Appearing from Somewhere, Suddenly
“So, you think you’re a writer?”
“Huh – what?”
I am The Rational Man. Commix Café. Kyiv’s Podil District. I am newly and freshly here, the only on-the-ground English-language undercover chronicler of postwar-wartime Ukraine. I will tolerate no pretenders. Especially those who consider themselves… “Writers”…
I sit across from him, separated by a breadth of floor of around two-and-a-half waitresses; maybe three, depending on their hips.
A vision comes to me, of who this man is, was, of who he had claimed to be, who he would still like to claim to be, but hasn’t a chance, not now, never did, never will.
I bore into a past that was never mine, with which I have no familiarity, an identity I’d never otherwise bother unearthing, if not for this tragic gift, and this mission, both and all of which have been given to me, unasked-for… my burden, and… the thing I have to, I must, do… and… I know who it is…
I am The Rational Man.
– Trailing a cold, sharp rain, which has just fallen upon Podil and is soon over, a damp and sickly fog slides into the once quickly-gentrifying streets of the now subdued district; where Kyiv itself began as riverport of bustling markets, contracts, and trade; this very intersection, of Kostyantynivska and Yaroslavska streets, once a marking post along the carriageway of the czars.
Here, just now, some hours ago, not much before noon, erratically and in slapdash-fashion, a book fair sprung up, materializing suddenly upon the intersection’s four corners out of a gruff if barely articulated consensus of unpremeditated whim among a loosely associated collective of babushkas, drunks, and old men, who’d made it their business to scour the neighborhood for war-abandoned flats, break into them, and ransack the woebegone domiciles for, odd as it may seem, books, literary journals, newsprint of any sort, and magazines – to the exclusion of all else. –
I note the several piles of books on his table; stolen merchandise; spoils of war in their own right.
He gloats triumphantly over his ill-gotten autumn-leafy old-new possessions like a madman wearing the mask of greed, musty, old, and disintegrating though they may be.
I know him, as it is given to me: this is one Axle Fischburgher. It seems to me he writhes and shivers joyfully, twisting this way and then that, pudgily, though but once, fatty matzah-ball flesh (matzah balls made defiantly with far tastier bacon fat, not chicken fat, by the way) buried inside some kind of lying, penitent, monk-like robe. Funny, he should also be wearing dirty gray socks inside a pair of dark-brown Lemuel Gulliver loafers.
– Hastily thrown together, with the chutzpah and gumption of fictitiously granted authority, from emergency tarp and polyethylene sheeting propped up and poked through by wobbly wooden sticks and aluminum poles to form makeshift lean-to awnings to contain rickety folding tables with the frangible black merchandise stacked upon them, the illicit fair managed to quickly draw attention to itself. People no one knew even existed anymore emerged out of their grimy hovels and helplessly gravitated toward it – even from other districts of the city. And this type of thing isn’t exactly inexplicable… –
I am The Rational Man.
And this Fischburgher now raises a cup of black coffee toward a jutting lower lip from the table upon which his illegal acquisitions are haphazardly heaped – pages dogeared, yellowing, and brittle; bindings obscenely cracked. But for all that, my mark is not in the least ashamed.
I note a number of titles – Russian translations of the French.
There, closer to the street-front window, with some spread out on the broad sill, half-hidden behind the truly lucky and enviable find of Sholokhov’s monumental, two-volume “And Quiet Flows the Don/The Don Flows Home to the Sea”, Emile Zola: I espy ‘Nana”, and “Therese Raquin”, and… “Germinal”!
There is also Goethe’s “Faust”. I can hardly believe this. As if he actually has anything to do with something like that; or imagines he does. Ascending toward the Eternal Feminine, or whatever…
In a separate small pile, closer to his left elbow, the French poets: Rimbaud, and Verlaine, and… as an uppity smirk reddens his cheeks, his peppershaker head pores over a rare and prized volume of Baudelaire’s “Flowers of Evil”, the tome pulsing up and downward at the end of his hand from the increased blood pressure of his uncontained excitement.
