The Blog

"And the other?"

"Got up, went to dinner. Should I fetch him?"

Once they’ve brought a Turk, young.

"Check him, eh?"

What’s there to check? Unconscious, a massive fragment stuck out from the skull.

"I ask you brotherly, check him, eh?"

On the table with him. The fragment anchored tight, I had to pull with mandibular molar forceps. Cleaned the bone fragments off the brain. Treated the wound. And the guy survived.

Yet, some gyrus suffered, obviously. Time and again he starts to shriek, "You Armenian bastards! This is Azerbaijani land!"

The nurses couldn’t calm him down, always called for me. Of me he was afraid. I says, "Ara! Behave!"

"Doctor, doctor! I’m fine!", says he.

Then he was traded for two of our hostages, for he had rich parents. When they were taking him out, I was told, "You also go, eh? In case he wanted to die on the way? But you’re a doctor."

The exchange was on the road between Askeran and Aghdam. An ambulance from their side and we by the same brand UAZ vehicle.

Stopped at a distance from each other. I go on with him and from that side his parents and two ours who could hardly move, the chest of one burned with dry ice and the second man is all like a balloon, minces each footstep. They made him eat raw clover, the shepherds, they know what it does to sheep.

But mine does not move at all, stands still and watches those mujiks. His mother calls, "Sunny! Sunny!"

And he cries, "I don’t go! We, Azerbaijanis, are not human! We’re beasts!" Tried to run away.

Phedais caught him by our ambulance, brought back.

"Ara!"’ says I. "Do behave!"

"Doctor, I’m fine! I’m fine, doctor!"

Came up to his parents. They’re hugging him, crying. Each ambulance drove back to where it had come from.

Later a man spoke up to me at the bazaar. "You know me, doc? I was the one fed with clover."

Well, had come back to himself already, looking like a man. But about that Turk boy I know nothing whether he’s alive or not.'

. . . . .

A day later a crowd of civilian marauders ascended from Stepanakert to Shushi. What was impossible to loot they set on fire. Some crying idiocy – their homes ruined by bombardments and here they got an intact city but no – burned it up. Emotional incontinence of paupers robbing other paupers.

On their way back the crowd was caught in a scel (it’s a torrential rain of a major meteorological proportions, you’d feel pity for your enemy getting under such a downpour).

Yet one marauding old woman was lucky to loot a washing tub. So she turned it over and kept above her head and plodded home that way under her enamel umbrella, bypassing the streams along the broken road…

I saw Borik in a week after the Shushi capture and I couldn’t recognize him, his hair turned ghostly white and later on he left the region for good…

Inside the Shushi Temple of Savior (of XIX century) they found an arsenal of GRAD missiles, some huge warehouse, actually, based on logical premises that Armenians would not shell their temple.

In 2 days after the storm there came a jet to hit the temple so as not to leave such huge ammo stock to the opposing side. Yet the raiding jet missed and later there was no reason for further tries because the ammo was moved from the holy building.

And that jet had been coming so belatedly because in Baku they for a long time could not believe in the capture of Shushi, it’s a citadel on impregnable cliffs and they had brought so much artillery there together with manpower and stuff…

Valyo’s mother told him to bring a cow from Kyusalar Village because her daughter, a sister of the two brothers, alive and dead, lost her milk and her baby stayed unfed – the children hospital bombarded and no milk kitchen for newborns around…

Another consequence of the successful completion of the “Wedding in the Mountains” became seeing off the Major, vet of Afghanistan, after the exhortation voiced by the commander of a Self-Defense group handled Izho.

The handle got stuck still at school because of the Teacher of Russian. After a dictation, she censured him before all of the class for failing to write the word «ещё», wrong in each of the three letters! She laughed, fucking bitch, and exposed his variant.

So he got hurt and dropped out after his eighth grade but the handle stuck firmly. He became a petty punk then got the job of a car washer and married, and what else would you do in such backwaters?

But then the Movement started up, mass rallies in the square, and the one-horse burg became a hot theme on TV. After the Sumgait carnage and ‘Ring Operation', the region washed in arms, who but hoods had to take it under their control?

He threw together a group of his likes, not as invincible fighters as the Fragment’s group but not the last too.

When Izho visited Komandos and without diplomatic equivocacy said, ‘Fuck off out of here!’, Major did not dare to speak up because even though smelling no gunpowder in Afghan (well, in fact, he was a supervisor at a big ammo warehouse there, inventories, accountancy, you know) he knew it pretty well – do not kick against a war component if you wanna stay on the safe side.

Like a wise pussyfoot, packed he up and departed to Yerevan. There sage Major lived to his pension, becoming a Major-General on the way and getting government awards regularly. For Armenians in Armenia he still remained the legendary Komandos, the Captor of Shushi with minimal casualties.

It’s only that the official sources, to spite me, moved the storm of Shushi from May 8 to May 9 which happened later though to synchronize the event with the totalitarian Day of the Great Victory celebrated yearly by Big Brother. But I did not take offense at all – everyone does his job at his workplace and puts their signature in the payroll of their kolkhoz.

In September the Self-Defense Forces were reorganized (read renamed) into the Army of Self-Defense of the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh.

Izho became the Commander-in-Chief although wise people abstained already to use the handle and even in their private conversations preferred to use his rank: “comandushchi” (from the distorted Russian word because Armenian, however rich in its phonetic system (some of the 36 sounds I cannot pronounce up till now), does not have the Russian «щ» and staging dictation tests where it is present is an example of outrageous pedagogical sadism).

The Lieutenant-General remained in the shadow as an adviser (no, not in vain I liked that photo of him!) and was driving it home to the General Staff of the Army of Self-Defense what the hell was that fucking logistics about and all that stuff.

Later they built a house for him in Stepanakert, where he did not dwell, of white cubics, and renamed Khojalu, captured not by him, after his name – Ivanian.

What was then? Whoever is interested might google it out.

* * *

Bottle #18: ~ An Elegy ~

He got it perfectly that all that was not for ever. Yes, he did. Already.

Though at first it was some unalloyed dazzling ecstasy, and delight, which he soared and coasted with over his boundlessly overflowing self-complacence.

He was tottering on the verge of giving out the timpani part then from the 8th symphony by Maler: “dum! tu-dum! Tu-da-dum!” with his fists instead of paired, a lil bit asynchronous sticks at the end of the first part, before switching over to the rhythms of the drum pop percussion in Brazilian carnivals: “yah-cha-cha-yah-cha-cha-yah” Ha! He did have done the trick!

Then, little by little, the exaltancy ceased fizzing, but still and yet he refrained from using that yellow-black checkered jacket for household purposes which are plentiful in Uninhabited, when the storms delay the delivery of another galleon or privateer.

On the contrary. He even fixed it spread over one of the rough walls in his do-it-yourself hut, not to mean a Persian rug but sooner as some trophy hunted down at a safari in a faraway land like, maybe, a tartan-hide buffalo or else (the cherished dream of any shotgun carrying man) a skin peeled off a patch-pocketed razorback.