The Blog

"Hey, nigga," sez I, "what’s the message in your What’s up? If there's questions to my interlocutor then his papers' clean, the guy’s on the AWOL from Santa-Monica."

He only moves the cud from his left molars to the right and goes on to slurp, to give the clue some time for sinking into his gray matter.

One more lost generation for you, they are unable to process human speech without “fuck!” slotted after every pair of words. No wonder he looks up at his buddy to kinda signal his need for a synchronous interpretation.

"Wow! Look who we’re having here!" sez I to the second comer. "I do know you, nigga, you are the only so

God knows how he’s not boiled yet in that airtight shellac latex which goes for a uniform by them, along with a ruddy ingot chain.

n ancient Rome they put a dog collar on slaves to see who's who but these spiffy puppies stuck their necks in of their own accord…

But now he tugs the glinting shit of his waistcoat up to flash, like in the genre boilerplate from fucking Hollywood, the handle of a Makar or, maybe, Luger 'cause of for a Magnum the kouros’ balls are not hairy enough, stuck under the belt in his pants.

That’s when my range of vision widens up to the next door porch steps and—behold and lo!—please observe the reason for the scene of discontent around my bench. Who but Mulatto Maya sits there emanating the youthful beauty of her pliant thighs wrapped in the on-looker-friendly loin cloth! And how not to mention her stuck up tits under nothing more but a short T-shirt exposing her navel?.

How could I miss that she had stopped to tarry there? Yeah, Chris bro, your knee-jerks certainly grow dull 'cause of this fucking entropy…

"O, fuck!" the hippie sez, and he fiercely scratches his left armpit.

The jaws of both muggers go loose and drop on the hinges to demonstrate their tonsils, and the big style tango of their act turns abruptly into a gallop to diverse destinations 'cause of the move of the flee-catcher his beard got pushed aside exposing a bandolier hung on his bare chest, loaded with a kinda sawed-off blunderbuss: Welcome to the Caribbeans!

However, the Treasure Island has been abandoned too soon, and only Maya on the nearby steps ran her sweet tongue over her abundant lips and switched the posture of her thighs to even more liberal position.

That’s only when the hairy yobbo fell out of his meditative mood again:

"I say, bud, where’s the bush here to take a leak?" sez he and scratches his other oxter…

* * *

Bottle #7: ~ Land is paid for with blood (Ayaz Niyazi oglu Mutalibov) ~

Almost all of the winter 1991 – 1992 Stepanakert spent in the cross-fire from 4 directions. From top it was shelled by the artillery in the Sushi City, from the bottom side pelted the missiles launched at the Khojalu Village, from left the bombardment was carried out by the howitzers positioned in the Malubalu Village, and from right the battery in Janhasan Village added their share to the barrage.

Machine gun and automatic weapon fire from Krkjan (the uppermost, Azerbaijani populated part of the Stepanakert City itself) did not reach farther than the theater building.

We rented a one-(but-wide)-room apartment in Tumanian Street and in the basement of the nearest 5-story apartment block—at a stone throw distance from the house we dwelt in—I had to empty out the space for sheltering of my family in between the walls of bulky concrete-blocks in the building's foundation under the ground.

At the outset of the movement for the independence of Mountainous Karabakh, while there existed yet communications with Armenia, they shipped from up there some relief including garments, deficit food products, and booklets of the Holy Bible adaptation for kids in Armenian.

Conceivably, certain undeclared goods arrived in as well, which is better known to the members of the special Committee formed then in Stepanakert for supervising the said relief and supplements among the local population, after a short-term storing away in the basement of the mentioned 5-story apartment block.

As a result, there grew a huge heap of smashed craters, emptied containers, broken bottles and other vestiges of clandestine orgies of those rats, the Committee members, in one of the basement sections. Nobody of the aboriginal tenants of the apartment block had enough vigor to undertake such a whale of cleansing job and the section had to wait till being liberated by my hands following the lead from my mother-in-law.

However, even I could do only half of the job which half though was enough for the accommodation of my wife and our kids—the 2-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter from her first marriage—plus two unknown females who failed to find room for themselves in other sections of the overcrowded basement-shelter.

My mother-in-law, among a dozen of other ladies from the surrounding neighborhood of predominantly private houses, sheltered in a tailor’s workshop (who had successfully taken away everything but the walls) in the nearby 2-story block of flats in fairly dilapidated state, and I dead refused leaving the one-but-wide room in the first floor of our renters’ house, which was equipped with a cast pig-iron stove for gas-heating, the room was.

The ultimate condition of survival in Stepanakert that winter was water. Having water for drinking, food-processing, laundry, and toilet flashing (if not blessed with an outhouse in the yard) was the foremost challenge because of its all-embracing deficit.

The trunk pipeline supplying water from the river over a dozen of kilometers away had been sabotaged, and the employees at the city water-supplying services guessed (quite understandably) that being engaged in renovating works in the terrain open to pinpointed shooting by snipers would not be much different from an out-and-out suicidal action, and they would blow it up the very next day all the same.

In difference to Leningrad blockaded in WWII, the Stepanakerters did not prepossess the Neva river by their side and had to rely on too few street taps of water ru

I, personally, preferred to go after water at night not because late or small hours prevented shelling—artillery men worked round the clock—but in the dark the queues seemed shorter, sort of.

In the morning I went to work though the newspaper, naturally, ceased circulating and no one proposed me to translate an editorial or stuff any more. However, I possessed a skeleton key to the translators' room furnished with three desks bearing scars left by the raw facts of life and two hard chairs.