asakiyume | Entries tagged with war

I don't read half as much as I'd like to, but now and then things spur me to read something and then wow! Amazed and delighted.

The first is a novelette in the December 2024 issue of Clarkesworld: "Lucie Loves Neutrons and the Good Samarium," by Thoraiya Dyer. It's an intimate story about a lesbian couple, Lucie and Izzy, both scientists (respectively from Tahiti and Australia, but living in France), and Miron Król, the Polish astronaut who fathers their baby. A nuclear war is going on in Europe, and where they live is dangerous because of its proximity to a research reactor (a research reactor that Izzy uses, in fact), and Izzy is nearly breaking from the mental strain:

In that moment, alerts [of possible nuclear strike] go off on their phones, and Izzy is overwhelmed. A new life has come into the world, Izzy and Lucie have just met their beautiful baby, and there is a fucking amber alert yet again, threatening to take everything away.

Izzy throws her phone at the wall.

“I can’t take this,” she screams. “Why can’t anybody make it stop?” She knows she shouldn’t be the one losing control. Lucie has just given birth ...

“Izzy,” Lucie says softly. “Izzy, I’ll make it stop. For you, and for Luc, I’ll make it stop. I promise. Now, forget about that. Come here, and kiss your child. It’s his birthday.”

And then Lucie does.

She does it. I don't think that's a spoiler because the drama of the novelette is not the in if, it's in the how, the many small moments, some funny, some painful, some joyous, as the characters live life, do their various researches ... and Lucie comes closer and closer to being able to keep her promise. Now there's a case of writing the change you want to see in the world! From Thoraiya Dyer's imagination to reality, please!

The second is probably also a novelette--it's "The Speech That God Understands," by Jonathan Edelstein, from the April 4, 2024, issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. This one takes place in 1194, in an alternative Tuluz, where Muslims, Christians, and Jews live and work together, where magic and science exist side by side, and Avram the Blind, a Kabbalistic magician, and Maryam of Wadan, a Berber scientist and a nonbeliever in any religion, join forces to deal with spreading incidences of people having their ability to speak scholarly languages essentially knocked out of them--they lose their Arabic, their Latin, their Hebrew and are left with their vernacular tongues only. But it's not just a physical brain injury, there's magic involved.

There's *so* much richness in this--Avram's summoning of various sefirot, the depiction of the hurly-burly of the city, and the discussion of language, translation, and reading--just great. I can share these beautiful lines from the end without spoiling anything:

From the silence, [Avram] conjured a vision of what Maryam might see if she found her reading-stone, a mental image of the night sky of Yetzirah. Who was it who’d said there were many more stars in heaven than human eyes could see? One of the Persian philosophers, or one of their poets? Did it even make a difference?

Those stars, as much as the sefirot, were outpourings of the divine, and messages were surely written in them. Isaac wondered what language those scriptures would follow. Or maybe they would be like the speech of the crickets, written in no language at all.

It didn’t matter, he decided. God would know them even so.

Current Music: Johnny Flynn & Robert McFarlane: Coins for Eyes

The Boston Globe broke a story on Tuesday about busting up a Russian smuggling network and arresting a key link--a 35-year-old in New Hampshire who was receiving high-end US tech in the mail, repackaging it, and sending it to Estonia, where another agent would take it across the border to Russia.

Today they had two stories describing how the smuggling operation worked in detail, including the long-term investment in agents and their embeddedness in the United States. It's all so spy movie!

"What the NH Smuggling Arrest Says about the Russian War Machine," by Hanna Krueger, gets into why the Russians need to smuggle this tech in:
[Note: all the articles are paywalled and the Globe doesn't allow for gift articles, but I'm a subscriber and I've copied all three articles into Word documents, so if you'd like any, message me]

The Kremlin’s war machine has always been dependent on Western technology, materials that the country has struggled to produce itself. In 1963, the KGB established a division called Directorate T — t for technology — that was tasked with acquiring Western electronics. As Silicon Valley emerged as a hotbed for technological innovation, Russia sent some of its best espionage talent to California.

