The Ficuses in the Open

Half an hour later I had supper with my mother-in-law. Then she left for the Shelter. A mattress and blanket stay there on a permanent basis to stake off their sleeping place.

December 10, __day 7 of 106__

It was a hard day's night, and through my sleep I heard only one missile attack—they say there were more—followed by the too loud bangs of the legitimate, Soviet army artillery guns. They were fired from the nearby garrison right next to the Upper Park. A furious answer to an Alazan missile gone astray?

I fell back to sleep and had a loathsome wet dream of sticking it in but feeling nothing, neither felt she—who?!—and didn't care a pin to conceal her resentment. Which of my wrongdoings called for punishment with so devastating a nightmare?

At noon, I ventured to Orleana's to take Sahtik with the kids back home. Heading downhill, I dropped in at the theater to partake in the referendum on independence for this country under bombardments. Sahtik voted on our way back.

(…so, we did it on the road… Anybody saw us?…)

At three pm, the so-long-and-eagerly-craven-for event took place in the Chief Editor's office: Maxim signed my job application. Starting tomorrow, I am (nominally) a sidekick reporter at the local newspaper but actually in charge of Armenian-Russian translations. Because throughout its glorious history, The Soviet Karabakh was always bilingual, the vernacular issues duplicated in Russian for the Big Brother to check the consistency thereof with the current imperial course.

The wise provision allowed for my kissing goodbye to unemployment. I’ve embraced the position of translator for the following three weeks, till January 1. And then—quoting Maxim, the Chief Editor—“as God will dispose.”

His concluding invocation set me on alert to heed the noise in the streets on my way home.

“You should've seen,” a Soviet army officer said to his mate marching along, “what a f—ing mess that Alazan’s made of my hotel room!”

In the following couple of gossips, a half block nearer to our flat, a Russian military officer's wife under a finger-thick makeup mask responded to her companion, “Yeah, I agree!” Loud and shrill, to drive it home to random passersby how readily she can agree.

From four pm till half past eight, I was fixing up a basement compartment in the five-story apartment block over the crossroad by the Twin Bakeries.

The musty air in the cemented catacombs moved in a busy stir: the buzz of voices, the rasping of a handsaw, hammers knocking, men ferrying through the trunk corridor in the basement pails of rubble and litter out of their would-be shelters.

One of the compartments, though, was overlooked by shelter-seekers. My mother-in-law conveyed the intelligence to Sahtik and, consequently, I was instructed to go over and inspect it.

I went there and found the mentioned compartment, dark and silent. A flickering match disclosed the mains running loosely along the bare concrete walls. A shuttle trip home after a bulb. I attached it to the mains and, in the steadfast light, took a turn about to have a look.

The view squeezed a tiny whistle of understanding out of me. The naked bulb’s light showed clearly why no one had staked a claim to the room. Some dreadful lump of work had to be done to carve a relatively habitable place out of the six-by-six-meter room..

Room? Sooner a dump filled up to the ceiling with heaps of discarded ventilation fragments, boxes, tins, bottles, bits and pieces of all descriptions, earth, masonry blocks, worn-out tires, and suchlike whatnots.

Fluffy layers of black dust coated the landscape, and cobweb festoons sagged copiously, crisscross, bringing the picture to utmost perfection… So it was the only compartment to choose from.

(…poor Robinson Crusoe! How could you possibly come to this!…)

After two hours of concentrated efforts, all of the sizable objects and things were copulated into each other and stacked up into one half of the room. At that point arrived the reinforcement—our landlord Armo together with his son Arthur, a boy in his late teens, and Romah, the adopted son of a single mother living next door to Armo's house. Normally, they all took refuge in the cellar under the floorboards in our single-but-spacious room, descending there by a steep flight of stairs directly from the yard.

Sahtik rallied them by advertising the advantages of the underground basement under the apartment block: a shelter where the explosions’ din is almost inaudible, the ceiling made of reinforced concrete slabs—not just inch-thick wooden planks.

Armo took to shoveling the earth and litter into pails; the rest of us—the two boys and I—were taking it out from the basement. By our incessant shock-work, we freed space enough for half a dozen cots and a table. Then the women came and swept the concrete floor. Later, they hung some blankets and old rags to screen off the trash-store in the other half of the room. Thus, it acquired the looks of a standard wartime shelter.

