The Blog

Who am I?!

A desolate sun-swept street around me. Rough asphalt in the road divides the two serrated rows of houses opposing each other, different in size and height. All of the walls look alike. Tired. Weary of everything, even of themselves, and of the row they are lined in. Tired of the tree stuck up from the asphalt, dried, the tree, the lifeless boughs look like withered roots. The tree, like planted upside down, provides no shade for the bench beneath it. Empty bench. Almost.

I veered to it…

The old man seated there exhibited astounding garrulousness. However, the stream of his speaking activities hardly coalesced into a picture of any sensible coherence.

The most stupefying feature about that nonsense pouring talking head were his eyes filled with cartographic lines of the blood vessels shooting densely all over his eyeballs the color of the powder-blue fog thru which there swam brown irises ferrying wide pupils. Those also swam all the time yet in a more controlled way, so as not to spill overboard, into his eyes whites.

The like optics organs are not an infrequent rarity and, in the same breath, the trump card among the celebrities in the business of movie production, as well as by the leading showmen, of Afro-American orientation.

Being aware, as it seemed, of his gift, he did his best to keep them up-squinted, which stratagem imparted to the fairly worn-out features of his face the looks of almost giggling Buddha, intended obviously as a red herring to put autograph hunters off track.

At times, because of negligence or weariness, one of his eyelids slackened its squint. However, the resulting map in no way increased the chances of collectors who, having rushed after the jolly Asiatic hieroglyph of Jack Chan’s signature, all of a sudden ran into the gloomy gaze of Morgan Freeman from the adjacent eye or vise versa.

However, I listened to him with just a half ear because the second half was pricked up to catch the hollow hum of intense thought work behind the thin partition from the dura mater embracing the gray matter convolutions.

By me, it is that classic case of “fragmented memory”: why did I recollect my uncle? the neurosurgeon? (what was his name, I wonder?) who had shown me the picture of cranium section to demonstrate the meninges of the brain, where the mentioned partition bears all kinds of graffiti: “dura mater” in Latin, then comes Cyrillic «здесь был Вася», which again reflows in Latin lettering «Kilroy was here».

And that’s exactly what produces this ever-present buzz (behind the partitioning), the absence of raw material for processing does, the thoughts just spin in an unproductive slip, like to when you try to recollect that long and winding dream that meandered through all of your night, but you are up and have shaved already, and sitting at your breakfast, and all retained by you are only vague elusive shreds of that past dream – something about Belomor cigarettes in it, eh? Or what?

Okay fine, let’s assume I’m seated now on this hard bench and this old screwball is yakking of nobody knows what, but who am I and where from?

And these two questions, if not answered with proper promptness, can very easily shed you off into the quicksand of doubts whether that “I” exists at all.

Aha! I’ve remembered! There was nothing about Belomor in it, and someone kept dumbly repeating, “Any evidence there was a boy? Any evidence there was a boy?? Any???”

Still and yet, who am I? Or am I simply to go on along with that trite sophism, “I feel the bench hardness under my ass, ergo: I exist”?

Exactly that moment I heard the dear and all-too-well-familiar clatter of hoofs…

My Rosinante!. click-clack… clippety-cluck… am I a jokey? An Olympic champion in show jumping? Or derby was our profile?

The curiosity woke me up and turned to face a bitter disappointment – the clicks were sounded by the feet of a female representation of the hominid species from the group of tailless primates, shod in shining yellow spikes, it’s them clattered along the sidewalk.

Ah, Rosinante! Where have we lost each other?!.

The look of her rather short caparison stung me with the unasked-for recollection, I have already seen the like tatters and I could easily reconstruct the rest of the picture – an iron-girdled chest, its lid thrown open, filled with bottles of dark glass securely drowned into the shim of exactly same rags, gaily angular snakes of the sunlight reflected by small ripples of water twine and swirl in the boards of the ceiling… where was it? In what dream?.

My neighbor in the bench fired off another incomprehensible declamation, this time on some sports subject, gorodki competition or something like that. Could he have been a coach at the CSCSA club before his retirement?

Very soon I felt the need to urinate and asked him the whereabouts of a nearest public toilet.

A first, he sent me, in the manner of his lacework verbalization, behind the car sheds, but guessing from the expression of my face that I had no predilection to silly jests like that at the moments of physiological need, he widely opened both of his Afro-American eyes and nodded invitingly in the direction of steps leading to the basement of a nearby house.

Leaving him alone, I still caught shreds of a centuries-old joke he was telling to the dried tree (Pyrus communis):

"Who the hell is whizzing like a cow right under my window?"

"It’s me, Mommy."

"You? Pumpkin? Go on, dear! Pee, sugar, pee!"

