The Blog

Two Indians with a brush and bucket ran up over the clay bare ground and, offering no explanation, slap-painted the bodies of the UltraFuckers’ team into white parallel stripes, wherever wicker aprons and stone arcs allowed it.

"Fuck! Off on the wrong foot!" the coach shouted. "We are for the gods today!"

From the opposite end of the corridor, the team of local bulls, already painted in yellow and black stripes, were approaching in an imposing jog.

Without tossing, the home team began to play the ball. The referee in the expensive green-scarlet plume was clearly pulling for them from the wall…

For a starter, they showed off their dribbling, and mincing, and passing the ball (half a meter in diameter) from the thigh of a player to the thigh of another, and other, and back, and again…

Inokenty opened his mouth in fascinated admiration – it’ll take at least a score of years to train yourself for the like hip-work!

Then the center received a pass from the left, for convenience he threw it slightly above himself (with just a hip clap!) And, sharply spinning thru all 360, hit the ball with the right prong in his arc-girdle whose ends stood out forward on his sides.

The cannonball of hard black rubber in a split sec grew to a planetary size, screening the entire field of vision, substituting blackness for his sight… already so too familiar, so fucking painfully familiar bl-a-c-k-n-e-s-s…

Then the hands of his comrades raised Inokenty up and put him on his feet for him to stand on his shaky, weak at the knees, pins.

He saw their mouths screaming mutely, like in a silent movie.

The stands were also silent and only kept swinging… hither-th…-thither… along with the strips of a couple of muslin-transparent clouds … there in … in the… the sky …

The imprints of what followed, Inokenty’s memory retains in fairly smudgy form. A kinda blurred rubber spanking, sort of.

Each hit whipped to the bone. The protective weaver work did not save, he felt the bruises heat spilling under the twigs.

Sometimes a misty, detached self-consolation surfaced, that eventually, with his head severed, bruises would cease hurting.

However, the head, as predicted by the coach, was already jerking off, reflectively, from the ball whizzing by.

At some point, he realized – that's that, he’s done with all it. He can go on no longer, that the dead feel no shame and turned his butt to the next cannonball…

Vzhzhzzz!… And the rubber ball banged the stone arcs tied to Kenty’s waist above his ass. He fell on one knee and over his shoulder followed the ball’s ricochet into the wall and then, unhurriedly rotating as if in slow motion camera, it swam up to be swallowed by the memorial hole in the stuck-out wheel. Boy, o boy! Some glorious swish shot!.

"Will you ever stop kicking?" Maya muttered with displeasure, turned her round (not rubber) bottom to him and fell asleep again.

Holding the painful groan back within his body, crushed like on the cursed coronation day in the Khodynka field, Inokenty gave off a muffled sigh:

"Hooeyhhh…"

* * *

Bottle #33: ~ But At First… ~

At first, the village mujiks were betting on whether I last for 10 days or until the end of the month.

And only I knew already that it was forever because two-meter-tall wall of grass stood along the road sides, and herds of cows and bulls roamed in the distant slopes above those walls before they would be driven back to the village for the night.

And when I asked the school's principal what that bright spot could be there in the distant toombs, he answered it was snow.

Snow in August, huh? Come on, it's not Everest.

Truth, snow it is, hiding in so cunningly twisted a gorge that summertime is not enough for the sun to melt it…

The main provider of romanticism in Yezznaggomer is marahoogh. Folks also call it "the wolf weather", but it's not the fog, because it doesn't swirl or flow, it's standing like a solid wall.

The first time I got lost in it was in the leg between home and school, where I had already worked for more than a month. True, it was already the dark part of the day, and therefore the torch of the “head-dick” type, on its elastic band, was beaming from my forehead.

The ray of light cut a neat tunnel before me, the space within its round walls clogged with the suspension of particles the size of tiny snowflakes which did not fall though. To set those particles in motion, you need to move your head sideways and back, and while the lighted tunnel moves, the snowflakes stray in this or that direction, yet the tunnel itself remains just as narrow, and having the same dark smooth walls, and still crammed to the utmost with that same luminous suspension entering thru one wall to vanish in the opposite.

Haha! It was the beam that moved, not the “snowflakes”! Another gull cheated! Thanks to the theory of relativity.

It's like in childhood, when you roll your head back, face to the sky, so as to see only the falling snow until it looks like you are flying upward past the irregularly standing snowflakes.

As for the density of moisture hanging up inside the marahoogh, on average, were you wearing a scuba gear, you could easily swim along like Yves Cousteau around the corals, but as you don’t put flippers on then go on foot yet very slow and twice checking each familiar landmark, so as not to get lost even worse.

Blizzards happen too, it’s not for nothing that the mujiks had in their households motorcyclist mask-glasses in case they needed to take hay to the cow house in the middle of crazy mixture of wind-and-snow-grit…

The bus was coming once a week, on Fridays, but that was only the first six months, before the bus driver Armen ultimately dropped straining both the vehicle and himself.

He lived in Moshatagh, 15-18 km down into the valley, and never liked the idea of 30+ km surplus run for the sake of a couple or two of passengers.

The number of passengers was so small because just 12 families and a loner teacher was all the population in the village, while the make-believe road so difficult that two or three passengers threw up on the way, especially kids too eager to be treated to ice cream in Lachin City.

While going there, they threw their breakfast up, and on the way back – the ice cream. The prose of life onto the roadside, if they were quick enough to jump out of the stopped bus, but in case of a too short notice – there’s the back of a passenger on the seat in front of you.

So, the first year was the most difficult because there was no electricity in the village. Well, not exactly a year, a little more than that…

But at first I had to ask Nick Wagner to take me to Yezznaggomer Village for the start of the academic year.

Which he did…

But at first we had to find a roof rack for his "Niva" in Stepanakert. And we did find it in the rehabilitation center named after Baroness Cox. Thanks to the center’s Director Vartan. No, the Baroness had nothing to do with alkies and druggies, the center catered for the people maimed in the war too heavily.

At that both the first and the last transportation by Nick’s “Niva” to Yezznaggomer, I managed to fetch there some provender (cereals, pasta, salt, etc.), as well as the most necessary hand tools: shovel, crowbar, ax, saw, and a bunch of smaller ones.

You can’t lift everything at one go, so the welding-machine-grinder-drill were left for later, moreover, when there’s no electricity in the village.

However, there was no building material either, but only stones in the ruins overgrown with grass around, and the nearest forest in seven kilometers downwards, if you need a pole or some kind of a prop. Yet on foot, of all the means of transportation…

But at first I had to find some lodging, because there were only ruins around, except for 12 houses and their adjacent cowsheds.

However, the school principal indicated there was a 13th at the very top, but he was certainly embarrassed to hand me the key, although in Lachin he had been assuring Karina, the Head of the District People Education Department, that I would be provided with housing…

But at first we in duo, the principal and I, had to convince Nick that his “Niva” was designed for coming up so crazy slopes too and she would certainly climb up to that house.

After a lengthy hesitation, Nick succeeded.

I dumped the cereals and the tools onto the porch, said goodbye to Nick, we parted with a handshake and I entered…