In Recovery At Yalta
by M. F. Korn

Near the edge of a dark murky body of water, a hooded figure in black slowly walked with the old man to the wooden skiff at the bank, where a strange box lay. He dragged the box built with ancient forged nails into the skiff, until it fit. There weren't any stars in the blackest sky. It seemed there wasn't even a sky. He pushed off the bank in a fluid ethereal motion. He glided the skiff with a long pole across the water, rowing them out of the blackness. He had brought the old man with him.

The codependency meeting at Briarwood Chemical Dependency Unit was exceptionally cheerful. When the old man entered the room, a rather huge lady, Linda and the others gave him a smug smile and he sat down. His face hid any sort of emotion.

Linda looked thoughtfully at her book sitting next to her on the formica table:

"A Moment to Reflect. Living Our Own Lives

Meditations for Codependents."

She was chairing the meeting today. After all, she worked at Briarwood after finally getting her Social Work degree from Mississippi State. She just recently had to share her office cubicle with Anthony, who had really been pushing her buttons. She was feeling anger about it now. But she knew she could cope. She glanced over at the old man in his gray suit. What's that odor, she wondered?

Susan began to share about Susan's dilemma: "When we learn we can't control other's lives, we can turn our attention to our own. This phrase sticks with me. We concentrate on our responsibilities and choices. We learn to take care of ourselves. I am just now learning to take care of myself, not just everybody else."

All the ladies smiled but Linda. She still felt anger and resentment. I've got to put it out of my mind. I've got to have courage, patience, she thought. The old man in the corner with the broad bushy mustache and gray suit looked nowhere in particular, but now straight ahead at a blank spot on the wall. The foetid odor persisted in the lightly pastelled room.

"Lisa, would you like to share something?", Linda asked.

"Well, I read the second chapter last night, about six times." She giggled. "So it would begin to sink in." Knowing nods from the girls. "The part that says, 'In order to accept new, happy wonderful events, we have to see ourselves as good and deserving. If we accept the good in ourselves, we can accept good things happening for us'." She seemed to be on the verge of crying, her eyes misty by the time she got to the last syllable. The ladies empathized, their faces showing concern.

The old man thought to himself, I would love to kill each and every one of these despicable women.

Linda looked at the old man. He was new around here, in our community of recovery. She had never seen him at any AA meetings or any of the twelve step programs.

He did not see her looking at him, he was still staring away at a fixed point in space, showing no emotion except weariness.

Everybody but the old man was smoking chic cigarettes. They had voted "smoking allowed" right after the meeting started.

Linda still thought there was something, well, strange about the guy. She had her emotional guard up, trusting herself.

Linda told Lisa, softly, "You've talked before about your situation." She paused. "You know what? You deserve to be happy and you already are. Keep TELLING yourself that. Keeping our focus on our goodness will help goodness flow into our lives."

She was good and she knew it. But she knew she would always be in recovery because of her alcoholic father. Her constant weight problem was just one symptom of her dysfunctional family, among others.

Lisa opened up. "My husband Tom just lost his sobriety last week after eight months. Before that he was constantly irritable. He always talked about using," she sobbed.

Things got solemn. "How he missed it more than anything...(sob)... How things were so much more fun when he was drinking and using." She kept herself in check.

"You've got to take care of YOU," Linda said, softly. A line came to her from another Codependancy book: "We will always be surrounded by people and their problems. If we attach ourselves to them, we lose ourselves in the quicksand of codependency," she quoted verbatim.

Don't take control of the meeting. Just take care of yourself, she told herself. You cannot solve these girls' problems.

The old man thought to himself: Will Trotsky show up? He will always be my greatest enemy.

Lisa lit up a womanly cigarette and smiled directly at the old man. THey all seemed to be looking at him with endearing kindness. The old man looked at her with a despair and melancholy that hardly began to sum up a despotic reign of terror. I would like to kill you, little woman, he thought.

Linda said to him, politely, "I'm sorry, I don't know your name." She smiled at him as best she could, trying to adjust to the thickly smell that still managed to emerge from the cigarette vapour trails.

"This was a closed meeting but we voted it open when we started. So you're positively welcome to stay." The ladies chuckled.

"Don't let Trotsky in here," he managed to say, looking worried.

"Tell us who you are and what you would like to share with us."

"Joseph Stalin", he said in broken, tired english.

"Would you like to share with us about what is going on in your life? Feel free." Even though you are supposed to be long dead, she thought. The old man looked up and around the table with an authority that was peerless, unmatchable. Infinite power.

"I am, how you call it, paranoid, very lately," he said. He unfolded his arms and with piercing eyes looked at Linda. She felt a bit odd but so far he was behaving appropriately. Give it time, just wait. She knew about this one.

"My biggest enemy--Trotsky. Killed with ice pick, Mexico City, 1940."

