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None of them (with merely one exception) demonstrated any savvy as to in what way a pedagogical college is distinct from a university.

Once, I even had to explain to a current one (not my fault though: who ever called that Rector to show up at a monthly sitting of the English Department (because any other foreign language remained in embryonic form of an optional subject)) that a university, in difference to a college, is engaged in scientific research as well.

The amount of the offered information clearly exceeded his cognitive capacity, and the unfathomable extent of the overflowing data plunked the usurper into the prostration of so violent a nature that the efforts of the Head of the English Department combined with the concerted assistance of other Anglo-ladies present at the monthly affair hardly managed to reanimate the poor fellow by the plenteous application of tea and jam.

Well, yes, they did manage to bring him back to life. Yet, the Head of the English Department had never forgiven me the accident. Not for the irretrievable quantities in the amount of the Departmental jam stock yet because of her strong instinct of self-preservation.

It was exactly that monthliness that effed me up immoderately and made me a plumb loco deep in myself. Because menfolks at the State University could then be counted on the fingers of one hand – Rafic at the Department of Russian, Volodya at the Biological, Karen at the Physics and Mathematics, and Yuri at the Department of Geography… Well, maybe a pair of laboratory assistants somewhere but those Rectors my hand does not rise to tally up to the ranks of this glorious cohort…

Ah! Yes! Uncle Kolya the electrician! He kept a spacious, but very cluttered workshop under the main stairs where he repaired just anything: from umbrellas to household appliances, which even a normal woman would not understand, let alone those college bluestocking ladies.

Later, Armen Yuryevich appeared at the Department of Armenian, and justified, in part, the University denomination, because he did undertake a research task compiling The Dictionary of The Karabakh Dialect of Armenian.

The work was accomplished at the level of The Russian Dictionary by Dahl, no kidding. The resulting magnum opus will surely outlive us.

Although who for? Meager 6 million people use Armenian nowadays, of which one half populates the Diaspora who use the Istanbul Dialect of Western Armenians, the remaining 3 million live, speak, and write in the Republic of Armenia applying the Eastern Dialect of the language, but neither of them have as worthy a Dictionary where each entry brims with the poetry of life in folk sayings some of which still make me neigh all stops pulled.

It’s only that the compiler exploited juvenile labor demanding from the students to stick down, whenever visiting their villages, everything heard from their granny-grandpa-uncle-ants. Anything at all: proverbs, swearing, jokes…

And the students were only happy to do the job. I saw heaps of their sheet-and-scraps on his Departmental Desk because that way they felt themselves students and not just the sheep for whose sake the tuition fee was shorn off their respective parents.

Still, on the other hand, it’s reassuring that no matter how hard a teacher would tyrannize you, they could not jump higher their own ass because the university should systematically fulfill the plan of harvesting with no reduction of the fleeced cash allowed. So you’d sure pass a test, and get your ‘three’ at the exam, and screw their bullying.

True, time and again you could stumble at those who’re eager to learn indeed. I met such unique ones at the reading hall…

O! the ArSU Reading Hall is certainly a pearl. The Diaspora had dumped there whatever books you want. Some treasure hoard starting from the two last reprints of The Britannica and so on alphabetically…

The uptake not for the critters present? But then, maybe, for those growing yet, for some of the following, future generations. Some huge 'maybe' though…

And that Rector, recuperated by means of jam and tea, never forgave me for the attempt at shuttering the foundations of his inert ideas and, full of vindictive villainy, he ordered the Head of the Computer Room—O my! That's real sweetie! a generous gift from some overseas millionaire—to keep me out of the gift Hall on the basis of hypothetical probability of my sending spy reports to Baku by means of the Internet.

She had to only follow her orders, and I had to await the idiot’s demobilization…

My relationships with the colleagues were characterized by evenness, always. Although the Head of the Department, with her hypertrophied instincts, could not conceal her fury that at their monthly jamborees I kept yawning, repeatedly and even with a distinct howl.

