The Blog

A year later, influenced by the mutual spirit of turbulent times, I married and migrated to Stepanakert to weave the family nest atop of the stirred up volcano.

The job of an isolation-tape man at the construction of gas pipelines to far-off parts of Karabakh was an extensively outdoors and far-off employment so the son was born in my absence.

About a half-year later, in August, they attempted at the SCES putsch in Moscow. The Central TV news program Vremya presented a dozen of bureaucratic pans in a consolidated row behind the wide desk of the State Committee for the Emergency Situation (SCES) reading up to the population their orders – the democracy announced null and void, we were to live as before, as we had always been trained, and follow the five-year plans approved by them at the Congresses of their Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).

In the morning, to demonstrate my discontent, disgust, and disagreement, I did not board the truck starting off to carry my co-workers to remote villages but handed in my resignation letter to the personnel department of the Building-Montage Management (BMM) #8:

“…because this here organization is a state firm, and I have no desire to work for the state of SCES, please fire me of my own accord”.

The BMM-8 Chief, Samvel Hakopian, amusedly chortled and signed his approval to satisfy my plea.

Next morning that SCES putsch went kaput and I, having lost the job along with their lost cause, concentrated on building up our family house in the lot allocated by the Stepanakert City Council on the ravine slope behind the Maternity Hospital…

When the walls were raised 1 meter tall, there started bombardments of Stepanakert City with Alazans from Sushi City and the Village of Khodjalu, yet in the following 2 months I still laid the walls to the level for spanning them with the concrete slabs because sand and cement had been acquired already and the construction of the running water of iron-pipe line (cross-section 0.5”) accomplished.

The money for the slabs had been paid too but the Building Materials Plant never delivered them because of the unfavorable situation.

For about a month I stayed unemployed because the city enterprises were coming to a halt one after another and there appeared a slot to make a dent in Ulysses in earnest.

My mother-in-law spotted that I could write for stretches longer than normal, and fixed me up with a job at the editorial house of the regional newspaper The Soviet Karabakh where she had the position of a janitor and the Head Editor thereof originated from the same village as her, and, as luck would have it, their family names coincided too.

My job was to translate articles from Armenian to Russian because The Soviet Karabakh daily, published in Armenian, had the Saturday supplement – a Russian digest, for Big Brother to conveniently check the stuff brought up in the previous 7 days by the paper.

My position of a translator did not fall under the category of the mother-in-law-backed nepotism. Nothing of the kind! In the two years at village school I studied all the curriculum textbooks in Armenian Language and Literature from the school library, starting off with the ABC Primer.

Learning a language by textbooks is way easier than thru communing with the native speakers because texts allow you more time to get it, and cancels the strain of tries at catching serendipitous shreds in the over-fluent-non-stop twitter of those who use it from their crib…

However, my month of work at the newspaper remained unpaid because the city got blockaded and bombarded on a regular basis with heavy artillery pieces, and the population switched over to dwelling in the basements under the five-story buildings, for the most part. Often blackouts worsened the situation, before the electricity was cut off for good. In the basements, they used oil-lamps or candles. When a candle melted away completely, the wax drippings were used for production of a new one, though of lesser size, of course.

The gas supplying was not stopped because the gas trunk-line, after reaching Stepanakert, climbed farther up to the Shushi City, whose population in the aftermath of the massacre in March 1920 became ethnic Azerbaijanis who you couldn't left without heating in winter.

The most forceful report on the ravages in the spring of 1920 was left by Osip Mandelstam in his poem “Here in Mountainous Karabakh, in the ancient Shushi City…”

He didn’t eye-witnessed the carnage but ten years later roamed about mute lanes in the demolished Armenian blocks in Shushi.

However, poets can see thru not only into the future…

* * *

Bottle #6: ~ The Clover To Roll In ~

Where the screwball popped up from I couldn’t even say. Nix, not a damn chance.

More so, that I was not as high yet as in my regular nirvana and only a sec back scanned the street with the enlightened gaze and stuff ‘cause of no ticker on me, nope, never, which reason makes me recon out the current hour's figures by only the upcurve in the bustling or, on the contrary, by the slant towards smoothness in the observable flow of street life. Quite a simple trick and does not take too much of practicing to read it, the time of day.

It’s hard to say or recollect the street’s name though ‘cause of them names keep replacing each other way too often, depending on who’s in power right now, the Reds or the Whites, but in our neighborhood I’d find it blindfold by mere groping, yep, with both hands tied.

