Читать книгу: «The Blog», страница 8

…no one will ever understand why because the question “why?” has no answer. Well, just for the record, it has, however, not one but infinity power infinity, you know, and anything at all can be the reason for anything at all, even absence of a nail in a smithy to shod a hoof, so chew a banana and relax or, if you wish, I can treat you to an apple, huh?. do have a look, so ripe and juicy! – Ѽ…

You? Again at your damn tricks? When or where will I get rid of you?. There are heaps of other shells, not enough for you? Go and hiss there your serpentine lullaby…

…you have to open this one, first off, before to say “Get out!”, you, sclerotic one… and be quick too not to be wakened up by the yell outside, “Get out, Lazarus!”

But why-why-why had no one vehicle run him over? They were just sliding thru him… Or was it he to slide thru the car interiors and their drivers? And possibly thru the passengers too?.

Why did the bullets fly from his plexus with welcoming “phew-phew!” without setting his beard on fire? Not even combing it for that matter? Such things cannot happen, right?

There’s something not there… yes, really amiss… nothing but some creepy virtuality… but who?. Scurrying autos, them those bullets or he himself?. Who was virtual?. Or—and—here enters the most horrible godawful possibility—what if all of them at once?.

…well, well, well, welcome back again… copy-pasting Matrix season 7, eh?. shame on you, Ekibastuzenko! plagiarizing Poles?. while having such a good mom who sings about the revolutionary locomotive… oops!.

A-ha! Have blurted it out? You Prince of Darkness!

Now I know who I am – Inokenty, Kenty, Kesha-sunny and nothing of that Western Nobodya!

With hectic acceleration revved his thoughts shooting ever faster like a squirrel in the wheel in his cage…

I’ve got the squirrel syndrome?

…hold on, not everything at once yet nobody will ever bypass the inevitable…

And in the rumble of the squirrel’s plaything’s rolling rotor there grows and widens new rhythm over the mariana trenches of dismay, some full of hope dancing beat the shaggy horse fetlocks stomp out in the mincing step of claps and clops which they play up clip-clop-clap-cluppingly:

No trumps in the deck any more remains!

All of them are swept off by my virtual Ace!

As to when exactly the Lieutenant-General arrived in Karabakh the sources keep mum, and only mention scantily that it happened in 1992.

A Teacher at a military school in St. Petersburg aged 72, he left his wife, his job and the city on the Neva-River to fly to Karabakh. That’s how he worried about the motherland because he was born in Tbilisi (Georgia), both like Sayat-Nova (1712 – 1795), the great master of amorous lyrics, and Mikhail Loris-Melikov (1824 – 1888), the Minister of Interior in the Russian Empire, and the famous film director from Hollywood Ruben Mamulian (1897 – 1987), and the Soviet composer Aram Khachaturian (1903 – 1978), and lots of other differently praise-worthy Armenians.

Yet, about the date of his arrival in Karabakh Google keeps zipped sternly, which is a pity because it's interesting, anyway to me, personally.

I like his photo in the company of the Minister of Defense of Armenia, and a couple of local Lieutenant-Generals scratching their head-gear in a puzzled manner. He’s so unrestrained and ritzy there in his T-shirt and no cap at all.

My prying attitude is warmed up by the ambiguity – did he come before or after the capture of Shushi City?

I maintain a firm suspicion that it happened before the affair. Unfortunately, this opinion cannot be substantiated without Google and, on the other hand, I am reluctant to bother his relatives or venture knocking at the germane archives doors because of my sloth and timidity – why leaving a wrongly prejudiced impression of myself in certain structures of appropriate security organs? The like thirst for knowledge can very easily invoke a boomerang response and eff squarely across my skull holding this here inquisitive mind. Do I really need that?

Still and yet, all my pros are for “before” and here are my circumstantial evidence —

While phedais were busy fighting to defend Armenian settlements, in the rear (Stepanakert City), in defiance to the blockade and bombardments, went on the process of creation of the elitist-political superstructure titled the Committee of Self-Defense. As a result, the phedai groups were automatically handled the Mountainous Karabakh Self-Defense Forces, although they did not give a fuck about change of stickers being constantly on the go to fight the Turks (in Mountainous Karabakh they never had learned to call Azerbaijanis otherwise) back off this or that village, to catch on a herd of cattle stolen and driven away from one or another kolkhoz farm but not clear yet by whose assistance and/or permission and so forth, and so on.