* * *

Bottle #9: ~ Ay, Phedai-jan, Phedai! ~

The screechy deafening discharge at launching of a GRAD missile is heard from afar yet the missiles themselves are nearing unheard, exactly the way ALAZANs do, and only when they brought to Aghdam City the cannons from the Caspian flotilla battleships and those started bombardment of Stepanakert from there, the sound track grew richer – you heard the 'boom!' of a cannon at about 20 kilometers off and in a half-minute from the same sector in the horizon there nears and widens the scream of the air torn apart by the purposeful flight of the shell, until it bursts somewhere in the city – GRHDAHKB!

Everything attuned to the technology of admiral Togo, who sent the flotilla of admiral Rozhdestvensky to rest on the bottom of Tsushima straits on May 27 1905, and—who could ever predict!—exactly that very day 70 years later I was set free after my hitch at a construction battalion in the Soviet Army of the USSR.

Still, the explosions of any sort sounded equally disgusting…

After lunch they always found some urgent work for me and, as a rule, in the underground shelter, my family did – to fix the section with the electric wiring (though all knew the electricity would be cut off all the same), to install the door, to seal the openings between foundation blocks with masonry of cubics meant to stop the chilly droughts as well as the raids of brazen rats, 2 in 1, you know. The task called for fetching cement from the box at our house building site while cubics (limestone blocks of 20 cm x 20 cm x 40 cm) were an easy find about the basement.

On completion the proposed job (intended, presumably, to keep me down there, in the underground's relative security) I retired to our rented flat and plunged into translating of Ulysses. The daily quota was set at 1 page, sometimes I knocked out one and a half, yet hardly a half page was the much more oftener output.

Then it was getting dark and the time to go out after water.

No, I never took the Joyce’s masterpiece with me to the editorial office—you never can tell, and the book was a borrowed property—that's why at the paper's facilities I scribbled a translation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Earth, a si-fi throwaway in the chewing-gum style,still and yet you have to somehow kill time, be it even at war. The undertaking served a practicable distraction though explosions of any remoteness from the scarred desk in the translators' room caused equally dismal contraction of the asshole…

At times I paid visits to the site of our future house, put away till more favorable conditions for construction works. Because you simply can’t let everything just drift by itself left to good will of your neighbors, who have enough of their problems.

The fact of 3-tonne water container being emptied and ladled out to the last crumble of ice was understandable, completely so, on my part. But where the heck disappeared the bundle of the barb-wire collected by me around the CPSU Regional Committee building after the special troops of the Soviet Army abandoned it for good?

The twigs and boughs chopped off the pine trees in Chkalov Street by the fragments at cover shelling were used for the construction of a passable Xmas tree so that the kids would receive divers impressions at their childhood and not only the monotonous panicky alertness of the adults around them in the miserly flicker of a candle dripping molten wax tears in the murky basement vault…

So, why after those relentless bombardments, and in absence of “the Russian bayonet” appraised in the Empire’s poetry as a panacea and pledge against Asiatic blood bathes, why (excuse the monotony of using the same question word) not to enter the city and kick up (no! we won’t say “carnage” we are too globalized citizens of the new order for that), kick up some fun at another ethnic cleansing, and get rid of all those basement dwellers (possible carriers of more threatening pandemics), and rename the city into “Khankendi”?

Well, they would if they could, they certainly would but for the nagging impediment named “phedais”.

Despite the Arabic-Muslim origin of the word that means “self-sacrificer”, some researchers derive it from Neo-Greek roots of the period when Hellas was no more and Greece was not yet around, and in their stead there was the Osman Empire (otherwise denominated the Ottoman or simply Sublime Porte). To keep things clearer, phedai is just a guerrilla-fighter or Bandera-man who kisses his family good-bye, grabs his wooden fork or AK, and leaves his home sweet home going to defend his village.

Why did Armenians need phedais?

It’s certainly a good question, yet after skirring thru Wikipedia or Britannica you’ll see that in a 15-year stretch (1894-1909) 2.5 millions of Armenians under the wise rule of the Osman Empire lived thru 3 massacres the most horrendous of which was the first (1894-1896).

Over-meticulous German pastor Johannes Lepsius had counted (absolutely proved) killing of 88 243 Armenians alongside the destruction of 2 493 villages (inhabitants of 456 of those got Islamized), the desecration of 649 churches and monasteries (328 were, luckily, turned into mosques), and death of additional 100 000 Armenians caused by starvation and diseases among the homeless. The total number approximates 200 000.

The following 2 massacres:

a) 25 000 in Diyarbakir Vilayet (yet, since there were massacred Assyrians as well, let’s divide the number evenly which leaves 12 500 for each of the groups, in brotherly way);

b) variously estimated from 15 000 to 30 000 in Adana Vilayet (only Armenians this time) which makes average of 22 500.

Sum total: 235 000 in 3 massacres.

(I don’t call for boycotting your summer vacation in Turkey, the hotel Manager over there might very well be a great-grand kid of an Islamized Armenian).