Читать книгу: «The Blog», страница 10
Who shoots at who is beyond comprehension, but all and everyone is shooting!.
And it’s not funny but very sad and difficult to live in a city where they shoot.
Abulfaz makes a telephone call to Nakhichevan, addresses the Chairman of the SC of the Autonomous SSR, 'Help me out,' says he, 'eh? Come on,' he says, 'eh? you’re Aliev, me too, moreover, both of us are from the same autonomy, eh?'
On June 9, Geidar arrives in Baku and a week later Abulfaz Gadirguluevich modestly, neither pomp nor surplus fuss, flies off to Nakhichevan to his native village of Keleky.
Another bloodshed-less transfer of power, hallelujah once again, if not to count those suffered in the period of mayhem shooting…
In the course of that internal strife, the Army of Self-Defense of Mountainous Karabakh liberated/grabbed five districts of Azerbaijan which initially, when all that Movement for Independence started, were not a part to the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region.
Where else if not to that sort of lamentable situation could lead “…the mistakes of the leadership in the relations with Russia”? (a citation from G. Aliev’s interview for the newspaper Коммерсантъ, ru.wikipedia.org/…/Алиев,_Гейдар_Алирза_оглы).
At the presidential election on October 3, 1993, Geidar Aliev put together 98.8% of votes and immediately joined CIS.
For such exemplary behavior, the Azerbaijani forces were allowed to launch, in December 1993, a major offensive.
“By spring 1994, the offensive died out [79, same site], the armed forces were exhausted [80, same site].
Then followed an equally hapless offensive by Armenian side and parliamentarian structures of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the unrecognized RMK signed the Bishkek protocol calling for cease of fire at night on 8 to 9 May [83]”.
Thus ended, to some extent, the first war for independence of Mountainous Karabakh and, resultantly, I got kicked out from the PC by the SC of the RMK, as long as presence of an analytic-translator was simply pointless at the time of peace.
And it’s a pity. In part. Yes, it is, because I had turned a state-of-the-art professional in the trade and in my monthly reports to the Supreme Council of the RMK foretold the ceasefire with the accuracy of 1 (one!) week without any prompts from the BBC, and show-politologists at Russian TV or any other mass-media clowns. Yay!
A week later, on the basis of the position liberated from me, they created the Analytical Department by the Supreme Council of the RMK of 35 employees (one of whom not a female) headed by an experienced nomenclature cadre, amateur philatelist (who certainly should know what side stamps are licked on), and very soon the connoisseur persuaded the RMK leadership that the most urgent need of the RMK was issuing a post stamp of their own.
(Ara! At the auction in 100 years this day, stamp collectors would bid millions for a single one of this shit!
Dig a hole in a secure place, stick it in, and your great-grand kids would thank you for the thought.)
Active hostilities transformed into the trench confrontation of posts, where monthly or once in two months the enemy sniper picks and shoots another boy, oftener to death than not.
Although there happened excesses too, alike to the massacre at the post in the vicinity of the village of Hatsi…
Phedai Valyo and the 14-man unit of the post shift from Hoctemberian District in Armenia went to relieve the 14 soldiers of the previous shift nearby the mentioned village.
The post comprised two 20-meter trenches meeting at obtuse angle, and a dugout. The fresh shift were coming unaware that the post had been captured by an Azerbaijani unit.
The moment the Hoctemberian guy leading their Indian file turned round the corner in the trenches, he was knifed to prevent the alarm. His follower in the file was too close not to hear.
A fierce gunfight burst forth ending in Valyo and other shifters’ retreat into a field of wheat where they were joined by his buddy Syamo, who'd been doing his turn with the previous shift.
Syamo related it was his watch by the machine gun at night, when the weapon slowly moved away dragged off by the crept up Azerbaijanis. He pulled the trigger yet the machine gun jammed. And the assaulting force rushed to attack firing their guns. Syamo jumped out of the trench, and rolled down the slope having no time to alert the buddies sleeping in the dugout…
The group, hiding themselves among the wheat ears, contacted over the walkie-talkie their regiment. Reinforcement came together with one tank. The Azerbaijanis fight back from the trenches. The tank went over and waltzed from above burying them in the trench.