But that was unintentional reaction due to physiologically irresistible stimuli. I tried to restrain my jaw, faith! I did! – even with my both hands, for keeping good manners… To no avail though. You just can't kick against physiology…

To curb the volume of her orations, it took only one adjustment. After another of her accusatory declarations as regards me, I took out the flash drive (alike to WALKMAN yet of smaller dimensions) which I used for listening Tina Turner on my way to the university when the bus driver turned his music too loud. However, this time I pretended it was a Dictaphone and said to the flash drive: “Recorded on February 2, at 13.38”

She got fuc… fully, that is… flabbergasted, being unable to recollect what exactly got shot off her mouth a moment before.

It's after that recording was I banned from the Computer Paradise…

Vice-rector Styopa also, once, in the presence of students in the corridor, began to reprimand me employing an unrestrained tone of voice:

“You’re kept here only because of being a foreigner!”

But those are slanderous rumors that I retorted:

“What can you know of foreigners? Wanna get mine to play with?” Because tongue-tiedness somehow disappears, at times…

The only rector that I did like, from aside, was Episkoposian, who immediately after the war arrived from Moscow and even moved his household furniture down here.

Under him, Anna Alexandrovna, the Library Manager, forgetful of her advanced age, shed off the heed to decency rules endemic in the backwaters, and began to wrap her throat with a chiffon scarf in the romantic manner of the singer Maya Kristalinskaya, especially on days when she went to the Rector's appointment.

Of course, given the difference in their age and similarity of marital status, her dress code did not lead to the slightest office affair, and everything looked an example of love purely platonic and touching to watch…

And what was his idea of spending vacations? Huh? In the hole!

Near the village of Mektishen he dug up a skeleton with strange decorations, which, by all scientific beliefs, were impossible to share that hole with the stiff.

He’d better ask me, when we’d been constructing the gas pipeline nearby Chldran Village, before the war it was, the back hoe dug up a hell of a lot of bones of all kinds of sorts there.

But on the second summer they pulled him out of the hole and clarified that, if his furniture was dear to him, he’d better fuck off out of here.

Meekly moved Episkoposian to Yerevan, it very well may be up to this day gathers he his flock there to lecture on strange Karabakh artifacts, and in summer, some place in the Ararat Valley, exhumes he spare parts jettisoned off Noah's Ark, because Armenia is a mighty ancient land…

Besides, in the eyes of the university administration, I had decrying connections with doubtful citizens from abroad. Not those who’d appear for a day or so to pass another grant or a donation, but of the kind they didn’t get it what those needed about here at all.

Take, for instance, Nick Wagner and our friendship for about twenty years…

A break it was and he walked the corridor along the second floor in the New Building. No rubbing his shoulders neither elbows with anyone, so delicate a passer-by. But his being an American was too obvious because nobody would sport the beard like his in the surrounding whereabouts.

"Hey!" sez I pacing in the counter direction and kept going.

So he U-turned, caught up and said: “Who are you?”

Well, it’s not my custom to make secrets of nothing:

“The last of the Mahicans,” sez I, taking into account my uniqueness at the Department, as well as my status along this second floor plus divers other sadly associated factors.

Since that moment we’ve been friends because he also had read works by Fenimore Cooper, although they’re absent from the American school curricula…

Nick himself was working then in Yerevan, at the American-Armenian University or, maybe, vice versa. However, he felt inclination to a less spoiled, by the civilization, nature. That’s why he came to Stepanakert, though without knowing the language.

So I escorted him to meet the current Placeholder. Nick wrote his application at the personnel department and went back to Yerevan to give his lessons at the AAU there. Damn no! AUA is the correct name! Whatever…

A month past, he comes again to say there was no answer.

Again, as an interpreter, went I with him to the personnel department.

"Why d’you grill the man? One whole month there’s no answer!"

"Not true! The answer was there."

"Where?"

"Right there in my safe."

O YOB… O MOTH FUC EFF BLIAD SCRE…

No, even for me it's hard to pick the right word, at times…

In short, there was the refusal to his application, in that steel safe, on the grounds that his Californian pronunciation plus degree from the University of Nevada State were not congruous with the aspirations of the ArSU English Department staff who wished instruct the RMK students in strictly British English. So was their ambitious design and predisposition.

