Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Ficuses in the Open
One page from Joyce.
Guitar. Ahshaut awoke and played it too. And he also participated in my Yoga making me a target for hurling his toys at. Equal levels (I was sitting on the floor then) widens communicational opportunities.
After they went over to the Underground, I had a supper and then Sahtik came back to wash the plates, but first we passionately protested against this here war.
She, by the way, wanted to know how to name the reverse of the missionary position.
Alas! There is a shameful gap in my education. Might it be—if one is allowed to make a guess—"the unconverted rider"?
And it's also a pity that the anti-war actions we are engaged in have to be mute – with Nasic/Armo's family and half a dozen of cellarless neighbors hanging on under our bed. The worn-out floorboards are too poor a soundproof. Poor us.
Then Sahtik washed up the dishes, I helped her drying them with a kitchen towel.
The water-walk looms ahead. Good night.
March 14
In the morning I went to the Site and till noon was fixing the chute for clay-tipping on the gorge's steep slope.
When going to the Site, I met another of my former colleagues from the gas pipeline firm—Camo, alias One-Monet-Per-Joke. Camo asked if I knew English well enough to explain the essence of the Armenian question to visitors from abroad.
'I could if properly paid for the job,' said I.
Then, he asked for how long I had been keeping my beard already and if I'd like him to present me with a razor. I thankfully declined his generous offer.
'But,' he said, 'if Azeries caught you they would surely take you for a phedayee and pluck off your beard hair-by-hair.'
'In such a case,' said I, 'let you give me your razor the moment they catch me.'
He contemplated the idea for a sec and refused.
When I was on my way back from the Site, GRAD shelling commenced. Now, bombardments are being performed another way, turned into a kind of suspended torture. Previously, when they were shooting by volleys, there was an interval of relaxation after each round of explosions—they need some time to recharge, reasoned I. But presently they shoot no more than half-dozen missiles at a time. Then, the launcher's leveling is readjusted and you know not how soon or where the next portion would explode.
Under such unpredictable conditions running is simply senseless—one may run right into being on target for the follow-up blasts. These reasons make my gait so stately slow when not carrying the bread. Yet, when the explosions are too close, I'm ducking like any unreasonable runner.
After lunch, I went to the downhill town with the bread.
Sashic was unshaven and annoyed at me arrogantly walking the streets during bombardments.
Valyo was not at home – mobilized to the Republican Army as a skilled specialist; he had served in the Soviet Army artillery.
His buddy, Leva, went to have a word with the authorities. In his opinion this particular segment of population (the directors) should have nothing to do with the combat service. Leva himself is a deputy-director and utterly indignant about the precedent.
During one page from Joyce, the shelling renewed.
Guitar-playing.
I chopped and took to the Underground an armful of firewood for the tin stove.
Then, I played backgammon with Aram at his place and lost three monets to him.
Supper.
The water-walk's ahead.
The day was sunny and really pleasant. Good night.
March 15
In the morning, I paid Nasic, the landlady, our rent for the second-half of the month. That was Sahtik's or rather Roozahna's money; the last three monets I possessed were lost in the gambling with Aram.
I went to Lydia's after the subsequent volumes of ARCHIPELAGO. Yet, her subscription was cut off by the war. I thanked her and returned the initial volume.
Then I went to Aram to continue our game. I told him that I was flat broke and only had a handful of kopecks – he magnanimously decreased the stakes. After dramatic oscillations in luck we finished our game at noon almost in drought.
After lunch, one page from Joyce.
Guitar.
I tried to read Dumas-peré's THE THREE MUSKETEERS in Armenian for the sake of mastering the language. The dull preoccupation dumped me into the sin of daytime napping.
Then, Sahtik and Ahshaut came from the Underground; she did some washing, while he stayed in the yard with Nuneh, Nasic's elder daughter.
Yoga: when in the last asana, missiles began to explode and continued until the end of my supper that followed.
I felt some shiver in my fingers, watched them closely and saw they weren't actually trembling, however, I couldn't get rid of the feeling.
Now, it's calm; I decided on no water-walk today. All the pails and pots are filled up with the melt-water, which falls in innumerous springs and streams from each and every roof in the town.