And even if taking the village of Khojalu with such a motley company might seem feasible (moreover when supported by machine-guns of 3 armed vehicles) then capture of a city situated on the commanding heights by employment of the yesterday's barbers and auto mechanics is quite another kettle of fish.

OK, fine, there was present a military specialist of the brave nom de guerre – “Komandos”, a Major from Yerevan who besides his experience in straightening out the Czecho-Slovakia's deviation (1968) was active in Afghanistan too (true, not the all 10 years 1979-1989, but…), however, (in the way of a buddy-to-buddy talk) even a Major is not qualified for capturing cities.

That’s why before storming Shushi his function consisted of visiting villages in the Askeran District (Stepanakert, by the bye, has no district of its own and is situated in the aforementioned one) where mujiks were happy to entertain Komandos during which proceedings he assured them that everything would be all right, and together with the present in the village house of celebrations drank tutovka under the flowery toasts to the imminent victory.

Nope. Only a man with a General’s past could codename the battle for Shushi “Wedding in the Mountains”.

I was not invited to the celebration and had to observe it from aside, from Stepanakert, where in the main square they set 1 (one) GRAD installation that each half an hour fired a singleton missile in the direction of Shushi.

Take my word, the launching thunder is not a grain less disgusting than the explosion concluding the flight.

At two-hour intervals, the building of the former Regional Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, whose basement was used for the hospital, saw arrival of another KAMAZ truck with a load of wounded in its dump.

The truck got at once surrounded by the shrieking crowd of relatives to those who left their homes to storm Shushi. Heavily wounded and unconscious were taken inside on the stretchers, those who could make it plodded to the entrance on foot replying to their friends and relatives in the crowd about who they had seen up there of their mutual friends and relatives.

Some answers caused lamentations which usually sound at the cemeteries.

Up there, khakied formations ran to attack supported by 2 tanks (God only knows how they managed to get up there yet they did the trick), and among them Mykola the Ukrainian, who arrived a day earlier to boost his rating at the “Rukh” movement in Ukraine.

So was the common practice in those days. Representatives of vehemently proliferating parties, organizations, and associations from all over the former, newly collapsed Soviet Union flew to Stepanakert to take shots of themselves among the ruins so as when back home use the pics in the way of a kinda trump card, ‘I visited the spot of the kickoff for the Soviet regime disintegration!’.

Those politicians are so monotonous in aping each other, you know.

However, Mykola, besides being a political activist, was also a stardust lover. He asked for an AK, they fixed him with one and in the outskirts of Shushi he caught a whole clip of bullets, into his belly.

No wonder, a two-meter giant among the bantam, against the backdrop of Mykola, welders and carpenters – anyone would imagine him to be the decisive factor in the battle.

When the chopper laden also with him took off in Stepanakert, Mykola was still alive yet only up to Yerevan.

A week later another Ukrainian dropped in, by chance, to the PC of the SC of the RMK, who worked at an anti-aircraft gun Shilka. We talked of life, he complained of being paid irregularly.

It took him just a week to make a legend of Mykola, of his heroically supernatural qualities. Say, when he began to talk, you unconditionally fell under the spell all over, like entranced by a murmuring river you turned, “Kobzar” thru and thru, I swear…

I kept back boasting of the half-hour personal communication with Mykola who preferred to use Russian and (which was especially captivating) in the same tongue-tie curse of a manner as my ingrained one. Although after a couple of shots it kinda lessen and you like feel, well, you know, to kinda give out, er, some, well, toast, hum, and stuff, you know…

Phedai Valyo did not participate in storming Shushi. Three hours before the battle his group began attacking Kyusalar Village east of Stepanakert with the since long deployed artillery battery up there. An elementary trick from a military school textbook on strategy. The reinforcement sent to Kyusalar from Shushi were several times impeded with machine-gun fire on their route and eventually they were called back without reaching the village and for the battle they also were late. That way the village of Kyusalar fell and Shushi City too.

There was no massacre of civilians when they captured Shushi because of the road leaving the city at the opposite end in the direction of Lachin City and from there another road (without any asphalt though) to Kalbajar and farther on to Ganja.

The practice from the first war for independence proved it more than once that existence of a way out pours oil on the attackers efforts.

