It was in that moment that his eyes popped open, and he sucked in his breath in a gasping lunge. His body shot upright and out of bed, and he suddenly became aware of the knock at the door.
Pyotr had risen at the first sounds of conflict and had begun to busy himself around the house, making coffee in the slanting early light that peered from behind and around the curtains. As he did so, he listened to the growing sounds of mayhem, and he wondered at the state of his world.
He heard people come out of their houses, and he made out the rough substance of their shouting and imagined the violence of their movements. He listened to the scuffling from between the houses near his own and sat quietly as neighbors set upon neighbors, and siblings attacked their parents, as the proverb manifested itself in Warwick that a man’s enemies were often those of his own household.
As the coffee reached its boiling point, he quietly slipped into his clothes and looked at the pictures on his mantle. He remembered the day now twenty years past when he’d said goodbye to his family as he secreted them out of the town on a truck that he’d arranged with the help of his uncle. He looked at the stove and listened to the street and wondered whether his family was still alive and whether he would ever see them again.
Pyotr Bolkonsky had always been a quiet man, rarely letting people into his thoughts, but as he sat and listened to the growing chaos from the street, he wondered aloud to the point that he blushed at the immediacy of his thought. “How can these people fall upon their neighbors in this way?” he wondered. “I would give anything for a moment to be with my loved ones.” As he thought this, he heard stirring from down the hall, and he walked over to the stove and poured two cups of coffee.
There is a contradiction in the Russian soul, Gogol and Turgenev identified it, where a man both accepts his plight dutifully as payment for his sins, and rejects all of the individual elements that make up that reality as products of chaos and evil. As Pyotr brought his coffee to his lips and poured the burning liquid down his throat, he thought of this contradiction.
As is the case in peculiarly Russian civil wars, and as has been mentioned previously, in the earliest moments of the conflict, it had been unclear where the battle lines were bound to be drawn. The war that was raging was not two dimensional, but it jutted into the third dimension, and intersecting axes of conflict could probably only be seen and understood from space… or heaven.
There were bubbles of conflict that developed in the street, only to drift until they burst, spilling their contents into the wider community. Men who had no interest in the fight suddenly found themselves engaged in fisticuffs because they had happened to be wearing red, or blue, or yellow when they left their homes that morning.
Women, who were making their way to the market as they might have on any other day, were accosted in the lane for their opinions, or lack thereof, and were immediately drawn into the heat of battle. One might easily pass a neighbor on the street only to decide at a glance that he was not with you (or that he might become one who is against you), or one might remember that an insult had once been received at the hands of a friend and use the war as cover for revenge. Reason had taken flight with the dawn and had left behind only brute and animal feeling. Actions may speak louder than words, but reaction speaks loudest of all.
The personal combined with the political, and both were soon lost inside the immediate. It was dangerous to walk outside of the house, and in some homes it was dangerous to walk outside of one’s room, and truth be told, even in one’s room it had grown perilous to climb out from under one’s bed. There was simply no telling who stood where in those early moments of societal rage.
The people who raged in this battle, the townsfolk of Warwick, could not have known that in the America outside the wire, the microcosm of their struggle had followed an identical course, and the seeds of it had taken firm root. In both cases, like two twins who are separated at birth only to be reunited later in life to find that they have the same taste in food and the same interests in music, the town of Warwick and the nation generally had become inflamed by the threat of collapse. In both cases, the people had been blinded to this reality by the immediacy of their comforts, and by the seeming reality of their delusions. Now that comforts and reality seemed to be lost to the reign of chaos, everything changed.
It was surprising to find, therefore, that passing through the growing chaos in that earliest light of morning was a specter of nonviolence in the form of a soft young man with a secreted supply of reason and a critical eye. He wove in and out of the pockets of turbulence around him like an aircraft passing through a storm looking for good air. He slid by the commotion at the bakery, and walked straight through a crowd fighting at the bank, bumping shoulders with the combatants as if he were one of them, all the while not catching anyone’s attention. He moved toward his destination with skillful avoidance of the crowd, becoming lost in plain sight like a benign and pleasing blip on the radar. And all the while, as he piloted through the crowd, he watched with a watchfulness that was complete, as his sister followed along in his slipstream. The two were going to the house of Pyotr Bolkonsky.
Kolya and Natasha Bazhanov ascended the steps of the winding garden, being careful not to attract any unwanted attention. They knocked at the door and were immediately let in by the large burly man in the faded khaki hiking gear. The door shut immediately behind them, and they stood in the hallway and stomped their feet. They took off their thick winter jackets before offering a quick exchange of greetings.
“Hello, Pyotr. It’s good to see you again,” Kolya said cheerily. “Perhaps you know my sister, Natasha. We were told that this is the place to meet Vasily.”
“Yes. And hello to you both. Is the situation out there as dire as it sounds?”
“Yes, well, you know. The fog has descended. Brother against brother, that sort of thing.” Kolya waved his hand dismissively, paused, and took in the room and its surroundings.
Vasily stuck his head out of the door down the hall and called, “Kolya, is that you? Good. Hello, Natasha. I am just getting out of bed, give me a moment and I’ll be out to see you.” He nodded good morning to Pyotr, and went back inside his room to get dressed.
Pyotr spoke. “Natasha. Vasily told me that you were coming along. I see that you and your brother have come dressed for a hike. Excellent. I cannot tell you how ill-prepared some people can be when setting out for a journey. This is good. We’ve a long road ahead.”
“Yes, Pyotr, we’re grateful for the opportunity to get out of Warwick at last. My brother here was so excited that he never even went to bed,” she smiled.
Pyotr looked over at Kolya, who had now bowed his head as if he were in solemn reflection, and his hand rubbed his pudgy chin, and his brow was down in honor of his thoughts.
“Well, we’ll find a place after a while where we can hunker down and get some rest. I don’t know what Vasily told you, but there is likely to be an electro-magnetic pulse event tomorrow that will be terrible in its extremity. Given what we already understand to be the social disruptions in the eastern seaboard, it will be a shock to the system that will likely never be overcome. Did you hear my uncle’s speech?”
“Yes, sir,” Natasha replied respectfully. “We paid close attention. But we weren’t sure what could be done about it, with all the guns surrounding this place. Honestly, Kolya and I had essentially decided we would just gather whatever information we could glean and then either hide out in our house or make some kind of desperate suicide run for the fence.”