Sunday Pages: "Alice, Always"

An essay by Zarina Zabrisky

Dear Reader,

The night before last, I had a strange, annoying dream. I was away from home on some sort of trip—for work? which work? I did not know—at a busy hotel complex. I didn’t know anyone there and I’d never been there before, and I was walking around with my guitar case and a suitcase, trying to find—what? who?—I cannot say.

After a bit of this meandering, I wandered into a ballroom, where a musician—did I know him? in the dream, yes; in real life, no—was on a stage, setting up for a show he was playing later that evening. Looking at the guitar case in my hand, I realized that I was there to join him as part of the backing band (which I am not qualified to do, in real life or in the dream). He was stressed out, exceedingly nervous, and I was the picture of calm. “I have to go to the bathroom first,” I told him, and wandered off to find the facilities.

It was an enormous place, and the men’s room was located what felt like a quarter mile away from the ballroom, through a series of equally opulent rooms. The bathroom itself was small, like something from a private home. I closed the door. But I could hear the musician screaming at me—furious, anxious, about to freak out—that I needed to stop what I was doing and get back on stage RIGHT NOW. Then the door became translucent, and I saw there were people waiting impatiently outside. That’s when I woke up.

This is typical of the sort of dream I have almost every night: a strange new sprawling place, people I don’t really know, no discernible purpose, encumbered by suitcases, some mishap with a bathroom. What the purpose is of a dream like this I wish I knew. Does it help burn through excess anxiety? It is my mind messing with me?

I recognized the tone of my dream yesterday, when I re-read Alice in Wonderland, a book I frankly never much cared for. Alice is one long, weird stress dream. Nothing makes sense. Nothing coheres. She’s falling, but falling safely, and slowly enough to grab marmalade, but the marmalade is empty, and she lands, and is too big, and then too small, and then too big, and then the keys don’t work, and she almost drowns in her own tears. With the exception of the grinning Cheshire Cat, who keeps vanishing mid-convo, every character she meets is self-absorbed, crazy, and mean, and stops ignoring her only to call her an idiot or rebuke her for asking stupid questions. The chapters about the tea party with the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, and the Dormouse are particularly frustrating, as all of them gaslight her in turn. A duchess is sneezing on a baby that turns out to be a pig. Playing cards demand capital punishment. And wherefore the White Rabbit, who is himself a fluffy-tailed ball of anxiety? Only at the end does Alice—who has been remarkably even-keeled and good-natured throughout—sense any actual danger. And that’s when she wakes up. It was literally all a dream.

What Alice in Wonderland lacks in plot—the plot is on par with the plot of my own dream—it makes up for in tone. The abrupt shifts in mood, her kindly and resilient attempts to make sense of the nonsense, the fact that the other characters in Wonderland are assholes, the way she is gaslit, the insouciant attitude towards beheadings, real or imagined: all of that is eerily familiar. And if the fictional stress dream of Alice feels apposite in the United States, 100 days into the Trump Redux, it has, sadly, even more resonance in Ukraine, now well into the fourth year of the abominable Russian invasion. Poor President Zelenskyy is Alice, navigating a nonsensical world populated by mean and selfish creatures; Putin is the Queen of Hearts, shouting “Off with their heads!” while his charges tremble in fear; and the United States is the Cheshire Cat, offering a friendly smile but vanishing when needed the most. This stress dream is real.

I was inspired to revisit Alice in Wonderland because of the essay you’re about to read. As regular readers are well aware, my friend Zarina Zabrisky has spent considerable time the last three years covering the war in Ukraine, often on the eastern front. Her reporting, some of which I’ve had the privilege of running on these pages, has been nothing short of remarkable. I am in awe of her courage, her passion, her talent, and her steadfast dedication to bringing the reality of the war to our attention. She is filing stories no one else files. (You can follow her on X and on Bluesky.)

Ukraine Dispatch: Human Safari

And now, here is her piece. All of the photographs were taken by Zarina, in and around the city of Sumy, and all of the Alice drawings are hers as well.

