The Blog

I rushed to the Help Desk and they clarified about some hitch at the airport in Moscow so the passengers to that flight were taken by two aircraft and the second one was still on the way.

After another couple of hours of waiting, the escalator brought down all kinds of sorts but mine. Yet by that time the Help Desk was already locked for the night and there remained no one to get a consolation from.

Full of despair, I went out to the airfield, although they yelled after me that it was a service exit.

The field was getting ready for the night repose, almost no lights around and by the glass wall of the airport building the airplane stairs dozing in the dark, but that small tractor who rolls the stairs to the planes was nowhere to see, they probably spent nights apart.

That moment a local employee was passing to that forbidden door. A janitor, judging by her venerable age. And she saw that heart-rending figure of me, immovable like a pillar of salt, with a blank stare glued to the airfield darkness, and the odd bunch of flowers in my sad hand hanging alongside my thigh in the posture of an idle broom, to which whole composition the passer-by remarked in Russian but with a beautiful Armenian accent:

"Ah, what a tragedy!" and only after that she entered that service exit.

At first, I felt hurt by the dig in the voice of that Komissarzhevsky actress on the role of a janitor at the Zvartnots airport, but then it tickled me as something funny, I don’t know why. No kidding, I meant to laugh, faith. So I lay that tragic bouquet upon the sleeping stairs and off I started because the leg from Zvartnots to Arabkir is a pretty long haul…

The relatives comforted me with the news that Satenic made a call on their home phone (in absence of mobile communication at those times) to say that there still were no seats for a number of passengers, however, the next day those having tickets for the flight would be transported to Yerevan at an approximately same time.

And so it happened! The next night about the same time after the arrival of the third airplane (they came at half-hour interval flying seemingly in a flock) atop the escalator turned up Satenic, Ashot in shorts (wow! behold how surely he stands all by his own!), Ruzanna waving and calling to all, ‘Look! There’s dad! Look!’

But I was without flowers already, just in case of any tragic delay, so as not to start up some form of bouquet addiction by those stairs, you know.

On the way to relatives (by a taxi) I began to carp, kinda you were sent to evacuation and not to just spend the summertime.

Now, what was her response?

"I got it there that to live just for the sake of living is not worth the while."

And I had to shut up because philosophy in a woman’s hands is an all-conquering weapon. Moreover, when you were parted for a 3-month stretch…

Later on, she told about that hitch at the Moscow airport. As it turned out, the flight they had the tickets for was outbid by some entrepreneur to send a consignment of consumer goods to Yerevan (it was 90’s, the business starting to raise their heads). And even the following day arrival happened by pure chance, when in the crowd at that Moscow airport Ruzanna sneaked away and some man asked her, ‘Why are you roaming alone? Where is your Dad?’ And she answered, ‘In Stepanakert’.

Then he asked who was her Dad and, when Ruzanna named me, he cried to his friends, 'Hey! I do know the guy!’, because he was not alone but in a company of men.

In a nutshell, Ruzanna took them to where in the crowd she left Satenic, and Ashot, and the trunk. From there the new acquaintances, bypassing the pilot and the stewardesses, who at the foot of the stairs were letting pass another batch of goods, put my family, over the handrail, a couple of steps up the stairs, above that cordon of overseers, so that they could ascend the airliner. And the crew members down there never peeped at such a breach of order because they marked that the seers-off were men only (I do love the 90’s).

For a long time it stayed a sassy mystery to me – who was the unknown do-gooder capable of identifying me by only my family name? And he sent his ‘hello’ too.

‘Hello him from a photo correspondent’.

And only in a month or so the memory snapped out the picture of our meeting in Mamikonian Street by School 8 shattered by large caliber shells.

The day was calm and sunny, we greeted each other and he said he had seen me at the Press Center where he dropped to, being a photo correspondent. Then he asked if Maria had flashed there, from Moscow, a correspondent like him.

