The Ficuses in the Open

Сергей Огольцов

The Ficuses in the Open

1 Explanatory

What is "Stepanakert Saga"? It's a series of books by an eyewitness, an indie writer.

What is an indie writer? Someone who doesn't write what is good, right, moral, and profitable…

No! He dwells on what he saw, felt, what he was scammed with, grown weary of… The bastard is nobody’s patriot! Ruled by no regulations! Yep, an independent indie SOB…

"Stepanakert Saga": a literary chronicle of thirty seven years, from the inspired start to the tragic finish of the struggle of the Armenians of Karabakh for the independence of their native land.

Sounds like the campaign blah-blah of a populist faggot, huh? Or the rant of a vet military instructor at a high school.

What is, is, buddy. No use arguing the obvious. That’s life, see? There's laughter, sin, tragedy—you'll die laughing! Comedy—to the grave. In other words, it's a thoroughly engaging read for a wide range of readers, of any caliber and level. Even for serious researchers of the question of why and what way Armenians around the world—including those in Karabakh, who still happened to be the concluding crowd—lost the most crucial part of their historical homeland.

2 Introduction

The Ficuses in the Open: Book One in the series "Stepanakert Saga"

Although the number of personae dramatis is pretty limited—they are just a family and their closest relatives and neighbors as well as a pinch of colleagues from the demised establishment, and though the action mostly consists of monotonous household chores, this here artifact is an attempt at honestly depicting the besieged Stepanakert town in winter 1991-92 when physical survival was the foremost objective common to all.

All that was so abysmally long ago:

a zero reason remains to suss output

if all that was exactly that way

or some other,

or at all…

makes no difference now

Important Note: English was not the Native Language sucked in with the mother’s milk by this indie writer, who feels deeply obliged to his Assistent Editor, Gemini Ai

3 ___month one

December 4, __day 1 of 106__

The night was serene. Weirdly so. Even the machine-guns up in Krkjan kept a pregnant silence…

Still, it took a lengthy wait before I fell asleep. The tossing in bed churned up the recollection of my last visit to the Department Store. Roozahna’s birthday it was. The girl turned ten—a good reason to pick a present for the occasion.

Two customers for all two stories of the Department Store: a dad treating his boy to treasures in the toy department. The father dug his heels in to make the kid discern silver lining in any crap, including the snafu we have here.

Sending tiny echoes into the murky void around, the sullen sales assistant lined up on the counter a row of random picks. Plastic clones of identical dolls-trucks-bunnies cramming shelves at any department store of any Soviet city in any year from the past decade.

“Anything else, jahna?” Daddy asked.

No answer, just a dismal gaze of the boy at the generous sweep stake. What’s the use of deathbed gifts?

(…rubbing shoulders with the Grim Reaper mitigates a certain percentage of tightwads, supposedly…)

Next, Maxim the Chief Editor popped up in my sleepless vigil. The boss paced in a stately to-and-fro across the renderers’. The subordinate gents, Wagrum and Lenik, sat at attention at their respective desks in the attitude of eager beavers.

The floorboards creaked yet held the ponderous maxim proclaimed by the head of The Soviet Karabakh, the one and only paper in all this Autonomous Region:

“To stick it out down here, to see it through thick and thin, is the uniquest opportunity for a journalist.”

Maxim underl1ined the point with a jingle of his regal key-bunch. He never left his office without that upturned iron bouquet dangling from the perennial clasp of fatty hands over his mighty butt. The wise gents repeatedly nodded in support of the philosophical extravagance in his axioma.

My backache, like a loyal vassal, sticks by me. The shortness of Lydia's couch makes me feel it even in sleep… Back on that same day, I rifled through her bookshelves and—wow! congrats!—there's The Bhagavad Gita in Russian.

Only on principle, I went on tossing under the blanket, too lazy to get up for the volume and switch the light on.

Same date, evening

Hard to say if it's a snowy rain or a rainy snow outdoors. Our kitchen tap yields just a needle-thick trickle, yet it yields.

In the morning, I had another job interview with Arkadik, the Russian Section Head—pretty bald already, and on the payroll of this uniquest rag in town.

Skillfully steering his gaze elsewhere, he trotted out that the periodical did need my professional services, so the coming week would certainly see me in the position of a renderer. The period until then is required for managerial chicanery—an unavoidable stage in staff-reshuffling castlings to create the vacancy. The process is not subject to acceleration, you know.

From my current standpoint—habitually here-and-now—employment in a week is a helluva distant call. I’m not really a fan of rubies in the sky. However, when jobless, practice patience, buddy.

In the afternoon, Sahtik sent me for a jar of milk from the Milk Factory. Down there, I found neither Valyo nor anyone at all whom I knew. Schlepping the empty jar back, just to bring it over again after a better-timed arrangement, didn’t sit well with my idea of basic reason.

I found a cozy little nook to stash it: that never-shut door to the eternally dark corridor on the second floor in the Administration Block. It has a turn-handle on its backside drawn to the wall. I bet there’s not a chance of someone ever nosing it out. Eternity handlers have turned into too rare a specimen in our cut-and-run world. Unseen, untouched, unvexed, the bagged jar will hang on that door handle in wait for my next arrival—a dead-on wager.

Later in the day, Lydia's husband Nerses, arriving from his native village of Hnushinak, tap-tapped from the street onto the matte-glazed windowpane in our single-but-spacious-room flat. With that window open, you can talk through the grates or pass things to a person standing on the sidewalk. The frames of other two windows in the room are simply nailed up.

He wanted the key to their house.

“Oh, sure, here you are!”

Now, his return to the town ended my career as a security guard at their place. Fare thee well, The Bhagavad Gita, and thee as well, O Procrustean couch!

My backache faithfully lingers by; however, tonight I'm in luck. The kitchen tap had trickled almost two pails of water before it was completely cut off.

December 5, __day 2 of 106__

At walking, the backache aggravates, especially in the morning, more so when moving downhill.

When at the Milk Factory I entered the Director's office, Valyo was yelling on the phone at the top of his lungs to share that the town had run out of flour, so the Bread Factory down here was stopped four days before. Then he rang off and, in a lower tone of voice broke the news: there was no milk either.

Fortunately, when I stepped out of the Milk Factory gate, Sashic was passing by in his car and pulled up for me to hop in—he was heading uphill to the downtown. On the main square I walked to the paper's two-storied Editorial Building. There, Ms. Stella, the Responsible Secretary, handed me two articles for rendering into Russian.

Despite the differently named authors, the things were remarkable clones of each other—Patriotic Jar-Rattle of an Empty Oil-Drum rolled downward along all bumps and potholes in the road. To save my ears, I went at both hammer and tongs to render their double din into Russian as soon as I could for riddance's sake.

In my position of an oddball not as yet officially installed, I nonetheless occupied the vacant desk whose sitter was on her pregnancy leave.

Wagrum, a reporter at the Russian Section, fluttered in, perched onto his desktop, and shared his utmost surprise at the shameful procrastination with my inauguration to the Renderer position. Some dickhead bureaucratic tricks, if you ask him. A solid monkey business! And he took wing again…

The too close burst of a protracted salvo made me jump, triggering off my personal response to occurrences of the kind.

A sudden heat whiplash through the belly up to the chest combined with a piercing grip at the back of my neck. Splashclutch! On the sensation’s peak, the grip goes slacker and starts to dissolve in the inaudible fizzle of the receding heatwave.

(…too wordy, buddy. Put it straight: “Scared stiff, I felt all funny; a crush of butterflies in the stomach.”…)

As it turned out, the salvo styled up the interment of the four youths killed by a single shell in their dugout in Krkjan: the Azeri part of the town on the commanding height to the northwest…

When I came home from the paper, Valyo's kids, Sego and Gaia, were on a visit to our place. Sahtik and I played cards with them, the kids’ game of “buy-it-or-flip.” Roozahna—still under punitive restrictions after the latest of her pranks—was not allowed to partake and bravely took her medicine, sticking around as a scornful onlooker.

The game was put off, the little party cheered up by the arrival of Sashic's wife, Carina, with their boy and girl. She brought a present for our Ahshaut: some hand-me-down footwear from her son Tiggo. All went on as merrily as marriage bells until an hour later Sashic pulled up and honked by our communication window to pick up all of our guests.