“The San Francisco consulate continues to be staffed with the creme de la creme, even more than Washington,” one Russian defector said in a 1981 Newsweek article.

Russia tried to develop domestic production in its own, but according to the article, the efforts always "fizzled out":

“You can’t solve this problem by just throwing money at it because it requires research and development talent and against the background of brain drain. They’ll be forever trying to copy, rather than develop,” said Maria Shagina, an expert on international sanctions at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies.

So instead Russia allegedly planted this guy, Alexey Brayman, in a New Hampshire town, which, as the article says, is expensive:

But at the heart of the procurement networks are human agents, who are expensive and time-consuming to develop. Byrne believes that Brayman, who ran a crafts company with his wife that made decorative lights, is actually “a trained intelligence agent who’s been living as an illegal in the country for a long time.”

The article from Tuesday (by Dugan Arnett, Hanna Krueger, and Brendan McCarthy) puts it like this:

As the Braymans lived a seemingly quintessential American lifestyle — attending Celtics games, vacationing in Florida, visiting local arts festivals — Alexey Brayman allegedly received a steady stream of “advanced electronics and sophisticated testing equipment used in quantum computing, hypersonic and nuclear weapons development and other military and space-based military applications,” according to the indictment unsealed in the Eastern District of New York.

The wife is not arrested, so maybe she didn't know? One wonders.

If you would like to know how to blend into a suburban New Hampshire town (and who wouldn't?), here are some pointers:

Alexey and Daria Brayman, a pair of thirtysomething Eastern European emigres, blended well into this land of shared casseroles, poker nights, and neighborhood book clubs. They ... stood out largely for their generosity and good will.

“They are the nicest family,” said a delivery driver who frequently stops at the home, dropping off packages of various shapes and sizes. “They’ll leave gift cards out around the holidays. And snacks.”

Two of the articles include this Facebook photo of the Braymans:

So there you go! Spy v. Spy in Anno Domini 2022!

As I say, feel free to message me if you're not a Boston Globe subscriber and would like to read the articles. (It bothers me that it's so hard to share articles that I subscribe to.) But it's also probably all over the news from other sources now, too.

Laloran Justisa is up front about being didactic/educational: it covers issues like domestic abuse, alcoholism, presumption of innocence, nepotism, and so on. The most recent episode dealt in part with an upright young police officer with a secret in his past: his brothers were part of pro-Indonesia militias that formed after Timor-Leste declared in a 1999 referendum that it wanted to be independent of Indonesia.

( quickie historical review )

In an earlier episode, Vitór and the idealistic lawyer Rosa bump into each other at the Centro Nasional Chega, a museum that documents the abuses of the Indonesian occupation.

In another episode, Vitór is present at the commemoration of the anniversary of the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre, when the Indonesian military gunned down some 250 protestors, in Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, including schoolchildren.

Santa Cruz cemetery

Students participating in the commemoration

Vitór, in uniform this time, watching

His brothers' participation in pro-Indonesia militias is revealed, and he loses his job, but Rosa helps him recover it. It helps that he himself did not participate. But by having him talk about the situation in his suco (village) at the time, the show is able to broach why people did participate.

Here he's saying what his brothers did, but earlier he says, "In my village, there was a lot of pressure for us to be part of Indonesia, and those who joined the militia were given money, nice clothes, and good food." Since deliberate starvation was an Indonesian policy tactic that killed more than 180,000 people,¹ "good food" was a compelling benefit.

I think about this a lot, about how you weave together a people that have been unraveled.

¹Sian Powell, "UN Verdict on East Timor," The Australian, January 19, 2006, courtesy of the Wayback Machine.

Current Music: Lemorai--Armindo Araujo cover

Before dawn the drums were lined up on the curve of the bay, and just before sunrise the drummers began to beat them, so that as the sun appeared, the echo was rippling back from the across the bay and there was not a breath of air that didn't shake with it. The drumming ceased but the echo did not: it waited for the command, and when the word was given, trees on the far shore shattered and houses fell to their knees, and the waters of the bay shrank cringing and then rose up, carrying off the wreckage as spoils.