The most widespread picture of today—pails on the sidewalks to catch dazzling showers of snow water a-glitter in the sun and the crowds of vellum-like washings on the cloth-lines sagged by the loundry weight.
As for the drinking-water, we have a pail-and-a-half of it. Besides, there is no vessel to go out with.
So, it was indeed a day-off. Good night.
March 16
In the morning a young giant visited me in the Club. He opened the door of my room, and had to bow when thrusting his head in to ask if it was the office of some unknown-to-me firm.
The paper folks recollected that there was some money (about three-thousand rubles) stashed in the editorial safe. The amount was too little to pay one-month salaries to all of the staff yet they quickly found a smart decision to divide the money into equal small sums of one-hundred-and-fifty each and distribute them among those members who would turn in time with the understanding that these sums would later be withhold from their regular payment.
The safe (kinda wardrobe made of sheet iron) today was cracked open with a bar-pick and they started the distribution.
Rita prompted me to go after my share. I obediently went to the indicated room and saw a woman in gray doling the money out. I had never seen her before. How many colleagues I don't know yet!
The cashier eyed me and said she was afraid it would be against the regulations to give me the money. Who knows how much I earned during these months?
I begged her pardon (bewildering her with so unpredictable a reaction) and left the room extremely proud with myself.
Rita was waiting in my room for Arcadic, who went to his big-shot buddy about the pass-bill for her to depart. Shamir, who had witnessed my encounter with the woman in gray, came into the Renderers' to express his consolation and to say that she was not right in his opinion.
A stout girl—just a match for that early basketball visitor—brought in the parliament decision typewritten in Armenian, declaring this newspaper from now on to be the government official organ called THE FREE ARTSAKH. A new newspaper for a newly independent state. However, they retained the old editor.
(…Boss! Where are you?.)
After lunch, I went to the Underground.
Rafic, the consort of the paper's queen in disguise, and his spouse herself, who was laid up in in the compartment after she had burned her leg with boiling water, were down there. I shared to them the smashing news.
One page from Joyce. Guitar playing.
Sometime after five pm, there were several separate bursts in the town. Cannon shell explosions.
Yoga. Supper.
The water-walk of two goes is ahead. Good night.
March 17
At seven in the morning, a GRAD attack.
I was out in the yard squatting in the privy and couldn't see, but visualized vividly enough, how Sahtik was grabbing Ahshaut into her arms and running over to the Underground. The mother-in-law didn't run away; she was making dough.
Nearing the Club, I saw that the most of its windows were broken. The next-door building, former-CPSU-DC-now-Hospital, had been hit by a missile. As it exploded on the uppermost floor, there were no casualties, I guess.
Lenic came with a story about a hideous shell splinter flashing a hair's-breadth off over his head this morning when he went to a water-spring and was caught by a bombardment on his way. Then he asked if it's true they were giving some money here. I explained their scheme. And when the woman-in-gray came, he was given his share.
Rita came with her complaints about untrustworthiness of Arcadic's pal in the government; I told her to go to the airport at Hojalu where planes from Armenia were flying to-and-fro daily, and where one needed neither pass nor other papers – just 150-monets, the fare-fee to Yerevan.
About twelve am, I took a broom from the corridor and started to sweep windowsills and the floor in the room gathering glass splinters of the shattered panes onto a piece of a cardboard. Rita found another broom and started to help me.
Shamir, the porter, with wine on his breath, was cursing the janitor-woman, who never comes to do her job these days, his invective was accompanied with his fierce hammering at the corridor window to cross-bar it with the boards he had stolen from the ground floor windows in the former-CPSU-DC-now-Hospital Block.
There was no streaming nor trickling nor dripping from the roofs, no streams ran down the roads. The snow's over.
Leaving for the Club in the morning I wore no hat and instead of my coat, I put on the sturdy jacket Sahtik made for me 2 years ago On my way back, I decided to visit the Underground first.
Sahtik and Ahshaut were in the block's yard. We, Ahshaut and I, smiled to each other, and at that very moment the day's second volley of missiles started to blast. Sahtik snatched him up and ran down to the Underground. I followed them. The explosions sounded fairly close.
