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. At the cross’ top was positioned the artillery shelling from Sushi City, from the pillar-root in flew the missiles launched at Khojalu Village, the left-hand side filled the howitzers positioned in Malubalu Village, the battery deployed in Janhasan Village added their part into bombardments from the right. And all of that does not bespeak over-large size of the besieged city – a rough circle of no more than 2 km in diameter, so that those batteries could barrage each other, technically, which they did not do though…

Machine gun and automatic weapon fire from Krkjan (the uppermost, Azerbaijani populated part of the Stepanakert City itself) did not reach farther/deeper than the Region Theater's building.

We rented a one-(but-wide)-room apartment in Tumanian Street and in the basement of the nearest 5-story apartment block—50 meters off the house we dwelt in—I had to empty out the space for sheltering my family in between the walls of bulky, cold concrete-blocks forming the block's foundation below the ground level.

At the outset of the movement for the independence of Mountainous Karabakh, while there still existed 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 mentioned relief and things among the local population, after a short-term storing the goods away in the basement of the said 5-story apartment block.

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

However, even I could perform only half of the job, which half allowed though 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 a 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-pervading 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 pinpoint 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 the Leningrad population blockaded in WWII, Stepanakerters did not prepossess the Neva River by their side and had to rely on too few street taps of water running from springs in the nearby slopes… Multimeter noisy queues snaked to those taps to put their pail under a thumb-thick leak of water, to scatter and/or press themselves into the walls of the nearest buildings in another artillery/missile attack…

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, a 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.

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 find that there was someone in the building, after all.

The seedy 2-story editorial office building (a couple of blocks off the printing house) was lost in the deep shadow from the right wing in the gray, 4-story, 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 it or so, 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.

No, yeah, “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 Johnny), Lolitas and so on, and so forth among otherwise Armenian people.

A 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 innumerable jokes’ personage’s name, Daddy just liked the sound.

And admire please 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, right?

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 her Moscow relatives to scribble something she had heard and liked from the radio on a paper slip, my mother’s-in-law mother-in-law did.

And who are you or am I to deny the beauty in “Orlee-Anna” name?

There happens a 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 pretty common the presence of a watchman whose given name was Rashid with his always at ready smile full of square teeth. Besides, I once met a small kid Elchibey (his parents had used the name of the belligerent president of Azerbaijan from 90’s for that quite quick and able mischief))…

In the morning our family were getting 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 underground basement, before starting off 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-extended-family circulation understandable to them who lived thru the realities of the USSR era of deficits…

And then, alleviated and full of feeling of my duty done, issuing tiny starch-creaks off my 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 knocked or pulled at the entrance door from outside (about once a week), it was not a long wait till I came along the corridor to check what’s up.

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

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 his creative efforts the writer failed to notice the trifle…

At too near explosions the building hopped, and the window panes spilled, with the parting tinkle, 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 ceased coming to do their job.

I acted a deaf stone 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. Well, yes, the wall’s outer surface would go kaput, the inside turn all cracks and crevices but still and yet the missile lacked might to penetrate and sky in. No, yeah, if it hit in through the window or balcony door then, no arguing, the place is smashed into a useless trash for sure, all the partitions felled down. However, were it some crummy house of wood, then one hit of an Alazan would turn it into a shitty heap of nothing.

But then, at night, when going after water, I could enjoy a mesmerizing opportunity to admire their beautiful flight—from purely aesthetic point of view—a lazy yellow comet falling from Shushi in a languid arc onto the city (too high this time to get at me) welcomed from the ground with long stitches of tracing rounds from Kalashnikov or two to burst it up, across the flight course, useless, unable prevent its final crash midst the city, and all of it against the backdrop of the full moon – lo! here comes another! and the colorful stitches again! Vain try, of course, yet the surrealism of the picture simply 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 had been the TV studio).

The blast left low hillocks of crushed masonry and some aggravating stink of burned rubber. I cannot definitely state whether it was the smell of the explosives or from the buried, smoldering TV equipment…

* * *

Bottle #8: ~ From the Alternate Angle ~

First off, the darkness did not seem absolute, some pin-prick scintillas still oscillated here and there, and extremely dark but still a sliver gray-hued streaks retained their static position along the edges of actual blackness.

