English / 06.09.2019 / 608

Brasileiro. Chapter VI

Nikolay Mokhov, author from the Dark Side of Business

Part I. Vaeroy
Chapter IV. Agnete and the Merman

The music system consumed discs and started slowly spinning the new day.
Brasileiro observed the Danish woman’s bright flat. He arrived in Denmark on a ship from Vaeroy. In Europe, nothing worked on the weekend, so they couldn’t deliver the cargo. All there was to do was to have fun.

At the karaoke, they were chanting rock hits into a microphone. That’s where he met a young woman. It happened on its own. They met each other’s eyes at the bar. A smile. He couldn’t make out her name through all that noise. So, he just took her by the hand. Her fingers were long.

The sailors’ conversations, the yelling of the singing people and the rumble of the music became distant. It felt as if the Danish woman and him suddenly entered a separate, invisible sphere. And that sphere carried them to her flat. A few years of an unsatisfied desire. He was rushing, taking his clothes off slightly quicker than usual, getting mixed up in his jeans and just as awkwardly, going in. It all ended rapidly.

All Russian bears are alcoholics. And in Russia, we’re all one big family… A bear that drinks — brings misery to the family

— On the Hojelands bridge, Agnete could see:
How a Merman just fully emerged from the sea, — the Danish girl sang an old ballade...

From the heading

Rule of the Weakest

A dense leader confident in their authority likes to give out orders.

“Because I said so!” the strongman loudly exclaims.

The leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, comrade Trotsky, called all the shots himself. He did it to show that he was the master of life and death. Trotsky was outsmarted by comrade Stalin.

How to feel the energy?

- I feel on top of the world... I'm so excited! Like I'm in love! I'm in the flow! This is energy, isn't it?

How do you answer this question? I do not even know... Oh, I've just remembered a story about this! A young man made a million, lets say dollars. So he decides to celebrate. He goes out to restaurants and clubs throwing money around like confetti and stuffing cash down girls' underwear. He is in the zone, and he invests the rest of the money in a new business. So he asks in the middle of the party...

Babylonian Squabbles

Once again I wondered: why is it so difficult to understand other people? Recently, we had a heated discussion in our chat. One of our readers pondered: what motivates young people these days to join power structures where there is “no place for individualism”? Someone suggested they could be compared to Batman: “Being afraid of bats, he decided to become one of them. So did these people: being afraid of the authorities, they decided to become them.” Someone else had a counter question, “How successful would they be had they not decided to join these structures?”

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.