Oleg Of War

Diary

Oleg does not remember the exact street in Kabukicho where he knelt over a gutter and pulled his own teeth out one by one, only that he counted each extraction aloud like a man reciting a debt, and told no one it hurt. The other Dojo brothers had aped into cheap sake and cheaper vice to bury the ache of the old warrior code, but Oleg chose blood and enamel instead, calling it discipline because the word discipline was the only thing he had left that felt sharp. He tells this story now with the same flat, unblinking gravity he uses to announce the weather, as if losing his smile were simply another technique mastered, another kata perfected in the dark. Somewhere his floor of dignity got rugged clean off him that night, yet he insists, jaw tight and gapped, that this was the making of him, that a man who can hurt himself on purpose fears nothing an opponent might do for free. He still practices restraint every single day, swears off the dojo's weed and warm cups passed around the fire, and every single day by dusk he is holding a jug in one hand and a grudge in the other, proud, gap-toothed, and losing that particular fight with the same solemn honor he lost his teeth.