After the fight was over, they dug out 36 bodies. The casualties on the Armenian side amounted to 14 (the previous shift-unit minus Syamo plus the Hoctemberian guy).
It took a long time to find all the ears from the Armenian bodies, still they collected all of them.
Valyo was loading the killed Armenians in the arrived KAMAZ dump to take them to the morgue, and his uniform front got smeared all over.
After unloading to the Stepanakert morgue, he was suggested to break the news to the families of the local boys. He answered, ‘Go and tell yourself’.
Then he went to his parents' house to change…
Armenian side contacted the Azerbaijani side over the radio suggesting them to collect the bodies. The answer was, ‘This is Azerbaijani state, let them stay in their Homeland’.
In the interment ceremony participated a light back how digger BELARUS…
The Stepanakert Military Registration and Enlistment Office (MREO) was repaired and became what it had always been before they used it for the phedai headquarters.
The wider gorges were barred with cables stretched across, high so high, with coiling pieces of wire to hang down at certain intervals so as to discourage some or another fighter-bomber from sneaking up thru the air space in that gorge.
The Supreme Council of the RMK worked hard, and carefully contemplated each and every of the laws copy-pasted from the SC of Armenia before to pass them second-hand, for the local use (yes, at times with the same typos overlooked still back in Armenia but who does ever need to open them those constitutions?).
The chairman of the committee in charge of distributing the relief for the population received thru Armenia (long ago, at the very beginning of the Movement), moved over to Yerevan but first… (eee! fuck him!.) and became an oligarch there.
The nomenclature consolidated into 32 ministries, like, Foreign Affairs, Defense, Monument Protection… a hell of a lot, actually (in Swiss they have got only 7 but they are dull and lacking inventiveness and imagination).
And how not to mention the Ministry of Labor, Ministry of Employment, Ministry of Sports, Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Education, Finance Ministry, Ministry of Patriotic Work Among the Younger Generation, Ministry of Philately, and…, and…, and…
Komandushchi remained the Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Self-Defense (certain persons had to learn pronouncing the letter «щ» to facilitate a smoother personal promotion). He got awarded the rank of General (Armenian, yet spiffed in the late USSR generals' outfit) and the title of the Hero of Nation (or something like that) as well as the Order of Battle Cross First Class or a sort of.
He had already seen to the prophylactic cleansing (which is the must in any liberation/independence war: fidels have to get rid of che gevaras because the horse named Bolivar would not carry two at once) – the field commanders of dangerously outstanding popularity fell by the hands of unknown saboteurs on the difficult Karabakh roads…
It was much easier with the fighters from Diaspora. You keep them for a month in the Shushi prison, set them free and they are no more around. Taking off with the afterburner. The trick is to let them out one by one, not in a bunch.
And, by the bye, them those Diaspora are so naive! While down here for the asphalt and general improvement of sidewalks in Engels Street (presently Manukian Street, whose whole length does not extend over 360 meters) they plumped $6 000 000, still over there they launch the annual TV marathon collecting cash for Mountainous Karabakh.
A few brothers-in-arms of Komandushchi also became Generals and moved to the Yerevan’s Ministry of Defense, and when some local plumb loco there parked his Jeep at the General’s Parking Spot by the Ministry, his vehicle got riddled with bullets from the General’s handgun – who do you wanna jump, bitch? Go and look for spare parts now!
In the impenetrable dark along main street of Stepanakert (former Kirov Street, presently Freedom Fighters Street) at night switch on half a dozen electric bulbs from loose wires fixed above the tables of seeds and soft drinks traders. Each bulb brought out of the cave darkness in the stair-case entrance to the building of the respective entrepreneur…
Across every other street or lane, black cloth strips stretched taut above the road—two or three in a street, or five, or more, depending on the street length—to perpetuate for a couple of years the memory of those who left that street to perish in battles:
«Арам – 18»
«Размик – 42»
«Армен – 24»
«Виген – 31»
«Тиго – 19»…
They lived here before the war and those figures indicate their age when it ended. For them…
For the survived, the war is not over but lurked to get regrouped and burst up anew from where you’d never guess to expect…
* * *
Bottle #22:~ Chums Will Be Chums ~
OK, fine—(kept he persuading himself)—let’s don’t jump at premature conclusions but preserve sane prudence and keep up approaching the whole matter logically or even arithmetically, which might suit it even better for the simplicity’s sake.