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Alice, Always
By Zarina Zabrisky
13 April 2025

And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you’re going to fall
Tell ‘em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call
And call Alice, when she was just small
—Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit”

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As black smoke covers the main avenue of Sumy on Palm Sunday, I watch it on my phone screen, listening to the air raid across Ukraine, all the way in Odesa, and remember how a major blackout leaves the stage of the Sumy Drama Theater in almost full darkness. I am teleporting to Sumy—only 60 miles from the front where the battle is raging—to watch Alice in Wonderland being rehearsed. This is, easily, the best metaphor for my life, my world, and everyone’s world in 2025.

“Mary Ann, Mary Ann,” screams a man in Ukrainian from the very back of the stage. “Where are my gloves?”

I used to listen to that record again and again—in Russian—when I was six and my parents would go to work and leave me alone at home, sick. I imagined that I was Alice, falling down the rabbit hole—and sometimes I stepped to the balcony and looked down, imagining I was falling. Seeing my body smashed against the asphalt. We were on the sixth floor. I am still falling. And it is not my imagination.

The costumes are not made yet, but it is clear the man is the White Rabbit. In Shakespearean tradition, all characters are played by men. Alice is a man: actually, three men.

“It is the deconstruction of Alice,” Oksana, the director, tells me.

Strong, beautiful, outspoken, with clear blue eyes and jet-black hair, Oksana became a close friend after I interviewed her in the Odesa Opera Theater. She staged the first-ever Ukrainian opera there. Her dream is to stage an opera in Ukrainian in Europe. I followed her to Sumy to write about her Alice.

“Everything is a deconstruction,” I tell her.

I show her the video of my last report. At night, Russians hit a state university building across town, reducing it to a pile of rubble and a theater of horror site, slicing the building in two, leaving the inside of the classrooms exposed.

Last night, we heard that explosion as we walked downtown, talking about Alice, strolling along that wide boulevard, past a white latticed wood-carved gazebo and a monument to a sugar cube. As we passed the statue of a “humorous” resident of Sumy, an explosion thundered.

Everything froze. It happens every time. A split second of a silent scene. The space spliced into another dimension. A boy, about four, licking a pink, blue, and white cotton candy bigger than his head. His preteen sister staring at her phone. A couple walking hand in hand past a waterless fountain. Dark silhouettes on the other side of the street. Like live statues. Like Lewis Carroll’s photos. Forever imprinted on my retinae, like the sequence of shots. Sumy. Kherson. Odesa. Kharkiv. Chernihiv. Kyiv. Flash. Flash. Flash.

“The blind and the one-handed, go over there,” says Oksana on stage, pointing to the corner.

My mind dives through the invisible looking glass: all the amputees and the blind I saw at the bus stations of Ukraine while getting here. Young men hopping on crutches. The boys on stage are in their early twenties, dancers. They glide across the stage, carrying the ladder back and forth, climbing on it, to nowhere— climbing underneath it, as if hiding. It is as weird as Alice should be—or weirder. Ukrainian war surrealism. Can be a new genre.

War is nonsense. Not light and whimsical Lewis Carroll nonsense. Not even cold and painful René Magritte nonsense. No. It is Francis Bacon, Otto Dix, incongruous, distorted, insane, illogical, confused critters, body parts torn, brutal deconstruction of the butcher’s aisle, and a total impossibility to connect the dots, to make sense. To make sense, you have to lose it. Surrender to insanity. Become one with it. That’s what I did back then, when I was small.

All three Alices are wearing skirts, a silk red one and two gauze white ones. They are stretched out on benches, like cats, waiting for critter lackeys to figure out how to stick giant arms and legs out of the non-existent windows. How to climb the non-existent ladder to nowhere.

The university had nonexistent walls and windows, too. The grass all around was covered with green chestnuts. Frozen mini-explosions.

“The roof is falling! Look after your heads!”

This could be Alice. This could be a Sumy street outside. Then, in September, or now, on Palm Sunday. Fast forward to the future: This could be Kyiv on April 24, 2025. And further into the future, as there is no one to stop Russians anymore. America has fallen without a fight. Glass, shrapnel, and roof parts are falling and flying after missiles hit buildings in the empty space. Our world flying nowhere.

“The roof!”

Roof also means head, or logic—in Russian and Ukrainian. To lose one’s roof is to lose one’s mind. In the post-Soviet space, roof also means a mafia boss. The mafia rules the world now. They came for us.

“Watch your heads!”

