Читать книгу: «The Blog», страница 16
So, my account stayed blocked, and now I don’t even know what happened to it.
It's a pity, of course, 5 years of rural life, people, animals, plants, clouds, flowers, stones… 2 pictures a day.
I counted on FB as an additional storage space. Alas, everything went to the hell, because soon the hard drive with the photos melted.
My bad! I should have stored the pics on Google Disk or made a backup laser disk copy!
But I have no complaints about Zuckenberg and I don’t call him a “f@cking b1tch” in the manner of certain irresponsible FB users.
The life experience prompts me that the Mister is nothing but another of showcase dolls like, say… (no! no! no! I haven’t uttered anything of the sort!. it’s not me! and not about Him! never! God give Him health without bounds and now, and forever, and for all His further presidential terms…)
When you don't have a musical ear, you can't really count on the careers of Bach, Van Cliburn or Tatiana Bulanova. More so if you don’t have a voice either, and your feel of tempo fails, at times.
But if you do want it? So really badly?
Then you download and install Muscore, audacity and other software of your preference, and you buy a $2 plastic microphone used for Skype or Zoom, and you set up a YouTube account named Studio Village.
Haha! Long live the Internet! Hooray YouTu.. what the fuck?! One of the numbers produced by painful efforts of all the Studio staff does not download…
Not a big deal for a seasoned Internet user here, you just contact the support service and, on exchanging 2-3-4 mails, you figure out the sequence of buttons to be pushed to get to where you should type in some shit or another. Smart boy! You have built up one more muscle in understanding software materiel!
But on YouTube, such numbers simply do not work, to won the right of contacting the support service, please present 1000 subscribers to your channel.
Who do they think I am? Damn Bach? Or fucking Tatiana Bulanova?
Okay (to quote the locomotive rumbling over Anna Karenina), take it easy…
However, when that same YouTube wiped out one of the Studio's artifacts because by that my anti-war number I violated the rules of the YouTube Community, it wafted a pretty familiar stink.
HEYAA!. WELCOME! ZERO ON YOUR PASTIME AT THE GLOBCAMP!
(Persons of different orientations, are requested to use applicable entry gates by pressing appropriate buttons:
[|_ Twitter |_]: (tweet your chirp!),
[|_ LinkedIn |_]: (your glorious career just a button-click off!),
[|_ Instagram |_]: (You! Are! So! Beautiful! To you!!),
[|_ Tik-Tok |_]: (fik-fuck-fec & pookie-lookie!),
see more…)
Nothing doing, I made a U-turn from the U-tube gate and deployed the anti-war copy on https://vimeo.com/727663083, while that platform had not yet been bought out by Google for the global edification of shepherded communities.
(For those over-keen and quick-witted, I admit:
1) yes, the first 4 lines in the opus were stolen from the film “Two Comrades At Their Hitch” (1968); and
2) no, the number was uploaded to Vimeo March 17, 2019, 3 years before the Special Operation of Russia against Ukraine.)
Another social network, discovered later on, called themselves LitProm, A Dutiful Guard of Spirituality on the Internet.
Well, I registered to see their standpoint on spirituality and who they defend it from: from the base bestiality raising its head more and more? or they man prison towers with the machine guns turned to cover the inside perimeter?.
Bro! It’s more than crystal clear there! Admire the Union of Writers of the USSR in a fresh present-wrapping a-spangle!.
And no need to flex your detectivity. They boast of it! Heedlessly.
But if their Head (Chairman) is a proxy of the President in his appoint-oneself-to-the-post elections, there is no need for deeper checking – a natural All-Union Union, for you.
And here comes a sigh, of its own accord, from my broken heart full of grief – Oh, no! The State Committee for Emergency Situation was never down and out. All of them, our dear feathered friends, are alive and kicking, clack-clacking and hopping, both they and the rest of the gang: the Kremlin Dreamer, drunk on the blood of Romanov family’s children, and the Kremlin Ghoul, who drove the multimillion classes to their execution as the elements incongruent with the socialist mass happiness, foreseen in hypotheses of theorists of Marxism and rote-learned by practitioners from the murderous Communist Party, and shiny-shit-loving Leonid Ilych, and the following mummies, each and everyone of them are here, smugly embedded in the Barbie Doll approved by the nomenclature Quality Check Department, licked up with tongues of silver by proxies from the Union of Writers…
It’s only that now, for democracy’s sake, they use any rude obscenity they’re aware of, and by them a comment does not count as such without foul-mouthing in the style of pimply ignorant teenagers.