It's half past ten pm, all of my family are over there now.

Armo, the landlord, ducked out of moving to the block's basement room. His wife, on second thoughts, balked at the idea and lined him up into sticking to the accustomed stall. Yeah, a cellar under the floorboards is not as safe as a shelter under the apartment block.

However, down here she queens over those of her neighbors who, having no cellars of their own, seek refuge in hers. Locking them out altogether is not a wise move in the present situation. Yet the option of leaving the cellar with her jams and pickles entirely to the neighbors' mercy is equally unthinkable.

It is a still and starry night outdoors. A muffled chitchat of the shelterers preparing for their night's repose is heard from under the scraped floorboards in our single-but-spacious room.

Good night, everybody.

December 11, __day 8 of 106__

The night was not too good for me. Instead of a sound sleep canceling all the troubles, I bogged in sticky insomnia.

At six in the morning, a major missile attack broke loose from all quarters. Severe bombardments were repeated every two to three hours today.

At nine sharp I was in the Editorial House to fill in the forms for my employment. There chanced to be only Ms. Rita, the Secretary of the Chief Editor. Her other position is that of Acting HR Manager, when not making coffee for the Boss and his visitors.

We had hardly started the action when a close round of Alazan blasts prompted her to apologize and take a hasty leave. I stayed alone in the whole building and, because the renderers' was locked, I kept sitting next to the Boss' office door in Rita's office-kitchen-anteroom.

At twenty-past-ten, Wagrum triumphantly pranced in. Know what? A dictaphone tape cassette sprang out of his pocket. See, huh? The recording of his interview from the day before yesterday with a Deputy of the USSR Supreme Soviet on a visit down here. Was Max in his office?

(… Boss should know once again what champ of a reporter sweats for this rag!…)

A sad pity. No fanfares. No one to be alerted of the hero's arrival. Alazan bursts made the Boss sit at home tight and steady.

The treasured cassette went back. The trifle of a key to the renderers' door lock was missing from Wagrum's pocket. Very likely, left at home. A rising star of journalism has more important things to care for, right?

He zipped out, and I—fed up with idling in the frigid anteroom—set off for the Town Military Commissar's to report a missing stamp in my military papers. The gap was spotted by Ms. Rita's experienced eye when looking through my military ID.

At the TMC I was met by Oleg Pronchenko in full uniform with major's insignia. The stink of the perfumes he wore reminded me of that broad wife from yesterday, boldly painted and ready to agree. He chose not to recollect our fleeting acquaintance and just abruptly indicated there was no one there. Okay, I ain't in no hurry—tomorrow's as good a day for me as this one.

Back home, I asked our neighbor lads, Romah and Arthur, for help and ferried a door from our Site to fix it up in the underground shelter for my family. The raw, doorless entrance made the compartment look like a primeval cave.

Then Sahtik took me for a little walk to find out the current whereabouts of Arega, the Senior Librarian at School 8. The lady was in charge of the key to the school library where Sahtik, a librarian, had our electric heater installed under her work-seat.

On the way, Robik, a lover of Arega and her husband's bosom friend, cut short our quest by fetching the appliance in question from his house's basement. In the ensuing shoptalk about their school affairs and schooling in general, Robik and Sahtik looked noticeably sad. I stood by wondering if it was caused by the subconscious libidinal current between the two. Desire's sad by definition.

Then the three of us—Sahtik, I, and the recovered heating device—returned home and (using a flowery cliche from the days of yore) "veiled off the Olympus summit with a golden cloud.” Scholarly speaking, it may be with sufficient accuracy stated that in the case of perfect sexual adjustment, even wartime conditions don’t have their say on the performance.

Another of the missile attacks took a shot at precipitating us, but in vain. We cum in a dignified manner and with the maximum pleasure attainable. Our concluding grunts added to the hilarious yells of the folks pouring in to shelter in the underfloor cellar beneath our bed.

Half an hour later, fixing up the door to the Underground compartment, and then the wires for the heater, I felt as slowed down as never before…

Now it's five to eleven pm, with an antiphony of Alazans and bangs of an answering cannon that measures the time outdoors.

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. His wife and kids shelter someplace in the town together with her parents.

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

December 12, __day 9 of 106__

An exemplary calm night was followed by a no less peaceful day. Machine-gun shooting has become one of those nagging yet petty trifles of no account by now.

