The Propagandist stared mutely at the wall and considered how to react to what he'd just been told.
The wall knew his mind, in any case.
He had been staring at it in some real or abstract sense since he was a child.
And in his turn, he understood the wall.
He could feel the awkwardness and the discomfort of the man who had just brought him the news...
Sasha.
The tension pleased the wall.
It was freezing outside and the wind was howling.
Sasha had his cloak fastened high, and his scarf wrapped tightly at his throat.
Three skinny candles flickered on the window sill at the other end of the room.
Night breathed cold emptiness against the pane.
The silence lingered.
No doubt Sasha would be expecting him to react badly.
After all, this last minute abandonment of the ideal would have serious ramifications.
Finally, the Propagandist gathered himself and asked calmly, "What do you mean Pavel's out?"
Sasha shuffled where he stood and the tired wooden floor creaked loudly.
He didn't quite understand the question.
"What do you mean, 'what do I mean'? I just mean that Pavel says he's out.
The Propagandist turned and smiled benevolently...
Patiently.
"What I mean is, did Pavel provide any sort of an explanation?"
At this, Sasha's expression lightened for he recalled that there had indeed been something said...
Actually, a few things.
He raced through his thoughts and attempted to render them formulaic and logical.
He stood tall, cleared his throat, and said as matter of factly as he could that Pavel had said "You are becoming an iconographer, or something like that."
"An iconographer? Are you sure that's what he said??"
Sasha nodded vehemently, "Yes, I'm sure it was something like that. Definitely something with an 'icono...'"
Again, there was silence as the Propagandist considered this.
After a spell, Sasha offered some reassurance...
"Well, it's not the end of the world really. Any one of us could have come to that conclusion, since you're always staring at those old oil icons and talking to us about moral and ethical superiority... about ideals and tradition."
Again, the Propagandist smiled at the other.
"Is it possible that Pavel said 'iconoclast,' and not 'iconographer'?"
Sasha pursed his lips and scratched at his head confusedly.
"Ah, yeah... yes, I suppose that's possible. Does it make a big difference?"
The Propagandist curled his bloated, pallid fingers into tight fists.
"It makes a bit of a difference, yes."
Sasha asked him vacantly, "What is an iconoclast?"
"It is someone who tears away at the sacred."
He turned to face the wall once more.
He closed his eyes and he could see with such clarity the most perfect representation of social harmony and correctness that he could ever have imagined.
"Icons..." he muttered unto space.
He recalled that a Priest had once described the process to his mother...
"Icons are religious images painted on wooden panels, typically made of linden or pine wood. Their production is a long and complex process. A layer of linen cloth soaked in sturgeon glue is put on the panel. The ground is made of chalk mixed with fish glue. This is gesso. Up to ten layers of the gesso are applied over the cloth, or pavoloka . An outline of the composition is incised on the gesso with the point of a needle, often based on an icon-painting manual.
To prepare tempera paints, mineral pigments are mixed with water and egg yolk. The common minerals are cinnabar for reds, ochre (iron oxide) for yellows and lapis-lazuli for blues. Natural minerals give transparency to colors. Transparency is key in creating the effect of luminosity in icons. Light and dark tones of different thickness are brought one on top of the other, layer after layer. The white ground reflects light falling on its surface back through the semi-transparent tempera. The effect is that of inner light radiating from the image.
After painting is done an icon is varnished with boiled linseed oil, olifa. Russian artists added amber to their olifa. The linseed-amber varnish protects icons from scratches and gives them a deeper tone. But, after many years in a wood-heated church or in a candle-lit ‘red’ corner of a peasant hut, the varnish becomes very dark and obscures the image. In the early twentieth century, to clean the old varnish off the icon surface, restorers used fire to soften the olifa. They put a little alcohol on the surface of an icon and set it on fire. A restorer then was able to scrape off the olifa varnish and clean the icon."
But his father had been a hardliner.
