The Blog

But at first, I had to break in, tearing the padlock off…

And right behind the door saw I a meter-deep pit or rather a quarry. Welcome to the kitchen!

The floor’s earthen, pretty bumpy. However, the following, bedroom’s, level one meter higher than the kitchen and thus, fortunately, even with the stone porch outside the house, from which (the porch) there’s a footbridge to the bedroom. I did tell I was chronically lucky, didn’t I?

The bedroom’s floor’s of handmade boards, thick and sturdy, not quite even and you had to pick your way in between the floor gaps and look out where to plant your foot, preferably not into a gap.

However, (lucky as always!) the room was furnished with an iron bed, even though without the net between the sides. Yet the mattress present! On the floor.

I took it up to take over the footbridge and throw away because of too many holes in its torn-up sides.

At the mattress' takeoff, a mouse fell out of one of the holes, looked at me disgustedly “fucking intruder!” and plopped into the nearest gap.

No! He didn’t dashed or flushed but lazily, over his elbow, without ever getting to his feet, deigned to plop out of sight…

In general, some fairy-tale hut on chicken legs, only of stone and the tin roof fixed with wire so that the upcoming winds would not blow it away, like in the forester’s case from the neighboring village who opened his eyes in the morning to the overcasting rainy clouds full of the shower to perk him up.

So, that winter I spent in a teepee, nothing doing.

No bison or buffalo lost their skin for that teepee. Cellophane film brought from Stepanakert was used for the teepee walls put up within the bedroom. The teepee door was made of plywood and closed tightly to let no wind from under the floor. The bed got new net (the window grates pulled from the nearby ruins) and even a Made-in-Iran gas stove was installed in between the transparent walls together with a 20-liter gas container.

However, the stove was switched on only on Saturdays, when I drank wine in the light of one candle and Louis Armstrong was singing:

What a wonderful world!.

from the player with a battery presented me by Ashot.

My mobile phone was to be charged at homes of the colleagues who came to the Yezznaggomer school from two nearby villages (they had some kind of electricity there) to give their classes, bringing along in their vehicles (yes, “Nivas” mainly, yet one UAZ van too) students as well, to have who to teach.

The school at Yezznaggomer had 24 students half of whom were itinerants. The students were not distributed equally between 12 grades, but in every possible way and some of the grades might remain unmanned in certain academic years.

However, the second half of the kids at school were provided by our village, as also was the principal and Anahit, the teacher at elementary grades, the mother of Spartak, Mariam and Andranik…

Lavash bread I was buying from Lachin, 50 pieces at once. After it was brought to Yezznaggomer, I hung sheets of fiberboard in the kitchen on strings fixed at the ceiling beams and spread lavashes upon them.

Mice cannot fly and the bread leafs were drying up undisturbed, and then I stored the stock in a secure box, where the critters could not get into.

Before use, wrap a lavash in a cloth towel and sprinkle water over it, from the wrap's dampness the lavash would soften and – bon appеtit!..

It was interesting to live – one problem followed another, you wanna survive?.– find a solution…

That winter ended on April 28…

In the summer that followed I was building me a house. For the purpose, was chosen the wreck nearest to the water spring. It was the only water source for the entire village.

Fetching water to the place occupied by me on the arrival in Yezznaggomer, I had to haul it in pails up a 9-story-tall toomb, rather steep and, naturally, having no stairs.

When the toomb slope got ice-coated, same height had to be climbed in zigzags. So I did know how to choose the right location for a house.

The chosen ruins had almost four walls, collapsed door jambs and two window openings in the same conditions, all of which I restored and spanned with reinforced concrete lintels, then raised the crashed parts to one common level.

Inside, I laid another longitudinal wall and in the end it turned out a kitchen, with two windows and the entrance door, and the blank-walled bedroom. All in all 18 sq. m.

All the timber for spanning beams and roof rafters were brought over 100 km from Stepanakert, everything second-hand, but I had no other choice.

Only the roof was not imported but collected among other wreckage in the village.