At ten pm, Sahtik and the kids started for the Shelter, a former tailor's shop on the ground floor of a dingy two-storied apartment block a little bit up the street. The room enjoys swell popularity in the neighborhood—its only window does not face the slopes from where they shoot Alazan missiles at the town. About a dozen women with two or three kids each spend nights in that six-by-six meter room.

Through the dark I saw my family over to the Shelter, carrying Ahshaut in my arms. A wordless walk it was under the snappy din of shooting out in Krkjan, beneath the stars indifferently gleaming from above. Our slow convoy proceeded in time to the kid’s breath. Wrapped in his blanket, he slept, pressed to my chest full of mute bitter butterflies in my heart.

December 6, __day 3 of 106__

I started at midnight and for two solid hours kept treading—to-and-fro—the2 sidewalk. Though the bastard usurped the noble title, being a low-grade SOB—ruts, potholes, and tree roots bulging through wrinkled asphalt: all the mess was at the ready to trip you and fell you on the route. Yet, there was no choice; with a couple of enamel pails I fetched water home, 'cause my missus was in the mind for a capital washing. Up and down I trod.

Down—to the Three Taps below the red slab set on its rib by the theater’s rear, carved in a huge bas-relief of three masks: comic, tragic, and silly with a tap under each.

Up—back to our hall-alias-outer-kitchen where all the containers in our household waited agape to get their fill. In and out.

Dog-eat-dog gunfire kept swelling in Krkjan—up and down the whole slope; bazooka booms too, to-and-fro.

Stepping out for another of the numberless downs, I marked silent forms across the road, right opposite our three windows. Their white garbs sent a ghostly gleam through the darkness. The ghosts lugged two drums from the upper Twin Bakery to its Twin—ten meters down the street. The polished metal of the drum sides shortly glittered under the lamppost.

Seems like the hearsay reported by my mother-in-law of some flour airlifted here by choppers had come from a trustworthy source. Up and down.

On the theater’s back porch a group of men stood chatting and smoking. A greedy loner split off, descending to the foot of the stairs to have a joint all to himself, unshared. In and out.

Nearing the Three Taps for the damnteenth time, I encountered a couple of guys trudging in the counter-direction. “Hey, bro,” a husky voice thickly slurred in Russian, “don't go there. They shoot.”

A split second later, a stray bullet from Krkjan confirmed the alert, whipping along the crossroad by the Three Taps. “Oh!” commented the folks in the lee of the theater.

About four in the morning, the town immersed in such an incredible calm that Sahtik and my mother-in-law left the Shelter to bring the kids home…

My mother-in-law shared news about a lad of twenty killed this night fighting on the Krkjan slope.

Same date, evening

About eleven am, I took Chief for a walk to the central park… A sunny day under the pale blue sky. The waves of hills snoozing motionless in the late autumn's haze. Empty park alleys under thick rags of fallen leaves—withered, brittle, rustling at each our step… The ever-present gunfire—distant, yet sturdy.

Leaving the park, we met Yuri, a co-owner and part-time attendee at the video games pavilion next to the entrance-exit steps. His business is closed now, the zeal of digital shooting fans at its lowest.

Yuri is the model of a small-shop keeper, oriental and plump, all sweet smiles, blissful squints, and immense happiness from seeing you at long last. Just a handshake caught betwixt both of his palms—gently tender and, oh, so soft—runs your train of thought straight to Orgasm Terminal. Why the hell did he marry at all? One may wonder.

After the regular greetings and exchange of regards were enacted, he amazed me with one more puzzle: bowing all the way down to Chief and kissing his hand for a good-bye…

Chief and I crossed the Upper-ring-road circling the mighty pines of Piatachok and strolled up Lenin Street when I marked Galyo in a group of four coming. He acknowledged me with a wink. Going home after a shooting night shift in Krkjan, I suppose. Though the buddies looked more like peasants than gunmen.

Galyo and I worked at the same construction gig, SMU-8. Gas pipelines to the Karabakh villages, but then smart asses from the State Emergency Committee came to power in Moscow. Next morning I resigned from work because it's a state organization and I didn't feel like slaving for a state ruled by clowns. The SMU boss had a hearty laugh yet he signed my application. In a couple of days the GKChP putsch in Moscow was cracked but I stayed jobless. That's when I started full-time raising the walls of our future house…

When the walls were finished and the general situation in Stepanakert grew grossly grim, my mother-in-law advised me to look for a job at the local newspaper, as I was such a bookworm. She and the Chief Editor had the same family name. No relatives though, notwithstanding the fact that the origin village of both is the same. Accidentally so…

We walked as far as the Corner Grocery. At the nearby news stall I bought a Russian digest of the local daily with my maiden-flight rendering on page four. A whoopee feature trumpeted in the most unbridled one-horse-burg style a skinny booklet of patriotic rhymes churned up by a local poet. Both the literary critic and the producer of the greatest achievement of poetry alive were from the paper’s building, the doors of their respective offices facing each other in the corridor on the second floor.

All day long the crowd, queuing at the Twin Bakeries, buzzed and shrieked right opposite the three windows of our single-but-spacious-room flat.

Already at dusk, Valyo tapped from the sidewalk onto the pane in our communication window to hand in the jar which I had left at the Milk Factory. Full of milk now.

It's five past eight pm and quiet so far.

December 7, __day 4 of 106__

At three am, a crushing detonations in the lower parts of the town frightened Roozahna out of her bed into a fit of uncontrollable tremors. Sahtik could hardly talk her into keeping calm. Before six in the morning, two more Alazan volleys ripped up the night. Ahshaut slept manfully through everything.

At dawn, the roaring monsters withdrew to their lairs, swapped for the screams and shrieks of humans in the raging crowds in a desperate scramble by the Twin Bakeries, just opposite the three unbearably large windows in our single-but-spacious-room flat. All day long, the fluctuations in their squash-and-shout made a kind of mighty surf background to our domestic affairs.

Carina and Orleana, Valyo's wife, called in to leave their children at our place. Sahtik joined her two sisters, and the three of them went out to pay their last tribute to the demised first headmistress of them all—at respective intervals, of course. The old lady lived next door to their mother's and died of natural causes.

I visited the building site of our future house to collect a bagful of apples and an armful of tree roots chopped off when digging the foundation trenches before I had started laying the walls. Since summertime, they had dried up enough for tomorrow's barbecue.

On my way there, I saw two Soviet Army armored vehicles bowling busily along, each one decked with a squad of five to seven soldiers. The braves had black warpaint on their mugs. The combat smear was applied at personal discretion, obviously—from finger-thick mud masks over the whole visage up to a soft touch or two at the cheekbones. Tastes differ.

However, no warrior eschewed the battlefield Schwarzeneggerization, not even their captain in a civilian beanie. On they rolled past the gazing sidewalks, feeling noticeably complimented by the public attention.

If some complete outsider to this here-and-now saw us just poke along or tread busily toward our daily chores under the constant din of the assault rifles in Krkjan, they'd certainly take us for a town of the deaf.

Don’t let our out-of-place appearance fool you, o, Stranger! We do hear the enraged rounds and each of us has inside funny feeling of their own…

By nine pm it turned completely quiet. Some creepy silence.

Could it be, I'm too strict with Roozahna?

December 8, __day 5 of 106__

Yesterday at eleven pm, Sahtik had to bring Ahshaut back home: he couldn't sleep in the Shelter because of a baby crying in the same room. She left him with me and went back to Roozahna, who gets funky when alone in a crowd of strangers.

From midnight till one am, I again was bringing water from the Three Taps: Sahtik's capital washing isn’t over yet.

My legs mastered navigating on their own the serrated terrain of the sidewalk. Their prowess let me fully enjoy the quietude of the night. No shooting at all. How sweet the peace is!

(…as sweet as a piss after six cans of beer—what a bliss!…)

At dawn, two mighty explosions in Armenavan—another uphill outskirt side by side with Krkjan. The big bangs did not disturb Ahshaut; he slept on bravely… Later in the morning, the two of us had a walk to the Bazaar after some herbs for today's feast—a synchronized celebration of Roozahna's birthday, almost a week after the proper date, and Ahshaut's, upcoming in a fortnight.

The usual feasting team of sisters-with-husbands-with-children turned up for the event as well, as our landlord and landlady, Armo and Nasic, respectively, and their three kids.

my mother-in-law was not present, attending the funeral of the late neighbor—the headmistress of all three of her daughters.

Now, it's half past eleven. Sahtik and Roozahna have gone to the Shelter. Ahshaut is left to sleep at home tonight.