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

The first 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 jaws and to offset the air chillness with rough smoke from their cigarettes. Still and all it's a good thing to have a workplace! And I tried to make a good beginning:

a) borrowed from Wagrum the key to duplicate it;

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

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

About three 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 an undertone, my mother-in-law sleeping, and I shaping and filing the duplicate key clutched with pliers.

At eight pm, my mother-in-law commenced to bake bread in the gas oven. I saw Sahtik and the kids to the Underground. There, Sahtik complained of unbearably cold draughts breaking into 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 the steady 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 an expensive fur affair on his head confronted me in the main tunnel. He demanded my explanations as to by what right I had cut off the air coming in for all the Underground. I let sleeping dogs lie and told him I hadn't sealed it up in toto, so some air was still getting in.

(…all things considered, my statement was true… well, to some extent. You bet he'd never dive into that dust maze to check the size of that extent…)

At home, my mother-in-law surprised me with her pensive question if I trusted in God after all. Supposedly, so queer an inquiry was instigated by some priest's visit to the Underground. He distributed there leaflets of a printed prayer and finger-thick Bible adaptation for for kids—short stories with candy pictures.

I responded that there were too many of Them; the overwhelming number clutters the way of my picking One as yet.

It's half an hour to midnight. My mother-in-law has just finished baking bread and left for 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 with its burst..

Fiat nox.

December 13, __day 10 of 106__

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 an 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 two to three meters above the ground as if arisen by the teeth of wind…

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

After the midday break, they summoned me to a general meeting in the Boss' office. A sizable space with single-rank rows of chairs each one run in tight formation under three walls. It was a solemn thank-you-and-good-bye affair to fling the gates wide open before a resigning veteran journalist.

The Boss, Arcadik, and one more member of the editorial upper crust took the floor, respectively, with their tribute speeches varying only in the orators' lens thickness index. They squeezed themselves out dry to put across one and exactly the same set of ideas: how it’s impossible to list the grand qualities of the departing vet. Unfortunately, all his life the man advanced in the wrong direction, deceived by those commies—not his fault, see? Nonetheless, our paper's door shall be kept open for him forever and a day… In the end, Ms. Stella presented the geezer with a sheaf of creamy rich carnations.

At home, I wallowed in our happy family life till ten 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 communication window. I had the usual heat whiplash up my chest. The heart went pit-a-pat. I went out to the sounds of beastly female shrieks in the street.

Some forty meters up the road, there was a house on fire. Clinks of glass going a-splinter, squeals of squaws in the bystanders’ crowd mixed up with angry demands from non-interfering males to give them fire extinguishers. The uproar was out-noised by the businesslike crunch of the fire devouring the house in high—about two-to-three-meter-tall—tongues of flame.

I recollected the red-clad Santa Clauses from my night dream.

Then there arrived a fire truck equipped with firefighters—never dreamed of—and in a couple of minutes they put the fire out. My mother-in-law stood in the throng, partaking in the subsiding lamentations. Her house is just ten meters off the one burned down.

Among the onlookers I also made out Sahtik, took her aside, and expressly asked her to go back to the kids.

In the absence of further entertainment, the crowd started to disperse. I spotted Nerses walking away and overtook him to arrange a visit to his place tomorrow at three thirty pm.

(The fortnight about St. Yuri's Day when serfs are free to seek another master is not over yet.)

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

December 14, __day 11 of 106__

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

It’s a day-off. Roozahna was taken by her biological father's sister to the girl’s grandparents. Sahtik, Ahshaut, and I had a downhill walk to the Department Store. On the way, we met Garrik, a grunt at Sashic's business. Excitedly, he shared the latest gossip about a missile fragment they found marked "Made in Turkey". Now they’re looking for means of shipping to the Soviet Empire's capital this corroborative evidence of an exterior force's involvement in our sovereign scramble.

(…they’re beating the dead horse, I’d say. Moscow will give no more ear to the case than Ankara…)

In the Department Store, they extravagantly put up for sale the goods kept normally 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 two buns also.

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 forties, who’s drifted here from a strange land within our mutual USSR, and the local woman ten years younger, divorced, having a pre-school daughter to raise.

