The Blog

So at the rare days of relative calm and no shelling (because, say, of another peace-broker team arrival in the region) those of my colleagues who dropped in, yielding to the too deeply rooted habit of theirs or because of having nothing better to do, were pleasantly surprised to fins that there was someone in the building, after all.

The seedy 2-storied editorial office building (a couple of blocks off the printing house) was lost in the shadow of the right wing in the gray 4-storied mighty parallelepiped of the Regional Committee of the CPSU, a kinda towboat by an ironclad battleship. And when the editorial House Keeper tried to introduce locking the entrance door with a heavy padlock as soon as in an hour after opening, I—thanks to being on friendly terms with Rashid, the watchman at the editorial office—managed to obtain the entrance key imprint in a piece of molding clay our kids used to play with. The duplicate key turned out okay because of my skills of a locksmith of the third category acquired at the Konotop Steam-Engine-And-Railroad-Car-Renovating Plant, though in absence of a vice it was not a trivial task.

(For the ethnography lovers.

Well, yes, “Rashid” is not a typical Armenian name, but then, playing with names is a deep-rooted tradition within the Armenian ethos. The parents feel at liberty to use any name as long as it sounds lovely (by their ear estimation) or would be correct politically, or both. Hence these slews of Arthurs, Hamlets, Ophelias, Jameses, Johnics (diminutive-affectionate from Joh

The teacher of Geography from School 7 was named Argentina (which is not a household-between-us-kids moniker but her legitimate ID-verified handle). Or how about “Chapaev”? Who cares it’s the Civil War and i

And admire the ingenuity at constructing the following, rather wide-spread in Armenia name from V. I. Len(in) – eliminating dots and brackets you get Vilen.

A woman named “Electrification” all her life had to respond to the shortened form: “Ele”. A lucky strike if you consider the base, eh?

Or take, for instance, the story behind the name of my sister-in-law? Her mother’s mother-in-law (the mother-in-law of my mother-in-law), while on a visit to her relatives in Moscow, was impressed by something she heard in a radio-play about Jean D’Ark from Orleans. (Radio-play is an audio soap-opera broadcast over the radio because it was in 50’s when the USSR hadn’t got television yet, and the fact of TV’s entering the Americans’ life in 30’s serves another proof that the West started to rot before us.) Now, she asked the relatives to scribble something she had heard and likedfrom the radio on a paper slip, my mother’s-in-law mother-in-law did.

And who will deny the beauty in “Orleana” name?

There happen certain admixture of prejudice too, and if a family is beset with stillbirths or babies lacking real stamina, they would use a Muslim (more often than not some Turkish) name for a newborn, which quick-fix usually helps because they believe it should work.

All that renders it pretty common, the presence of a watchman whose given name was Rashid with his always at ready smile full of square teeth. And I have also met a small kid Elchibey (they used the name of the belligerent president of Azerbaijan from 90’s for that quite quick and able mischief).

In the morning our family got together in the one-room apartment or, if it was shelling outdoors, I took a kettle of water boiled on the gas stove to the basement, and then went out to visit the families of two more daughters of my mother-in-law to pass them, in the basements of the respective five-story blocks, the bread baked by her the previous night in the gas-oven of our one-but-wide-room flat.

They answered with a jar of cream or mittens for Ashot that had become too small for his cousin already, the hand-me-downs were not quite our son’s size but of a manly cut and hue…

The usual in-family circulation understandable to them who lived in the era of deficits…

And then, alleviated and full of feeling of my duty done, making tiny starch-screeches of the immaculate integrity, I opened the massive padlock on the entrance door to the editorial office building to latch it from inside because the House Manager (not present) had uneasy misgivings about the Russian and Armenian typewriters in the typists’ pool on the second floor, you know.

The translators’ was on the first floor and when they jerked and pulled at the entrance door from outside, it was not hard for me to go and check (about once a week) what’s up.

Once it was Sylva the typist, who believed wild rumors that the editorial office got hit by an Alazan and burned up. Seeing it was all bullshit, she felt happy and decided to take home her slippers from her desk in the pool's room because it’s easier for her to type when the are on, somehow, yes.

Or it could be an outsider veteran graphomaniac (you would not make out the exact age thru his stubble but no less than eighty), who brought a parcel of “material” prepared by him for the paper dead for at least two months already. Which is not paper’s fault with all the newsstands locked up or destroyed.

Carried away by the creative efforts the writer omitted noticing the trifle.

At too near explosions the building hopped and the window panes, with the parting tinkle, spilled the glass fragments over the floor. I raked them with the broom borrowed from the toilet room in the end of the corridor, and helped Rashid to seal the gaping window frames with the vinyl tape from the house manager’s keeps. The watchman was stinking with wine and bitching bitterly to his hammer about the janitors who had stopped coming to do their job.

I acted a deaf to his harangues because I had no desire to guess who he was hinting at.

Actually, Alazans produced more noise than effect. The missile could not pierce a stone wall 40 cm thick. Yes, the wall’s outer surface would go kaput, the inside turn all cracks and crevices but still the missile lacked might to penetrate and sky in. If it hit in through the window or balcony door then, yes, no arguing, the place is smashed, all the partitions smitten down. However, if it were some crummy house of wood, then one hit of an Alazan would turn it into a heap of trash.

But then, at night, when going after water, I had a charming opportunity to admire their beautiful flight—from purely aesthetic point of view—a lazy yellow comet from Shushi descending in a languid arc onto the city (too high this time to get at me) and from the ground long stitches of tracing rounds from Kalashnikov or two burst up, across the course to its final crash in the city, and all that against the backdrop of the full moon – lo! here comes another! and the colorful stitches again!

No use whatsoever yet the surrealism of the picture looked awesome.

And after Stepanakert was left not only by the special troops of the Soviet Army but the primordial regiment as well, they unleashed bombardments by the missile installations GRAD, and those things you couldn’t play down – undeniably powerful beasts. The hit of just two rockets was enough to level the three-story wing in the City Council (where there was TV studio).