Yet, Nick turned out a slippery customer and moved to Karabakh all the same. Became an Instructor of English at a private university. Yes, there were birdies of that feather too (2) in Stepanakert, not only the State was born to fleece.

Besides, he got some means, his Dad was a popular barber and Mom a scion of refugees from the Western Armenia. But she did not undertake to teach her three sons Armenian…

And I can understand him, in Yerevan I also would not survive…

Well, as for Mike Newman, then yes, everything’s in full view, an inconcealably epitomic spy for you, I have to admit.

A Briton himself, he lived in Paris, and had worked thru Russian language courses to a level with a charming accent. Not enough? How about his visits to Karabakh? Not every year, yet periodically, although instead of books on the BBC order he wrote poetry, and even sang his own songs playing a guitar, simultaneously. Not bad, by the bye.

No need for a diagnosis from the KGB here – some undeniable spy.

Thanks to him, I saw the meaning of that dry British humor, you know. It’s when I kinda flashed my Britannica fostered erudition:

(britannica.com/biography/Saint-John-Henry-Newman).

"Mike," sez I, "are you aware, if we pick the subject of possibility of weird coincidence, that you've got a namesake who's also a Newman?! That same one who later became a cardinal. How about that?"

Not a single feature twitched in the face of the handsomely attractive manly man, James Bond (nothing like that ugly Quasimorbid from the most recent series), and Mike Newman (ahem!) very calmly, with a perfect coolness remarked:

"I forgive him".

The dagger-and-cloak men are lenient enough to absolve the sinful clergy…

Considering all that, when Nick and I am getting together to celebrate another Saturday, he always starts one and the same, rehearsed to the level of virtuosity, number, both frivolous and futile:

"The educational system in Karabakh failed!"

And I comfort my friend with the no less profoundly practiced, delicate diminuendo:

"Not just here, Nick. Not just here. It’s a fucking global fiasco…"

* * *

Bottle #26: ~ The Re-Union ~

The day got doggone from the very start. At breakfast, after she put sugar in her tea cup and lifted the bowl to shove it up onto the shelf, it suddenly slipped from her fingers and leaped to the floor drawing the white mare’s tail of grit all over the kitchen, loose and wide…

Clutch the broom, Maya, here’s a job for you, bitch!

The only consolation was it was a day-off. That batty floozy, the mistress of that salon-bookstore loony bin, told Maya yesterday not to come next day.

That slut’s kooky in her head, beyond repair. Changing three times a day.

Hoopskirt in the morning or else in the Elizabeth Virgin Whore style from the Tudor dynasty, unless, of course, not in a mini-bikini.

Do all women at that age bust their nuts so wholly? The only sane thing about her that she's made Maya learn to read and write.

At first it was knotty hard – oh! that fucking "Golden Key"! but then it gradually began to move on and somehow turned even interesting what that bitch Malvina, the puppet show prima pussy, dyed her hair with, eh? Not laundry blue, for sure.

Then she wanted to cook a soup. No, yeah, no go. There’s just a spoonful of dry pasta shells in cellophane, on the shelf.

Some familiar ring, eh? Why to leave there that scant pinch? When you see it’s just a nip left then dump all of it in the pot on the stove with everything else to finish it off. But no! Wrapping back in cellophane and storing on the shelf.

Sometimes it’s hard for Maya to understand her herself.

So nothing doing and she decided to go out to the supermarket.

Moreover on that TV they sow their stupid oats all day long – how could Ukrainians be so fascists and not even spare their own civilian population…

Well, not right away, of course, it takes time before you decide on which rags to put on after all…

. . . . .

At the supermarket of her former kinda colleagues there stayed only Nastya, the cashier.

Because of her obesity she’s too lazy for looking for a decenter job…

And that mudak in the line behind with his gaze riveted to Maya’s bottom as if it's his first time throughout his miserable life to see a woman’s ass.

Though yes, her ass is the coolest one in both this and the next hemispheres. Not fat yet round. Exactly what is lacking them those bitches in the podium that wiggle their skinny pelvic bone back and forth like empty scales.

Well, were you the only of the kind, then okay, fine. But not battalions of cloned Masha-Dasha in different rags and wigs of any hue on the march – left-right! left-right!