He'd had little patience for the sentimentality...
The process...
The ritual.
But mothers want their little boys to grow and to dream of big things, and even as de Saint Exupery's fox had said in "Le Petit Prince..."
"Il faut des rites..."
"Man needs his rituals."
"Even if that ritual is oppression," muttered the wall unto the Propagandist.
His own father had turned his mother into the secret security division, and she was sent someplace north of the Arctic Circle to think about what it means when a woman tries to step into the shoes of priests and create iconography.
Just then it seemed that somehow...
In that flickering candle light...
With the cold night gasping and grasping at fleeting warmth on the other side of panes...
The wall bled oils in violent and mythic tones.
The Propagandist sighed and asked over his shoulder, "Did Pavel say anything else?"
With the words, he poured vodka into two glasses and proffered one unto his compatriot.
Sasha took it, and the two of them drank deeply.
The candle flames burned more brightly.
"You were saying?"
Sasha scratched his head again as he thought.
"Yes, actually. Pavel said that he doesn't understand why the number is 13 and not 12, and why you would be the one at the top."
"What do you mean he doesn't understand?"
Sasha thought for a moment.
"I'm not exactly certain. I suppose he... doesn't... understand."
The Propagandist's patience was wearing thin.
He poured two more drinks.
They drank.
"Well, neither do I. What exactly did he say?"
"He said that if we're all equal in this idea you have of social harmony and balance, then why wouldn't it be an even number, like 12? And he also said that the injections you've been taking to make yourself look younger are disturbing."
"What do you mean 'disturbing'?"
"I don't mean anything... It's Pavel who said all of this."
"Well, what do you think?"
"Well, I think perhaps you may have been pushing the envelope a little bit when you created the icon of you wrestling with the world serpent."
"It's all about image and perception, Sasha. Did you forget about the Potemkin Village? It doesn't matter what's on the inside... beneath or beyond the surface...
It only matters what people see, and that is that we are united and that we are committed to a single purpose and ideal. The people must see that we are capable of everything together."
Sasha thought for a moment.
"I can see that, but why YOUR image, and then why 13 and not 12?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, it's just that Pavel said that if one is talking about balance and harmony, then the image should be the collective, and an uneven number doesn't quite convey the intent of equality or solidarity, least of all in the practical sense of a single man reaching the highest level, but only after climbing on the backs of all the rest of us. He suggests that through your ideas and the actions advocated and effected, you are destroying the ideal."
"Pavel is missing the point."
"What is the point?"
"The point is that we are all in this together."
Sasha again scratched his head.
"So, in your mind it makes sense that the twelve of us should crawl like animals on top of one another, forming a base at the bottom on our hands and knees on the frozen sidewalk, whilst you... the thirteenth... step and climb on our backs and heads to reach the top and unfurl your image at the wall? To do what, exactly? For what purpose?"
"To show the spirit of our people. To show that we are one."
"Ah, well that's exactly what Pavel told me you would say, and he then said that if that's the case it shouldn't be a problem if one of us go to the top before you... even, he said, my little Zhenya."
"Zhenya? Wait a minute, do you mean your little retarded son? Can he even climb himself up onto a stone?"
Sasha glared at him.
The Propagandist cringed and put up his hands in concession to having offended the other.
Imagined scenes of the torment his own mother must have known at that barren, arctic place for having deigned to lend a woman's hand to the colours of ideal.
"Listen, I apologise for what I said about your boy. I am certain that he's a real sweetheart. But don't you see that this is a world of actions, and not ideas? This is why Pavel has turned against me. He does not value the physical application or implementation of the ideas we have so long discussed because he thinks that they are somehow dangerous... that I am somehow... dangerous. Whereas I would say to you that to NOT enact the ideas we have invoked in those countless hours of café discussions and debate, would consign us to the same circular, and lifeless corridor of hell in which Plato and Aristotle found themselves... ideas versus forms... trapped forever in some nebulous state of non-becoming."
