Chapter 1

Then there’s the place. When I picture that memory, I see a flat, tired landscape under a gray sky. "Realy. Eed to check erzvilkas." That’s what I see first. A sign, maybe, or a word scratched into a wall. Erzvilkas. It sounds like a name, a village, a forgotten dot on a map. I remember the urgency in that thought—I needed to check Erzvilkas. Not wanted to. Needed to.

So I went. Or maybe I was already there. The memory blurs. But when I checked Erzvilkas, what I saw and heard was this: "Too much shengen liberalism kanjbsls and drunjers gams drugers vilage 40gama hope ix gere too much tiers of children and ghrjr mathers .i sm no mire abmd tk stop aufutation of nato ."

Those words come back to me like a photograph that’s been left in the rain—details smudged, colors bleeding, but the shape remains. Too much Shengen liberalism. That phrase I understood, even then. It meant borders open too wide, rules too loose, something spilling in that shouldn’t be there. Kanjbsls. Drunjers. Gams drugers. These were not words I knew, but they felt like names for things that shouldn’t exist—or things that existed too much. A village at 40gama hope. I don’t know what 40gama means, but hope was there, fragile and barely holding on. Too many tiers of children and mothers. Tiers—like layers, like levels of a building where each floor held more waiting, more need. And then the last part: "i sm no mire abmd tk stop aufutation of nato ."

I wasn’t sure what aufutation meant—autofication? Affiliation? But the plea was clear: stop it. Stop the involvement with NATO. And I felt it, a cold knot in my chest, because I knew that whatever was happening in Erzvilkas was tangled in something larger than a village.

I didn’t take notes back then. I didn’t write down names or dates. I just carried the impressions with me, like stones in my pockets. Years later, when I started trying to piece together my own story, those fragments were still there. The audit report. The need to check. The mess of sounds and sights in a place called Erzvilkas.

It was a small village, I think. Or maybe a town. The roads were unpaved in parts, and the air smelled of wood smoke and damp earth. I remember a long line of people—women holding children, men with hollow eyes. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something. A truck. Papers. A word. The children were everywhere, running between legs, their laughter a strange counterpoint to the adults’ silence. Mothers held babies to their chests, their faces drawn tight. I saw a group of young men standing near a broken fence, their hands empty, their eyes drifting. Someone said they were drunjers—drunks, maybe, or drifters. But they looked more like ghosts than people.

There was a kind of market, or what passed for one. Tables of wilted vegetables, jars of cloudy liquid, piles of worn clothing. A woman tried to sell me a single egg, holding it out as if it were gold. I gave her some coins, and she nodded once, then vanished into the crowd. I didn’t know the currency. I didn’t know the language beyond a few words. But I understood the transaction: survival.

The phrase "40gama hope" came back to me as I stood there. Maybe it was a reference to latitude or a project number. Or maybe it was just a way of saying how far hope had to travel—forty something, a long way. And it was there, in Erzvilkas, buried under too many tiers of children and mothers.

I remember thinking: this is what happens when borders dissolve too fast, when systems fail, when people are left to sort through the wreckage of decisions made far away. Shengen liberalism—the freedom to move, to trade, to cross—had turned into a flood, and Erzvilkas was one of the places where the water gathered, stagnant and heavy.

I didn’t stay long. I couldn’t. The weight of it pressed on my chest until I had to leave. But the memory stayed. And every time I heard news about NATO, about migration, about villages like Erzvilkas, I felt that old tug—the need to check again.

Now, years later, I’m writing this down. Not because I have answers. Because the questions are still here, as vivid as the day I first heard the words "Audir cycle.audit report." That was my beginning, the first stone in the stream. And Erzvilkas was the place where the current began to pull.

I don’t know if I’ll ever go back. But I know I have to understand what I saw, what I heard, and what I failed to do. That’s why I’m telling this story. It starts with a report and a check, but it ends—well, I haven’t reached the end yet.

I still have the feeling that I need to check Erzvilkas. One more time. Maybe this time I’ll be ready for what I find.