So, you’ve popped up in the city whose name you’re not aware of.
The point of your second entry coincides with your previous exit which portal is, currently, leaned on and sealed with your ass freshly kicked by that old lady. Esma or whatever it was, her name.
Ain’t it your ass? Ain’t the wall hard?
Both answers are in the affirmative. In toto so… Which makes it (+) 2 to begin with…
But why that fist time Peccy chose to drop her load off nearby the Chris’ bench? By that pear tree? That is the question wrapped wholly in absolute dark.
The problem (even when leaving aside the cause for the pear-tree dryness so as to keep things simpler) was effing enough to surprise Einstein himself if caught unprepared. Meanwhile he, this poor wretch with his ass to the wall, in his still pretty rickety and befogged state of mind, he wouldn’t rule out the need in even two fucking Einsteins.
2 + 2?
Hmm, looks fundamentally hopeful…
So, if his logical arithmaticity does not play tricks on the accuracy of his calculus, then the most consequent step would be unplugging his butt from this here Point 2's hardiness and choosing a suitable trajectory or, rather, course towards Point 1.
Conceivably, that destination was as good as any other for a rendezvous with a chance revelation or a hint at something besides his own name which, by the way, he determined single-handedly, no prompts from no Einsteins nor from any other outsiders…
If we assume this street for a line drawn between two bars in its opposite ends, then Point 1 bisects, in a manner, that line into two (yes! he knew there was one more 2 somewhere!) halves. Not a too short leg to that figured out midpoint, however, right now he's not quite pressed by any overly urgent arrangements…
He tore his ass from the wall..
. . . . .
Yep, here it is. The bench. Oh, Chris…
That old nutty babbler. Sorry for the geezer…
A couple of meters off, the chrome in the rims of a wheel-chair draws glistening supp next to the dried rind of the tree. A figure in a checkered slouch hat fills the seat. The stilled head dropped motionless onto the cover of a plain gray blanket swaddling the chest armpit-to-armpit.
The slumbering paralytic left alone to wander in his dreams of the days past… The board of Douglas VC-54C, Sacred Cow's her handle, buzzes thru the clouds transporting him to where he’ll deliver his authentic autograph… yes, three on one sheet… an ambulatory villa in the Crimea… perambulating allies…
He approached the bench, sat down. Yes, exactly over there, five meters to the right, his bare feet contacted the heat of the torrid asphalt at that his first landing.
What a naive greenhorn he was then! Yes. Breaking the back of his head before Peccy got it what was his want…
As if now he’s any cleverer except for the acquired, by pure chance, skill at driving that derelict shell.
However, it was inside her darkness that the revelation of his name came to enlighten him…
"Kenty! How’s it going! How've ya been, dude?"
As if from the synchronous bite of two tropic mosquitoes, he started vigorously, at a loss which one to scratch first off.
A furtive roundabout look… damn! I’m deranged… started to hear them those fucking voices…
"Stop jolting, bud, or They will get it. Just put on you’re baby-sitting the sparrows."
"What fuc… ahem!… sparrows! Who’re you? Where?"
"Oh, right… just a sec."
On the sidewalk around Inokenty’s feet shod in possum skin moccasins, issuing lively twits began to hop a couple of gray-brown sparrows who’ve just popped up from nowhere.
The third one impudently perched upon the silver buckle over the right foot arch.
He felt kinda fucked up… hmm, well… that is to say like fucking intoxicated (somewhat better now, and do not forget that proza.ru is a decent site of the exemplary normativeness, thru and thru so).
"That’s it. Now, be careful not to address me, we don't want Them catch a whiff. The damn hicks belief I’m good for nothing better than spoon-bending with a glare."
"How did you guess my name? Another ability thru trisomy?"
"It’s you who is a Downism boob. Mine is a different case. And there’s a hell of a lot I know of you. Even what’s written up there on your arm."