I could not recollect anyone matching his description and we parted…

People! Humans! Ahoy!

Wherever you are: on a bus, train, airliner or just sitting on a bench in a park, or seated in a cinema, any place.

I pray – yank your noses out of your mobile applications, break away, look around, have an eye-contact with your neighbor, exchange at least a few words – sometime, somewhere this fleeting action will become your savior.

And in conclusion, following the well-known declaration by Julius Fuchik, a Czech by his nationality:

‘People, I loved you! Be vigilant!.’

** *

Bottle #20: ~ A No-Rules Fray ~

Scabby rubs and randomly chipped-in crevices corrode the entire field of view because of improper over-zooming in the vast surface of vertical stone squares tiling the old blank wall.

Without ever looking back, he knew for sure there was a street behind him and, across the street on the other bank in its two-way traffic stream, the lengthy glass strip of the high windows in “Make Or Mar” along the opposite sidewalk. There it should be. As sure as he was standing there, his forehead leaned against the wall. You could just bet your farm on that…

The jagged, nervous noise of cars rushing behind him only confirmed such a conjecture, yet he still was withholding the turn about which would make it sure a hundred per cent, and instead raised his hands at shoulder-height and pressed the palms to the flat smooth surface of hewn stone.

As hard as you would expect, anyway.

The scrape exactly at the level of his pericardial sac served one more proof – it’s right here that he had given the slip to the chase. The bullet couldn’t follow, stopped by the stone.

Before or after the stone couldn’t stop him?

Did the bullet hit the wall thru him on the run or a sliver of a split sec later, as he had already dissolved in the barrier?

No way to punch into the matter deep enough for an articulate answer. Not without Isaac Newton and a bottle of vodka for the sake of clearer comprehension. But Isaac Newton replaced his flying colors with the standard of total abstinence though being a quite promising dude, at first, before that effing apple had domed him too severely. Since the accident the guy abandoned all crazy ideas and flopped over to horny materialism on whose behalf he got knighted, later on in his sober career.

Nothing doing but to strain your brain alone, without ‘the call to a friend’ or 'the prompt from the audience'.

"Hello! May I speak to Sir Isaac? This is the program Wanna Be a Millionaire? And you? Ah, the butler… And he? Ah, drinking coffee in his study… Okay, fine, we’ll recall a bit later."

"Uite, oameni buni. Este o oaie."

A pack of noisy kids surrounds him. Street Arabs. He let the wall go and turns about.

Yep, he was right – there looms "Make Or Mar", across the street.

From all the sides around him, big flashy eyes underneath the stomp-dance of greasy black strands curly, wavy, a-swinging. Everyone watches him closely gauging his high of intoxication. Swarthy hands, emaciated kids' hands jerk the skirts of his plain blue frock coat without epaulettes. The cloth is not in its prime yet holds on, withstands the pulls and yanks of the restless ants with their loudly importunate gibberish…

And here comes the queen of the anthill.

"Lashi bun, romale! Lashi bun!"

The Gypsy takes a crack at shooing their swarm off, at which movement the corner of her flowery shawl touches on the sly, caressingly and softly, his right wrist.

The kids recoil from the "sheep", retreat a step back yet never break the circle of their flicker of incessant shifting. Their voices never hush and only merge switching over to a chant in the rhythm of Hypnopedia.

"Aye-aye, Captain! You've seen a harsh spell! Vicious enemies tried hard to harm you, yet intact you stayed. Well, almost. And where it smarts the pain will cease and the long and winding road awaits ahead…" commences she her part in the usual score in the process of steeping the victim into mesmerized tetanus.

"Gimme your hand, Esma will read your fate. Esma does not cheat, Esma sees, Esma knows. Free palmistry for you, handsome. Gimme your hand."

The slightly puffed eyelids screening her eyes, which had seen anything there ever could be to see, went down slowly, suggesting the example to be followed: