The Ficuses in the Open
Introduction
Although the number of personae dramatis is pretty limited—they are just a family and their closest relatives and neighbors as well as a pinch of colleagues from the demised establishment, and though the action mostly consist of monotonous household chores, this here artifact is an attempt at honestly depicting the besieged Stepanakert town in winter 1992 when physical survival was the foremost objective common to all.
All that was so abysmally long ago that
no conceivable reason remains to suss output
if all that was exactly that way
or differently,
or at all…
it makes no difference now
Month one
December 4, morning
The night was quite serene, even the machine-guns up there in the Krkjan part of the town kept pregnant silence…
The day before yesterday I dropped into Department Store to pick some present for Roozahna on her birthday. She turned one decade old.
In all the murky void of the Department Store only 2 customers— a man brought his son to the toy-department for the kid to see sunny side in the current snafu.
The sullen saleswoman placed on the counter a dozen of random picks from the rows of plastic clones lined over the shelves at any Department Store in any Soviet city for years.
'Anything else, jahna?' asked Daddy.
There was no answer just a listless gaze of the boy at the magnanimous yet useless deathbed sweepstake.
(…rub your shoulders with the Grim Reaper for a while, and you become a spendthrift…)
Even in Maxim, the Chief Editor of The Soviet Karabakh, the one and only paper in this here Autonomous Region, there cropped up somewhat extravagant streaks. Stately strolling, to and fro, in front of his subordinate gents, Wagrum and Lenic, who in the attitude of wisely eager beavers sat at attention at their respective office desks, he cared to proclaim, 'To stick it out down here, to see it through thick and thin is the uniquest opportunity for a journalist.' To spiff that piece of wisdom up with a ring of ponderosity, he jingled his regal bunch of keys dangling from his fatty hands in the constant clasp over his mighty butt.
My backache loyally sticks by me, and the shortness of Lydia's sofa makes me feel it even in sleep… Yesterday, I rummaged through her bookshelves and—wow! what a catch!—there's THE BHAGAVAT-GITA in Russian for which reason I picture myself pouring over the volume tonight on that shortie of a sofa.
Same day, evening
It's hard to say if it's a snowy rain or a rainy snow outdoors. Our kitchen tap yields just a needle-thick trickle, yet yields.
In the morning, I had one more job interview with Arcadic, the Head of Russian Section (and pretty bold already), at this uniquest paper in the town.
Keeping, in a well-trained manner, his eyes elsewhere, he trotted out that the periodical did need my professional skills and the coming week would see me in the position of a renderer, after all of unavoidable managerial chicanery and staff-reshuffle castlings would get seen to to create a vacancy. There's no way to accelerate the process, you know.
From my current standpoint (which as always is here and now) the employment still looks like a pretty far off pie in the sky, but when jobless practice your patience, buddy.
In the afternoon, Sahtik sent me to fetch a jar of milk from the Milk Factory. Coming there, I found neither Valyo nor any one at all who I knew. To skip the unavoidable schlepping of the empty jar back and bringing it over again after a better-timed arrangement, I just stashed it away in a quite quiet nook, hanging the bag with the jar up on the back side of the eternally open door to the always dark corridor on the second floor in the Administration Block. Not a chance, anyone would ever nose it out. Eternity handlers are too rare a specimen in this here cut-and-run world. Undisturbed and unseen will the bagged jar hang on the unvexed door handle till my next visitation, betcha.
Later in the day the Lydia's husband Nerses, arriving from his native village of Hnushinak, tap-tapped from the street onto the matte-glazed window pane in our one-but-spacious-room flat. With that window open you can talk through the grates or pass things to a person standing on the sidewalk. The other two windows in the room are simply nailed up… He wanted the key from their house.
'Oh, sure, here you are!'
Now, his return to the town ended my career of a security at their place. Fare thee well, THE BHAGAVAT-GITA, and thee as well, O, Procrustean sofa!
My backache faithfully lingers by, however, tonight I'm in the luck, the kitchen tap had trickled almost two pails of water before it was completely cut.
December 5.
At walking, the backache aggravates, especially in the morning, more so when walking downhill…
When at the Milk Factory I entered the Director's office, Valyo was yelling on the phone at the top of his lungs to share that the town had run out of flour, so the Bread Factory down here was stopped four days before. Then he rang off and, in a lower tone, told me that there was no milk either.
Fortunately, when I stepped out of the Milk Factory gate, Sashic was passing by his car and pulled up for me to hop in as he was heading uphill to the downtown. There I walked to the paper's 2-storied Editorial Building where Ms. Stella, the Responsible Secretary, handed me two articles to be translated into Russian.