It is a pathetic, almost depraved scene, as I can smell the volume’s musty age from where I sit, and the book is all but disintegrating, its binding pulverized and freakishly taped where it had gone missing.
“So, I asked you, and the question, I think, was pretty clear – you think you’re a writer, don’t you?”
“Are you seriously talking to me?”
[We, here, of the Kyiv Unedited Secret Editorial Board, fail to see how The Rational Man can both describe himself as engaging Fischburgher in a taunt, which immediately provokes the latter’s response, and Fischburgher as being almost perversely immersed in his newly acquired used books – whether they are illegal or not is irrelevant – and gleefully drinking his coffee, effectively, it appears, shutting out all other possible distractions around him. The two actions cannot be occurring at the same time, but can only happen sequentially. This, therefore, is The Rational Man at bad writing, and quite beyond any editing that we can do to save it, or him. But it’s his reputation on the line, so maybe he should bear that in mind: a word of warning, as well as caution, to the wise. The KUSEB, for that is what we’re acronymically called, in short, has spoken. And we run this whole thing.]
“Yeah, I am! And let’s start with this: How did those movie scripts go, Fischburgher? Oh, sorry, ‘screenplays…’ in the accepted parlance among the true professionals. Huh?! Ha-ha-haaa! Hey, Fischburgher – maybe you never got that movie deal because they weren’t formatted correctly…”
“They were TOO correctly formatted!”
“Eh, I don’t know… otherwise, you know, you probably would’ve gotten –”
“That’s the one thing I’d check first and last – formatting! I was a meticulous screenplay formatter. Properly formatting a screenplay is the most important part of getting a screenplay accepted for –”
“Yeah… and don’t I know it. Because then why would you have all those computer programs… you know… all that different screenwriting software out there, devoted exclusively to making sure a hardworking, conscientious, er, ‘screenwriter’ – well, like yourself, just to take an example – makes no mistakes and hands in to the sweaty, cigar-chomping Hollywood agent, or, more likely, his personal secretary, the perfectly formatted screenplay…”
“I used all of them! All the software out there, I –”
“Yeah, and how did THAT go? Spent a lot of time out there, didn’t you, doing just that; practically going door-to-door… and then state-to-state: Utah, Nevada, Arizona… And besides, all that shit is done by AI now, even the actual writing, so, no one actually NEEDS so-called ‘screenwriters’ anymore. They’re all washed up, as they finally deserve to be. Imagine, calling themselves ‘writers’ to begin with. Give me a fuckin’ break. Yeah, Fischburgher – no more unions, guilds, collectives, strikes, or temper tantrums; and no more unilateral, freelance, free agent, outsider breakthroughs into the film industry by the likes of, well, you; not that you’d ever succeed, judging by your desperate and failed record of the last, say, 20 to 30 years. Enough time, I believe, to prove the point. You know, establish it as incontestable fact.”
Fischburgher is galloping through some kind of reasonable-sounding response to me, couched in contained resentment and anger, but out the window, I am momentarily, but significantly, distracted, and therefore do not really take in anything of what he is trying to say.
For a woman and her enthusiastic daughter decide, suddenly – so suddenly, in fact, that it makes me suspect the move had been long rehearsed for just such a moment – to swing open the door of the café and… walk in!
Not only that, they are both clutching large plastic shopping bags filled with books and periodicals they’ve just gotten from the market and are talking about them – all of them! … at the same time! Oh, but of course… of course…
“You cannot come in here! Get out! Get out! GET OUT!!!”
I simultaneously put them in their place and kick them out.
The mother and daughter at first lurch, from fright, and then slink dejectedly, cowedly, and cowardly away, angry, even enraged, but too paralyzed by fear of me to do or say anything about what I am doing, have just done, to them.
I see them, now outside again, shocked beyond belief, attempting to get the attention of law officers, who properly proceed to ignore them, much as I expect them to.
The cops – paired off as a woman and a man, for some stupid reason – look through the window, find me, and I raise my eyebrows. I produce a half-mouth grin, and shake my head subtly and barely, but enough to perfectly communicate what unfortunate and pathetic nuts some people, very much like the woman and her daughter, can be. I tap my temple a few times with my finger to underline the point. The peace officers appear to agree and walk away.
