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Well, there also was added a basement cellar to stock the crops, a laundry room and a shower room both outside the house. And the bath, cut out of a 400-liter plastic tank, was placed in the insulated hut next to the tiled water pool. And the outhouse in the yard, 20 meters off, but with the warm seat of polystyrene foam.

Three apple trees grew there above the ravine inherited from the Kurds, previous inhabitants of Yezznaggomer. No, they sooner were Azerbaijanis already…

Yet the grapes that I planted did not take root in 4 years of my endeavors, although I had been warned beforehand of the impossibility of such undertaking in the climate at that altitude.

However, the plum tree matured.

That way I turned a kurkool, a malicious representative of the counter-revolutionary class eliminated still in the early years of the USSR. Especially when I started to distill grain alcohol in the insulated tin hut from wheat bought in Stepanakert, yet, on Saturdays I continued to drink only wine, such was my habit instilled by Louis Armstrong.

No, I didn’t trade in alcohol, but just for curiosity’s sake and subsequent processing it into absinthe, since a cellar had been made already.

And for the repair of throwaways (hairdryers, kitchen utensils etc.) brought by the village womenfolk because their husbands were too busy to check and put the trifles aright, I charged a tolerable fee, the purely symbolic couple of liters of milk to uphold the glorious traditions of the class of artisans.

The bedroom walls were plastered completely and paint-coated with latex so that mice would not come to visit through the masonry in the ancient walls.

Then I had a go at the kitchen. The window frames were constructed of (again) a second-hand material, but the glass panes I had to bring from Stepanakert being nothing of a glass cutter.

All the floors were of laminate, and all the furniture, except for the table, the stool, and the chair, added swiveling casters for the convenient wet cleaning, you drive the furniture in one half of the room and work your mop unhindered over the floor in the liberated half…

Quite a hell of a lot of what-nots you are capable of accomplishing when not distracted by wars and stuff, you know…

Once Ashot brought his wife Gaiane, and Satenic with Emma by his swanky SUV.

We celebrated the occasion. Aram came with his wife and a baby.

The next morning mine left.

I was sorry for the SUV though, one more such a picnic and the poor critter would need a luxury hearse…

The house seemed small compared to the plot area, but I didn’t need anything bigger, it served me a springboard for starts off to the parallel world, from where I was coming back dog-tired, yet seeing the houses' two windows beneath the roof of throwaway tin I perked up – home at last.

It's good to have a place where you can return from parallel worlds…

* * *

Bottle #34: ~ The World’s A Theater ~

Time was running out, inexorably, although the period set up by Don had not yet ticked away.

Inokenty did not feel like thinking in that particular direction, discouraged by a depressed, flypaper-like sticky state of mind that trapped him after the nightmares leaving multiple bruises all over his body as if kicked brutally. (Come on! They were not live mares kicking shit out of him!).

On the other hand, neither had he any desire to ponder on the nature of those marks or the mechanism of their popping up because of a headache (sticky as well) in the crown of his head (sic! another strangeness – the crown but not the back of the head!), which spot would not stand for the slightest touch.

Maya, discovering in the morning his wretched conditions, condemned their unknown source, whatever it be, and pitied him most emotionally before going out after some or another sort of crap from a drugstore to dissolve hematomas. Because in the bookstore where she worked at, there was also a shelf of medical books full of most crazy terms.

He stayed alone sharing his doubts with her apartment, silently: Was it possible at all to survive in the world where you can no more be sure of even Almighty ESC Button?

Or what if UF-1 even now, in spite of all probabilistic logic, was not dead again?

You cannot be too sure of such a fruit, moreover over-fertilized with that greenshit slime.

Some wiggly friend for you, huh?

However, of Parthos he remained sure intrepidly, UF-2 stays UF-2 despite any heat, were they even African cops.