Albeit authored by different names they were remarkably alike—Patriotic Jarring Rattle of an Empty Oil-Drum rolled along all bumps and pot-holes. I went at both articles hammer and tongs to render their double din to Russian.
Being (technically) a startup oddball, I occupied the vacant desk whose sitter was on her pregnancy leave. Wagrum, a reporter at the Russian Section, fluttered in, perched onto his desk, and shared his utmost surprise at all this crying shame of procrastination at my inauguration to the position of Renderer. Some stupid bureaucratic tricks, you know. A monkey business for kids!. And he took wing again.
A sudden close burst of a protracted salvo made me startle and started off my individual response caused by the like occurrences.
It feels like the combination of a sudden whop of heat upshooting through the abdomen to chest and of a piercing grip at the back of my neck—splashclutch!—and when the sensation reaches its peak, the grip slowly slackens and kinda dissolves together with the inaudible fizzle of receding heat-wave.
(…too many words, buddy. Put it straight, 'I got scared stiff and felt all funny, full of butterflies in my stomach.'…)
As it turned out, the salvo was to style up the funeral of the four youths killed by a single shell in their dugout in Krkjan, the Azeri part of the town on the commanding height in the the northwestern outskirts…
When I came home from the paper, Valyo's kids, Sego and Gaia, were on a visit to our place. Sahtik and I played cards with them, the childish game of 'believe-or-not'. Roozahna—still under punitive restrictions after the latest of her pranks—was not allowed to participate and bravely took her medicine, sticking around in the role of a scornful on-looker.
The game was put off and the little party cheered up by the arrival of Sashic's wife, Carina, with their boy and girl, and also with a present for our Ahshaut – some hand-me-down footwear from her son Tiggo. All went on as merrily as the marriage bells until an hour later Sashic pulled up and honked by the communicational window to pick up all of our guests.
At 10 pm, Sahtik and the kids started for the Shelter, a former tailor's in the ground floor of a dingy two-storied apartment block a little bit up this street. The room enjoys swell popularity in the neighborhood because its only window is not facing the heights from where they shoot Alazan missiles at the town. About dozen of women with two or three kids each spend nights in that 6 by 6 meter room.
In the darkness I saw my family over to the Shelter carrying Ahshaut in my arms. It was a talkless walk under the snappy din of shooting out in Krkjan, beneath the indifferently gleaming stars above. We proceeded slowly in time to the slumber breathing of the child wrapped in his blanket and pressed to my chest full of bitter mute butterflies in my heart.
December 6, morning
Starting at midnight, for about two hours I tread, to and fro, the sidewalk—a too lofty term for all the ruts and holes and the crooked tree roots all too ready to trip you by their bulges through the crumbled asphalt—and carried water home with a couple of pails 'cause my missus's in the mind for a cap-tail washing. Up and down.
Down—to the Three Taps beneath the huge bass-relief of comic-tragic masks behind the Theater. Up—back to our kitchen where all the containers in our household waited a-gape to get their fill. In and out.
The dog-eat-dog gunfire kept swelling up in Krkjan—up and down the entire slope—bazooka booms, now and then. To and fro.
At one of my downs, I marked across the road, right opposite to our three windows, silent forms in white garbs contrasting ghostly to the darkness. They lugged a couple of drums, polished metal a-glitter under the lamppost, from the upper in the Twin Bakeries to its twin, 10 meters down the street. Seems like, my mother-in-law's gossip that they've air-lifted by choppers some flour down here came from a reliable source. Up and down.
On the back porch of the Theater, a group of men stood chatting and smoking. An unfriendly, split-up loner descended to the foot of the stairs to have a reefer all to himself. In and out.
Nearing the Three Taps for the damnteenth time, I met a couple of guys staggering in counter-direction. 'Hey, bro,' a husky voice thickly slurred in Russian, 'don't go there. They shoot.'
A split second later, the warning was confirmed by a stray bullet from Krkjan that whipped the crossroad by the Three Taps. 'Oh!' commented the males in the lee of the Theater.
About four in the morning, the town was pervaded by such an incredible calm that Sahtik and my mother-in-law left the Shelter to bring the kids home… The mother-in-law shared the news of a twenty-year-old youth killed tonight in Krkjan fighting.
The same day, evening
About 11 am, I took Chief for a walk to the central park… A sunny day under the pale blue sky. Motionless waves of the hills snoozing in the late autumn's haze. The empty alleys in the park under the thick rag of fallen leaves—withered, brittle, whispering at each of your steps… The ever-present gunfire—distant, yet strident.
