The Ficuses in the Open

When coming back from the Underground, I met Sahtik's brother in the street. Aram was making for his mother's house he currently lives in. A solitary pedestrian through the darkness and cannonade.

We shook hands as Brethren of the Order of Lonely Hearts. He also sleeps at home alone having left his wife and children someplace amid the town in her father's shelter.

Good night, Aram, my brother-in-law.

December 12

An exemplary calm night was followed by a no worse day. The machine-gun shooting has turned already into one of nagging yet petty trifles of no account.

At 9 am, I visited the TMC where they glibly clapped the missing stamp-smear of theirs into my military identification card.

Maiden day at a new job. The Renderers' is a chilly corner room with three windows in two walls and three office desks. At times a pack of idling men assemble in it, one after another, to wag their jaws and to offset the air chillness with rough smoke from their cigarettes. Still and all it's a good thing to have a work place! And I tried to make a good beginning:

in the room I borrowed from Wagrum the key to duplicate it;

in the corridor I made friends with Ahlya (really, it's her first day too? well I never! a typist? wow!);

from the Typing Pool I collected carbon copies of my four renderings to proofread them before submitting to the Head of Russian Section.

About 3 pm, I was told I might leave: there was no more work for today.

A nice and cozy family evening at home. Sahtik was playing with Ahshaut, Roozahna reading in undertone, the mother-in-law sleeping, I shaping and filing the duplicate key clutched with the pliers.

At 8 pm, the mother-in-law commenced to bake breads in the gas oven. I saw Sahtik and the kids to the Underground. There, Sahtik complained of unbearably cold droughts breaking in to the compartment from behind the hanging rags.

After a long and winding way meandering between and over the heaps, stacks and hills of boxes, pipes, bottles and sundry jetsam jumble, I reached the deepest, dustiest and darkest corner in the room. A pitch black hole—two by two feet—gaped there letting in a uninterrupted icy breeze. I stopped the hole with a piece of cardboard.

No sooner had I climbed out of that dust abyss through the sideway and a minor corridor than a tall gaffer rigged out in a stylish overcoat and expensive fur affair on his head confronted me in the main tunnel. He demanded my explanations as to what right I had to cut off the air coming in for all the Underground. I let the sleeping dogs lie and told him I hadn't seal it up completely, so some air was still getting in.

(…all things considered, my statement was true… well, to some extent. You bet he'd never dive in that dust maze to check if I was lying…)

At home, my mother-in-law surprised me by asking pensively if I trusted in God after all. I guess her queer query was prompted by some priest's visit to the Underground where he distributed leaflets of a printed prayer and books for kids, short stories from the bible with gaudy pictures.

I answered there were too many of Them, the immoderate number postponing my choice as of yet.

It's half an hour to the midnight. The mother-in-law has just finished baking bread and ventured to the Underground. I saw her to the crossroads.

The biting cold wind outdoors sweeps snow dust along the street. At times a random cannon shell spices the setting by its burst.

Fiat nox.

December 13

Both the night and the day were quite quiet. Had a dream of

…dwarf Santas in red coats lined-up in close rows to form alive maze in a tremendous hall with mirror walls where a plushy pop-singer with his sugary hit was sticking out from among the narrow lanes in their dwarfish labyrinth until the gaudy number got swept away by a black-leathered angel of hell riding like hell for leather and finally coasting at 2 or 3 meters above the ground as if arisen by the teeth of wind…

At the work place, I rendered one article and gave the final cut to my duplicate key before returning the original back to Wagrum.

After the midday break, they summoned me to a general meeting in the Boss' office. It was a solemn thank-you-and-good-bye affair to fling the gates wide open before a resigning veteran journalist.

Boss, Arcadic and one more member of the editorial upper circles took the floor, respectively, with their tribute speeches varying only in the thickness of orators' glasses. They squeezed themselves out dry to put across one and the same idea of impossibility to list the grand qualities of the departing vet who all his life kept moving in the wrong direction deceived by them those commies—not his fault, see?—yet our paper's door shall all the same be kept open for him forever and a day… In the end Ms. Stella presented him with a bunch of creamy rich carnations.