The ladder falls with a loud clap, and I jump up in a plush aquamarine chair: it sounds like an explosion. Many things do. Thunder. A truck on a bad road. A door clapping. Imprinted on my eardrums. Out of nowhere—bam.

Just a day before the rehearsal, I was reporting from the Sumy region, in a burnt and ruined frontline village. I saw two men on a ladder trying to fix the roof of the local cultural center. The windows were covered with plywood—glass blown by explosions—but a beautiful red rose garden bloomed in front of them. Two lonely, giant critters loomed over the roses: Crocodile Gena and Cheburashka, “an animal unknown to nature,” a lame Soviet parallel of Alice. The Crocodile wore a suit and played an accordion. Cheburashka was a plain nightmare material. Both looked sad, forlorn, and monstrous. Putin has this look, all alone on the huge stage. The ghosts from the Soviet past. No children were left in any of the villages near the border.

Back on stage, men speak in funny voices. Three Alices are idle. One is asleep. As a siren starts, no one moves, even though there is a shelter in the theater. From an adjacent hall, disjointed music sounds mix with the siren. Severed, with a broken trumpet tune.

“Who did all this?” screams the White Rabbit. “Who did all this?”

I don’t know. A dictator with a fear of death? Hell bent on gaining immortality in the form of a paragraph in a chapter on great conquerors in a history textbook? One hundred forty million zombies brainwashed to oblivion to ensure this chapter is written? Aliens? God?

There is no god. Can’t be. If there is one, it is the scariest dictator of them all. Nightmare worse than fucking Cheburashka. Maybe god is Cheburashka, giant fluffy ears and the innocent eyes of a man-eater.

A caterpillar boy walks across the stage, carrying a spade.

One soldier told me at the frontlines, he’d never hold a spade again, once the war was over.

“All we do is dig,” he said.

The other soldier told me that Russians dig graves for themselves before the assault and carry their own black body bags. I don’t know if it was true—many things cannot be verified during the war and just fall down the rabbit hole, tumbling alongside me, falling, falling.

“Break!” says Oksana.

We go backstage. I plan to come the next day to interview three Alices, the White Rabbit, and then come to the premiere to finish this article, but—

—During the war, you are not the one writing the story. The story writes you.

You think you are writing it, your fingers missing the keyboard as the stinky mini-bus hops up and down on the tank-destroyed road, past the block posts, “dragon teeth” fortifications, and craters from explosions. But it is an illusion. You don’t know where you are going. You don’t know where you will arrive.

Cat: Where are you going?
Alice: Which way should I go?
Cat: That depends on where you are going.
Alice: I don’t know.
Cat: Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.

But it does, it does. We have agency. We do. The old record is playing on repeat in my head, and outside of it. I wanted to go back to Sumy, but there was no access, as Russia was threatening to capture it. The buildings I visited last time have been deconstructed. A pianist from the theater was killed. The wide boulevard was turned into ashes and flames. Where is that four-year-old with his cotton candy and his sister? Were they on a trolley bus of death? Burned to ashes?

To make sense of the war, you have to lose your mind.

Back in Russia, they say it was all staged in Sumy. For them, everything is staged. The world is a horror theater run by bloodthirsty Cheburashka gods.

Instead of Sumy, I have to go back home. Or what I thought was home. America. I am falling down the black hole, and my thoughts are flying past me:

Will they arrest me at the border? Will they send me to El Salvador? Will they send me to Russia? Back to the balcony in the Soviet wasteland?

I have been reporting—no, screaming!—for more than ten years that Russia was taking over. I have warned that Trump is Putin’s puppet in this theater of horror—to the empty audience, blackout and all, with me as the only spectator in the green velvet chair, deconstructed, severed, listening to my own disjointed screams from the dark stage, “Watch your head! The roof is falling! Mafia is coming!” while the little girl on her detached balcony was orbiting over the black vinyl record spinning in her head under the deconstructed sky—and I am still falling and falling and falling as Kyiv is torn to pieces by more Russian missiles and the future is now—and the world is deaf—

When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice
I think she’ll know

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ICYMI

Just me and LB on Friday. We talked about all the treaties Putin has violated; the truth about Steve Witkoff, Trump’s shadow envoy to Moscow; the bust-out of Social Security; and the death of the Pope.

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