Leaving the park, we met Yuri, a co-owner and part-time attendee in the video games pavilion by the park's entrance stairs, now closed, no customers for digital shooters.
That's an unmistakable small shop-keeper, oriental and plump, all sweet smiles and blissful squints because of being so happy to meet you. A single handshake from his embracing palms—soft and full of immense tenderness—is enough to send your train of thoughts straight to Orgasm Terminal. (What the hell did he get married for?)
After exchanging the custom regards and greetings, he presented me with one more puzzling enigma when bowed down to Chief and kissed his hand for a good-bye…
Chief and I crossed the circle of mighty pines within the ring road of Piatachok and were sauntering up Lenin Street when I noticed Galyo descending in a group of four. He acknowledged me with a wink. Returning from their night shift of shooting in Krkjan, I suppose. Though his pals looked more like peasants than gunmen.
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.
If some complete stranger to here and now saw us dawdling along or going about our daily chores amid the ever-present din of assault rifles in Krkjan he'd take us for a town of deaf. Yet, don't be fooled by our out-of-place looks, Mr. Stranger, we do hear the enraged rounds and each of us has some kind of their inner funny feeling…
By 9 pm it turned completely quiet. Some creepy quietness.
May it be, I'm too strict to Roozahna?
December 8
Yesterday at 11 pm, Sahtik had to bring Ahshaut back home: he couldn't sleep in the Shelter because of another babe crying in the same room. She left him with me and went back to Roozahna who gets funky when in a strange crowd alone.
From midnight till one am, I again was bringing water from the Three Taps: Sahtik's capital washing is still in progress.
My legs got used to navigating on their own over the serrations in the sidewalk terrain, letting me enjoy the quietude of the night. No shooting at all. How sweet the peace is!
(…as sweet as a piss after six cans of bitter beer…)
At dawn two mighty explosions in Armenavan – another uphill neighborhood next to Krkjan. The bangs did not disturb Ahshaut, he slept on bravely… Later in the morning, the two of us had a walk to the Bazaar to buy some herbs for the today's feast – synchronized celebration of Roozahna's (almost a week after the proper date) and Ahshaut's (upcoming in a fortnight) birthdays.
The usual feasting team of sisters-with-husbands-with-children turned up for the event as well as our landlord and lady, Armo and Nasic, respectively, and three their children.
The mother-in-law was not present, attending the funeral of the late neighbor – headmistress of all of her three daughters.
Now, it's half-past-eleven. Sahtik and Roozahna have gone to the Shelter. Ahshaut is left to sleep home tonight.
Silence outdoors.
December 9
The night was shattered by bombardments: seven volleys of six to ten Alazan
missiles each were shot at different hours… A missile from the second volley exploded fairly near to our place. There followed a stretch of deafening silence in the street followed by hasty footsteps and agitated male voices. 'Where? How?'
A not too distant voice called out, 'Hit here!'
Ahshaut slept okay through all the night.
Stretched on my bed, I followed through the matte glass in the panes of our three—so absurdly wide!—windows the languid flame traces of Alazans flying towards their earsplitting crash.
During a lull between the attacks, I had a oddly long dream.
...the bombardment's over I'm coming back home through the raw rays of rising sun midst a silent crowd going the same way and an old women—dark and strange—asks me to help and at once puts a girl of nine on my back to carry along I catch the legs of the kid bestriding me and feel through her brittle stockings that her left leg is cut at the knee and the oldie plods after me assuring her dear Ira-girl that now all's gonna be all right and when we part I enter our room just in time to hear Sahtik's call from the kitchen that I have a visitor and going over there I'm confronted with a close-up of a hen spread out on the asphalt floor with its head chopped off a second before and the bird wriggles its neck ending with a pulpy ringlet of raw meat while the girl that I carried along stands by and she turns up to me the smile on her face shadowed by lank bangs of her dark straight hair falling over the brow to her eye-sockets where instead of eyes only seamless patches of pinch-tight skin...
It's a quarter to 10 am, the night is over, Ahshaut is playing with his wooden blocks. Sahtik has dropped in and stepped out to ring up her sisters. Roozahna, reportedly, sleeps in the Shelter.
My mother-in-law went to her work place to wash the floors there, which, actually, is her job.
Same day, evening
At 11 am I turned up at my soon-to-be work place just to find the renderers' locked up. I went upstairs to Ms. Stella's office room who informed me there was no stuff for translations.
