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"And where is Athos buried or was he cremated?"

"Yo! You’re a natural indeed! Can’t you make him out on your buckle?"

The empty eye in the wide-lipped mannequin head winked a good-bye at him from under the brim of the hat pulled askew down to his ears, and got lost behind the jerking curtain of the back robed in chromosomes propelling the wheel-chair in progressive motion.

“Fare thee well, Parthos!”, a mute poignant tear plopped from the left eye's eyelashes of speechless Inokenty after his departing buddy.

The sparrow joyously chirruped and, without ever leaving the buckle, splashed out a generous white streak of guano onto the possum’s back to teach him not to drop his fucking jaw when among chums…

* * *

Bottle #23: ~ War As a Watershed Between “Before” and “After” ~

In the last year of the first war artillery/missile bombardments ceased pestering Stepanakerters (after the capture of Aghdam City) and were substituted with air raids.

First off, it was the team of day-pay pilots from Belorussia not averted by the stink of petrodollars.

NO! I’m not asserting they were Belorussians, it’s just that their base was deployed there.

Later, an Azerbaijani pilot in service at some other place hi-jacked a SU fighter-bomber of the latest make and flew it straight to Baku where he got the title of Hero of Nation and started running missions in the Karabakh war.

Goorguen, whose house was next to our lot with the construction site in it and who all the war was carrying ammo to phedais by his state-owned KRAZ truck, told how a SU-jet surprised him on one of the passes, and he decided it was his last run. However, the pilot only waved to him thru the cockpit glass and flew away.

Highly improbable that it was that Hero of Nation hijacker who soon was shot down by a thermal rocket while stalking up to Stepanakert City along the Karkar river valley…

The pilots were taught wariness by the fact of the Army of Self-Defense having got equipped already with radars, so that in a couple of minutes before the raid, the air-defense sirens filled the city with their warning howl followed by the aircraft—one or two units at most—dropping their bombs onto the city, not many but pretty powerful blasts, and under the rapid barking of anti-aircraft guns the raiders would fly away.

The thundering roar of jets died out, the sirens shut up too, which felt like awesome bliss after their godawful howl all thru the raid.

Yet, one time they did shot a jet down, not the right one though.

In 1993 members of the newly established CIS were cutting up the pie of military property of the collapsed USSR, a certain percentage went to the former republics on whose territory tarried the said equipment and the remaining bulk collected Russia. In the process, Armenia got two jets.

Full of delight, one of them flew over Karabakh, without warning in time, and was shot down.

The ejected pilot came down by the parachute and caught in the field. They wanted to beat him (you would not kill so a precious trade item) and, to prove his origin, he yelled up words with particular sounds in them which only a born Armenian is able to produce while outsiders emit something kinda alike (the way I do) because being unfit to hear the difference themselves.

On the whole, that same old story from the Holy Bible repeated itself, one to one, how the Israelites at punishing one of their tribes, the knee of Benjamin it was, used the ‘shebaleth’ word to see Benjaminians from the rest of Jews.

Thus Armenian Air Force lost 50% of their aircraft in one go.

Six months later shooting down a wrong one repeated itself. An aircraft with Iranian diplomats on board flew from Moscow to Tehran to celebrate the New Year at home and deviated from the security corridor. It got hit by a surface-to-air missile. That was my turn to spend the night on duty at the SC building and after the midnight I heard the wheezy roar of the aircraft in its dive down.

A day later there arrived an Iranian Colonel with a couple of Sergeants to collect the offal of the dead. He invited me also to admire the collected variety meat through the glass in the UAZ vehicle windows. I refused to approach, however. Couldn't make myself, not even for the diplomatic politeness' sake…

As there was no one to present the check paid before the war so as to retrieve the concrete flooring slabs (the former Building Materials Plant housed the repair battalion for restoring tanks already) I had to again use my official position and visited the respective office to get a signed endorsement there for collecting the roof timber from the not fully ruined ‘October’ cinema. Really good material the beams were, not even damaged by the fire.

With employment of an auto crane and a trailer platform, the beams were pulled from the cinema ruins, ferried to and unloaded in the yard of the maternity hospital for their further transference into the ravine where our unfinished house was located.