To be frank, all of us are scions of our teenage goonness, but for some reason my nostalgia cuts off at bullies from vocational schools.
Abrupt and unaccountably.
And now, a bunch of grown-up men (by their looks) yet without a clue that the frowned-at slang of Maht is the innermost essence of the language at large, which requires the most careful handling and correct presentation to let all the facets of Maht’s associative connotations properly do their job.
No off-hand handling here!
In order for a raw vulgarism to shine as it should, it sometimes needs to be preceded by no less than half a page of thick-set text.
Do you remember those mornings of Louis #14 entering his Royal chicken coop of a court?
‘His Majesty… Maht!’ and the usher fucking the floor with the fucking pole in his hands…
And what’s more (here lies the subtlest trick of a master stroke), the Maht-word itself should sound without superfluous pathos, sincerely and (you might even say) in a homy way by which a compatriot will be felt immediately, in the speaker.
Take, for instance, the ubiquitous "f*cked up", turned a sheer truism already by its everyday use, while more often than not "f*cked vertically" would serve the purpose much better!
And a whale of other similarly useful finesses that will make of you the soul of a party and always welcome guest…
But no! For the guardian machine-gunners at LitProm, all this is a sealed-and-too-deep-buried scroll.
Stupidly, basely, pick they up shoddy patterns from each other by the "copy-paste" method, not able to comprehend with their heads screwed up the wrong way that their ‘limp dicks hang like a drenched hearse wreath’, citing the classic.
Alas! we’re in a deep sh*thole where the language pearls are dealt with by swine! Like those shibzdiks behind the row of sheet-iron car sheds, lining to suck at the cigarette stolen by Vovchik from his elder sister, and droning monotonously:
'I say, pussy-ass, ain’t we, pussy-ass, cool, huh?'
'Yep! Pussy-ass! We, pussy-ass, are shocking!'
The pussy-assers memorized without grasping what’s that all about…
Poet Mayakovski was who did truly face-off shocking at his concerts. He would hang the grand piano by its legs over the stage, and lay up a tea-table with a samovar beneath it, and—who could guess?—starts drinking tea together with his buddies at that table until the most smart from the bewildered public stops gaping and tries at expressing their dissatisfaction, to which Vladimir Vladimirych (no! no! no! I’m not aiming at the Chairmanship, it just coincided!), without particularly bothering to look back over his shoulder into the hall and even almost without delving into what, specifically, the complaints were about, thundered the diagnosis from the samovar council: “You’re a fool yourself!”.
(Which is hard to deny remembering the ticket paid for.)
Eeeh! Folks knew how to showdown shockingly before the Bolshevik revolution…
No, I don’t argue, at LitProm there also happen those kissed by the divine Muse in their domes, who it is pleasant to discover, but the bulk of the rest drudge on creaking their uniform harness belts, scratching pens, indistinguishable from any other poop on their creative work floor, and when their superior, the Chairman Deputy, deigns to poop a piece of his memoirs out, like, how at the premiere of the horror film “Alien-12”, he shitted his jeans (sic! he swore on his mother’s grave!), then all the scribble-groupies lap up while it's hot, delightedly, the seasoned connoisseurs and gourmets: “Ah! how, pussy-ass, poignant!”—“yes, yes! so, pussy-ass, refreshing!”—“Wow! pussy-ass! some fullest pussy-ass!”
Still would! the most burning memory from the young years of the Turn-key, except for the bumblebee biting their pussy-ass, however, the Chairman Deputy has not yet shared that one…
In short, they kicked me out of that almshouse after 3 weeks, although I didn’t use a single taboo word there.
Or maybe that's why?
. . . . .
And the presence of the electricity (yes, there happened blackouts, but not for long – a day or two, no more than four, and on such days by the candlelight I toasted to ArtsakhEnergo (which somehow excused breaks in electricity supplying. Besides, the crazy blizzard was not their responsibility), combined with the presence of my desktop PC, prompted me to recall the longly-delayed The Rascally Romance, which I diligently set about.
Preface to the 2nd Edition of The Rascally Romance
“… A couple of years ago, some incomprehensible affliction beset me, several times a day I turned off completely, fainted regardless of the place and time: in the kitchen, in the yard, on the steps of the stairs climbing up to the entrance door… then I slowly floated back out of nowhere, pulled me up from the recumbent position, and tried to live on.
So I suffered for three-four days, and on September 1, as a law-abiding teacher, I made my way to the teacher's room at school in our village, but instead of “hello! congratulations!” I could say only:
“Take me to the District Center Hospital or I’ll die.”