Back at home, Sahtik announced her intention to take the kids to the downhill part of the town and shelter for the night in the basement of Orliana's apartment block.
A senseless plan if I were asked, yet I preferred to keep my humble opinion to myself in the hope that the long walk and change of place and doing something—however senseless it might seem—would do her more good than just sitting and waiting for nothing good.
Then Sahtik spoke of her funny feeling when scared suddenly. She feels an icy curd that starts up inside her and gets tighter and tighter until it gets real hard.
(…quite contrary to the heat decompression of my innards after the splashclutch…)
We set off through the autumnal drizzle never letting up all this day.
Roozahna mouthed off nonstop about missiles, shelters and stuff until Sahtik, shedding off her despondent meditation, ordered her shut up. My seized up back grumbled under the weight of the bag with victuals and kids' clothes, so I kept silent too and only Ahshaut bubbled up with joy at having an all-out walk and now and then issued yells of delight…
Walking back alone, I was as slow-go as the ceaseless rain itself. Yet, a couple of times the sun peeped through the clouds to perk me up and set the tiny raindrops a-glitter. By the Department Store I met my former workmates at the gas pipeline constructing firm, a couple of horny-palmed lads of Baluja village. Vartan asked if I had enrolled a phedayee
group and by his up-palmed hand he kinda sawed across his chest alluding to my beard.
'No,' said I, 'I have not, and beards can't be privatized by guerrillas as their league badge as long as both artists and drifters have the time-honored right to sport it.'
Further uphill I encountered Murad, a KRUZ truck driver, barging down along the sidewalk as any mortal biped, he did it as bulkily as his bull-truck. We just halloed each other.
One block higher, at the next crossing, I exchanged a courtly nod with Guiro, a gaffer from SMU-8, hanging uselessly around—a white-collar remains a white collar—on the opposite side of Kirov Street.
Near the Theater I was saluted by a group of my former pupils from the Seidishen Village School. They looked like adolescents already because of that fluffy down on their upper lips. Kids can't but grow up. These village boys are growing up into a war.
At 8 pm I went out to make a call to the Orliana's on the payphone round the corner. No one was over there to answer. Everybody's gone down to the basement shelter, I guess.
Half an hour later I had a supper with my mother-in-law. Then she left for the Shelter. A mattress and blanket stay there on a permanent basis to stake off the sleeping-place.
December 10
It was a hard day's night and through my sleep I heard only one missile attack (they say there were more) followed by the too loud bangs of the legitimate artillery guns fired from the Soviet Army garrison next to the Upper Park. Retaliating for a maverick Alazan missile?
I fell back to sleep and had a loathsome dream of sticking it in but feeling nothing, neither felt she (who?!) and didn't care a pin to conceal her resentment. What was my wrongdoing to be punished by means of so scalping a nightmare?
At noon, I ventured to the Orliana's to take Sahtik and the kids back. Heading downhill, I dropped into the Theater to participate in the referendum on independence for this here country. Sahtik voted on our way back.
(…so, we did it on the road… Anybody saw us?…)
At 3 pm, the so-long-and-eagerly-craven-for event took place in the Chief Editor's office: Maxim signed my job application. Starting tomorrow, I (nominally) am a sidekick reporter at the local newspaper but actually in charge of Armenian-Russian translations because throughout its glorious history The Soviet Karabakh was always bilingual, vernacular issues duplicated in Russian for the Big Brother to check their consistency with the current imperial course. This wise provision allowed me to kiss good-bye my being unemployed and embrace the position of a translator for the following 3 weeks, till January 1, and then (quoting Maxim) – 'as God will dispose'.
After that concluding invocation, I left his office and on my way home paid attention to the noise in the streets.
'You should've seen' a Soviet Army officer said to his mate marching along, 'what mess that Alazan’s made of my hotel room'.
In the next couple of gossips—a half block nearer to our flat—a Russian military officer's wife with a finger-thick mask of makeup responded to her companion, 'Yeah, I agree!' loud and shrill, so as to drive it home to the passers-by how readily she can agree.
From 4 pm till half past 8, I was fixing up a basement compartment in the 5-story apartment block over the crossroad by the Twin Bakeries.
The musty air in the cemented catacombs moved in a busy stir, the buzz of voices, rasping of a hand saw, hammers knocking, men ferrying through the trunk corridor in the basement pails of rubble and litter out of their would-be shelters.
One of the compartments though was overlooked by shelter-seekers. My mother-in-law conveyed the intelligence to Sahtik and, consequently, I was instructed to go and see to it.