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I’m twenty-five percent Swedish. That number matters less than what sits behind it. At one point, the Swedes were only a few generations removed from the people who would later be called Rus. Not metaphorically—genealogically, linguistically, materially. Rivers were the highways. The Baltic poured into the Volga the way thought pours into habit. The people we lazily call Vikings never used that word as a name for themselves. Viking was a verb. Something you did. Like rowing. Like raiding. Like leaving home and not apologizing for it. They called themselves austmenn—men of the east. Outsiders, yes—but outsiders from where? From the forests, the coastlines, the edge of the known map, moving toward the steppes, not away from them. Identity wasn’t fixed. It was directional. That’s what rowing up the Volga really means. You don’t drift into becoming something. You apply force against flow. You choose upstream. People love to contaminate words after the fact. Take Aryan. In Sanskrit it meant noble, straight, honorable. A word of alignment, not domination. Then came the DNSS—Dead Nazi SS—the conceptual rot that takes ideas, kills them, and lets them possess language afterward. The word didn’t fail. The hosts did. Field Marshal Guderian—often dragged into these conversations—was not SS. He was a Wehrmacht officer, a Prussian technocrat of movement and speed. History flattens nuance when it wants villains neat. But reality is messier. Always upstream. Always resisting the current that wants everything simple and dead. That’s why backward lyrics matter. Why reversed Russian can sound like English. Why boj ym etah I hits harder than saying I hate my job straight. Meaning arrives sideways when the river is crowded with noise. The Vikings understood this without naming it. So did the Rus. So did anyone who ever picked up an oar knowing the river wouldn’t help. You don’t inherit that kind of movement. You reenact it. Rowing is not ancestry. It’s action.
The White Crows were packed into the car like a single nervous thought. Tod—whose name had been patiently Russified into something like Fyodor, though no one ever used it—was driving. He trusted the M7 the way you trust a sentence you didn’t finish writing. It ran beside the Volga, which kept its own rhythm, wide and indifferent, as if it had been there before direction was invented.
Sasha sat in the back seat with the accordion balanced on his knees. Every bump in the road opened and closed it slightly, so the instrument breathed on its own. It sounded like it was remembering something. The song they were rehearsing leaked out in pieces—half-melody, half-complaint—about rowing upstream for reasons that refused to present themselves.
Outside, the river slid past, gray and patient. Sometimes it looked faster than the car. Sometimes it looked like it wasn’t moving at all. Forests appeared, withdrew, reconsidered. Bridges passed overhead like sentences crossed out by the editor.
They were supposed to play at a Viking reenactment club, which already felt like a mistranslation. Men with plastic helmets would drink beer and argue about history as if it were a rehearsal that had gone wrong. The White Crows liked this. History, like punk, worked better when the instructions were missing.
Sasha began singing the chorus softly, not to be heard, but to see if it still existed. The words made no demands. They admitted ignorance. They rowed anyway.
Tod watched the road curve along the Volga and wondered, briefly, whether they were driving toward the city or whether the city was slowly being reeled in. He did not ask this aloud. Questions were heavy. The car was already full.
When Gorky finally appeared—factories crouched, windows blinking—the song was finished. Or perhaps it had only just learned how to stay unfinished. The river kept going. The road agreed to follow. The White Crows did what they always did: arrived without explanation, played as if passing through, and left behind a sound that refused to settle where it was placed.