However, the designed logistics failed in the concluding part planned to be carried out in the airspace above the narrow strip of land between the hospital fence and the mentioned ravine, whose top edge was used by Hrantic, who lived in the 3-storied apartment block to the left from the maternity hospital, and had started a 3-meter wide vegetable bed for growing beans there, on that shelf-edge above the ravin.

The boom of the crane (operated from the aforementioned medical institution’s yard) was long enough to take the beams (one by one) over the so-called vegetable garden. where Hrantic had stuck already 2-4 rows of slender poles (2-meter tall, vertically) for the beans to climb up when/if they sprout.

Unfortunately, at the first go Vazyo, the crane operator, grazed one of the poles (without tumbling it though) with the beam being carried over. No actual damage, by and large.

Nonetheless, Hrantic came racing from the yard of his apartment block with yells (he’s so expansive, habitually), snapped up a couple of anti-personnel grenades from his pocket and swore on his mother's well-being to use them at any further try to exploit the airspace adjacent to his plot.

Vazyo told me he couldn’t work under such conditions where because of that fucking war everybody had become fucked up in their head already.

On assembling the crane’s prop paws back, off he was.

That’s why I had to saw the beams to size, in the maternity hospital yard (the Head Physician Brina leaned out of the window of her office on the second floor, but she did not object, eventually), and then, in that shortened and lighter form, to haul them, the beams, assisted by Aram (Satenic’s brother), on our shoulders, bypassing the vegetable bed of fucked up in his head Hrantic, and drop them down in the ravine so as to pick them up, the beams, down there and drag in the reverse direction to the location of our unfinished house. The operation took two days (not to count the preliminary sawing the timber up to size by me alone).

In token of gratitude for the live assistance, I helped Aram to solve the problem of amassing firewood for the coming winter season by the suggestion to utilize the tall and mighty, yet wholly dead, pine tree in the Central Square of Pyatachok, which had dried up because of the damage to its roots brought about by a hoe digger producing a trench for the pedestrians to shelter, in case of an air raid, cut too close to the tree or, possibly, as the result of multiple wounds from shell/bomb fragments endured in the course of the war for Karabakh independence, when even the made of gypsum pioneer on the nearby pedestal lost his right arm together with the bugle, or I cannot even imagine why at all.

That dry tree I proposed him to fell with my participation.

The brother-in-law did not dare to raise his hand on a state-owned tree in a public place (even though dead already) and kept talking me out.

Then I prepared a relevant endorsement fake from a fictitious Committee of Assistance to Those Wintering and typed it with the typewriter at the PC by the SC of the RMK. The document was signed with a long and exquisitely vignetted signature because I had no rubber seal.

Aram scrutinized the artifact with pensive attention. Then he agreed. Seemed like the signature looked convincing enough (he’s crafty in the like matters being a self-employed artist and wood carver).

The parts of the felled tree we transported to his yard on a handmade prototype of skating-board assembled of a piece of plank and three wheel bearings (no steer foreseen in the design). Before the war, Stepanakert kids liked getting seated on such things and rolling down steep streets, not in the downtown, of course, where the drivers would justly reprimand them for such a hazardous fun…

At the advice of Emma Arshakovna, my mother-in-law, I illegitimately seized a two-room apartment in a five-story apartment block built before the war. The project was stopped in the stage of works at inner finishing. Then the building’s bigger part was shattered by the artillery bombardments from Shushi, yet two stair-case sections (of five, all in all) survived and even the tin roof over them did not leak.

My squatting action was necessitated by the desire of the owners of our rented one-room flat, Armo and Nazic, to give their daughter Nara in marriage and they were planning to dole out the first floor of the house (with one and only room) to the newly-wed couple because your daughter’s happiness is more important than a side income.

And, as always, everything turned for the better because the seized apartment was at a five-minute walk from our unfinished house.

In the apartment, I put up a stove of refractory bricks (a positive rarity in the sea of Karabakh tin woodburners).

The brick pieces were collected in the ruins of The Children Library near that very Pyatachok Square and ferried over in a homemade one-wheel barrow to our place of residence, taking advantage of traffic absence, especially when the air defense sirens were howling.

