The Blog

Sometimes I think, would all the Roman legions be able to resist a battalion of paratroopers armed with modernized Kalashnikov assault rifles for 45 days?.

. . . . .

The village emptied out, the younger folks taken to the front, except for Armen, the father of seven kids.

The village children (except for those of Armen) were transported to Armenia, the homeland of the Yezznaggomer settlers.

Out of 12, life still went on in 3-4 houses.

Briefly, the principal of school appeared, who deserted and arrived in the village to drive his cattle over to Armenia.

The cannonade rolled in from the horizon, day by day more and more audible…

Meanwhile, I moved earth with the wheelbarrow to cover the back wall of the workshop shed with an earthen rampart so that the rains would not flood in thru that wall, a not overly urgent task but you have to do something to fill the days up.

It was a good wheelbarrow, two-wheeled, homemade 6 years ago. The box of rotten tin rigged for the job was, sure enough, younger.

After the day work I got seated at my desktop PC and translated Pynchon's novel.

Well done Thomas, the real thing, decently produced…

(http://sumizdut.narod.ru/volume-2/pynchon/index.html)

Then Melsik came to visit with a bunch of some home-pickled grass.

Not that he avoided eye-contact, he did look into your eyes, but in his stare there was nothing except for some not seeing emptiness.

"In all of the village he respected only you," said he, “so he said.”

Melsik’s Aram’s father.

I had rice and bread for dinner. We drank alcohol of double distillation, yet we could not get drunk.

Thirty years ago, in the first war, Melsik was a phedai, and in this one, he arbitrarily came to the artillery unit of a wide-range gun by which Aram fought. Together with his son he was retreating from Fuzuli to Amaras.

It was a good gun, covering up to 20 km, only you couldn’t see where it hit.

Once upon a time it partook in the Battle for Berlin firing shells at the Reichstag.

In Karabakh, there were only six such guns. Nearby Amaras, the drones finished off the last of them.

Melsik talked calm, evenly, without the slightest emotion.

The gun personnel commander allowed him to stay, since his son was there, and the officer even listened to Melsik's advice, but he died anyway.

Because they see from above where to hit and how.

Of the entire battery personnel, only three troopers survived, one of them Melsik, yet he was not wounded like the other two…

Aram died before his eyes, about a hundred meters off. They were setting the gun up and there banged that blast.

Melsik ran up, began to turn over the corpse of his son, as he had been turning over his comrades-phedais thirty years ago.

Two fragments killed Aram, one through the heart, the second through the temple to the neck. Probably, he didn't have time to feel anything…

The night is nearing. The kitchen windows wide open. Melsik sits haggard-faced, his eyes are empty.

He lists the mistakes in tactics and strategy. That when the civilians were evacuated out of Hadrut City, there remained nothing to fight for, no one to protect.

A column of empty buses came from Armenia and Komandushchi (yes, that same one) shouted thru a megaphone for people to get on.

The Prime Minister sent him as a representative who’d be listened to.

"Just as Turks fled from us in that war, so now we are from them, there are too many Kalash assault rifles dropped on the roadsides."

Melsik took his 33-year-old son and buried him in his native village (he did not know that the village was planned to be handed over), then he came to Yezznaggomer to drive Aram's cattle to Armenia, where his widowed daughter-in-law, Amest, had already gone to with both of her preschool kids.

The next morning he told me that the capitulation had been signed at midnight…

Three days later I took a hot bath in the tin hut (of thermically isolated walls) and left Yezznaggomer at 10.17 am.

The door I did not lock, so that the marauders would not break it in vain. Still, a "euro" door brought over 100 km from Stepanakert, pity the thing.

On the two-wheeled wheelbarrow I cinched a sack with sweaters that my daughters and Satenic once knitted for me, also a backpack with a one-liter container of absinthe and a pair of shoes, a pair of jeans and a pack of cookies.

Atop of everything else was fastened the guitar. All other belongings were left behind, even the Solzhenitsyn's three-volume work with his autograph.

And I had already managed to distribute alcohol away in the village. The things of halidom should be disposed of in awe and deferential devotion. And in time.

So, with a light heart and not too heavy a wheelbarrow, moved I forward without looking back, past the house of Anna and Armen, which was built only a year ago on grants from the Diaspora because of their seven children.

Armen was still dismantling tin corrugated boards and roof beams for taking them over to Armenia to his kids already evacuated there…

Over the pass to west from the Ishkhana-Sar mount, at 3.48 pm next day, already without the wheelbarrow, but still grabbing the sack, the backpack and the guitar, I entered the empty dormant lobby of the Sisian City Hall (Armenia) with a big square clock on the wall. 47 km away from Yezznaggomer.

On the way, Satenic called, scolded me for being inaccessible 4 days already. She said that our village and all of the Lachin District had been surrendered by the capitulation and I shouldn’t sit and wait for Turks there, they would not ask my nationality…

Two days later, at still young night, I arrived in Stepanakert by taxi from Yerevan via Vardenis, before the peacekeepers handed that highway over to Azerbaijan (as arranged) and got astonished by the lack of destruction in the city. In the main street, for example, only one store was smashed and burnt out, not a single government building was damaged in the downtown.

Everything went on as agreed upon. In Shushi, on the heights above the city, the Azerbaijani army, in Stepanakert – peacekeepers' vehicles sporting jolly tricolors.

By the City Hall, to the noisy queues of retirement-aged civilians they fork out refugee rations from the Red Cross—cereals, pasta, confiture, toothbrushes, 2 kg of flour, 2 cans of beef stew per a cardboard box.

Only one fragment of a cluster bomb fell into the backyard of the house, which turned 25 years old.

Yet, that bitchy contraption of a bomb is designed so that its fragments explode too, on and on, into smaller buckshot.

The glass in the bedroom window got shot through as if by a bullet and one sheet of the corrugated slate in the roof got broken, so I had to fix it with a patch on silicone glue…