The ladies all around the circular table laughed sweetly. "My wife killed by CHEKA, KKVD."

The ladies smiled and lit their chic cigarettes, sipping decaffinated Community chickory coffee.

He paused indefinitely, without saying anything, like he suddenly drew a blank. Finally Linda spoke up, her tone soothing but not sad for him.

"Well, it sounds like you have been in a dysfunctional situation." She didn't exactly want to go into it, but asked, "Do you feel, umm, anger, or just how do you feel? If you don't want to talk about it, that's perfectly okay, too."

The old man laughed a good long laugh that rang through eternity. The ladies raptly watched him. He looked at Linda and smiled, regaining his composure. "Nyet."

"Ooo-kaaa-y", Linda said, to herself, patronizing and drawn out.

She was about to move down the line but he then said gravely, "I feel I am in Lyubyanka Prison. Some kind of gulag...I was not good father. I did not care for my son." He paused. "I ruled mercilessly."

"Kind of like a dictator?" one of the girls said sweetly. Everybody laughed. The tension left the room. But Linda knew there was a silent but noticeable odor of malingering death here. The ladies kept smoking up their Virginia Slims and Kool Ultra Lights. Everyone seemed to be transfixed on the old man, sitting squarely and surely in his chair. He had a look of power and importance to him, but somehow broken down a bit. Like someone in denial.

The old man thought, you all would already be dead now.

"I remember speaking on Moscow radio after Germany surrendered. June 22, 1947. I lied to many people."

"Well, let's move on", Linda said, smiling but totally perplexed.

"But my worst enemy was Trotsky. Trotsky. He was killed with ice pick, Mexico City, 1940." The ladies seemed not to really be listening, but lulled by his friendly articulation and deep resonant voice, like it was an autosuggestion, almost.

Linda suddenly realized this wasn't the Happy Birthday StripO Gram, but THE Joseph Stalin? General Secretary of the Communist Party under Lenin? Who ruled from 1922 to 1953? No wonder it smelled like death in here. The room which was gay and cheerful ten minutes ago to her had became a cloistered shunted room, filled with malevolence, all radiating from the inner fortitude of this rigid old man. The ladies were flipping through their Meditations books happily, looking for pert answers to his problem and hopefully stumbling on some nugget of wisdom for their perjuring, alcoholic husbands.

Linda thought to herself: The few affirmations that she had carefully drilled into herself for the last three years,

"I forgive everyone and everyone forgives me...I am totally responsible for my life, and I no longer blame others. I acknowledge there is a power working through me to manifest good in my life. I release everyone and everyone releases me." and then she thought, what about those six million people shot execution style after torturous years in gulags...do they forgive him?, the man that is sitting quietly across from me?

LInda smiled at him, a twinge of sickness around the corners of her full, round face , around her mouth.

Then an emotional lifeline came to her to share: "Mr. Stalin, we can listen to others when they need to tell their story, but we don't have to have answers for them. I can let you make your own choices and live with the consequences without trying to save you. I can only stay focused on my own inner voice, my higher Power, my spiritual path. You should let go of your problems. You cannot be ready to receive love from others until you embrace yourself with love. You cannot extend love until you recognize your own goodness." The old man looked at her with feinted hatred.

The ladies were all smiling contentedly. She imagined him tearing her head right off her neck. Goodness, she thought? "Loving yourself is healing yourself."

The old man looked at her and smiled, his gapped teeth like a rodent's, alabaster, his smile one that did not seem to come too often. A megalomaniacal fraught grin came upon his face like a gash and his power emanated like sheer electricity from his seat, it seemed to her. The ladies chirped, smiled at him.

One lady spoke up, "You are obviously going through a lot. Just give yourself to your higher power. You seem like a nice man. She smiled at him and he smiled at her and then his face went dead cold stiff.

He scratched his cheek with his thick left hand, and Linda fidgeted in her seat, wondering what malice came from that hand! This is just too much, she felt. I'm having a break with reality. I've got to get this meeting over with. This butcher , who promoted his people right before he had them shot, after a good stint in prison. If she hadn't taken that world history course about world war II at Mississippi state before she almost flunked out she wouldn't have regarded him as such. But was it really him?

"I hate to say, y'all, but this meeting is adjourned. Let's form a circle for our closing prayer...And remember, stop that stinking thinking, and get a check up from the neck up."

The ladies laughed and tittered as they formed the prayer circle. Stalin bellied himself up out of his chair, his old creaking bones barely able to get up. The two pretty things on either side of him had pristine perfumes overbearing him.

I feel no guilt, never did, never would. Lyubyenka Prison. What am I doing so far from the Kremlin? I am confused and am having a hard time breathing. I do not know the prayer, I am an atheist, but as I hold their hands I will not go ahead and have all these poor women executed. I am not feeling good about myself. I have't in a long time. Someone is making me come here, I know I have to come back.

