English / 09.09.2019 / 4072

Brasileiro. Chapter II

Nikolay Mokhov, author from the Dark Side of Business

Part I. Vaeroy

Chapter II. The travelers’ club

Brasileiro had spent a long time washing himself off in the shower. The smell of fish refused to go away. The man was desperately rinsing his nose — it felt as if some invisible particles somehow got there. In the end, he gave up, dressed up in something clean and set off to greet his guests. Today there was a real celebration — a young woman finally arrived in the house where he lived.

When he was younger, he wouldn’t have even looked at a girl with even a hint of cellulitis. Nowadays, he had visions of a big rough female butt in the mornings

Vaeroy was an island of single men. The issue with sex was prevailing. In the beginning, when Brasileiro was at a bar and spotted a girl, he instantly began shooting his shot (**).
His kind neighbors stopped him. Using broken English, they explained that the girl was the only daughter of the island’s only policeman. It could have ended badly — the aborigines didn’t approve of their local women fooling around with foreign gentlemen.

Today’s beauty was a newcomer. That was good — perhaps, there was a chance at something happening… An older comrade once told Brasileiro:

— You chose the life of a sailor... What women do you expect? You know what they say about Arkhangelsk? Anguish, plank and codfish. That’s what’s waiting for you. Women aren’t waiting for you. Don’t even bother.

Brasileiro didn’t hope for anything. Five years ago, he left his hometown. He thought that he was looking to find adventures. Turns out — he was looking to find himself. And now, this Odyssey had brought him onto an island which no one needs, an island, which has the sole purpose of hiding fugitives, who would then prepare codfish…

From the heading

The Simple Person's Nightmare

I am a complex person. And there exist simple people. Simple people have it really bad right now. A simple person is faced with a crisis and doesn't know what to do with themselves. What is a crisis for them? They used to work as a fitness trainer, and now they can't. They have to rebuild their whole life, but how? Their slightly more advanced friends and relatives tell them:

“Well, you can do workouts through Skype!”

Don’t You Worry, Dear, You’re Tripping

There are hallucinations that we join in on. And there are those that we walk past. And there are people who hallucinate, but don’t want to share their world — we call them schizophrenics. Schizophrenics are outsiders in our hallucinogenic world. We’re not going to talk about them today. We’re going to talk about the leaders of the hallucinogenic world.

Leonardo’s Notes

“The problem is, Nikolai, that you never finish anything you start. You don’t even have a degree,” my girlfriend scolded me. We were on the subway.
She had just received some money to make a website, where she would eventually put up some boring local news. The site had dramatically less subscribers than even her Facebook page. In a couple years, the project went bankrupt. But she never lost her faith in the magical formula:

“You need closure. Every beginning has an end…”

Escaping Fate?

My grandfather Semyon escaped dekulakization, a wave of Soviet repressions in the 1930s. He grew up in a big family. His father died fighting in the First World War, and his grandfather (my great-grandfather) had a fairly decent, by rural standards, household. He had a sturdy house, some horses… In the Soviet thirties, this was a death sentence.