At home, I wallowed in our happy family life till 10 pm, and then saw everybody to the Underground. When I was back and scribbling these notes, two powerful but mute flashes ripped up the darkness outside our communicational window. I had the usual fit of heat fizzling up my chest. The heart went pit-a-pat. Beastly female shrieks sounded in the street and I went out.

Some forty meters up the street, there was a house on fire. Clinking of splintering glass and squeals of squaws in the crowd of by-standers mixed up with angry demands from non-interfering men to equip them with fire extinguishers, all that being out-noised by the businesslike crunch of the fire devouring the house in high, about 2 or 3 meter tall, tongues of flame. I recollected the red-clad Santa Clauses from my dream.

Then there arrived a team of firefighters (undreamed of) and in a couple minutes put the fire out. My mother-in-law was in the throng partaking in subsiding lamentations. (Her house is only ten meters away from the damaged one). Among the onlookers I also made out Sahtik, took her aside and expressly asked to go back to the children.

In absence of further entertainment, the crowd started to disperse. I spotted Nerses walking away and took him over to arrange a visit to his place tomorrow at 3.30 pm. (The fortnight about St. Yuri's Day when serfs are free to seek another master is not over yet.)

It's quarter past eleven. Desultory shooting of no account in the thick fog outside.

December 14

At night, the cannon bangs woke me up. Then I slept again. No dreams remembered.

It is a day-off today. Roozahna was taken by her biological father's sister to her grandparents. Sahtik, Ahshaut and I had a downhill walk to the Department Store. On the way we met Garric, a worker of Sashic's, who eagerly shared the latest gossip about a missile fragment they found marked 'Made in Turkey'. Presently, they seek means of shipping it to the Soviet Empire's capital as the corroborative evidence of exterior forces involvement in our sovereign scramble.

(…they pin too much hope on the dead horse, I think. Moscow will give no more ear to this case than Ankara…)

In the Department Store they extravagantly put up for sale the goods normally kept for shadow transactions. I bought a kit of household hand tools. A lucky strike.

Stepping outside into the sunlit Kirov Street, we met Carina with her children. She frisked the innards of her bag and presented Ahshaut with a pair of mittens grown too tight for her son Tiggo and then she added also two buns.

We returned to our place. After lunch my mother-in-law left for her home and, with Ahshaut having his day nap, Sahtik and I were given free rein to make love.

Yes, ours was a commonplace marriage of convenience for both the man nearing his fourties who drifted from a strange land in our mutual USSR and the local woman ten years younger, divorced, having a pre-school daughter to raise. However, as usual, I was in luck to meet such a partner in life, as well as in sex. At my point in lifespan, the grounds for romantic feelings are scarce and dwindling, yet, by heaven, I believe it's not a made-up trash to say that I love her. Sure, I do. And even if not madly, I love her properly and deeply and with real vigor – yep! – when needed.

Historically, there are no records of a female making a good wife as well as being a superb sex partner. It's either one or the other. You just can't have this 2 in 1. I am a lucky dog to find in Sahtik both qualities.

At half past 3 pm, I visited Nerses. He gave me the latest address of Larissa and Vanya, his daughter and his son-in-law, respectively. They were our dear weekend friends before their flight to Vanya's Cossack fatherland at the outbreak of armed confrontation down here.

However, my main objective was to borrow THE BHAGAVAT-GITA to which request Nerses immediately consented. In the follow-up chat, he outlined his current venture at selling grapes from his garden at Bazaar. The basement in the TMC Building, just opposite his house, served him the nighttime hideout.

About 4 pm Roozahna came back followed at once by my mother-in-law. We had a peaceful family evening. Sahtik, Roozahna and I played a pencil game, then all five of us had supper after which I made a fresh start with two pails for the round of water bringing.

It's ten past ten pm. By now, they're in the Underground now. All's calm outdoors.

December 15

This night's dream was a slow zoom-in to

…vast emptiness in a colossal military tent of slowly quaking smeared walls, no action at all just the scrolling close-up of the greenish sagged-in tarpaulin walls until...

shellbursts of a bombardment brought me back to the reality inside our room as dark as the thunder or even blacker.

The second day-off. In the morning I took Ahshaut for a walk to the Main Post to send a birthday postcard to Nerses and Lydia's granddaughter who was Ahshaut's play-mate at weekend bouts of our and Larissa-Vanya's families. Today she becomes two-year-old.