One and a half weeks under the IV drips in the Lachin Hospital helped me put my feet upon the ground and surely persuaded of the risk of leaving the novel (the idea of which had been brewed up for more than a decade) unwritten; and it would be a pity.
Such preconditions brought about the first online publication of the work completed in a little over a year. Later, while working at translation of the stuff into English (to leave such a material to the vagaries of political course changes would be a sin), I saw that some parts in the Russian version were written post-haste, barely indicating the details with a sloppy blueprint dashes in the feverish style of dastardly storming the job – o! not to be late! only not to be late!
And so, in irksome shame for the hurriedly over-looked blunders, I had to sit down for the next (I swear – the last!) edition of The Rascally Romance.
As for the original plot and arrangement of components, there are no objections—you can’t twist cooler something bent so dashingly—and the work was mainly carried out about placing right words where they belong, in a nutshell – editing the style.
It’s like going over a finished product with a piece of sandpaper (for those who understand what it’s about, and the rest are only able to “jingle their precious pendants of nano-pebbles” (J. Lennon from Liverpool) or simply “click-clack their fucking balls” (V. Kaverin from Konotop)).
Seems like that's it.
Bye!
2018-10-28
The future clearly proved my perjured, perfidious nature.
But then, who's never sinned?
* * *
Bottle #36: ~ We’ll Catch On And Out-Hollywood ‘Em! ~
"But why indeed?" thought Inokenty the next morning, “or, rather, what exactly do they find in that smoking? Besides, on so all in, enthusiastically massive level?."
It was impossible to ask Maya for the information straight from the horse’s mouth, because she was taking a shower, and from behind the bathroom door there sounded a springy swish of water in duo with her cheerful whistling – Maya's inseparable habit in the moments when she rubbed her sides. Yes, she could soap the sponge in silence, but its touch to her body triggered off all sorts of warbles and trills in supreme improvisations of unheard virtuoso pieces (never repeating themselves). This her quality delighted Inokenty who could not stand clammy deviations from the familiar classic numbers thanks to his absolute musical ear in the first half of the day.
For some stretch of a while he continued thinking on down that path, despite the obvious lack of factual evidence for his speculations-in-progress concerning the subject. Eventually, Inokenty took out a cigarette from Maya's jeans so as to experimentally convince himself that he was right, for which purpose he went out onto the balcony and lit it, the cigarette.
Visually, the smoke looked rather interesting if not getting into the eyes, however, the cigarette’s taste only accrued the unbiased negativism of the experimenter's attitude.
Consequently, most of the research material, not subjected yet to the test in hand, had to be disposed of into the ashtray (originally, a half-liter glass container for pickled cucumbers), that long since lost the sticker from its side, grown dim and misty, somehow becoming one with the iron rods planted along the three edges of the rectangular balcony, enclosing its narrow perimeter with the wooden handrail beam run at the blind intestine level in an individual of average hight to connect the rods' tops.
Then he briefly followed the evolutionary warps in a lonely cloud, exactly in the center of the otherwise empty sky, in toto, from where, by a perfectly pure chance and all the way unconsciously, he dropped his gaze down past the seventh floor balcony he stood onto.
The sight unfolding there alerted Inokenty sharply.
From two black vehicles pulled-up by the entrance to the tower-block, emitted two groups of people in black onto the black asphalt in the road.
His well-trained eye of a gamester instantly identified (notwithstanding so plumb sheer view perspective from the standpoint of his observation) the black-colored uniform of Don's slobs.
Their master obviously decided not to wait till ten o'clock in the evening, when expired the period let Inokenty for making his mind. Don unilaterally had changed that of his own, the treacherous bastard of a criminal boss.
Inokenty’s reflections on the unfolding disembarkation came to a screeching halt. He dropped the subject altogether, and returned to the room where Maya was already in her white terry bathrobe and freshly damp black curls, after the shower.
"Time to fade into the woodwork, babe," Inokenty’s voice sounded tense and decisive.
Getting it at a breakneck speed, abruptly threw she her white bathrobe off her naked body sending that deliciously seductive waft of Palmolive gel aroma around, pulled on her jeans, and sneakers, and the blouse, which she decided on at the third try from the closet in the corner, then hung her bag over her shoulder.
"42 seconds," he summed up with a brisk glance at the face in the round wall clock, “meet the Navy SEAL standard. Let's move it, kitty."
Out on the landing, she locked the door to keep the pursuers by that obstacle for at least a couple of seconds.