Silence outdoors.

December 9, __day 6 of 106__

The night was shattered by bombardments: seven volleys of six to ten Alazan missiles each were shot at different hours… A missile from the second volley exploded fairly near our place. There followed a stretch of deafening silence in the street, followed by hasty footsteps and agitated male voices: “Where? How?”

A not too distant voice called out, “Hit here!”

Ahshaut slept okay through all the night.

Stretched on my bed, I followed through the matte glass in the panes of our three—so absurdly wide!—windows the languid flame traces of Alazans flying toward their earsplitting crash.

At a lull between the attacks, I had an oddly protracted dream:

… the bombardment's over I'm coming back home through the raw rays of the rising sun midst a silent crowd walking and an old woman—dark and strange—asks me to help and immediately puts a girl of nine on my back to carry on I catch the legs of the kid bestriding me and feel through her brittle stockings that her left leg is missing—cut at the knee—and the old hag plods after me fast-talking the small Ira-girl that now all's gonna be all right and when we split off I enter our room just in time to hear Sahtik's call from the outside kitchen I have a visitor and going over there I'm confronted with a close-up of a hen spread out on the asphalt floor with its head chopped off a second before and the bird wriggles its neck ending with a pulpy ringlet of raw meat while the girl that I carried along stands by and she turns up to me the smile on her face shadowed by lank bangs of her dark straight hair falling over the brow to her eye-sockets filled instead of eyes with just seamless patches of pinch-tight skin…

It's a quarter to ten am. The night is over, and Ahshaut is playing with his wooden blocks. Sahtik has dropped in and stepped out to ring up her sisters. Roozahna, reportedly, is sleeping in the Shelter.

My mother-in-law went to her workplace to wash floors in the two-storied building of The Soviet Karabakh. Which is, actually, her job.

Same date, evening

At eleven am, I turned up at my soon-to-be workplace just to find the renderers' locked up. I went upstairs to Ms. Stella's office, and she informed me there was no stuff for translating.

Back at home, Sahtik announced her intention to take the kids to the downhill part of town to shelter for the night in the basement of Orleana's apartment block.

Not a reasonable idea if I were asked. Yet my humble opinion remained wisely corked up. Now, five stories above your head are as insecure as two. However, a long walk, a change of place, and doing something—however senseless it might seem to a certain smartass—would do her more good than just sitting and waiting for nothing good.

Then Sahtik spoke of her funny feeling caused by a sudden fright. She feels an icy curd started up within her, tightening to become real hard.

(…quite contrary to the decompressing heatwave over my innards in the goddamn splashclutch…)

We set off in the fall drizzle, never letting up all this day.

Roozahna mouthed off nonstop about missiles, shelters and stuff until Sahtik, emerging from her dismayed thoughts, ordered the girl shut up. My seized up back grumbled under the weight of the bag with victuals and kids' clothes, so I kept silent too. And only Ahshaut, perked by having an all-out walk, time and again issued yells of delight…

Walking back home alone, I was as slow-go as that ceaseless drizzle. Yet, a couple of times the sun peeped through the clouds to set tiny raindrops a-glitter.

By the Department Store I met my former workmates from the pipeline constructing SMU-8, a couple of horny-palmed lads from Baluja village. Vartan asked if I had enrolled in a Phedayee group. His hand stretched out up-palm went sawing air across his chest to hint at my beard.

“Nope,” sez I, "I have not. Besides, guerrillas can’t claim beards as their property, a kinda league badge. Look at artists and tramps, they have a more time-honored right to sport it.”

Further uphill I encountered Murad, a KRUZ truck driver, barging down along the sidewalk as any mortal biped, though he did it as bulkily as his bull-truck. We just halloed each other.

One block higher, at the next crossing, I exchanged a courtly nod with Guiro, a gaffer from SMU-8, hanging uselessly around on the opposite side of Kirov Street—a white-collar remains a white collar.

Near the theater I was saluted by a group of my former pupils from the Seidishen Village School. They already had adolescent looks, with that dawn on their upper lips. Kids can't but grow up. These village boys are growing up into a war.

At eight pm I went out to make a call to Orleana's on the payphone round the corner. For half a minute I listened to long beeps in the receiver. Everybody's gone down to the basement shelter, I guess.