Fifteen 15 +

Our activism quickly transformed the African Women's Congress from an ambitious startup into a dangerous player. International foundations were the first to sound the alarm; they saw our voluntary repatriation programs as competitors siphoning off grants.

Clergymen then took up arms. An influential Pentecostal pastor, Reverend Kesey, saw his flock dwindle and declared full-blown war on Vera. He publicly accused her of secretly promoting a voodoo cult—one that was allegedly officially banned in the EU.

  But Vera refused to compromise. Instead, she attacked the major geopolitical predators, harshly criticizing China for draining the continent's resources and openly condemning Russia for fueling military conflicts in the Sahel and Mali. We were making far too many enemies.

One day, we decided to take a short break and headed to the famous Dutch Afsluitdijk dam. It was a beautiful Saturday. A steady, iodine-infused wind blew in from the North Sea, and cumulus clouds floated like caravels across the pale blue sky. The landscape practically begged for a canvas, and once again I regretted not becoming an artist.

Leaving Amsterdam through the IJ tunnel, we found ourselves in a touristy, almost fairytale Netherlands. The pavement on the A7 highway was flawless. Familiar windmills, the neat, toy-like houses of local farmers, and green meadows dotted with grazing cows flashed past on either side of the road.

We popped into Zaanstad to buy some real Dutch cheese — the famous Catharina Hoeve cheese farm is located right next to the town, where tourists can watch the cheesemaking process for free. And then we continued.

Vera was at the wheel today. She drove our Cadillac with the ease and grace of the famous French racing driver Michèle Mouton, overtaking heavy Volvo, Scania, MAN, and Mercedes-Benz trucks on the curves. I remembered how some hapless race director—probably a misogynist and a fool—saw Michèle in her brand-new Antonelli overalls and declared, "The only helmet a woman should wear is a salon hair dryer."

"Well, yes, of course, you're lying, Lyonya, as always, just to sound clever," my Brain immediately signaled sarcastically. He had no mouth, but he synchronized directly with the AI reality generator through his quantum channels. "Toto Roche blurted out that nonsense back in 1958, addressing Maria Teresa de Filippis. And 'Antonelli' is actually the helmet and gear of a young Italian from modern Formula 1 that you looked up online! But go ahead, keep making things up — Vera likes the mess inside your head..."

But what the hell does it matter? The main thing is that Michèle went on to win four World Rally Championship rounds with the Audi team, finished as runner-up in the 1982 season, and, in 1985, won the grueling Pikes Peak Hill Climb, among many other victories...

When you love a woman, you see only the best in her and embrace her entirely with your heart—her face, her body, her scent — as absolute perfection. Knowing that I can't stand it when a woman smells like a perfume hell, Vera used exclusively natural cleansers: strawberry or mint soaps, alongside gels and creams made solely from herbs and royal jelly. They don't emit the foul odor produced in chemical labs at the same factories that synthesize isoprene and sarin. Moreover, all Vera had to do in the morning was wash her face with clean, cold water, and it would immediately become as youthful as that of a fourteen-year-old nymph.

"Oh, here comes the heavy artillery," Brain buzzed in the back of my mind again, sending a sarcastic impulse into the higher realms. "He brought up Nabokov, lumped rubber isoprene and combat-grade sarin into the same bottle with Chanel... Lyonya, sarin doesn't actually have a smell in its pure form; any military man will tell you that! And as for the fourteen-year-old nymphet—be careful on the curves, or Vera might just yank the Cadillac's steering wheel, and your nymphet will turn into your own nurse in the trauma unit!"

Meanwhile, Vera once again deployed her ability to fold and unfold space like a household rug. Instead of taking just over an hour, we spent only thirty minutes on the road to the famous Dutch Afsluitdijk dam. 

The car slowed to a smooth halt. We stepped onto the dam's crest and stood transfixed, captivated by the vast freshwater lake Ijsselmeer.

Vera was momentarily speechless upon seeing this grand structure, reclaimed from the stormy, salty bay. She recalled a recent dinner with Lucas van Janson, the captain and innkeeper of an Amsterdam schooner-hotel, and their conversation about the courageous people who had been at war with the ocean for centuries. Having now seen the scale of it with her own eyes, she felt an even deeper respect for the Dutch.

"You know, Vera, around the same time they were building this dam, in my former homeland, the Soviet Union, they were undertaking a massive construction project—the White Sea-Baltic Canal," I said, peering into the bluish distance. "And that two-hundred-twenty-seven-kilometer route was built in just one year and nine months, if the official figures are to be believed..."

“Impressive,” she said, surprised by the pace of the construction.“Yes, but to be fair, out of the canal’s entire length, only forty-eight kilometers were man-made. The rest consisted of natural lakes and rivers.”

“But still, it’s a monumental project, and the timeframe seems incredible.”

“Especially when you consider that it was built by about a hundred thousand Soviet prisoners,” I added.

“And with practically no heavy machinery.”

“Why prisoners?” Vera frowned.

“Because political prisoners were the cheapest slave labor in the USSR.”

“Lenya, you’re talking about sheer savagery!” she said indignantly.

“It is savagery, Vera. Especially when you consider that in less than two years, twelve thousand people perished or died of disease during the construction of the White Sea – Baltic Canal,” I said crisply, citing official statistics. “That’s how cheaply the Bolsheviks paid for their first ‘construction project of the century.’”