The ancient iron wheel for the barrow was a present from Nerses, the father-in-law of Vanya, a welder at the gas pipeline construction organization, BMM-8, who I worked with before the war. And the roomy box for the barrow was made of a sheet of aluminum, a sizable traffic sign, formerly.

The handles were of aluminum pipes and very sturdy – from the stretcher for carrying wounded, whose tarp got so smeared with blood that the city hospital (the one next to the maternity hospital) had just to throw it away onto their dump heap.

I cut the tarp off and—voilà!—here are pipes of clean aluminum for you with convenient handles of black rubber to grab at…

Having the beam-timber allowed to span the walls of our house in progress. Then followed accomplishment of the roof of corrugated slate sheets from the pre-war stock of them at the warehouse of a certain construction firm, paid in cash.

I had no plastering skills at that period because in the previous life my predominant job was that of a bricklayer so the plasterer had to be hired.

Actually, it was not even a plasterer but the plasterer’s hand from a team of two. They were engaged at the renovation of the half-destroyed building where our family squatted illegitimately, and they both did not participate in the hostilities due to their old age.

The plasterer refused to do the job for an agreed fee but his hand, Vanik, agreed.

Later on, I more than once had to bear the brunt of bitter criticism for the unevenness in the plaster surface, which happened not thru my fault, I was just the hand to a hand, old-aged Vanik.

The final air raid took place when we were plastering the bed room. It was a one-jet raid and the air defense missed out on noting it, and did not even had the time to switch those sirens on.

It rolled in over the Krkjan hill, escorted by the puffy round-feather explosions of anti-aircraft shells so cute-looking in the blue sky. The jet rushed on, way ahead of the blasts, at a low level and dropped the bomb over School 8, a little before it. In its fall the bomb looked like a cask, kept turning in the air, sparkling with metallic glitter.

The bomber took an abrupt left turn and I never saw it any more, but the bomb kept on flying exactly towards me and Vanik because we were busy preparing the mortar before the entrance to the house.

It missed the school building and, going on farther, fell into the private sector on the other side of the ravine and blew up someone's house (empty at the time).

The spray of fragments of the house sprang up, and a thick dust cloud rose to screen the sun.

Little by little, the dust began to dissipate but high above it there for a long time coasted a throwaway piece of a newspaper, and it even glided over to our side of the ravine to land somewhere in the bush.

Later I wanted to find it and see which language it was printed in because The Soviet Karabakh was a bilingual paper. A sepia-yellowed Saturday digest in Russian it was…

Vanik put onto his head his wide ‘airfield’ cap to announce that he would not work on that day any more, and went away despite the heap of mortar we had just readied. He, probably, went to get drunk, I would, in his place, but couldn't do it in mine, being myself abstainer for three years already and the following five.

A year later, taking advantage of a certain lull in the situation (shootouts at posts did not grow over into large-scale offensives), Satenic gave birth to one more daughter, Emma and, when the restoration and finishing works of the apartment block we lived in were over, and the independent authorities sent their law-enforcing representatives to expel the unauthorized invaders from the two sections, because in two years our number grew there notably (one especially extended family of squatters lived in two apartments on different floors), then, at a five-minute walk from the illegitimately grabbed lodging, there was already a house for our family of 5.

True, the evictors came not in the police uniform, which they did not have got yet, but in the habitual phedai fatigue – trench coats and Kalashnikov assault rifles that rather scared Ashot, our pre-school son, while they announced politely enough that we had 48 hours to move fucking away. However, the set period allowed for both moving, and disassembling the stove of the refractory bricks, and transporting the materials to our plot.

Since then it’s become very easy to remember the age of our house – it’s as old as Emma and vice versa because everything always happens for the better, as a rule, surpassing any optimistic expectations…

* * *

Bottle #24: ~ The Iron Lady ~

"Can I help you?"