That whole area in 1920’s was Red Kurdistan, populated by Kurds, but later the Soviet Azerbaijan annulled that autonomy, the Kurds were given passports of Azerbaijani citizens and were assimilated.

So nowadays the word “Kurd” is considered a rude offense by the descendants of the assimilated Kurds, just like in Turkey, and Turkey is Azerbaijan’s Big Brother by the political orientation.

Viewing Yezznaggomer from an even taller height, I counted up to 150 ruined houses and sheds or so, all of stone, but a couple of times went astray in reckoning.

At the time of the war for independence, there were no fighting in the former Red Kurdistan, the civilians fled over Kalbajar. Then pauper looters from Armenia came to plunder abandoned poverty, followed by richer looters who brought equipment to dig up and take away the piping for running water, so there remained just one water head in the village, 50 meters away from my building site.

Subsequently, when I had constructed a 3-ton water pool near the house, with ceramic tiled walls inside a tin hut, whose walls were insulated from within with polystyrene sheets bought in Stepanakert and carpet-flooring discarded at the Satenic & Rosanna's business, I was attaching a rubber garden hose to the iron pipe stump, thru which the stone trough for cattle got filled with ever running water, and my pool got full just overnight, thanks to the gravity.

I couldn’t replenish it in the daytime, although cattle, and horses, and smaller living creatures did not mind (the trough was pretty capacious), but the human residents of the village every day came to the spring by their “Nivas” or tractors bringing empty canisters and barrels, and then my hose would be in the way because not only I needed water for washing and other needs…

Yezznaggomer was populated with immigrants from Armenia, because the RMK legislation forebode Karabakh people move over there, so as to prevent outflow of the much reduced already Armenian population of Mountainous Karabakh.

For that reason, besides me, only two men from Mountainous Karabakh landed in the village: Aram, on the grounds that he had married a daughter of Edic, a settler from Armenia, and Arthur, who left his wife in Stepanakert and made his way to Yezznaggomer illegally, because he all his life was a shepherd.

Aram sometimes worried as regards the local ethnography. He would ask then whose was our village and the toombs around: Kurdish or Armenian?

Well, the cemetery on the toomb in the village outskirts was certainly Muslim, but in the ruins inside the settlement I happened to find khachkars (carved Armenian tomb stones) way too heavy to dispense with them in the masonry of walls, so they survived and were just kicking around. Besides, the Armenian temple in Tsitsernak (below Moshatagh village) was being built from the 10th into the 12th centuries, and had the look and feel of the Reims Cathedral (it certainly had, although I never paid France a live visit).

Do you really need it? Live your life for your own pleasure, shovel the bullshit out from your father-in-law's shed, and enjoy sex with your wife, while having sufficient strength and desire…

But later, Aram and his family split off into a house above the water spring, after repairing it, of course.

That’s why tin in the ruins was an easy find, although pretty rotten and crumpled, throwaways, as a matter of fact.

Out of them I had to cut usable pieces and gradually mastered the profession of a tinsmith.

The tin went to the roof in my house which I tinkered myself as well as the roof over my workshop, whose walls were provided by a cowshed ruins. Although, on the second thought, the Azerbaijanis, who no longer were Kurds, kept sheep there, probably.

Not to mention the hut over the 3-ton water pool and the 60-meter-long aqueduct of tin…

The plot about the house was spacious, bordered with a hedge on three sides, with breaches at some places, so that pigs would have direct route to the fourth side – the ravine with the brook running from the common water spring.

The breaches in the hedge walls I, of course, filled with masonry, the pigs got disgruntled but learned to bypass the whole plot for the mud baths in the brook relieving them from blood-sucking insects.

In the household territory along the high bank of the ravine, I planted a vegetable garden: garlic, tomatoes, potatoes, for crop rotation, and upstream, where the brook had the banks of certainly volcanic origin, I built a dam.

The construction lasted 3 years because erection of a dam to block a channel with the constant water-flow along its bottom is not a trivial engineering task.

And when the dam began to work, came the time for a tin aqueduct propped by columns of rebar hammered into the ground because the dam was outside the plot, away from my kitchen garden.