By 5 pm on May 8 phedais captured the city…

Later in the evening in Kyusalar, captured by the phedai group where Valyo belonged, arrived the ‘goat’-Willis with commander Karen sporting his swanky white boots who called Valyo aside.

He got it at once it was an ominous sign and did not mistake. His elder brother, Vladic, mechanic-driver of one from 2 tanks in the battle of Shushi, when they busted the left track, got out thru the bottom hatch under the tank and was hit with a bullet through his chin. The exit hole was in the opposite jugular.

The fighting raged on and Valyo’s brother died under the tank…

One murder happened though after the battle, when a journalist from the local television, Borik, ascended to Shushi by his Niva vehicle to collect factual materials and was roaming thru empty, winding lanes until he ran into a couple of Azerbaijanis.

They either did not know that Shushi was captured or else on their way out recollected something forgotten at home and decided to go and fetch it quick, on foot.

They were a middle-aged mujik and a guy about 20 with an AK. He slung up his assault-rifle yet Borik was faster to draw his AK and shoot, without harming the elder one though.

Phedais ran up to the sound of a burst round and grabbed the alive man.

At that time man-trade went at full swing, the captured hostages were exchanged for money or for the compatriot hostages kept by the hostile party, variously.

The major merchant on the Azerbaijani side, handled Fantômas, even created a private prison for the purpose, and his Armenian counterpart in charge of live goods exchange was a former KGB officer whose handle and rank I do not know or, maybe, have completely forgotten.

I did not keep a journal at war except for the winter of 92, and that one in English so as to keep in check my garrulousness by means of a not native language, yeah, which is another weak point of mine – I just cannot pull up my cacography but only trot and trot on without any periods. Possibly to counter-balance my oral tongue-tiedness when every next word has to be born in phonetic spasms same way as by Mykola killed in Shushi battle, but that copybook was over long before the storm and I never picked up another.

Told by Ashot (the Head of a field medical battalion at that war)

'I had to become a surgeon, yet my dentist kit kept by me, the hand fairly used to those tools.

You never can tell by a wounded. Say, they bring a couple of them, just a scratch on one, the other entirely in khkhrots (‘agony’ in Karabakhi Armenian). Late in the evening you ask, "How’s the guy with a superficial?"

"Died."

"And the other?"

"Got up, went to dinner. Should I fetch him?"

Once they’ve brought a Turk, young.

"Check him, eh?"

What’s there to check? Unconscious, a massive fragment stuck out from the skull.

"I ask you brotherly, check him, eh?"

On the table with him. The fragment anchored tight, I had to pull with mandibular molar forceps. Cleaned the bone fragments off the brain. Treated the wound. And the guy survived.

Yet, some gyrus suffered, obviously. Time and again he starts to shriek, "You Armenian bastards! This is Azerbaijani land!"

The nurses couldn’t calm him down, always called for me. Of me he was afraid. I says, "Ara! Behave!"

"Doctor, doctor! I’m fine!", says he.

Then he was traded for two of our hostages, for he had rich parents. When they were taking him out, I was told, "You also go, eh? In case he wanted to die on the way? But you’re a doctor."

The exchange was on the road between Askeran and Aghdam. An ambulance from their side and we by the same brand UAZ vehicle.

Stopped at a distance from each other. I go on with him and from that side his parents and two ours who could hardly move, the chest of one burned with dry ice and the second man is all like a balloon, minces each footstep. They made him eat raw clover, the shepherds, they know what it does to sheep.

But mine does not move at all, stands still and watches those mujiks. His mother calls, "Sunny! Sunny!"

And he cries, "I don’t go! We, Azerbaijanis, are not human! We’re beasts!" Tried to run away.

Phedais caught him by our ambulance, brought back.

"Ara!"’ says I. "Do behave!"

"Doctor, I’m fine! I’m fine, doctor!"

Came up to his parents. They’re hugging him, crying. Each ambulance drove back to where it had come from.

Later a man spoke up to me at the bazaar. "You know me, doc? I was the one fed with clover."

Well, had come back to himself already, looking like a man. But about that Turk boy I know nothing whether he’s alive or not.'

. . . . .

A day later a crowd of civilian marauders ascended from Stepanakert to Shushi. What was impossible to loot they set on fire. Some crying idiocy – their homes ruined by bombardments and here they got an intact city but no – burned it up. Emotional incontinence of paupers robbing other paupers.