Verily decent neighborhood, the ours. No harassment from cops, nopes, no patrol car will ever take risks to get in if alone. It’s only in the all-out posse, with the sirens a-wailing so as to uphold their own courage. But there’s always a chance to run into an M2 if not into some of cheap machine guns made in China. The question of karma and stuff, you know.

Not much of industries in the hood either. A score or there about of Northern Koreans day and night rattling their sewing machines in the basement opposite the bar You’ll Get It. A no never mind production line. Samely dispensable as those posterity of the Jamaican delegation to the International Forum of Youth and Students Organizations of the World, on the sixth floor in the tower-block where they keep packing coke for Don. Completely quiet, decent, and no trouble at all society members.

No, yeah, though, last week one of their team took a dive from the window. Exactly as I was passing by at the lunch break, he plummeted a-singing his parting aria of the Lonesome Swan if you know what I’m about. High alt up to B-flat in the second octave, full and steady, and no shit.

In the right chosen moment too. No one got damaged, of those uninvolved. With quite a tolerable precision value, in the sidewalk – sh-plumps! And keeps the classical supine position, the eyes plumb-up into the sky. Maybe, with the pinch of reproach, a kind of.

You’d never think the dude was a Jamaican brat. Sooner might be taken for a native from some state in southern India, by his looks.

And those two brothels too, under Thai Massage signboards, yet the nurses in the business are not so too tiny after all, same pod’s peas, each and every from the Middle Russia regions, not for nothing we've scrambled so frantically to join the lined crowd of chip implanting globalization.

Not even a regular slot machine hall around, just a couple of underground rat holes for local gamblers in Three-Card Brag and Black Jack. Stagnating backwater, in short.

As regards those sporadic reports at night, it’s just youngsters trifling with their handguns. All in all, the hood's weekly output rarely overshoots a couple of farting-bags with stiffs, on average.

And as for my nirvana where could it be from a couple of minutes before the second slim?

Moderation and consideration, in keeping with good homeopathic manners, that’s my approach to pot. Two slims in the morning and two in the afternoon, after the lunch.

Not that I need much really, politely landed in the corner will graze a package of chips, I, or maybe a hot-dog, two at most. Cutie critters them those doggies, do not bite back. Then the spill of a cup of something from coff-or-coa line, atop – that’s my lunch in a whole day, and back I goes to my bench to watch the pulse of the business activities, while enjoying my third slim, and the full-fledged blunt's turn comes at night, code-named “night-cap gasper”.

So, no way I would omit him any moment back but—here you are!—out of nowhere appeared this feathered wonder. Pelage a-bristle, hair style in the vogue of 60’s when children of flowers kept a-stirring their cultural revolution in the sands of Californian beaches.

The jeans severed at knee-length to make them into shorts, yes, you could see it at a glance – not cut but severed, when he had put them on a boulder and chiseled off with a flat tool stone like an inadequate Neanderthal man. And that befuddled glare, you know, from his bugged-out eyes in all directions. In short, the famous lost-and-found picture by Rembrandt “A Hick at the Fare or the New Mark to Fuck Up”.

Then, naturally, I lit up to enjoying the free show in full.

After gaping for awhile he veers to my side.

"Where am I?" sez the wacko.

And it’s quite OK by me, shortly after a fresh slim I’m always ready for a chat.

"Welcome back to the planet of your likes, alien," sez I. "And since getting the answer to your 'where?' you'll certainly go over to testing the waters about your squadron's landing spot, why not to contact Dr. Serafimovich then, with your rickety questions directly?"

"And it's winter or summer now?" sez he. He did soar high that fucking hippie.

"It depends," sez I, "on the Tropic you are in. And where are you from?"

"Island of Freedom."

"Wow! Amigo marijuanisto! Cuba – si! Yanks – no! How is compa?ero Fidel over there? When is his exhumation scheduled for?"

To which he pinched his beard under the lower lip, jerked his head sideways and landed on the bench next to me:

"Most likely on Friday," sez he, and plumbed into a deep meditation.

That moment Mulatto Maya strolled along the sidewalk, a cherry babe in her sweet 16.

Paraded herself, in fact, and in an unmistakably motivated way, it’s not a walk but embellished writing. The chick performed a nice version of stylish striding at which they write the eternity sign with their buttocks, you know, outlining a direct hint and promise, Maya was, and well addressed too. I wonder what’s that hairy yobbo touched her soft spot with, eh? She never attempts at such calligraphy when passing by two of us, the bench and me.