Sasha absently patted his cloak for his pipe.
The winds groaned and grated against the pane.
There was the suggestion of sulphur on the air within that enclosed space.
Sulphur and deterioration...
Leather boots that smell of sweat and ill-taken steps in relation to well-meaning ideas...
Humanity.
Just then, the Propagandist suggested that they go find Pavel...
The two of them together.
Sasha nodded without saying anything.
They went out.
*************
It had begun to snow.
The two men lurched against the wind along the main thoroughfare of the city.
It was well after midnight.
Everywhere, there were ideas, both good and bad, being dreamed into being...
At least within the myriad, compartmentalised, snow globes of existential waking.
The Propagandist had begun to mark the steps they took within his mind.
There would be an action...
There would be an outcome.
Ideas and forms could not remain independent of one another in true, rarefied social strata...
At some point, they must converge.
If not, there is just cowardice and hypocrisy.
He remembered the night before they came to take his mother.
His father had conveniently gone out to drink with his workers.
But it was palpable.
They would come for her, and soon.
So she laid all of her oils and brushes onto a long but narrow wooden table, and she called her son over to her.
She heated a sowing needle in the stove.
Then, she helped him remove his shirt, and told him to relax.
He was a bit frail, as a boy.
Undersized.
He was not a gifted athlete.
But in order to remain a part of the accepted social paradigm, he took to martial arts...
As others would not have him on their team.
In his solitary application of the ideals that were set forth before him in his training, he excelled for his calculated brutality...
His harnessed hatred of all those who possessed...
Hope.
His mother looked him in his eyes and murmured over and over...
"Glory to our birthplace..."
She went on to meticulously paint...
To carve and burn into his chest...
The most beautiful image he had ever imagined.
The winds had picked up again, and when he came with Sasha unto the frozen river they both drank deeply from the bottle of vodka that the Propagandist had brought with him.
When the bottle was empty, Sasha threw it away onto the ice.
They leaned against the iron railing alongside the walkway, and the Propagandist asked Sasha whether he made any distinction between the two-heads that marked the symbol of the state.
Sasha clumsily repacked his tobacco and then took another drag at his pipe and blew the smoke audaciously unto sky that it merged with wind and surreptitiously danced...
"Something about church and state, I think... or?"
"More or less... at the idea's conception, perhaps... The Empire, too..."
Sasha passed the pipe, and the Propagandist too smoked deeply.
After a spell, they rippled through some relative state of alcohol-induced warmth unto the threshold of a place called "Idiot."
Sasha pushed through the narrow portal and the Propagandist followed.
They were met with sweeping warmth and laughter touching them like kisses on the cheek.
Thinkers, lovers, drinkers, and others swayed like flames in some human abstraction facade.
There was a violin player bleeding gypsy suffering into a palatable tune by a lantern in the corner.
Pavel was standing tall upon a chair not too far from there...
At a round table around which three others were seated...
A man and two women.
As Sasha and the Propagandist approached, they could hear Pavel pontificating about duality, contradiction, and hypocrisy.
"Look," he exclaimed... "It's even there in our national crest. We are condemned to half-truths, half-rights, half-hopes, and half-lives."
The Propagandist laughed along with the others, and even though he held no glass, he feigned the gesture of taking a drink along with the others, because it is all part of the ritual, and man needs his rituals.
Just then, he came back to himself and decided to go have a word with Pavel.
Pavel was still standing tall upon the chair and marvelled when he saw the Propagandist approach him.
"I say," he began. "I'd forgotten how little you are."
The others laughed loudly.
The Propagandist indulged the mockery...
Cacophonous chorus of vengeful devils singing in his head...
He extended his hand unto the other to help him down from the chair, and then said loudly so that the others could also hear:
"Don't forget... don't ever forget, that the greatest and most eternal beauty of our national symbol is that the two heads never face one another, which means that there is always plausible deniability in all we do to effect and perpetuate the state and the ideal."