To sum all that up, he decided to keep his thinking process deflected off any sorrowful contemplations, when Maya be back with that crap, and in the evening to go out with her to the theater and spend the last of piastres from the frock coat in his pocket or, rather, on the contrary, but it’s just that the fucking head hurts at an unusual spot.

True, he did not know if there was a theater in this city and, as it was, neither had he any idea about the city’s name. Nonetheless, he eschewed asking Maya, she might form an opinion that he was dumb in any respect although more than once he made it obvious that he was not.

No, Inokenty was not goofy, it’s just that after that away game in Mesoamerica (what was the name of that city? Athos then shouted back something like “Chechen’s Inn” or what?. But because of the scream-and-shouting fans Inokenty could not really hear and now his head was just, like, going asunder) thinking called for certain efforts to keep you concentrated to follow them, the thoughts.

Which added one more pro to his reckoning that it’s much better to go to the theater than to the park, where there again would be noise, squeals, shrieks of any goon kind, moreover, he never could stand for all those swings or merry-go-round, because of getting nauseated and seasick in even completely landlocked locations.

And ice cream you could eat at any cafe, but the circumstances of Chris’ death did leave a bitter after-taste in the form of allergy to the establishments for in-public uptake.

So a theater it was, moreover that weighing up other options seemed a too big strain for his thinking apparatus…

. . . . .

His and Maya's seats turned out to be next to the very barrier in a second floor box. There were also seats and spectators in the same box, yet those behaved not over noisy and, seated behind him, they did not block the view.

From up there they could see the whole orchestra.

Inokenty liked them, in part, even the cacophonous moment of tuning their instruments seemed somewhat congenial and depicting, with tolerable precision, his current mental situation. The flutes were especially nice, the sound much softer than by those piercing fifes in Chechen’s Inn.

The conductor also behaved in a civilized way compared to those… (ouch, fucking head!.) but at times he started fluttering his arms too much and then the orchestra also sounded too much.

There went a kinda warm-up for gymnasts, on the stage. The guys performed short runs, jumped, lifted each other in a mannerly way and no rubber balls whatsoever.

On the whole, Inokenty would even call the first part agreeable to his frame of mind, if not for that bitchy timpani…

When there started the intermission, he and Maya went to the buffet.

Most of the female audience looked askance from their decolletage frocks at Maya's sweater and jeans, but she did not give a bean about the ladies, because the present men looked at her more than at all those variously exposed tits in the necklines.

Among the male music lovers, Inokenty did not stand out too much by his frock coat, except for its color—shocking blue—as befits a junior officer in the British Navy of His Majesty George III, and he watched Maya’s ass with no less admiration than their, that is not like he liked their or theirs, which is neither here nor there, but that his and their admiration target which it was watched with… well, whatever…

Then Maya was approached by a friend, with one more low neckline to show off her beads, and off they went to chirp like morning birds around his hut in Island.

The tack to ornithological similitude made Inokenty somewhat sad and he went back to the box alone carrying away his sprouting melancholy… Not a chance to ever out-tweet the non-feathered chicks. Would feathering improve the situation? Well, a theater is not a kitchen to stage experiments of the sort. Anyway, Class of Aves are unsurpassable in a number of respective, generally speaking, approaches, if you think hard enough, while opinionated views to the contrary as maintained by certain start-up soft-boiled egg-heads are too rare exceptions, fairly negligible, by and large…

So, on his way down the corridor to the stairs climbing up the second floor, Inokenty, having soundly founded impregnability of his position on this subject, leisurely strolled with his attention switched over to the white busts lined in a row on the right. Some of them missing not only arms but their shoulders too.

The fourth in their line of mutely motionless images surprised Inokenty by unexpected winking at him with the white marble eye. Taken aback, he also petrified for a closer inspection and determined that who else it was but UF-2!.

"Parthos! What the eff! It’s a hell of a challenge to recognize you. What's the outcome at our match with those Mesoamericans?"

"The skedaddler still gets the nerve to ask! The potent victory, of course!"