From the luminous board by the elevator door, "2" winked at them and got swallowed by "3".
Wasting not a single word, the alarmed pair tapped their shortened steps in the precipitated run down the stairs.
One flight of stairs, another, the next floor, still ano…
Inokenty stopped and stood rooted to the spot, his arm held aloft in a wordless warning.
Maya stopped close nigh as if frozen into a lovely figure beneath his armpit open at the level of her forehead under the unspeakably cute crisp curls thanks to the triple-action shampoo for all types of hair, from that same Palmolive brand line.
From the stair flights below came the discordant clicks of footfalls of right smart feet.
Casting a feverish look around, they simultaneously detected a door ajar for the sliver of a crack, aluminum number 50 stood out in its peeling-off paint-coat.
Thitherward!
In the room after the hallway, the black tenant muttered from a corner in displeasure:
"Nothin’ wrong done nor intended! Fixin’ primus stoves up, me here!"
"Come on, Behemoth!" retorted Maya impatiently. "We’re no CheKa operatives, see? Packin’ no Mauser heat!"
Inokenty took a closer look at what turned out to be a black cat of glossy smooth hair and unusual height for a felid.
"Maya!" purred the black beast. "Nice sniff. Switched over to Palmolive? Beyond the kitchen window runs the fire escape. Y'all don't step into the milk bowl on the windowsill!"
. . . . .
Once on the ground by the back side of the building, they turned into the nearest squalid lane making for the busy street.
The unsuspecting stream of pedestrians flowed meandering along the sidewalk, bypassing, skirting, and dodging those who stomped in the counter direction…
"Wait! Oh, shit!" Maya stopped all at once, although rooted not as deeply as Inokenty a little back. "But we, me and Minnie, arranged meeting at 10 am by the dry pear!"
"No time for that, Maya! They’ll be stalking the streets."
"This is pressing, hon! Oh, please! Minnie's aunt will be waiting."
. . . . .
The girlfriend was pacing around the appointed place without ever sitting down onto Chris’ bench:
"Late as always! Look alive! Aunt’s slot isn’t of rubber, you know."
… But here they are already, all three of them walk obviating the indistinct hum and echoes in the obviously health-caring corridor, as evidenced by the number of medically donned employees among the interloping visitors.
Minnie knocked on the white door, from behind which there peeked out the good-natured black face of Afro-American origin beneath the fancily shaped barrette partly buried, not unlike an iceberg in the ocean waves, in her crispy high ‘Afro’ hairstyle.
"Morning, Angela! Aunt Davis here yet?"
"Yep, ma'am."
"My fingers crossed for you," Minnie explained to Maya, and stroked her shoulder reassuringly with two short braids she had managed to swiftly plait of her right hand digits while accepting from her friend (though it was not an easy task with the fingers crabbily laced as promised) the straps of her shoulder bag.
On handing over her luggage to her friend, Maya meaningfully knocked on the wood in the door and disappeared behind it.
"And then… well… there… hum… like… what?" asked Inokenty.
"Ultrasound," Minnie’s answer was marked by the unfakeably talented brevity…
Unable to hide her emotion neither behind nor in between the features of her face, Maya appeared back from the office.
Sweeping aside the inquires of her girlfriend with a slight flip of her chin (the no less questioning gaze of Inokenty took two more), she explained: "Not now!"
For her, the child of raw facts of real life whose bringing up has taken not a village but the slums of their whole hood, the growing heat of their situation was obvious and felt in full, by lock, stock and bottom ('barrel', actually, but there's no time to be too picky) – time was running out, making herself scarce was the must or, still better, taking off to some place away from the professional killers of the Mafia Don with his asinine past and there, if possible, to lie down and deep too, and not betray her whereabouts by excessive gurgling…
The grim forebodings did not deceive her, at the exit from the health-curing (shut up with your orthopedic orphograffiti here! you, sissy purist!) facilities there stood four slobs, both in a row and in black, clutching the heats under their ulsters.
"Oh Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" discharged Minnie the round burst outta her trembling lips, trying to squeeze herself deep into the unyielding hardness of the vestibule wall.
The magic invocation she had chosen for the purpose didn't work, obviously so.
The girlfriend's bag slipped from her interwoven fingers onto the floor.