On their way back the crowd was caught in a scel (it’s a torrential rain of a major meteorological proportions, you’d feel pity for your enemy getting under such a downpour).

Yet one marauding old woman was lucky to loot a washing tub. So she turned it over and kept above her head and plodded home that way under her enamel umbrella, bypassing the streams along the broken road…

I saw Borik in a week after the Shushi capture and I couldn’t recognize him, his hair turned ghostly white and later on he left the region for good…

Inside the Shushi Temple of Savior (of XIX century) they found an arsenal of GRAD missiles, some huge warehouse, actually, based on logical premises that Armenians would not shell their temple.

In 2 days after the storm there came a jet to hit the temple so as not to leave such huge ammo stock to the opposing side. Yet the raiding jet missed and later there was no reason for further tries because the ammo was moved from the holy building.

And that jet had been coming so belatedly because in Baku they for a long time could not believe in the capture of Shushi, it’s a citadel on impregnable cliffs and they had brought so much artillery there together with manpower and stuff…

Valyo’s mother told him to bring a cow from Kyusalar Village because her daughter, a sister of the two brothers, alive and dead, lost her milk and her baby stayed unfed – the children hospital bombarded and no milk kitchen for newborns around…

Another consequence of the successful completion of the “Wedding in the Mountains” became seeing off the Major, vet of Afghanistan, after the exhortation voiced by the commander of a Self-Defense group handled Izho.

The handle got stuck still at school because of the Teacher of Russian. After a dictation, she censured him before all of the class for failing to write the word «ещё», wrong in each of the three letters! She laughed, fucking bitch, and exposed his variant.

So he got hurt and dropped out after his eighth grade but the handle stuck firmly. He became a petty punk then got the job of a car washer and married, and what else would you do in such backwaters?

But then the Movement started up, mass rallies in the square, and the one-horse burg became a hot theme on TV. After the Sumgait carnage and ‘Ring Operation', the region washed in arms, who but hoods had to take it under their control?

He threw together a group of his likes, not as invincible fighters as the Fragment’s group but not the last too.

When Izho visited Komandos and without diplomatic equivocacy said, ‘Fuck off out of here!’, Major did not dare to speak up because even though smelling no gunpowder in Afghan (well, in fact, he was a supervisor at a big ammo warehouse there, inventories, accountancy, you know) he knew it pretty well – do not kick against a war component if you wanna stay on the safe side.

Like a wise pussyfoot, packed he up and departed to Yerevan. There sage Major lived to his pension, becoming a Major-General on the way and getting government awards regularly. For Armenians in Armenia he still remained the legendary Komandos, the Captor of Shushi with minimal casualties.

It’s only that the official sources, to spite me, moved the storm of Shushi from May 8 to May 9 which happened later though to synchronize the event with the totalitarian Day of the Great Victory celebrated yearly by Big Brother. But I did not take offense at all – everyone does his job at his workplace and puts their signature in the payroll of their kolkhoz.

In September the Self-Defense Forces were reorganized (read renamed) into the Army of Self-Defense of the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh.

Izho became the Commander-in-Chief although wise people abstained already to use the handle and even in their private conversations preferred to use his rank: “comandushchi” (from the distorted Russian word because Armenian, however rich in its phonetic system (some of the 36 sounds I cannot pronounce up till now), does not have the Russian «щ» and staging dictation tests where it is present is an example of outrageous pedagogical sadism).

The Lieutenant-General remained in the shadow as an adviser (no, not in vain I liked that photo of him!) and was driving it home to the General Staff of the Army of Self-Defense what the hell was that fucking logistics about and all that stuff.

Later they built a house for him in Stepanakert, where he did not dwell, of white cubics, and renamed Khojalu, captured not by him, after his name – Ivanian.

What was then? Whoever is interested might google it out.

* * *

Bottle #18: ~ An Elegy ~

He got it perfectly that all that was not for ever. Yes, he did. Already.

Though at first it was some unalloyed dazzling ecstasy, and delight, which he soared and coasted with over his boundlessly overflowing self-complacence.

He was tottering on the verge of giving out the timpani part then from the 8th symphony by Maler: “dum! tu-dum! Tu-da-dum!” with his fists instead of paired, a lil bit asynchronous sticks at the end of the first part, before switching over to the rhythms of the drum pop percussion in Brazilian carnivals: “yah-cha-cha-yah-cha-cha-yah” Ha! He did have done the trick!