The room emptied out. It was dark outside. The ladies got into their volvo turbo station wagons and drove off. Stalin walked by a hugging therapy session that was impromtuing in the hallway with Linda and other recovering members. As he walked by, looking straight ahead, Linda eyed him with fright. She walked out of the lobby and she saw the old man slowly walking through the parking lot and then he vanished like that old silent Three Musketeers movie where D'artangan and Porthos walked up to heaven, like Heathcliff and Cathy in "Wuthering Heights" crossing earthly boundaries. He found the wide river that didn't seem to end and had no shoreline to speak off. The skiff was there once again, waiting for him to board. A black-robed figure with a vague outline stood next to the oblong box quite resembling a pauper's coffin. He climbed in and sat down and they shoved off. They fought a silent deep current. Far off in the distance seemed now to be a shoreline. He put his hand in the murky water and it was chillingly cold. They seemed to row forever through the fog. There was a lapping of gentle ripples against the shore. The land seemed wrapped in a mysterious swath of magical otherness, a land not trodden upon for centuries. The old man got out of the boat and the shadow-cast face of the hooded figure turned away. The hooded figure pushed off and headed back. There was a small path beckoning Stalin to try, through a patch of woods blurred in the midst of hideous darkness. He paced the stretch of muddy sand, the sand foamy and wet from contact with the water at its edge. It was slow going at first with the vines and grown. The path seemed not to be travelled in a long time. The old man walked up and down stilted mounds and topographical blemishes in the blasted heath, along a shoreline of shadows and unnameable sounds. He was looking for Znegoviev and the others, his top men that were all dead by him. When the old man looked again through the steppes he saw the Gulag Siberian Death Camp. This was to him a special Hell, and there were others like him here, who only belonged in this special hell. A specific inner circle.

Next week at the codependency meeting everything was going just fine until Stalin brought Adolph Hitler in full military dress with him. They were like human facsimiles of old WWII stock footage, gray overcoats for Mississippi weather, as if Hitler had just come from Berchezgarten and Stalin the steppes above the marshy swamps of the Ukraine. Linda asked Mary beth, "How are you dealing with your anger?"

Mary Beth looked down for a second. "David, my fiancee, does endless cleaning as a result of his sobriety. He cleaned the kitchen for three hours and it didn't even need it. He drinks coffee endlessly. So he's tense all the time. I think he's becoming psychotic from so much coffee."

Hitler was smiling, rather handsome, his brown eyes flashing with helter skelter aplomb madness. He seemed to feel like just a few minutes outside the Isle of the Dead gulag was some sort of reprieve. He knew he recognized the Gulag as a spitting image of the Arnold Bocklin painting from just outside it, in the woods.

Linda spoke up. "He's substituting one craving for another. We don't even allow our recovering alcoholics candy and cookies because it could make them slip. You've got to allow him his anger. Tell him the coffee makes him crazy."

It was Martha's turn. "My husband got into a fight with his neighbor about the neighbor's dog. The dog is always barking every morning, all morning. My husband is seriously thinking about shooting it if it gets into his tomato plants." The ladies laughed slightly. "I mean, I like dogs. I mean, shooting a poor innocent dog."

Stalin's eyes twinkled with sudden recognizance. "Young

lady...Once I too had that problem".

Linda was unaware of the sudden social coup. It's my meeting, dammit, she thought. Well, it's open discussion. She touched the binding of the "Meditations in Codependency" book, nervous and irritated.

Stalin went on: "I found out the owner of the dog, that bark, "Baarrkk, Barrkk", and had him shot and dog too!" He laughed as Hitler smiled, his magnificent nazi uniform riddled with medals. Today Stalin had on his traditional Labor Party Proletariat brown with the red trim, double breasted, with military cap on his knee. The ladies sat there silently.

"I knew it would come to this", Linda said disgustedly. "That kind of talk is not going to solve anything, sir." She gasped with unbelief at Martha, for support.

"Here, page forty-two of our book...'Life is change. Progress travels up and down a winding road. Whatever difficulties we have today, this too shall pass. I will remember that nothing lasts forever, and I have as much to learn from the pain as the joy.'"

Hitler seemed to fancy the lithe fraulein, there couldn't be a speck of dirty blood in her Aryan body, he thought. She was coolly smoking her Ultrathin Kool and looking at him like they both could be right now in a nightclub, checking each other out over two-for-one Kamikazes. After all, she was looking for a new man, somebody not an asshole like Doug.

"You are my friend", Stalin said to Hitler.

"Danke. Once we discusst how to divite up Britain. Do you remember?"

"Yes. We have always admired each other."