He redirected his stare from the yellow-red waves in the motionless surf squeezed with the geometrical rigidity of the frame keeping at bay the verism of surrounding wall – onto the two strands of hyper-large pearl beads dangling the apex of their quadratic function parabola graph over the wrinkles in the cream vicuna below the waste, rubbing the hem of the flared blouse extended below by a narrower skirt of trapezoid cut, down to the mid-calves, in the blissful style of early Tutankhamen-and-all-that-jazz… Ah! The free of cares belle epoch of Charlestons and Foxtrots – the Great War's left behind already, the Great Depression's not there yet…

"Eh?. W-well…"

"Oh, yes! And I do understand you! Righter than anything I've heard, ever! Impeccable taste and errorless choice! It's one of the finest paintings by La Jue, from his late period. “Playful jerk La Jue” as he was lovingly named in Mont-Mart. At times, I also just stand and watch, and watch, and… As if under some magic spell. The picture is called «The concierge outside her dishabille."

"S-so, it's not the sea then?"

"O? You mean his «Sails near the Fort Bayard», of course? Painted on the back. The artist not always had means to purchase canvas and, when under some unrestrainable afflatus, you know, too uptight with the surge of inspiration, he pulled them backside front. We'll gladly turn it about for you. I felt it at first sight, you are a connoisseur and true aesthete."

"I ain't into pics, you know…"

"Unbelievable! You also read books live? No iPhones, no applications?

Sure enough, we keep quite a few copies for adept gourmets of bibliophily. “The Golden Key”, for instance, “The Golden Rooster” certainly we have. “The Gold Bug”, “The Gold of Kolyma”. "The Empress of Gold", "Golden Gulag for Goldsmiths"…

"Ahem!. Ho… hum… looking for the girl that works here. Name’s Maya…"

"O fuc… ficus' facsimile!". The bob-cut strands of straightened platinum-dyed hair run in ripples over the thick layer of pink plaster in her cheeks. "You should have told at once. A boy-friend, huh?"

"Well, a kinda sort of."

"Okay, cool it. Having a day-off, your Maya. Check her diggings."

"I went there. Locked."

"Use yours, lover boy."

"Well, I'm back from a kinda business trip. Urgent suddenness and stuff. No time to grab the key when departing."

"Save your whoppers, sudden tripper! Wanna take me for a ride? My old man's also havin' the like trips and first thing out of thee can he visits a barber shop to learn his map, where they sprayed it with as shitty cologne as you're wearing now. What's your goes whole, love?"

"Two."

"A greenhorn yet. No holding a candle to my old man. Nabbed again. Okay, I'll lend you his wonder-skeleton-key that'll take less than two secs to open the President's Button box. Then you're bringing it back with a big-big "thank you", eh? The hungered stallions are my best-loved".

. . . . .

Seeing off the client in a blue frock coat, officer's fatigue in British Navy end XVIII century, she took off the wall by the entrance the elegant miniature by António de Hollanda "View of Lisbon in 1530" painted collaboratively with Simon Bening for the "Genealogy of Don Fernando" and clapped it over the tablet “Open” hanging against the glass in the door, face to face.

The size matched perfectly and thru the door now was seen the miniature's backside promising in the manner of apian pointillism, "Gone after goods, soon to be back".

Bypassing an eclectically retrograde collection of paintings in the degenerate cubomorphism style distributed wantonly on nickel-plated openwork stands interspersed with figurines of late ozone anomalistic nudes, the owner of “Salon-Exhibition The Easter Eggs" strolled over to a chrome-synthane leather armchair with kirza inserts, in the corner of the hall and slammed open the black square in the wall.

Inside the shallow niche behind the hinged square, she removed the ebony, dildo-shaped powder microphone of the Lorenz system from the mahogany box and flipped the call-speaker switch (two-in-one). Under the melodically elongated beeps, she sank into the gleaming seat.

The vermilion ovals of manicured nails kept playfully filliping the pearls in that rosary of a necklace about the level of her gallbladder concealed under the layers of her blouse and the black silk corset of Secretly Screwed Victoria.

"Yeah", sounded a male voice from inside the well-polished mahogany.

"Hi, Don… How's your priceless vigor and stuff?"

"What's up?"

"Wanna play Fish and Fisherman? Standin' up in the raft, thrusting you pole thru the mossy water weed at the river bed, eh?"

"Having nothing to busy yourself with?"

"O-okay, don't tick off at Ann-Granny. Better tell me, DonKEY, who's popped up in my dream right now?"

"Get to the point, Anna Serafimovna."

