By PAYAM SHARIFI

Even when brimming with optimism and enough can-do energy to make an American blush, children of the East are nonetheless tempered with an almost abstract understanding of defeatism beyond their years. Dressed in tight jeans, white shoes, and a striped Marine top straight out of Fassbinder’s Querelle, with a schoolboy coiffe to boot, Nicolay Mukhin applied to be my research intern earlier in the year. He had clearly struck a balance of cool, mischief, and responsibility difficult for anyone, much less in a society whose socio-economic codes have been suffering a decade-long stretch of bipolar disorder such as in Moscow.

On his second day on the job, however, Nicolay came to me with his head in his hands: The V.I. Lenin State Library had turned him away. Not for his new-rave Technicolor dissidence, or knock-off Slimane-silhouette but rather because Nicolay was not yet eighteen and the library, being a place of serious study, is for adults.

When he returned from his summer holidays in Yalta, the gravitas of the site, apparently, had neither escaped him nor his strict, otherwise Atlanticist regime of kitesurfing. It was there that, in 1945, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin had held the Yalta Conference to redraw the map of the world, and Nicolay brought back a gift: a 45 LP of wartime songs from the failed Soviet War in Afghanistan in the ’80s, which speaks volumes to the young teenager’s grasp of romantic defeatism lampooned by the weight of history.

Ранены мы в душу с тобой, Афганистан

The title reads, literally, as “Injured We Are in the Soul by You, Afghanistan”. The reversal of the normal order of subject and adjective (it should read “We Are Injured”) has just as much to do with prosaic urgency than any poetic device. Jacques Audiard’s De Battre Mon Coeur S’est Arrêté with Romain Duris also employed a similar reversal, a delicate counterpoint to an otherwise brutal feature film.

After hours spent in the library – thanks to perhaps the most benign forged ID in the storied cloisters of forged IDs – Nicolay had caught a certain Orientalist bug. He asked if I could help with any contacts to organize a trip to Afghanistan with his girlfriend.

Today, as we watch Afghanistan slip once again into the hands of the Taliban, we are bitterly reminded of, on one hand, its impenetrability and, on the other, the world’s tendency to stick its collective head in the sand. To watch history repeat itself with such numbing brutalism should be a high crime.

Thankfully, history has its small, albeit Sisyphean, type: in this case, a young Russian economics major who runs not away from his Near East and rightful past, but rather towards them.