The Blog

Everything as it was and always is to be in a one-horse burg of N…

That way, at nights, the notebook became the time-machine to which they flocked hurriedly, those a hundred times already mentioned ant-critters to turn into a fixed scrawl in another white field (small-scale-grid-ruled) until they stole the machine, not ants of course.

I didn’t report the vehicle theft and never showed any surprise, outwardly, so as to skirt dour declarations that I’d been warned it was to happen.

Yes truly, a couple of times there were voiced reproofs in the interrogative form: what fucking rascal hooey was I scribbling in that notebook?

But then the City Psychiatrist diagnosed the notebook’s case as not outrageously violent so it could be taken back to lie beside the hefty stiff parcel.

The whistle blowers played along with the doc’s recommendation, however, they were not ready to what happened after.

‘And what? What was that? Tell us, tell! Cut out your damn tries at frigging suspension! Damn coot, you!’

Well, not a thing. None! Nothing whatsoever.

The retrieval was met with the deadpan of my poker face (if observed from outside), no comment, total indifference, and since then the number of untouchable idlers on the shelves doubled drastically – the mustard-hued mother walrus, and her gray cub immovably advancing towards the equivalence in their pigmentation due to the natural growth of the dust layer of identical thickness.

Both time and place let me in on their mutual incongruity with wanton games at ant domestication and getting schooled in response. That’s the ballgame, folks!

In all fairness to the twix (time-and-place), the so rigid hault was partly motivated by a vengeful wish to pinch the nose of mess-arounders, whose sporadic and somewhat pensive looks in the direction of dormant walrus colony of two upon their shellacked shelf, as well as the fingerprints detectable in the dust layer over the gray leatherette were telling signs of their, deductively, thirst to know what was to happen next in them those fucking scribbles?

Not a thing. You should of taken it to the psychiatrist and let the wise guy guess the story line without helpful clues from letter-ants.

That’s how that particular point turned a false start.

The following try was flagged off a couple of years later by the pocket-book volume borrowed for a 10-year stretch, which accompanied me over the watershed of the Caucasian mountains…

The first winter was lived through inside the tiny Pioneers' Room on the second floor in the two-story school building.

Way back, it was an ordinary house expropriated later from the owner living at large or else he, the owner, gave it up in token of his good will, after which move the village obtained the ready-made school for the compulsory secondary education.

However, all the above-supposed had taken place before my arrival from over the Caucasus and I had no desire to inadvertently chafe the sore spot by ferreting the details out.

The Pioneer Room was equipped with the ubiquitous mark of such cubbies – the compound attribute of the Pioneer Horn-and-Drum, and furnished with a nondescript desk inserted by the wall opposite the entrance, bearing the cross of the school library—a couple scores of books worn to tatters. The heaps of happy kids in pioneer red ties hung from two walls in the cardboard visuals for teaching Armenian to the elementary kids and English grammar to the students at secondary schools because the third wall (opposite to the library) was barely wide enough for the wooden door from the corridor, which ran along the Teachers’ Room (the former living room) towards two itsy-bitsy classrooms sliced out by the plywood partitioning from the erstwhile bedroom (five more partitioned classrooms were on the first floor). The fourth wall in the room was a complex of small glass panes in the wooden window binding.

The square sheet of tin, substituting glass in one of the panes in the middle of the laced structure, had a round hole in its center, cut to let out the 5.8-inch-wide tin smoke pipe rising from the rectangular-cuboid tin stove [60 cm x 40 cm x 40 cm] on 4 tin legs to keep the contraption 25 cm clear off the boards in the floor. All the tin grown with brownish crust of rust and the round hole (cut thru with the convenience of thrusting the smoke pipe out in mind) had generous gaps for the ventilation and immediate contact with the outside weather.

The Horn-and-Drum couple kept mum on the stand shelf by the door, in company with a weighty jingle-bell cast of bronze with the relief molding, which ran around its wall, in Russian: “Gift from Valdai”, distinguished by the knack for mighty clangor to a

The firewood for the tin stove I cleft in the tin-roofed shelter nearby the two-door outhouse in the yard.

The ax kept flying off the handle. Old Goorguen, the school watchman from the house next door, ironically chortled beneath his white-yellow mustaches to every flight he witnessed, while the Principal, named Surfic, instantly a

Late in the evening, the tin stove turned the Pioneers’ Room into a scorching sauna but after midnight the freezing cold harassed me even through the mattress upon the folding bed, and in the morning I got up into the mountain raw winter cold…

I did not set off translation of Ulysses right away. First off, employing The Chamber’s 20th Century Dictionary, I translated Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man pretending it was the must to have a closer look at Stephen Dedalus, the youngest in the trinity of Ulysses’s main characters.

Whenever some passage stayed unclear even after The Chamber’s 20th Century Dictionary, the following Sunday saw my travel by bus to Stepanakert, the capital of the Autonomous Region to keep a council with BDSE, The Big Dictionary of the Soviet Encyclopedia, in the regional library down there…

At the end of academic year I was dished out a no man’s house in the village, comprising one room on the second floor level above the locked up store cave for keeping the tin school stoves in warmer seasons, along with the stock of bits and scraps from ruined school desks.

Part of my salary was spent for gradual acquisition of plywood sheets from the Building Materials Shop in the Stepanakert Bazaar, which I kept nailing up, gradually, in between the paydays, to the planks in the ceiling through which there leaked the earth spread under the roof as the thermal isolation.

The plywood repair accomplishment coincided with the start of the following academic year, and the room was shared with a rookie teacher arrived from Yerevan, where he had been freshly baked and certified by a pedagogical institute.

Arthur wore black-rimmed glasses of rigid looks and soft locks of moderately long hair, also black. At school he taught Armenian to kids and coming home shared the woeful tales about the eternal wounds of Armenia with me.