"Wow! Our Donkey has turned so businesslike! So seasoned and mature, and even dry behind his long ears…

Hark, bustler! A visitor I had, that same quickie customer who whipped two of your slobs in one go. One's turned a cross-eyed lobotomy victim, the other gives daily interviews to the head doctor at the funny farm about greenish men and how softly them those aliens enter the landing mode, thanks to Vaseline.

However, the verbal description matches not – freshly shaved and wearing The Triple Cologne."

"Then, maybe, it's not him?"

"Maybe not him, then, was looking for Maya".

"And you?"

"Presented him with the golden key to any hindrance in life".

"Now, it's you who's a bustler. Better leave him in the street. Check his connections."

"Don't you ever lecture me, mudak! Even Dented Denny, my old man, is most wary to teach me. Have you forgotten who in the can took Donkey under his wing? Who promoted that go-getter, you, to a business-doer? Who watered your rose with solicitous regularity, huh?! We kinda wives from the same harem, you and I, if you got it, asshole!"

"Whoa! Slow down, lady. I didn't mean nothing."

"Okay, fine. By seven tonight, you'll send a couple of slobs from your fresh recruits here. Some drive test will I give them. A complete feng shui at rug rolling-respreading all over the bedroom, the best activity for scaling up your positivity."

"Would two do?"

"No indecent innuendos in presence of your superiors! Dismissed!"

Don slam-rang off and growled thru his clamped teeth:

"Fucking matriarchy!"

* * *

Bottle #25: ~ Fiddling About Pedagogy ~

When because of the truce brokered in Bishkek I got kicked out from the Press-Center by the SC of RMK, my diploma of a Teacher of English from the Nezhin Pedagogical Institute helped me out once again. It substantiated my job application to Stepanakert Pedagogical Institute gift-wrapped already in the spangle-twinkling title of State University.

Rector named Arvat did not turn down my request supposing, erroneously, that I was another white collar from the Supreme Council (in the war years folks used to view me that way) maintained up there by a hairy pow who did not mind my looking for a side job. That conjecture made him not over keen on verifying the truth of such speculations or else he did not give a fuck about these here theories on his hypothetical guesswork and he just gave me that job. Period. Anyway, it feels good to take care of yourself as nobody’s protege.

So, I became a teacher of English at the Department of Foreign Languages by the Artsakh State University because the local cadres of eaters found nothing better to busy their screwed up heads with except for dumping the word “Karabakh” altogether. They kicked up a resolute campaign (up to a referendum) to substitute it with the word "Artsakh" of dubious meaning yet without Turkic roots in it. The blithering dunces all of a sudden turned linguistically aware… The common folks went on naming their homeland Karabakh while the managerial dimwits stuck 'Artsakh' tag on any effing shit…

Having Rector Arvat around (though I never communed with the guy) provoked some deep rooted uneasiness in me, a sort of not quite there déjà vu.

A strangeness out of joint should turn into normality, right? Well, in this case it did not work that way.

I had already had Rector Arvat, back at the Nezhin Pedagogical Institute, although by that one 'Arvat' was his family name and not the given one. And the geezer (the previous Arvat) was a Jew from Odessa. Of course, it made no difference still two Arvats and both Rectors were kinda more than enough for me alone. Such a temporal-cognitive discordance created a sort of tension. It’s like meeting 2 John Lennons and both playing the piano, separately.

There happen namesakes, okay, I can buy that. Job-sakes? In millions. Name-and-job-sakes? Not suspecting of each other? Hmm. What next? N&J-sakes sharing an unaware wife? That’s where the straining entered. Or, say… no, I’d better not go down that road.

However, Arvat (the Stepanakert Armenian) soon got replaced with another rector (they were shifting there like knaves shuffled by an experienced deck sharper) who, fortunately, incurred no allusions to my previous life which brought some alleviation, in part.

No use of concealing the fact that the turnover of Rectors at the ArSU went through the roof. It suffice to note that in the course of just one employee's career (namely, my 14-year stretch there) the Artsakh State University saw somersaults of 8 to 9 of those high-ranking educational officials. Thus, the Frequency of Rector-Rotation (FRR) per clown coincides, on average, with the duration of a conscripts’ hitch in the Soviet Army.