Welcome to The New Classic, where the past and the present merge, to form a new future.
Once that no one can see coming...
Join Angelo, Vanessa and the rest of the gang three and a half long years after that fateful night.
Lo kept count. V didn't...
Moodlist Bonnie and Clyde - Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot Compared To What? - Roberta Flack Walk On By - Dionne Warwick A Song For You - Donny Hathaway
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Vienna, Austria Early October
It was a brisk autumn day, at the beginning of October.
Vienna, Austria was now fully barren. The leaves of the trees across the old city had fallen, littering the streets. They danced in the roads, and on the pavement, moved by an invisible force. As the Ukrainian man walked from his car to his office building, he relished in the sound of the brown, hardened leaves crunching under his dress shoe.
It was one of the small, inexplicable joys of life. He briefly recalled a memory of being a child, chasing the same thrill of stomping on dry leaves. He had grown up under the Soviet regime in the seventies, with his favourite pastime being playing on the grounds of the Stalinist, Red-Bloc like apartments, located somewhere between Kyiv and Pryp'yat', where he resided. This was a simpler time for him. It was before he had to leave home as a teenager, due to the nuclear disaster that was the melt down of the Chernobyl reactor.
That's when everything started going downhill for the young man.
He went from being the prince of his home town, to the pauper of an impoverished and underfunded Soviet capital city. Kyiv was a difficult place to live in after the disaster. And when the opportunity arose, he was on the first thing smoking, headed for Moskva, or Moscow to those in the West.
His fate in the capital of Russia started off the same as that of most people who migrated to a big city in search of a better life.
Infinitely more difficult that he ever imagined or prepared for.
He had enough money for hotels at first. And then downgraded to hostels. He roamed around aimlessly, doing a few odd jobs for those in need. Then he starting spacing out his stays in proper accommodation, alternating these stays with nights of rough sleeping. Rubles were getting tight and desperation started to sink in.
He had been warned by a transient man he met on his travels to stay away from the Bratva, for they were nothing but trouble. But the Ukrainian man knew he needed to get his hands on some money. quick. So he went to the bad part of town and waited. He was a tall and strong young man, and before he knew it, he was on doors outside clubs in uptown Moscow, stomping out those who were out of line.
And then he got his first real assignment. It was a trust test, requiring him to kill one of his comrades. The man had been caught stealing, and the Ukrainian knew his story. The mouths he had to feed. And shared his desperation when he stood, pleading for his life at the other end of the gun he was holding.
He shot him in the head anyway. And immediately prayed for forgiveness afterwards.
And like that, he became a bratki, or a brother; a small cog in the machine that was the Russian Mafia.