However, all that jump-n’-statics abated gradually, and dissolve, and died away substituted with solid jet-black impenetrability. The wider opened I my eyes, the more of aspic char-coaled dark oozed into them.

The silence—wished for so eagerly just a while ago, before the ominous click of the lid—commenced to depress the ear drums drowned within the all-pervading blackness getting wrapped, layer after layer, into a thicker and thicker shroud of hermetic soundlessness.

“Aaaa!” hollered I desperately at the top of my lungs, horrified, trying to disengage myself, to kick away the sticky horror of being deaf-and-blind, which straining only brought about an even bigger fright and made me realize that atop of everything else I'd become mute. The scream felt like virtual, it did not reach the organs of hearing and sounded only within me. But how on earth could I be sure that it was sounding at all?

A captive in the double cage, twice doubled as a matter of fact – three layers of indissoluble calcium in the shell's structure added with my deaf-mute-blindness, a kinda mollusk’s mantle sack, that's what I was, firmly fixed, strait-jacketed, incarcerated.

Piercing panic rushed thru me like AC of 240 V, set all of my frame a-shake like the vigorous clutch of the deuce yanking a withered pear-tree, hither-thither, yet even those violent quakes went on within the delimited space of a rock-hard cocoon—my nose squeezed between the knees, unyielding bottom under my left shoulder, the lid (not budging an inch) from above, and no way to stretch the legs out. Help! Got trapped and nabbed by the shrewd dickens like an unboiled frog under the upside-down washing-tab!

And only my head still have some room to enjoy the freedom of knocking its back against the shell wall, without the proper revving though to prevent, sadistically, my suicide, just like they did to the accomplice in Lincoln’s killing before the execution… a sack of thick black cloth pressed onto the head to spoil his aiming, not to let Louis ram his skull against the wall and smash it open and damn well ruin the high of the law-abiding crowd coming together with the hangman a-swing in his noose on the warm sunny day… where’s something hard enough?. please!. but the cloth kept softening the impact to save the show…

Of course, I’ve got my constant accessory on me – an old good boarding pistol from two hundred years back, the find on the smashed galleon, which I don’t part with ever since, is still in the sling over my chest… but no, damn! the powder must've got washed away by that mad toad-strangler downpour… wait-wait-wait! See? there’s no softening layer on my head except for my wet hair. Ha! This is the major flaw in their calculations! That’s where the bastards have screwed up!

And I begin to pound the back of my head against the stone-hard calcium carbonate in the shell composition. The pain is shot thru with hilarious triumph – aha! At least I’m able to feel it! Bas! Tard’s! Screwed! Up! Bas! Tard’s! Screwed! Up!

It’s hard to say how many times I’ve looped thru this here mantra—one potent headback-bang for every syllable in it—before the loss of consciousness swaddled everything into the merciful liberating darkness…

………………………………….

…we stood in a close circle where there were some whose names I knew and some fairly unknown though all of them I met for the first time or mayhap had inadvertently forgotten…

…because of the strangely dim light everything around submerged in an unidentifiable uniform murkiness which did not allow for guessing the time of day or where this strange light was coming from or why the contour of each thing got doubled by an additional external line etching any object with a pin-thin luminescence of also gray-hued and equally inexplicable yet more bright weeny glow…

…the downcast stares of all the present alertly followed the ongoing movement of an index finger ticking jerkily along the circle without ever hitting any chest just like a clock hand substituted with a compass arrow exuding morbid-greenish phosphorous gleam off its head…

…each arrow leap got accentuated by a voice full of that hollow aloofness as it happens in the thick fog which suffocates the tiniest echo of any sound —

"The porch of gold was seated by : czar and czars’ sonny : king and king’s sonny : shoemaker and tailor : policeman and watchman : so who are you at all?

tell us all:

tell us: tell us: tell us:

Who?

Are?

You?

…sheeshell… meeshell…

off with you!

to the DEUCE!"

………………………………….

The ascending echoless voice cut off abruptly, and ticking of the index finger spooling inside the circle got lost too together with everything else leaving behind only grayness evenly monochrome and loaded with no contours, but inside it there already dawned and spilled a paler grayness mingled with some light from a still not quite discernible direction.