Demon, fragmented scenes of what he imagined they must have done to his own mother at that place...
That penal colony...
Plodded across his mental landscape like a fattened, feted horde.
He collected himself and then thought to say, "But in the end, the parade that shows our might and superiority is all that matters."
Pavel came down from the chair and brought the other warmly into his embrace.
"Look, I'm not saying that you don't have some potent ideas, but to actually enact the things we've been discussing would bring about global conflagration. And it certainly cannot be characterised in this grandiose gesture you've dreamed-up, which to my mind utterly contradicts the notion of societal equality and solidarity... 13 rather than 12... it doesn't make sense to me if you're serious about giving everyone a voice."
"One's voice is earned along the way, my friend," said the Propagandist.
"First, there is sacrifice."
Pavel laughed and dragged his cigarette.
"And the sacrifice is the initial twelve upon whose backs you climb to get to the top to unfurl your banner? How is that fair? How does that represent equality?"
"Well, what have any of these others sacrificed for the sake of realising the ideal?"
"But that's my point, man! You can't expect people to do that. Sacrifice happens, whether we want it or not. But to preemptively create a construct where one man... symbolically or not, climbs on the backs of others to attain a height from which he then unfurls an idealised representation of the state symbol... it just doesn't pass muster with the rest of us. You get it?"
The Propagandist regarded him fiercely.
"I get it. So, when you say 'us,' that means the rest of them agree with you?"
Pavel patted the shoulder of the Propagandist.
"Look, it's nothing to feel glum about. The world turns and tomorrow is another day. These ideas do not need to define us, and not everyone needs to agree, okay? Come on now, let's have a drink."
The Propagandist suppressed the compulsion to vomit.
If ideas don't at least to some extent define us, and our actions or lack thereof are governed by fear and constraint, then are we defined by the mundane alone?
Are we defined by our contributions to the labor force... our vices, gluttony, and our visits to the holes in which we shit and piss?
Pavel, sensing the other's consternation, preempted subsequent commentary...
"Collectivisation of ideal, and enacting it is not all there is my friend. And what of reclaiming former controlled territories which are now sovereign? Is there any end to any of this 'actualisation of ideal? Where does it end?"
The Propagandist was sweating.
He remembered those cold winter nights when his father would tell him stories which rendered heroic the deeds of those who presented the truths of their family member's imperfections and improprieties to the state.
He remembered falling asleep to sound of his father's voice repeating the eternal mantra that was presented to them by their former state leader...
"Where there are no people, there are no problems."
He called the student who was performing the function of "after-hours barkeep" over to him.
"No? Then what is there... my friend?"
"There is this moment."
"This moment. Do you mean a moment in which to idealise, or to do? Because there, my friend, is where I believe our perspectives diverge. I believe that in order to be more, one, or a collective, must DO more... not just sit around and talk about it."
"Philosophers and ideologues throughout the ages have debated this," said Pavel.
"Yes, and at that point the ones who actually make things happen in the world walk away from the table and unleash the unknown."
Pavel smiled.
"I suppose that's true. Are you implying that it is between idea and action where we diverge?"
"Yes, I am... I'm stating it overtly" said the Propagandist.
The young man ran over with a few more bottles of vodka and placed them before the Propagandist.
The latter paid with coin and waved his hand over the bottles in front of Pavel in majestic jest.
They both laughed easily...
Constrainedly.
The Propagandist had brought some of his mother's old vials with him.
They were full...
And then they were not.
He then made a great demonstration of selflessly servicing those around him by filling their proffered glasses and saluting them...
For the betterment and glory of...
The state.
At this point, Sasha was sitting against the tired, expansively constricting, stinking wall of that enclosed space, breathing-in the sickness of the scene.
He asked absently of Pavel, who had come to join him, whether or not everything was now as it needed to be.
They raised their glasses to one another and drank deeply.
"Yes... absolutely."