Maya instantly grabbed her accessory up, clutched the blue sleeve of her swain’s frock coat, shouted “Run, Kenty! Run!", and dragged him along, flickering the brand of Nike on her sneakers…
From a gurney on its wheeled slender legs that accidentally turned up in their dash, used as it was by the seller in the refreshment room of the medical institution for snacks transportation, Inokenty snatched an elegantly shaped bottle with the alluring sticker ‘Coca-Cola’…
They rushed into the elevator and managed to find and slam the right button. The high-speed contraption rocketed up. The asynchronous burst of rounds by belated killers spilling their clips at the shut door left not a single dent in the the shining surface under the boilerplate of Zongzing Limited, the famous producer of bulletproof steel.
The pursuers wiped the sweat off their foreheads and, followed by the thirsted gaze and empathetic dry gulps of the witnesses to both the incident and the quality of the latest product by Zongzing Limited, quaffed their Coca-Cola, which they managed to pocket from the gurney on the go, without slowing down the tempo of the chase (the pros know how to keep their colors flying), in the previous dash, like racing Formula Ones—wzz!. wzhh!. wzz!. wzhh!.—past the gape in the bartender's olive-skin mug, before they opened their useless gunfire, if anyone still remembers…
The lovers ran out to the roof of a high-rise building.
Nearby, midst the herd of roof ventilators battery of Riseenconvert (Thailand) production, with increasing retardation, the blades of a helicopter that had just landed between them, were turning. Chop-chooop-choooop…
Maya's Dad bouncer briskly jumped out from the flying machine sporting (as always) a weighty hammer under his belt, followed by Don and a couple of his slobs in black.
"Because you can’t jump higher than the ass of the housing and communal services," Don chuckled with a businesslike mockery and, turning to the sadist bouncer from the bar “You’ll Get It”, added:
"Come on, you know the procedure!"
With his well-trained obsequiousness, the senile bodybuilder yanked his hammer out from under the leather in his belt.
Maya and Inokenty hugged goodbye each other.
The chances were too slim in any direction. They’re out-forced but nothing would ever force them out of love. Two intensely hot stares merged and melted, each in the eyes opposite, full of love in return, respectively. Anything else ceased to exist…
The incestuous home raper swiftly tapped his hammer, nailing a wide board with the dextrality of long-standing skill. The board’s other end stuck out from the roof into the void of air-filled nothingness. A bridge to Nowhere…
"I love you, sweetheart!" admitted Inokenty. "You’re better than Island!"
"Ai luv yoo tuu, moi Kenty! Ahhh how yoo luv Ai! Liyk nevir befour in moi liyff!" The inimitable Russian sad sensuality pervaded Maya's response.
Viciously gnashing his vile teeth, by the final blow of the hammer, the full of rage jock instead of the nailhead fucked his own thumb.
Whining and yelling, the bouncer shoved the victimized digit up into his armpit and, hopping on his feet in turn, one after the other as if in front of a locked toilet door, when the beer rips the bladder fucking open, he stumbled over the ledge and dropped off the roof with an evenly fading hoot.
"Finita la comedia," commented Don, whose title obliged him lately to enroll in a Sicilian-Sardinian dialect course online. "Nothing personal, but I’ve got to be getting back to my business, so you, lovebirds, take a walk along the plank, as dictates the beautiful ancient tradition in the Caribbean. Oldies but goodies, so to say."
The muzzles of two glinting barrels rose menacingly…
Nike sneakers kept slowly shuffling farther and farther overboard, athwart the swaying plank, followed—closely behind—by the possum moccasins, until they—ah!—slipped off, both pairs, in a synchronous slither…
"Fuck that Button," Inokenty had a couple of split seconds to think through the whistle of air ripped up by their joint fall, all ready to get flattened by the too rough landing at hand, after the next cleft seconds. He hugged Maya tighter than before and mentally confessed to himself:
"That’s who I need, but you, Button… (and the end of his farewell thought he shouted out loud – obscenely, vulgarly, rudely) …'FUCK YOURSELF!’"
…………………………………
…looks like this here hell is crammed to the utmost, it’s worse than even inside Peccy (thought Inokenty), yet the darkness here is as pitch black as hers…
"… eeeee!" a tiny pitiful squeak was heard, but for him it sounded somewhat familiar.
"Maya? You?"
“…eeeyeah…”
Anxious not to take deep breaths, so as not to pressurize Maya, packed too tightly upon him, Inokenty thought—in hectic leaps and bounds—Peccy, as it seemed was able to intake even two, if you use the correct Word of Control… but better get out of her right away and stop straining poor thing by the unbearable pressure from this double overload.
"ESCAPE, Peccy! ESCAPE, my one and only!"