“Okay, I’m tired of this talk,” Vera said, her irritation clearly growing.

“After all, we came here to relax, not to debate politics. And you know, I want to take a boat ride on this lake.”

We made the rest of the journey in silence, frustrated with each other. Arriving at the resort town of Makkum, a popular hub for windsurfers, we easily rented a small motor-sailer.

However, before we could even leave the dock, the air shook with a sharp, unnatural bang. Our Yamaha outboard motor instantly turned into a pile of smoking scrap metal. Then, with a loud crack, the rigging snapped, the steering jammed, and the falling mast, tearing the sails to shreds, nearly crushed us.

The boat lost all headway, throwing us hard onto the deck. Instinctively, I managed to grab Vera and shield her with my own body. Luckily, we escaped with only bruises and a good scare, but the icy wind blowing from the North Sea brought a chillingly clear understanding: this was no coincidence. It was a warning.

However, we didn’t linger on the sinking boat to wait for the police. Vera merely squeezed her eyes shut, once again folding space, and in that same instant, we found ourselves inside the dry cabin of our Cadillac.

“Well, at least in Amsterdam we planted a seed of doubt in the minds of the migrants and refugees from Africa,” I said, coming to my senses.

“Let them think about it, let them decide for themselves where the cheese tastes better: in their homeland or in a Dutch mousetrap.”

Vera silently turned the wheel, smiling softly at the road that our Cadillac was now devouring kilometer after kilometer.

Outside, summer was melting. At the gas stations where we stopped, tourists squeezed past us, having doused themselves with half a bucket of deodorant in the heat. The air around them turned into that very perfume cesspool, capable of suffocating an entire regiment. I gasped for air, quickly retreated to the car, and buried my nose in Vera's shoulder—she smelled of clean grass, morning coolness, and mint. It was pure salvation.

“Well, Lyonya,” Vera adjusted the rearview mirror. “To Brussels?”

“Step on it, Verochka. Great things await us there.”

We burst into the Belgian capital just in time. Local eco-activists and anti-colonial protesters had already swarmed the monument to King Leopold II, preparing to topple it from its pedestal amid the jeers of the crowd.

“Attention, Lyonya! Quantum radars are detecting an act of vandalism!” Brain screeched in the back of my mind. “Leopold was certainly a despot in the Congo, but if they tear down this piece of history, Belgium will lose some of its charm. Save the monument, you marginal!”

I didn’t waste a single second. Jumping out of the Cadillac with a heavy adjustable wrench at the ready, I launched into a tirade in a mixture of choice obscenities, broken French, and Frisian that instantly stunned the crowd. While they were trying to process who this madman was and why he was defending their late king in an incomprehensible dialect, Vera whipped the Cadillac around in a dramatic spin, causing the tires to squeal violently. The element of surprise worked perfectly: the activists scattered in terror, convinced that a Russian intervention had begun. Leopold was left standing on his pedestal, looking down at us with mild surprise.

In Paris, everything was repeated, only on a much larger scale. But what struck me most was that I didn’t see a single white or even olive-skinned face among those chanting. It seems Raspail’s prophecy has partly come true, and the vast majority of refugees and migrants from Asia and Africa have indeed moved to Paris. People of all stripes stood in a dense wall along the route our Cadillac was taking, chanting deafeningly: “Mayson! Mayson! Mayson!”
The Eiffel Tower was adorned with a giant banner featuring a girl's portrait and the caption: "Vera Mayson, welcome to Paris!"

"Wow, your connections in high places have excellent taste in outdoor advertising," Brain whistled respectfully in the back of my mind. "Quasimodo would burst into tears of envy. Look at those native Parisians, their mouths are wide open!"

The Parisians were truly stunned. And we, with no letup in the madness, flew at full speed onto the Champs-Élysées. Vera drove our huge, imposing American Cadillac as if it were a nimble go-kart. The French gendarmes on their ridiculous mopeds and the policemen in kepis literally dropped their baguettes and whistles. They tried to wave their traffic wands at us, but Vera only smiled dazzlingly at them through the open window, pressing even harder on the gas.

The heavy executive car carved such wild turns around the Arc de Triomphe that seasoned Parisian taxi drivers crossed themselves on the move. We left behind the bewildered police, the trail of cheap French perfume, and the admiring sighs of tourists. Ahead, in the very south, lay Marseille — a riotous city reeking of sea and crime.

My visit to the city of my dreams left me with a toxic-green souvenir. As we raced through the Bois de Boulogne before leaving Paris, leaving gendarmes and taxi drivers utterly dumbfounded, an unlucky wild pigeon —apparently out of sheer fright — dropped a massive load right onto the lapel of my chic white jacket. Judging by the size of the stain, it wasn’t a pigeon at all, but a whole condor!

On the outskirts, we finally swapped places. As our Cadillac broke free from the congested metropolis and merged into the dense traffic on the Paris-Marseille autoroute, Vera leaned back in her seat and asked: “Leo, where did you learn to drive so well?”

"I don't know," I admitted honestly, without taking my eyes off the road ahead. "I've never even had a license."

And Brain, with all his might resisting Vera's mental charms, droned monotonously in the back of my mind, reworking Chekhov's "Three Sisters": "To Marseille, to Marseille, to Marseille..." — as if on the foggy shores of the Mediterranean Sea, a long-awaited liberation and the end of all our ordeals in old Europe really awaited us.