Panic-stricken voices sounded in the darkness of the corridor. In the compartment there stood a woman upright and still as if petrified by fear for both her husband and grown-up daughter, who were somewhere in the town and not by her side.
Sahtik tried to calm her down by assuring that the missiles hit an absolutely other place, some place where they could never possibly be.
When the bombardment subsided the mother-in-law sent me to see if Aram was all right. Yes, he was.
After lunch, one page from Joyce. Guitar. Duma-peré.
Sahtik has finished the pullover she was knitting for me all this winter. She's just a
March 18
"She's just a treasure" was my intention to write yesterday, but the pen had run out of all its ink or paste or whatever it had been writing with. Nevertheless, I'm ready to repeat it even today – she's just a treasure!
It seems to be the last entry in my diary. This blocknote is finished, and at the barber's—the only working enterprise in the town—they sell no notebooks.
Thus, the time has come for winding up. Anyhow, one shall draw a line somewhere. Well, I'm fully aware that these notes o' mine have a hell of misgrammings and missspellings. They are dull. They are monotonous: Yoga. Guitar. Supper. Good Night. Good Night. Good Night. Good Night.........
But! For three-months, they were my shelter and outlet for my horror, frights and sentimentality. The point is so evident, it doesn't need any further exposing.
On the other hand, there is some other thing I cannot prove but may suppose. Chaadaeff, a seminal Russian thinker of the XIX century, prophetized fusion of this world made up of countless individual minds into the world of One Mutual Mind. He called it "the Kingdom of God".
Academician Vernadsky, already in the current century, announced that not only biosphere, lithosphere and so on exist on this planet, but also one more, let's call it noosphere. It's like a common pool of human minds and thoughts and ideas to which all of us are contributors (…he seems to pick up the idea from the contemporary French Jesuit monk, overly obedient to the orders of his bosses…)
Some twenty-years after him, THE BEATLES sang: "All we're saying is to give to peace chance." I would add – all we are thinking, crooning, all we are doing (if not as a part of the war effort) is to give to peace/world a chance. In this respect, these writings were also a part of the anti-war activity in the very epicenter (one of too many) of hatred, killings, suffering of the noosphere contributors, who are chewing ancient cud about native land or sacred vengeance.
All False. "Native land" is a rattle-toy for paupers and imbeciles. I have been to various lands (within the former Soviet Empire): any of them may become your beloved, if you are able to love. And, if my Treasure or our kids get killed or maimed, no mountains of corpses, no seas of blood would ever repair the loss.
Aye, Coleridge said: "sweet is the vengeance", but it's true only for ravens, not for the contributors. However, all that is my suppositions only, for which I've got neither tangible prove, nor undeniable evidence. So it's high time for me to drop this sermon and go over to more common sense matters.
During the night, the town was bombarded with missiles—the noise in the streets awakened me from time to time.
In the morning I went to Carina's underground with the bread baked by her mother. Carina was glad to get it. She said, that tomorrow is her daughter Rita's birthday.
In the Orliana's underground I was told that she together with her children had flown by a plane to Yerevan. Valyo remains here as a GI.
At the Club, there were almost no visitors today. Only Rafic and another member of the staff, to whom the news about money distribution came too late.
After lunch—guitar-playing with near-by blasts of a GRAD volley.
Yoga—with near-by blasts of another GRAD volley.
Then, I went to the Underground to keep Ahshaut in my lap for a while. At my knocking on the room's door, he opened it and distinctly cried in Armenian: "Daddy has come!"
I hope he won't be a stale thoughts chewer, but become a real contributor in any language he chooses. The lingua makes no difference. In the end Ahshaut will find his contributions as wanting and incomplete as bibles, qorans, vedas, relativity theory or any other holy scriptures from all of the pack. Anyway, it is Ahshaut's future, his problem. And, I have my problem—my present to cope with. Jedem – seiner.
Sahtik began to knit a sweater for Gaia, the daughter of Orliana.
After the visit to the Underground, I returned home and ate supper cooked by my mother-in-law.
The water-walk of two goes is ahead.
GOOD NIGHT