The dressage training, an Olympic sport.

And when already coming back home, the left spike broke off clean, as she was nearing her tower-block entrance.

Some damn well out of luck day and no doubt! With one foot you’re normal while keeping your right one on tiptoe as if sneaking up… Some lame duck with her sack of bad luck…

And then the elevator was not coming down for half an hour. Some bastards rape-holding its door in the upper floors.

Finally arrived, a couple with a baby came out.

The little baby’s such a cutie, the eyes so round, lips open in a small “o”. O, sweetie!

Maya got out on her seventh floor, opened the door, and still in the hallway she realized that something was not quite there.

She kicked her ruined heels off and looked from the corridor into the room.

Yep! So it is, some bum in a blue pea jacket is snoring on the couch by the balcony door.

Happy-New-Year-and-heat-your-ass-in-sauna!

It’s not that Maya freaked out completely. Nopes. She knew a trick or two from the bouncers at the bar “You’ll Get It”, some hard stuff so that kicking the guy in his balls was a kids' game, in comparison.

Yet just in case, she quietly went to the kitchen after the meat hammer.

How ever could that bum get in?

"Hey you! Reveille!"

He jumped up, batting his eyes and rubbed his lips with the heel of his palm.

"How d’you intrude? What’s your want?"

"Maya…"

Her eyes contacted his stare.

"Nobodya … And … the beard … where?"

The hammer slipped out the clutch and tapped at the floor, slightly…

"Actually, I’m Inokenty."

"What are you talking about? Inokenty the Who? The First? Second? Third?"

"The third… UF-3."

"Yeah. Unparalleled Fool. Can be seen in the dark too."

"Wait! Where so too many Inokenties from? Your exes’ count?"

"Too many or under many is for me to size up… The employer at the bookshop got me hooked on reading. When there are no clients, I leaf through everything. Lately The Sacred Puppet Show it was by the French blogger named Taxil.

O, Lord! They did jump bones in their shows! Did indeed! Even with their daughters…

You rarely come across the like porn even at X-sites.

Inokenty The Third’s the coolest of them Popes. It’s him to train all the princes and emperors in Europe kissing his shoe."

"A faggot or what?"

"The tribute of respect! You, fool! And no yo-yoing here! Where’s the beard?"

"Well… hum… see… Esma undid me in the morning… then UF-2 told about Athos, and he himself worse than a skinhead… it all got me somehow… and there’s a barber shop, well, I just went in… er… only they didn’t have change from a piastre…

"A tough case… seems like not just the beard was lost."

"Worried sick about that beard? Why so keen on it?"

"Having even the nerve to ask! Ha! Why am I keen? Yeah? Why? Got lost for so long and God only knows where. Then rolls in with his mug shining! Where have you been?"

"On the Island."

"Boy, o boy! A fucking bucket of steam! Which one? Vasilyevsky Island? Or Honshu?"

"Come on… Chris got killed. When you told me meet him."

"How d’you mean killed?"

"Two shots. A slob of Don’s."

"But you?"

"The bastard hit from behind my back. I didn’t see nix. Nothing at all."

"You not hurt, Nobodya?"

"It’s Inokenty. I’m Inokenty! Too hard to remember?"

"Again? The Third? Or you’ll share the last name too after all?"

"There’s nothing to share. I know nothing."

He got up on his feet and in few steps reached the glass door to the balcony, leaned his forehead on the transparent hardness. Keeping her eyes on him, Maya downed onto the couch.

"Look, if you're on the run, speak openly."

Still with his back to her, the still silhouette against the backdrop of the dim light of the waning day answered:

"Told you already, I know nothing… Sorry for Chris. He plays was writing."

"Good, at least?"

"As if I’ve read… Don came up. Blah-blah-blah. Went away. In a moment – bang! bang! above my head."

He started pacing the room from the balcony door up to that to the hallway and back, his freshly shaven chin sunk in the cup of his left palm, the blank gaze straggling along the floor under his feet.

Then, to shed off the gloomy recollections, he asked:

"And what’s your last name?"

"Waringova."

He stood as if rooted to the spot, smack bang in the middle of the room:

‘WARRING MAYA?!.’

