From redacted volumes of the Bassandan Dictionary of National Biography
Bassist, historian, iconographer, oenologist, Rift theorist
born c1920; location and nationality uncertain, though his 1940s familiarity with the bohemian neighborhoods of various European capitals, including the Left Bank and Montmartre in Paris, the old city of Pest, Praga in Warsaw, and Žižkov in Prague, suggests a peripatetic early experience. The likeliest origin story has him born as “Jean de Maréchal-Ferrant” in the Loire Valley of France, the son of a winemaker’s daughter from Roanne and a soldier who had served with the American Expeditionary Force, and raised among the vineyards and tributaries of that lush canton, with frequent travel to Paris as part of his maternal relatives’ wine-export business. Years later, Madame Algeria—herself a quite remarkable polymath—commented: “we always surmised he might have come from the aristocracy, originally, but he never spoke of any noble antecedents. It was more just a manner of how he carried himself, and the things—wine, food, languages, medieval history—that he just seemed to know, almost like an inheritance.”
On the other hand, another account suggests him to have been born “Džonatan Výrobca,” in Bassanda around 1920, though any records which might confirm or contradict this alternate account were destroyed during the aerial bombings that preceded the Nazi Anschluss in the winter of 1939-40. There is however a dog-eared, much used library card in the Archives at Miskatonic, dated 1932 and made out to “D. Výrobca,” issued by the Biblioteka Nationale in Ballyizget (a remarkable collection which had been modernized, under a commission from Tsar Alexander III, by the Belgian Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet in the 1870s).
At any rate, as “Džonatan Výrobca,” he more reliably appears in the Bassandan orbit in November of 1936 as a teenaged bicycle messenger, liaising with the International Brigades during the Nationalist defense of Madrid. Proponents of the Loire Valley story of his birth suggest that, running away from home “to fight the Fascists,” he crossed the border at Couflens in the French Pyrenees in the preceding August, just after the coup that fractured the Republican army command. Inside the city, the incognito General was expediting the clandestine importation of specialized arms based in Bassandan Rift theory and was directly in contact with Nas1lsinez, based in New York and working through clandestine Republican sympathizers in the first Roosevelt administration; it is said that Výrobca smuggled both Documents and essential circuitry, under the guise of delivering baguettes and coffee across the lines to the besieging Franco forces.
The ground-breaking Rift theorist Professor Ibrahim Hazzard-Igniti, headquartered in Bassanda in the late 1930s, was ostensibly conducting electromagnetic experiments investigating the propulsion methods of the locomotive known in Bassandan folklore as The Beast, but it would appear that the Doctor was also working with the ancient Documents of Peace which had been smuggled to Ballyizget by Cécile Lapin and Ismail Durang in the Oughts, but which were seemingly lost again, until they reappeared at Dolpu in the Hindu Kush in the early 1970s. It is openly questioned whether the Documents were even traced between the Great Train Ride for Bassanda in ’06 and the 1970s, or whether they were entirely lost, or indeed subsequently forged. But at least one of these circuits, the PET—Prokhorov Electromagnetic Tractor—appears to have traveled successfully from Bassanda to Paris, and then into Madrid, by the General via Džonatan, and to have been successfully field-tested: on the night of 23rd November, during the worst of the aerial bombardments by the Fascist Condor Legion, six wings of Junkers Ju-86 bombers crashed in succession during their approach-runs. An anonymous eyewitness, a member of the French-speaking Louise Michel Battalion of volunteers—or perhaps Džonatan himself—left a reminiscence:
They came in waves from the West, over Villanueva, out of the red sunset like storm crows. And we knew that sound, of the sirens on their wings. I was picket at the western lines, and I saw them coming, and then, just as the first wave appeared, silhouetted against the sun, it was like they just twisted aside—like a wind came and flipped them over end upon end, and blew them into the ground, one wave after another.
Regardless of his role, or absence thereof, during the siege, Výrobca drops out of sight after the fall of Madrid to the Fascists in early 1939, and only resurfaces in Ballyizget, during the Nazi occupation, in the winter of 1941-42: lean and pale, dressed in ragged castoffs and surplus. To the casual eye, he resembled the other Displaced Persons who passed through the capitol at this period, some evicted from farmsteads, others fleeing the former frontiers and current combat zones, as the Soviet counter-offensive inched forward. Such persons kept an exceptionally low profile, flitting from one bombed-out block to the next, scavenging for food or metals, avoiding the daytime Nazi patrols (though the Germans learned that to send out a foot or truck patrol in the unlit nighttime back streets of Ballyizget was to markedly decrease the odds of the patrol’s return), appearing like nocturnal creatures only after the red sun had set, lighting up the grey rain and black smoke clouds to the east. To a more discerning eye—say, that of Nas1lsinez, who he seems to have met in this period—Výrobca stood out among the other refugees in his air of calm competence, in the sophistication of his language skills, and in the facility with which he deflected direct inquiries about his past.
For there was more to him than the typical DP. Documents from his wartime record in the Correspondence, still embargoed since the fall of the Bassandan Communist Party, are alleged to link him to the legendary Cell #1, the urban resistance group founded c1939 by Ана (“Ana”) Ljubak de Quareton, Kristina Olenev, and Terésa-Marie Szabo, and operating clandestinely in Ballyizget, as liaison to the partisan guerrillas of the Forest Brethren. He appears to have been brought into contact with the women of the Cell through Jēkvēlina Vovk, a dancer and later kolo player and visual artist, and to have lent his expertise to the nascent Bassandan Bicycle Corps as they developed anti-imperialist motorcycle-sabotage techniques.
Though he kept a low profile throughout the Occupation, it was not uncommon to see him bicycling to various café jobs in the nightclubs frequented by Nazi officers, his double bass balanced across his back. While he drew a degree of scrutiny from Wehrmacht patrols, he was typically allowed to pass unmolested, carrying as he did an Ausweis granting him passage to and from gigs—the fact that the occupiers found him a reliable source of smuggled brandy and French champagne possibly facilitating this official leniency. Ever afterward, Vovk was exceptionally elliptical in describing just exactly what his clandestine service to Cell #1 had entailed—though that same service, decades later in the 1980s, earned him a commendation from the democratic government of Polli Kilotona. The commendation, couched in the very careful language which Kilotona, a former activist and the first leader of the Republic after the fall of the Soviet regime, typically employed to describe radical actions and “wet work,” reads as follows:
A commendation for meritorious and courageous service, in the spirit of Daiitoku, in the assumption of karma, and on behalf of the freedom of all peoples, in Bassanda and beyond.[1]
Queried by the Eagles’ Heart Sisters Oral History project, in the 1980s, Vovk said only “he did what needed to be done—at a time when few would or could do it.”
[1] The reference is to the Bassandan version of the Bodhisattva Yamāntaka, who wields the sword that cuts through ignorance.