The Blog

Being aware, as it seemed, of his gift, he did his best to keep them up-squinted, which stratagem imparted to the fairly worn-out features of his face the looks of almost giggling Buddha, intended obviously as a red herring to put autograph hunters off track.

At times, because of negligence or weariness, one of his eyelids slackened its squint. However, the resulting map in no way increased the chances of collectors who, having rushed after the jolly Asiatic hieroglyph of Jack Chan’s signature, all of a sudden ran into the gloomy gaze of Morgan Freeman from the adjacent eye or vise versa.

However, I listened to him with half an ear because the second half was pricked up to catch the hollow sounds of intense thought work behind the thin partition from the dura mater embracing the gray matter convolutions.

By me, it is that classic case of “fragmented memory”: why did I recollected my uncle? the neurosurgeon? (what was his name, I wonder?) who had shown me the picture of cranium section to demonstrate the meninges of the brain, where the mentioned partition bore all kinds of graffiti: “dura mater” in Latin, then comes Cyrillic «здесь был Вася», which again reflows in Latin lettering «Kilroy was here».

And that’s exactly what produces this unbearable buzz, the absence of raw material for processing does, the thoughts just spin in an unproductive slip, like to when you try to recollect that long and windy dream meandering through all the night, but you are up and have shaved already, and sitting at your breakfast, and all retained by you are only vague elusive shreds of that past dream – something about Belomor cigarettes in it, eh? Or what?

Okay fine, let’s assume I’m seated now on this hard bench and this old screwball is yakking of nobody knows what, but who am I and where from?

And these two questions, if not answered properly, can very easily shake you off into the quicksand of doubts whether that “I” exists at all.

Aha! I’ve remembered! There was nothing about Belomor in it, and someone kept dumbly repeating, “Any evidence there was a boy? Any evidence there was a boy?? Any???”

Still and yet, who am I? Or am I simply to go on along with that trite sophism, “I feel the bench hardness under my ass, ergo: I exist”?

That moment I heard the dear and all-too-well-familiar clatter of hoofs…

My Rosinante!. click-clack… clippety-cluck… am I a jokey? An Olympic champion in show jumping? Or derby was our profile?

The curiosity woke me up and turned to face a disappointment – the clicks were being produced by the feet of a female representation of the hominid species from the group of tailless primates, shod in shining yellow spikes, it’s them clattered along the sidewalk.

Ah, Rosinante! Where have we lost each other?!.

The look of her rather short caparison stung me with the unasked-for recollection, I have already seen the like tatters and I also knew where – an iron-girdled chest, its lid thrown open, filled with bottles of dark glass securely drowned into the shim of exactly same rags, gaily angular snakes of the sunlight reflected by small ripples of water twine and swirl in the boards of the ceiling… where was it? In what dream?.

My neighbor in the bench fired off another incomprehensible declamation, this time on some sports subject, gorodki competition or something like that. Could he have been a coach at the CSCSA club before his retirement?

Very soon I felt the need to urinate and asked him the whereabouts of a nearest public toilet.

A first, he sent me, in the ma

Leaving him alone, I still caught shreds of a centuries-old joke he was telling to the dried tree (Pyrus communis):

"Who the hell is whizzing like a cow right under my window?"

"It’s me, Mommy."

"You? Pumpkin? Go on, dear, pee, sugar, pee!"

* * *

Bottle #9: ~ Ay, Phedai-jan, Phedai! ~

The screechy deafening discharge at launching of a GRAD missile is heard from afar yet the missiles themselves are nearing unheard, exactly the way ALAZANs do, and only when they had transported to the Aghdam City the ca

Everything attuned to the technology of admiral Togo, who sent the flotilla of admiral Rozhdestvensky to rest on the bottom of Tsushima straits on May 27 1905, and—who could ever predict!—exactly 70 years later that day I was set free after my hitch in a construction battalion of the Soviet Army of the USSR.

Still the explosions of any sort sounded equally disgusting…

After lunch they always found some urgent work for me and, as a rule, in the basement – to fix the section with the electric wiring (though all knew the electricity would be cut off all the same) to install the door, to seal the openings between the foundation blocks with cubics to stop the droughts and the raids of brazen rats (cement for the job had to be ferried from our house building site and cubics were limestone blocks of 20 cm x 20 cm x 40 cm, which could be easily collected in the basement too).

On the completion of a task (intended, as I suspect, to keep me down there in the basement’s relative security) I retired to our rented flat and plunged into translating of Ulysses. With the daily quota set at 1 page, sometimes I knocked out one and a half, yet hardly a half page was the more oftener output.

Then it was getting dark and the time to go out after water.

No, I never took the Joyce’s masterpiece with me to the editorial office—you never can tell but the book was not mine—so there I scribbled a translation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Earth, a si-fi throwaway in the chewing gum style yet you have to kill time somehow, even at war. The undertaking served a practicable distraction though explosions at any distance caused equally dismal contractions of the asshole.

At times I paid visits to the postponed project at our house building site, you can’t let everything to just drift by itself and leave it to good will of your neighbors, who have enough of their problems.

The fact of 3-to