In response, familiarly clicked the valve and the lid slowly moved up, normally…
Inokenty accepted Maya's bag for her to conveniently fall out thru the gap, and to walk over the beach sand in an unsteady, cramped style of gait.
He was looking after the prettily rounded seat in her Levi's jeans, before to squeeze through after her, when his side sensed a strange vibration in the bag pressed with his elbow to the ribs.
His hand dived inside the bag to unwrap from a neat package there a ticking iPhone, that switched over to the final beeps of infernal machine bomb from Hollywood action flicks.
In a snap, was Inokenty thru the gap, rushing after Maya at the lightning speed leaps of a cheetah, yet feeling that he wouldn’t make it, the last meters he flew like a swimmer who had thrown himself into the water with his arms outstretched.
Reached out.
They rolled together over the sand exactly at the moment of a deafening explosion.
Maya shook off the grains of sand stuck to the corner of her lips and asked:
"What was that?"
"Your iPhone."
"I don't have no iPhone."
"No more, but there was a pink iPhone in a green purse."
The lips corners parted open, turning her mouth into a charming "O"…
She stood up next to him, who watched sorrowfully the bunch of white uneven shards – all that remained there of Peccy, then moved his stare to the blackened stump left of a palm tree trunk rooted nearby…
. . . . .
As they approached the hut, Maya suddenly remembered:
"And at the ultrasound they told me it’s a boy. I know already what name to give him—Gautama. And which one would you like?"
"I would like Yegor, in honor of Peccy, but it can wait, I know you’re stubborn."
With those words, like the prize to the winner, he handed her a bottle miraculously survived in the blue pennants of tatters. The dash in the compound name of the brandy drink squinted invitingly from the sticker…
And the scarecrow in the jacket bleached by the heat, behind the hedge of dry stones, breathed a sigh of relief, but refrained from smiling, anyway there’s nowhere further to smile if you have the slit of a mouth in the style of The Man Who Laughs (the blockbuster in the making)…
To the sounds of innocent rock from the half-forgotten childhood:
‘Drop attending school, hey, kids!
Coca-Cola is all…
(hush! hush!)—(and already in a whisper)
…one needs!’
from the bottom up, thru the cannabis thicket floated the final credits higher and higher…
* * *
Bottle #37: ~ Set Up For Eternal Reiterating ~
Aram was reverences itself, always addressed me with honorific "Uncle Syrozh" and he asserted hotly that that never even heard my village handle "Tsogl", though to my face they did not call me that.
To counter his hyper-politeness, I hold back my dislike of his adding volume in tries to sound more convincing, which gives out folks not really certain of themselves.
However, visiting my turf on that day, he was unusually quiet and in our usual run of the rehash of village news, just to add another detail or an afterthought, like, what a sore asshole was that new Chairman of Community Council (who, actually, lived in Lachin City, yet neatly listed there as a resident in one of 3 neighboring villages that constituted our community), how many calves were slaughtered by wolves the day before, at Ambo's turn of shepherding and now he was to repair the damage with his, as well as the news in the nearest villages—Aram wore a sort of inexplicable half-smile and, when he switched over to inquires of my future plans: what structure was I to build next, and how many liters of alcohol were already stocked in the basement cell, I even felt some leniency in him, towards me…
Some uncanny conceited aloofness. As if he already knew…
That morning Emma got up early and not at 11 am, as was her habit on Sundays, and she stood in the yard when there started these strange “thumps”.
She was standing on the porch in the sun and knew it already, but still unwilling to guess, she asked her mother, and Satenic, with a hardened look in her face, replied:
"This is war, Emma."
Stepanakert was being bombarded…
Mom told Emma to go down to the basement under the kitchen.
Crazed cars rushed along the streets, heedless of the color in traffic lights.
People were running in all directions, screaming. Where? Who to?
Clouds of dust and smoke were rising into the blue sky.
The third Karabakh war went off.
A month and a half of the strange war.
The war of drones against the legendary Kalashnikov assault rifles.
A war in which generals gave orders to leave the fortified area and withdraw the military personnel.
"Well, the commanders should know, eh? Probably, some clever maneuver. For strategy’s sake."
Then they were thrown to attack at the surrendered positions. Fortified. Until there was no force left to throw to attack.
And after, the Prime Minister shared the titles of Heroes of Nation, to the generals. For the precise execution of their combat duty…
A Colonel handled Qyokha, as stubborn as a Karabakh donkey, by his obstinacy made the Prime Minister call him directly, to which phone call the headstrong Colonel replied:
