also had a method, called ‘personal participation,’ in which the guilty pupil stayed after lessons and Mr. Isenberg read aloud to him excerpts from the Tortures and Punishments encyclopedia by Brian Lane.

From him, I learned about ducking-stools, the rack, the ‘Judas Cradle’, the ‘Spanish boot’, ‘the heretic’s fork’, ‘the qualified execution’, decimation, castration and decapitation. Some of my schoolmates felt dreadful during ‘personal participation’, but I usually stayed calm, since I am rather phlegmatic by nature and not so imaginative.

All the same, one of Mr. Isenberg’s conversations, I remember, did make a strong impression on me. It was about China, and I had always, since early childhood, been interested in China, its culture and history.

It was about Chinese women who, according to medieval standards of beauty surviving into the 20^th century, had to have small arc-shaped feet reminiscent of a new moon or a lily petal. Mr. Isenberg pointed out that it was hard for a girl who didn’t possess these signs of beauty to marry.

To get that arc-shaped foot, girls from six years-old had all toes, except the big one, turned in and bandaged to the sole. Twice a day, bandage was tightened firmly. This continued until the sole took the arc-shaped form.

This procedure caused extreme pain in girls, their legs often grew numb, and there were problems with blood circulation. The toes pressed into the sole completely lost blood supply. In adult Chinese women, they looked like white rectangles inserted into the skin of the sole.

As a result, adult women had the small foot of a six-year-old child, with only the big toe developed and providing support for walking. Because of this millions of Chinese girls couldn’t move easily, fell on ladders, on slopes or in a strong wind, but were considered ‘graceful’ and ‘distinguished’. Mr. Isenberg emphasized that they were ‘standardized’ and willing to suffer great torment for it. Not without reason did the Chinese people have sayings such as: ‘Beauty demands suffering’, ‘A pair of bandaged feet costs a bathtub of tears’.

I also learned from Mr. Isenberg that the famous Chinese politician Sun Yat-Sen, as a little boy, went through anguish because of the tortures his little sister suffered as her feet were bandaged by their mother.

The poor girl couldn’t sleep at night. She groaned and cried and only at daybreak went off into a leaden sleep. But almost at once, mother came and changed the bandage on the girl’s feet and the torture continued. Shocked by all this, Sun Yat-Sen addressed his mother one day:

‘Mother, it is too painful for her. You shouldn’t bandage the legs of my little sister!’

I don’t think that the daughter’s suffering pleased the mother, but she was forced to answer:

‘How can your little sister have lily-feet without pain? If she doesn’t have little feet then, when she becomes a young lady, she won’t marry and she will condemn us for violating of customs.’

Sun Yat-Sen, the future revolutionary, continued to campaign against bandaging, but only succeeded in getting his mother to invite another woman to bandage his sister’s feet, telling him:

‘It is the custom. Everyone does it.’

Mr. Isenberg gave this example and always stressed that the destruction of traditions and ‘standardization’ was the work of mad revolutionaries who as a result destroyed the state as Sun Yat-Sen had destroyed the Great Middle Empire and led millions of Chinese to death.

Sometimes, listening to Mr. Isenberg, I thought that one of us was mad – either he was, because of what was saying or doing, or me, because I was listening to all this.

And I couldn’t really understand how and why in the best and most fair country, in the center of the world, in an era when distances between continents were reduced to a several hours flight, and electronic communications have made it possible to contact anyone and anywhere instantly – when the future which science fiction writers dreamed about had arrived – nuts such as Mr. Isenberg lived there.

Some children wanted to send a complaint about him to the State Department of Education and even began to collect signatures, but what is known to two is known to everybody – someone informed and the complainants received additional sessions of ‘personal participation’.

To be honest, my dislike of school was cultivated not only by the teachers, but also by my schoolmates. As I said I had no real friends, and plenty of enemies.

I was rather thin, but I wasn’t a puny creature at all, and in sport I did everything I should, so it was no standard healthy-fellows-against-the-puny-nerd situation.

It was rather the contrary. The guys that snubbed me weren’t on friendly terms with sport. They were big, even fat guys, fans of chips, cola, burgers and movies with Bruce Willis.

They wore rapper trousers with low crotches, black caps with long peaks, undershirts with skulls, and portraits of Jam-Master-Jay and chains as if they were black.

And of course, they listened to rap, rough rap, Onyx, D.I.T.C. and Tupac Amaru. They called themselves ‘whiggers’ – well, like ‘white niggers’ though they were typical ‘white trash’…

Yes, and they spoke among themselves in rap slang as well they understood it. You know, all those words: ‘Hey, dude, high five, brazza, everything is cool, break off to the bro a couple of dollars on heating’, and other garbage.

I wore chinos and polo necks and didn’t listen to music at all. These ‘whiggers’ latched on to me, but I usually told them where to get off or simply ignored them. Once they came up to me and began to mutter something in their slang like ‘dude, brazza, everything is great’ and so on in their ‘ebonics’. So I answered them: ‘Speak white, guys!’ There were four of them, but I could only answer two or three times before I was shoved to the ground. And then it began…

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.”