A bit back I posted about spirits that live in geodes in Timor-Leste. Here's a real-life example people interacting with the spirits. It sounds like something from an old folktale--only it's from 1994. I came across it in the memoir A Woman of Independence, by Kirsty Sword Gusmão. She, you may recall, is the wife of Xanana Gusmão, the current prime minister of Timor-Leste. In 1994 Xanana was in prison in Indonesia, and Kirsty was his English teacher and liaison. They were communicating only by letters, and Xanana sent Kirsty this letter, regarding a photo she had been given to send to him, of a boy in an orphanage, a boy Kirsty had been told was Xanana's son.

( My dear, thanks for the photo of my son of war )

This story entrances me, the story itself, most of all, but also the way Xanana shared it with Kirsty. It's a delicate thing, explaining about beliefs. The world is a complicated place, and how people live in it is different in more than just material ways. Some people experience a world that's thick with spirits, others a world with very few, others a world with none at all.

More on the book when I finish it--I'm nearly done.

Here is the other thing about Canajoharie: It is the site of battle and conquest.

If you read its Wikipedia page, you'll see that it's near the site of a Mohawk town of the same name. That's a weird nicety: preserving the place names of towns you've conquered and whose inhabitants you've driven off or worse.

This whole country is built on conquest, a fact that isn't acknowledged very often.

. . . Okay, here is something more cheering.

From Nunavut, Canada: a company that is working on putting video games into Inuktitut, an Inuit language: Inuktitut Localization

Here's a video about their localization of Osmos, Apple's 20120 iPad game of the year.

Watch on YouTube

Translations for "Little Dew," a Swedish game whose Inuktitut localization is currently being beta tested:

( below cut )

If you'd like to learn some Inuktitut through music, check out Pinnguaq's app "Singuistics."

That song, "Clamanda," those lines,

And shall the world with dread alarms
Compel you now to ground your arms

I'm hearing it as drown your arms

The scene--

Archers drown your fiery bolts
Foot soldiers, your flaming swords
Into the wide sea send them
Into the ocean plunge them
Now kneel here on the shingle
And drown your incandescent rage
In the brine of your deep grief

But I just made that up. The actual hymn is more real, more intense:

fires fill the sky from whence you came
And brimstone in a driving rain
Blows ash and dust upon your heels
As you in haste your savior steal

I tell you, shape-note hymns. There's just nothing like them.

Current Music: Keith Murphy: Clamanda

This will be probably the most sobering of my entries on Timor-Leste.

( First, a tiny bit of history )

The fighting was intense in Ainaro--Wikipedia notes that 95 percent of the buildings were burned by the departing Indonesian forces. One of the young men whom I talked to remembers his house being burned and fleeing to the mountains when he was ten years old. Another lost a father, an uncle, and seven half-brothers in the conflict. Many of the buildings remain in ruins:

A short walk from where I was staying is a place where the land falls away in sheer cliffs on both sides of the road. This place is known as Jakarta 2. It's where the Indonesian forces conducted executions--pushing people off the cliff. There's a concrete crucifix there now:

another memorial

The guy who took me here told me that when cars drive by here, they will slow down, out of respect, and people on motorbikes or foot will often stop for a moment to say a prayer.

We looked over the edge. I didn't take a picture. Too many ghosts.

All of which makes the children at the school across the street from where I was staying, singing Timor-Leste's national anthem while raising the flag of their eleven-year-old country, extra moving. (Voices you can hear are the voices of my two hosts.)

(If the embedding doesn't work for you, go here.)

Current Music: Cloud Cult: The Calling

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Two remarkable (longish) short stories
"But they always said hello and stopped to chat"
more from Laloran Justisa
echo warfare
There are those who bear amulets
brooding on conquest--then something more encouraging
drown your arms
Jakarta 2

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Asakiyume mita

Entries tagged with war

Two remarkable (longish) short stories

"But they always said hello and stopped to chat"

more from Laloran Justisa

echo warfare

There are those who bear amulets

brooding on conquest--then something more encouraging

drown your arms

Jakarta 2