As for me, a long since established fave of fate, I was in luck to find such a partner in life, as well as in sex. At this point in my lifespan, the grounds for romantic feelings are scarce and dwindling; yet, by heaven, I believe it's not 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 is no record of a female making both a good wife and 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 indeed to meet a fill for the gap…

At half past three 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 objective was to borrow The Bhagavad Gita, to which request Nerses immediately consented. In the follow-up chat, he outlined his current venture selling grapes from his garden at the Bazaar. The basement in the TMC Building, just opposite his house, serves as his nighttime hideout.

About four 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. They're in the Underground now. All's calm outdoors.

December 15, __day 12 of 106__

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

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

The shell bursts of a bombardment brought me back to the reality inside our room, which was as dark as 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 playmate at weekend bouts of our and Larissa-Vanya's families. Today she becomes a two-year-old.

In the evening, a tin tub was placed in the middle of our single-but-spacious room for the kids to bathe in turn. Sponging their sides, Sahtik remarked pensively that the simplest and most routine things seem weirdly odd amid the war raging around.

I concurred, admitting that some TV programs do seem absurd to me when it shells outdoors.

As my back starts to behave, I decided to resume my yoga exercises. Some asanas—even after such a pause—remained as feasible as they used to be.

It's half past nine pm. The family went to the Underground, but my mother-in-law is to come back for bread-baking.

An uproar of dogged shooting surges up in Krkjan.

December 16, __day 13 of 106__

A pretty gross bombardment they kicked up yesterday while I was bringing water to spend the time before my mother-in-law finished baking bread. A couple of times while shuttling with the pails along the sidewalk, I heard quite close whistles overhead. Bullets or missile fragments?

I soothed myself with the speculation that, of whatever nature they were, neither had my name on. What's the use of getting uptight after the threat is over? And I beseech you, Mars, O God of War, if one of those be more accurately addressed, then let it kill me flat and clear. No monkey tricks with curability, rendering, reanimation, and suchlike blithering drivel. One right through the temple would perfectly suffice, methinks.

The bombardment intensity grew to the point of forcing my mother-in-law to leave for the Underground. She trusted me to handle the last batch of bread put in the oven before I saw her out.

Today at nine am, I was at my workplace to find nobody in the whole Editorial House. For a couple of hours, I fiddled about the locked-up drawer in my desk. All my attempts at making a skeleton key fell flat. Full of shame and sadness, I gave up on the undertaking and just raped the lock open with a screwdriver.

From eleven till twelve am, Wagrum, Lenik, and Arcadik peeped in, respectively. Lenik asked if I would like to visit a room down the corridor to watch a game of chess. Most politely, I declined.

(…why on earth does Sahtik say I am an outright disaster in terms of sociability? I'm politeness itself…)

At noon I left a note on the desk for all who might be concerned about my pending return at one pm. Sashic and Carina with their children were at our single-but-spacious-room flat, having lunch. I presented Sahtik with the paper issue containing three voluminous renderings by me. Sashic promptly toasted the event; yet, reluctant to be back to work with vodka on my breath, I abstained.

I wolfed down my lunch and went to the Underground to fetch our heater. Yesterday, down there they forked out a brand-new, mighty-looking heater per compartment. I planned to take our old one to my workplace but changed my mind when Sahtik reminded me of the blackout we had been having since midnight.

At a stone's throw off the Editorial House, I met Arcadik strolling away with an unknown youth. Arcadik told me to go home as there was no work that day. I nodded most humbly and slowed down as if pondering alternative things to do. The maneuver was followed by a stealthy penetration into the Editorial House, smuggling The Bhagavad Gita under my coat breast.

In the renderers' I found my note on the desk flipped over and used for an unsigned communication dashed off across the backside—“We are not working today.”

What a smart thing this Bhagavad Gita is! And so mighty to stir and make you hit the road! It cut the anchorage and put in motion the very cornerstones in my concept of the origins of modern civilization. Those drifted to much more oriental quarters.

Now, I know where the Greeks ferreted out the ideas of countless universes and the tininess of atoms.

And the digits that I was taught to think of as Arabic came to the worldborn millennia before a single Arabian mathematician was conceived.

And the Fathers of the Church would become fans of the Trinity interpretation found in the Gita! They would admire such refined subtleties or anathematize them on sight!

Yet as usual, after the initial delight, there pops up one or another bitchy bitter word of "but"… At being told for the first time that the human soul is an immeasurably wee spark residing in the heart of each and every individual, I just give a shrug and say “Okay, why not?”