Then, little by little, the exaltancy ceased fizzing, but still and yet he refrained from using that yellow-black checkered jacket for household purposes which are plentiful in Uninhabited, when the storms delay the delivery of another galleon or privateer.

On the contrary. He even fixed it spread over one of the rough walls in his do-it-yourself hut, not to mean a Persian rug but sooner as some trophy hunted down at a safari in a faraway land like, maybe, a tartan-hide buffalo or else (the cherished dream of any shotgun carrying man) a skin peeled off a patch-pocketed razorback.

But then this particular interior detail began to somehow irritate until it annoyed him so bitterly that he had to strip the wall bare, although the droughts were getting in too easily in the rain season.

The jacket went around, changing hands as is the custom in poverty-stricken families—hand-me-downs from elder kids to younger siblings—and landed onto the outstretched arms of the scarecrow inside the enclosure of the walls built with no mortar, just of dry stones, raised by some previous islander. Maybe, by Robinson Crusoe himself.

And, probably, it did have been erected by his hands because he kept goats, Robinson did, who graze wherever they get to and draw attention of the local fauna representatives to the illegitimate flora. Yes! And you cannot sustain a reasonable doubt about it! This here Great Non-Chinese Wall is but his genuine creation!

Poor, poor Robinson! How could you possibly come to that!

By the way, in vain were lost his efforts, to no avail trickled his sweat upon the dryness of too heavy stones because in absence of a clever breeder in the bleak times after his deportation under fairly blurred out circumstances (the end of the timeless masterpiece by Defoe is just a shameless falsification concocted glibly by the reactionary government fighting the problem of not giving a fuck about the state-supportive values by the younger generations) the grass became just grass, some gelded stuff of no high, to put it plainly, of so scarce delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content that it calls for the equivalent number of centuries, flown away since the forced displacement of poor Robinson, to restore the weed to more or less acceptable condition. Hopefully.

Timely culling and calibration can work wonders, you know.

But for him, who got to the island after the Two Levels, no less disappointing was the absence of goats. Were they also deported? Or maybe, unable to bear their separation from sweet, sweet Robinson, they in turn (if not as the whole herd of groupies) rushed off the cliff into that very bay where later was stranded the storm driven ship with the chest-load of bottles for his postage by care of OBPS?

Anyway, he is alone here if not for the scarecrow behind the hedge, and in the evenings he at times stopped by to share a word or two about what’s up–what’s down, however, the scarecrow also was not aware which tropic they were namely in: Cancer or Capricorn?

Yes, it was the scarecrow he presented the trophy jacket to, notwithstanding its low level of education, and gave a look full of his habitual sadness at the hooking-up contours of the leaves in the uselessly beautiful cannabis growth.

Sterile Paris doll unable to give alleviation to the plight of distracted sclerotic by its fruitless crop rotation.

His only salvage from the depressing disillusionment was his being accustomed to the life in the world of fakes, silicone anatomy, false smiles, nylon feelings…

The scarecrow kept nodding in unison, a pair of bee hummingbirds were building a nest for their future bee hummingbird babies in the right pocket of the tartan jacket fairly bleached by the tropical sun…

But the tiny couple of diligent birdies got kicked out by a pack of crass sparrows. Where did they pop out here from? Sparrow is not bird of passage at all, any ornithologist will say you that.

"Oh, My!", agreed the scarecrow sorrowfully, "nowadays them those migrants can crawl anywhere thru what you’d never guess to think of, despite all migration regulations…"

At first he was awesomely proud, of course, of himself but now the feel was gone together with all other thrills and turned into jejune ho-hum automatism…

He certainly loved this Island.

He remembers the exited alertness at his first penetrations into the unfamiliar terrain folds, rubbing elbows with the mysterious world of the rain forest starting from the very threshold in his hut.

And he remembers his first rising up the ridge to the silent volcano not even knowing if it was feasible, going to his spur-of-the-moment adventure… Could he climb it at all?.

Yay! What a view!

From the basalt tip he observed the immense endlessness of the ocean, and all of the island too that looked like a green lizard wrapped in the soft fluff of the tree tops far down below his feet, and he even made out the outlines of the bay at its northern cape.

Now, after all that what he refrained from even to think of, the one-time vibes of elation did not come back to him. He confirmed it by a probe. He bummed around by his most favorite routes, liked so much. Before.