Reflexively, Kenty clutched the cloth in the sleeve of his blue frock coat – the uniform of junior navy officer in the British Navy sewn by the tailor named Trevor Priggs in Seville Row, London, in spring 1786.
"What?!"
"UF-3! That’s what!"
He startled. 2Bsure, they were the signs in the only tattoo on his whole body that often irked him to white heat by their inexplicability.
"And what’s the meaning?"
"Aramis, you fool, it means 'Aramis'. 'UltraFucker – 3' is what you are. We were three there in the team of UltraFuckers: Athos, Parthos, and Aramis. I’m marked UF-2. Wanna me show?"
"No-no! You’ll catch cold or They will dig it. And who are They?"
"For you it’s too early yet… Yo, dude, d’you indeed get amnesia-screwed so severely or there happen still some flashbacks?"
"I’ve recollected my given name."
"Oh-oh! They weren’t stingy on your behalf… Two vaccinations as a minimum… But what a daredevil UF you was! Spread them left and right in Street Fighter, both hands tied behind your back!.
So we threw our team of 3 together. Invincible UFs! It became a byword in the crowd of gamesters “UFs will make you wet your pants!” and instead ‘fuck off’ they’d say ‘Go and challenge UFs!’
Yep. That was some time…
Remember how we’ve been screwing those Mongos to pieces on Asteroid T-4?. Well, yes, you can’t… You’re vaccinated…
Then you somehow began to keep off… delved into those 2 Impassable Levels and disappeared… untraceable…"
"Yo, and how’s Athos?"
"Athos is no more, Kenty. Croaked our UF-1. Tragically and teragigabitedly…
That time a new shooter rolled they out in the Net, under the name of Warring Maya, snuffing aliens against the backdrop of Hindus mythology. Shiva, Vishnu and stuff. The soundtrack from those Basta's clips—shrieks of baboon… total jerk…
The engine itself hidden in the Cloud, G&PaaS, you know…
Well, you unavailable by that time, so we started together, two of us… Armory, ammo selected and off we go. All as always in any other shooter…
Now, we drop into some basement vault. O, those walls! I didn’t like them at once. So, I yell, ‘Athos! It’s a set up! Let’s get out!’ But he, ‘No fear! We’ll pull thru! Don't chicken out! Button 27 and God’s Might by our side! Besides, I’ve grabbed a couple of cool shortcuts from Counter Strike! Woohoo!’
That’s when it gushed. From all the walls… Green, disgusting…
Later they reanimated me in this here wheel-chair-fixed variant. As for Athos – light be the bites filling his grave, and the memory of him in ROM both radiant and undeletable…"
Nearing the tree in a gliding gait with obvious skidding due to the left leg paresis, appeared a swollen female figure in a flannelette robe of fading printed pattern depicting twining chromosomes. With audible pants and puffs, grabbed she the handles in the wheel-chair back.
An awkward movement of the clinodactyl pinkie caught on the pulled down hat.
The headpiece dropped into the blanketed lap and went on down to land onto the ground.
Moaning from the sedulity of her efforts, the pusher started to fold down, the way transformers do, so as to reach…
In terror, watched Kenty the spheroid, shaved to the bare glare, head of his buddy in radiation burns and wine stains, the legacy from serial chemotherapy.
Not a single hair in the brows, the eyelids snarled in folds above the corners of the eyes near the flat bridge of the nose and—the most horrid of all!—the absolute emptiness in smooth eyeballs: neither irises nor pupils but only flat empty spans, like those in antique statues, where the sculptor has not yet painted the eyes in.
"By the bye, Kenty, Athos thanks you dearly for the nice rags."
"What eff… else… rags?"
"The tartan jacket, black-and-yellow. Or did they impaired your short-term memory too?"
Without answering, UF-3 grimaced a warning mien in the direction of the amoeba-shaped form who, a-snarl-a-grunt, was raking the hat out from under the wheel…
"Take it easy, partner! She’s not of Them. An under-aborted. Jérôme Lejeune, from the French Resistance, der Artz in the Block of Selective Eugenics, is an ardent opponent to abortions."
"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.