"Yeah. Close enough."

"Fu… eff me…" his voice trailed off and he picked pacing up. After a couple of to-and-fros the question was readied:

"And what did you need Chris for?"

"There's a delay by me, and he knows folks anyplace."

"What do you mean delay?"

"What a fool you are, Nobodya."

"I’m Inokenty."

"Makes no difference. You both are fools… Come on here, damn you!."

* * *

Bottle #27: ~ People Got Killed For A Base Metal’s Shine ~

In 1997 I visited Ukraine as the stipulated stretch of my keeping Ulysses, the work by James Joyce farmed out to me by my Teacher, was over.

A year later in the seasonal summertime session of writing articles for the local newspaper Azat Artsakh, the travel turned into a serial of seven chapters named The Way of Return. Some shitty name, undeniably, but then the job of a writing beast of burden was paid for with beggarly kopecks.

My grabbing any job at all was motivated by the chronic absence of the needful. In fact, we were paupers with a house of their own, not dying of famine but having no money for an in-city bus. A healthy life-style, if you think deep enough, on the whole…

As a teacher at the State University, I got 15 000 AMD a month (except for the 3-month unpaid summertime). The zeroes looked cool yet remained just zeroes as long as the plum-looking sum equaled 15 rubles in the Soviet Union. Hence my return to the position of a translator in The Soviet Karabakh paper renamed already into Free Artsakh, and loss of the sight over its smudgy signal prints.

Cooperation with the independent monthly Demo, published on grants from the Great Britain, lasted much shorter (I was fired for being insufficiently democratic).

Producing Internet sites from scratch (there were no handy templates and platforms yet). The ordered site remained my one and only side product in that line, as a matter of fact. The hotel owner understood the profitability of his enterprise’s presence in the Net when ordering the site and pretty soon he had to construct a couple of additional two story buildings for his business. The rest of the public was either as needy as me or seeing the Internet as a means of private entertainment.

Tutoring at the branch of the Modern University for Humanities headquartered in Moscow (later on MUfH was renamed into the Modern Academy), specialized on selling their diplomas printed in line with the internationally accepted forms. It was kinda education by correspondence, the students studied from their hometowns for passing the tests online. The job they gave me at the branch yielded additional 15 rubles for each non-summer month.

It's only that school graduates stubbornly bypassed me and looked for private lessons of English elsewhere.

And I fully got it – what’s the use of being prepared by me if they had no chance of seeing my face among the exterminators when enrolling the ArSU?

But I still cannot get it – why paying to a private tutor when anyone is welcome to the all-out fleecing? If only for vanity’s sake? To flash up before their herd-mates the phrase ‘London is the capital of Great Britain’?

Naively open coverage of the events in the internal political life of the RMK at the pivotal period of the millennia switch put an end to a couple of months of my remote collaboration with a Russian-language newspaper in Yerevan.

Why?

Because of the base shiny metal…

At times you start, like, thinking: Where do them those lucky ones come from? At all, huh?

The question's asked not to emphasize or show off my personal qualities over again, but from the pure curiosity.

Seems like in their previous life they, those fortune's favorites, behaved with proper circumspection and managed to avoid denting their karma. Right?

Let's consider me, for instance…

Although, on the second thought, let’s not. I'd better be set aside, mine is a special case. The prodigy is a prodigy and accepting the one in million for a standard would be an incorrect approach in a discourse on fundamental matters, wouldn't it?

So, to put it accurately: Where all them ordinary lucky ones come from, eh?.

A rather interesting question. Worth of applying my scientifically shrewd mind to. When at leisure…

The presence of gold in the Karabakh toombs (‘toomb’ is a mountain of not standardized length and/or height, which does not turn yet into a monstrosity propping glaciers and eternal snow deposits upon its top) was brought to my attention soon after I arrived for settling quietly in the village of Seidishen.

The tip leaked Gypsies or rather it was proposed by Rafic Shakarian, the Biology teacher at the village school. He pointed at the two pedestrians in the road bend on the nearby slope who schlepped an obviously bulky load, but still of not too big weight to tell on their hang loose gaits.