– Axle Fischburgher stares challengingly at his opponent, The Rational Man, as though he is ready to make something of all this; as though he is ready to sacrifice his peace of mind and happiness at this very moment in the café, having sat, till now, among all of his new books, carefully turning their precious and delicate pages, while slowing slurping that rarity of a bold and full-bodied, heavily roasted hot, black coffee taken and truly enjoyed inside a cozy and warm corner café, at least momentarily sheltered from the cold and wet outside; almost as though he is actually ready to fight. –
I am The Rational Man, and a rook now crouches next to me at my table. Sharp of beak and long; black, large, dangerous, and frightening of aspect – altogether beauty buried deep in feathered darkness; incomprehensible and impossible to reach, even through the eyes. But I am unafraid, and the bird seems to grasp this, to actually know it, in a knowing that feels to be somehow beyond the more-or-less usual ken of beastly senses. It apparently decides against making my shoulder its perch, but rather to somehow bend me downward so that my ear is next its open beak – to bend me, as it were, to its will.
As I listen to this awesomely self-presented corvid speak to me, into me, not so much through its well-developed human speech-mimicking ability as via its unique set of problem-solving skills, my head is tilted both toward and against Fischburgher, directly across from me, his bespectacled eyes intensely buried inside one of his new used books – Baudelaire’s “Flowers of Evil”, if I’m not mistaken – and as if I were not even there…
The rook, meanwhile, and as you may know, is a gregarious, company-seeking bird, unlike his close relation, the brooding, loner crow, which sets up the precise and apposite metaphor in Act 2, Scene 3 of “Macbeth”, when:
“Light thickens, and the crow
Makes wing to th’ rooky wood”;
a thing never made plain in any footnote of any edition of the play I’d ever read, leaving it to me, The Rational Man, to finally come up with it myself – the whole thing being so clear. And now that I’ve gotten you to see it, you will never hereafter unsee it, and no need to thank me.
– As nighttime begins to fall, The Rational Man, having paid his bill, with appropriate gratuity added, now leaves The Commix Café. –
A rook, of all creatures, somehow gets inside the place and flies up violently at Axle Fischburgher, causing him to rear back in his seat and reflexively shout out in fright, shooting his right arm, which clutches “Flowers of Evil”, above his head to protect it.
“Hypocrite lecte-e-e-eur!!!” the rook caws, as it again attacks Fischburgher, striking the book in his hand and then landing on the back of the chair, in which The Rational Man had just sat. But the bird is not satisfied, for Fischburgher appears to remain calm.
The book, though loose-paged and old, remains intact, and the rook’s work is still far from done.
The rook attacks again and again, and no one else, who has remained in the café, is able to stop it, for it seems to fly right through their hands and fingers every time. And yet, its strikes upon Fischburgher and against the book are palpable and, ultimately, devastating.
The book has been half knocked, half torn out of Fischburgher’s hand, and the rest of his second cup of coffee spilt all over his robe; the cup and saucer smashed to pieces on the floor. Parts of the book lie strewn throughout the entire café.
The rook sits calmly perched under the café ceiling on a rafter that seems to not have been there before, and to the memory of everyone there, had not, until that moment, been part of its inner architecture.
As the bird clucks and chuckles to itself at Fischburgher’s expense (Axle Fischburgher, who sits still in his café chair, barely breathing, shocked into silence, fright-paralyzed, both eyeglass lenses fractured), it looks down haughtily at the scene of its surprise appearance and at the chaotic mess it has caused to be made.
And if one listens closely, one can hear it repeat, as a bird of this sort, which has learned to mimic our speech, is wont to do: “… mon semblable… cluck, chuck, cluck… mon frere… squawk… mon frere… mon frere…” Harsh, and rasping, as nothing less can be expected of a rook – and as is appropriate…
I am The Rational Man.
Filed by Ed Tomorrow, of the Nevermore Times, special to Kyiv Unedited, March 18, 2025