The Ficuses in the Open - стр. 4

Till August Galyo and I worked at the same state organization, SMU-8, constructing a pipeline in the Mountainous Karabakh, but then big shots from the CPSU Central Committee took power in Moscow. Next morning at work, I handed in the application to fire me by my volition because I don't want work for the state ruled by those clowns. They laughed at the administration, yet conceded. In a couple of days the SCUS putsch in Moscow was put out but I stayed jobless. That's when I started to raise walls of our future house… When the walls were finished and the general situation in Stepanakert grew grim, my mother-in-law advised me to look for a job at the local newspaper, as I was such a book-worm. She and the Head Editor bore the same family names and were from the same village of Harav…

We walked as far as the Corner Shop and at the news stall by it I bought a Russian copy of the local daily with my maiden rendering on page 4 – a whoopee feature by a self-assigned literary critic to trumpet in one-horse-burg style a skinny booklet of patriotic rhymes turned out by a local poet (seated in the next office down the corridor) as the greatest achievement of the poetry alive.

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

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

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

December 7.

At 3 am the whopping detonations in the lower parts of the town frightened Roozahna out of her bed and into a fit of uncontrollable tremor. Sahtik could hardly talk her into keeping calm. Before six in the morning two more Alazan

volleys ripped up the night. Ahshaut slept soundly through everything.

At dawn roaring monsters get back to their lairs replaced by screaming humans as those in the two noisy crowds scrambling at the Twin Bakeries just opposite the three inadmissibly large windows of our one-but-spacious-room flat. All day long the fluctuations in their squash-and-shout made kinda sea roll background to our domestic affairs.

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

I visited the Building Site of our future house to collect a bagful of apples and an armful of tree roots chopped off at digging foundation trenches before I started laying walls. Since August, they got dry enough for the tomorrow's barbecue.

On my way there I saw a pair of Soviet Army armor-vehicles bowling busily along, each one decked with a squad of 5 to 7 soldiers. The braves had black warpaint on their mugs, the combat smear applied in quantities reflecting their personal preferences—from a finger-thick mud masks over the whole visage up to a soft touch or two at the cheekbones. Tastes differ. Yet, no one escaped the pre-mission swarzenneggerization, not even their captain in a civilian knitted hat. On they rolled past the gazing sidewalks, obviously wallowing in the public attention.