"Gentlemen, we are trying to stay on the topic of dealing with family members who act inappropriately," Linda said.

"How would you like if I shot you?", Stalin said, looking her straight in the eye. Hitler was now positively beaming at his little skinny Fraulein from Picayune, Mississippi.

"I'm trying to talk my husband out of killing that dog", Martha said, smiling in the moderate pastel light across from the despots. These men are beginning their power plays , stances and manipulations, Linda thought.

"Excuse me, I'm sorry, but no one here realizes that you are both famous historical figures. The most evil rulers of all time, in the most pivotal war of all time. You both should be dead and it is a physical impossibility that you could even be here. Either I'm hallucinating or this is some cruel inappropriate joke from some staff members who hired somebody from Happy Birthday Grams. I must be hallucinating." She stood up.

"Don't you recognize these two men that smell like warmed over corpses?" The ladies were regarding Linda's inappropriate behavior.

"Linda, this is an open meeting. As long as they are here, they have every right to join in and share."

"Yeah, they can share their feelings too", the little Fraulein said, as rickety old Hitler brushed his shirt, whisking it briskly with his feeble old hands.

"No! You don't get it!", she said. "This man here (pointing to Hitler's handsome countenance) was responsible for twelve million deaths-six million jews, the rest Gypsies, beggars riff raff, poets, undesirables, people against the Reich."

"They are human beings. They have a right to feel good about themselves...don't they?" Mary Beth was cut off.

"No!", Linda said, her immense frame girdling her smart pants outfit. "These men were not human beings! They were monsters! If they are technically alive!"

She sat down as the two men stared at her hard, with a malevolent hatred. She could feel their cold hardboiled eyes drilling straight through her. She felt violated. She forgot about dealing with anger. The resentments. She needed to vent, and she did.

The two men were over there in their own territorial corner, now laughing their selves silly. Hitler started coughing, he hadn't laughed this hard in a long time. He looked over at his little fraulein, she still looked interested, she smiled at him with bedroom eyes.

"I'm sorry, I have to close this meeting. I'm turning it over to Mary Beth. I can't deal with this. I've got to go someplace quiet and sift through my emotions."

A surprised Mary Beth took over the meeting and Stalin told some wonderfully amusing stories about the secret police and internal struggles. But most of all, telling how he instilled fear consistently in all the officials around him.

"I promote and then I shoot!" The ladies roared.

After the meeting it was back to the salt mines for both the men. The two of them followed the same lachrymose course back to the Isle of the Dead.

Next Wednesday was an open meeting. Linda decided no matter who showed up, she would control the meeting, keep her cool, and kept the codependency meeting along the lines of self help and recovery. She had confided in her friends who convinced her she was not losing touch with reality. She said to herself for five days over and over, "I feel good, I feel great, I feel wonderful" and all the other words of healing. She was armed to the teeth with positivism. She could triumph in the battle ahead of her. But the real clincher was that she prayed for Hitler and Stalin to her Higher Power until she couldn't pray anymore, almost sick to death of it.

Next week the two old men brought some other men with them, out of the stygian haze of the Isle of the Dead , transfigured from the steppes of the quasi gulag reality, to the Briarwood CDU unit. They walked slowly through the carpeted hallway of the lobby like they were nihilistic gunmen in a Spaghetti western, fierce and invincible. One of the other men, an oriental looked at the register book by the main office as they walked. Easy listening music was irradiating from ceiling speakers with a calming obsequiousness as recovering alcoholics, coke addicts stepped aside, getting out of their way, a path forming mysteriously.

A tall stringy drug addict, whose lineage was from the Fish Cheer at Woodstock and Fillmore East casually asked Pol Pot, "Can I bum a cigarette off you, man?"

"No!", he said, with a hint of death.

Stalin saw Linda with his steely eyes, she was coming down the hallway from her cubicle with another counselor, trembling. He marched up to her and stopped.

"Get rid of Stinking Thinkink", Stalin said, earnestly.

"Check up from de Neecchk Up", Handsome Adolph rejoined immediately.

Her face turned from pale ghostly white to a flushing pinkishness. Her face went slack and her mouth dropped infinitely. "I think you two are in Recovery", she said cheerfully, smiling.

Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin were in recovery, and were bringing others from the annals of history, the 3000 some odd wars that took place. I prayed and God done gave me a Time Warp, she thought. What a relief.

The meeting went splendidly. Pol Pot talked with fond remembrance about his college days at the University of France in Paris. And the Secretary General said, in turn and quite appropriately, "Ivan the Terrible will be in attendance next week", his tremendous voice pitched throughout the malodoring room, not so shunted anymore. Linda marvelled to herself later about how the meeting went so well.

the end

Appeared in a colelction of MF Korn's stories called Stygian Relics of the Lacrymose, published by Golden Meteorite Publications.

Top of page