All of them turned too short, dull, predictable.

He knew at each step what would be brought by the next one, and even atop the volcano thought he – it’s been already…

By Jove, where are the cannibals to pay him a visit?! At least some variety.

Well, on the second thought no cannibals are welcome, his blunderbuss got lost somewhere…

On his way back thru the jungle, in whose thicket there quivered none of the invisible vibrations of unknown already, a pincer-billed motley-colored parrot fluttered by to light onto a bough above his head and cried out:

"Kenty’s a fool!"

Came it to pass some time ago, the loop of his sling made of the sturdy snake skin of a Bothrops asper would spring in a split sec out, and he would have parrot soup for dinner that night. And now?

"Some stale news," was all for his sluggish response.

For some reason, he avoided going to the beach, where in the conceited attitude of ‘Know nothing!’ basked Peccy’s skeleton while she herself kinda stepped off to frolic in the swaying waves and be back any other moment.

What prevented his going there? Not the pitch black stub of the palm smitten by a dire lightning in the memorable pandemonium on Friday. No. Not at all.

However woeful and pathetic it might seem, but any Cocos nucifera did away with his dendrophilicity, killing it stone dead, on sight.

All because of his allergy to the secondary endosperm of its nuts pressed out to produce coconut butter and napalm.

Too much jungles got felled and replaced with coconut palm plantations!

Too many orangutans shot and killed in purchase of predatory income!

I won’t eat the butter mingled with you blood, brother Yum!

A primate is a friend, comrade, and brother to another primate!

But having neither honor nor morality wheeler-dealers commenced to add that butter to anything at all, to what you’d never guess to think of. Even to ice-cream! That’s when the allergy came to the rescue.

No, the palm is not guilty that its endosperm of disgusting marg taste is used to fool the omnivorous consumer (easy as pie! engaging ads and incomprehensible incantations by medical shamans will make them eat any shit).

The palm has nothing to do with the annihilation of countless lives of rain forest sacrificed to the monotonousness of the squared rows of plantations producing its chips.

It’s not the palm’s fault that for the forgetful of their kinship bipeds only a dead orangutan is good orangutan.

Not the palm makes him stop at the fork to the familiar path winding to the beach with the white shell and the charred stump.

No, his perambulation in that direction is arrested by the knowledge (yes, he knows that and all his sightseeing excursions about Island, his conversations with the scarecrow—he was not stoned, I swear, where on earth could he get a fucking blunt here!—and all his somnambulistic automatism is just another prove that he knows) that sooner or later he’ll follow that path.

Will he?

Oh, yes. He knows that and is just playing for time, and he does not say a single word on that account even to the scarecrow. No, even their united brainstorming will not produce the answer to how could he possibly step into?. He, who had passed Two Impassable Levels paying for that with his amnesia. (OK, he did recollected his name eventually, but what is in a name besides its empty sounds?)

Why to go to where he is nobody (yet not Nobodya any more!)?.

To where he has lost his, well, not exactly a friend but somebody who, well, if to put it correctly…

Yes! His friend! Old silly Chris, who himself was not able to follow all the crap he yabbered, and who got high from his own blubber…

Chris is not there. No more. Never more…

But there remains Maya. She still hangs on although it’s not clear in which of the 2 hemispheres. However, given his amnesia, he has nothing to be afraid of, left or right does not matter much in his condition and—if God’s truth be disclosed—he’s kept back by only fear.

Or maybe, two fears?

First off, suppose, he trades Island for Maya but what if she too will become an island? One of the dull islands where the thrill of pioneering discoveries gets replaced with boredom ahead of time?

What if he’s heading to the ineluctable loss of a mellow violin melody, with its girlishly naive waist, maturing into the gluey buzzing of cello's solo to be transformed into ungrabbable double bass (more and more so) with its regular brain-busting “dum! pdum! dum! Pdum!”?

Or else what if…

Stop! Forget it! It does not matter! Even these virtual “ifs” are not enough to steer him back until and if they become a reality…

And then his fear number two – he is not sure if Peccy would assent and how does he start her at all?

"Intuitively, boy! Intuitively! Besides, there always is the old good try and error…"

. . . . .

He moved, hither-thither, rubbing himself into the tight space, sighed, and sweeping aside the unnecessary in the irreversibility of this here moment doubts, said irrevocably: