Unfortunately, I met no one on the way home. Walking the empty trail, I dreamed of being written about in The Pioneer Pravda, where they published an article about a pioneer who signaled with his red tie to the locomotive driver about the damaged railway ahead.

And only entering the Courtyard, I met, at last, two passers-by. They looked at me alertly but none of them asked, “Where does this black soot in your face come from? It looks like you've been fighting a forest fire, have you?”

At home, Mom yelled at me for going around so dirty, and no washing machine would do to keep my shirts clean. I felt unjustly hurt but suffered silently…

On summer evenings, the children of Block and mothers of those kids, who as of yet were to be looked after, went out of the Courtyard onto the surrounding road of concrete. Everyone was waiting for the platoon from the Recruit Depot Barracks to come up to the road for their usual drilling promenade.

Reaching the concrete surface of the road, the soldiers started to march in parade step. As if in a magic transformation, they seemed to merge into a tight-knit united critter—a closed squad—that had one mutual leg comprising the entire length of the marching flank, the leg fused of dozens of black boots that simultaneously broke away from the road and fell down one step farther, advancing the whole formation for that one step. It looked so fascinating a creature!

Then the sergeant-major tagging with by the squad’s side abruptly shouted, “Sing off!” And from the midst of the compact mass, throbbing in time to the mutual “plonk!” of the boot soles against the concrete, a young vibrating tenor rose solo to be followed a few steps farther by the thunder of the supporting chorus:

 
“…we are the paratroopers,
the wide sky is all for us…
 

The squad went on and on to the corner of the next block with its inhabitants waiting for it to march by them too, and some children from ours followed it as a running tail, while the young mothers looked in the wake of the soldiers marching to the sun half-sunk in the woods, pervading with its parting rays the evening wrapped into the calm, all-embracing serenity because we were the strongest, and so safely protected by our paratroopers against all the NATO spies in the anteroom to the Detachment’s Library…

~ ~ ~

They brought long iron pipes into the Courtyard. When you hit such a pipe with a stick, it rang loudly and longly… Much longer, actually, than needed and for all my effort I could never play the drum roll with which the Whites marched to their “psychic” attack against Anka and her machine gun in the movie “Chapaev”. Day after day, coming from school, I tried, again and again, filling the whole Courtyard with ding and dong, yet in vain, it sounded nothing like that roll.

The pipes were buried all too soon and my musical self-education interrupted, but the blocks on the Gorka got furnished with gas. They installed the gas stove in the kitchen and hung the white box in the wall above the sink to light the gas on when heating water to wash up or take a bath. Titan the Boiler disappeared from the bathroom, and firewood was needed no more, our basement section with Dad’s workshop became roomier…

One day in early summer, when the parents were at work, I came down to our basement section and took away Dad’s big ax, because I and some other boy wanted to build a fire in the forest.

We descended into the thicket behind the Bugorok-Knoll and started climbing up the next, lower, hill. On the steep slope, there stood a small Fir-tree no taller than a meter and a half. And from the moment of entering the forest with the ax in my hands, I had had an itch to put it to use. Now, there it stood before me the one-and-a-half-meter tall opportunity. A couple of blows and the Fir-tree dropped on the slope…

I was standing next to it, unable to grasp— what for? You couldn’t use it for making a bow, nor even for a mock-up Kalashnikov gun to play War-Mommy. Why did I kill the Fir so aimlessly?

I no longer wanted to build any fire nor have a walk. All I needed was to get rid of the ax, the accomplice in my cruel barbarity. I took it back to the basement section, and from that time walked the woods unarmed…

(…see? What a lovably prissy boy! Yet, the core in this pathetic self-praise thru self-chastening is true to life. However, don’t run over yourself to list your Daddy among the good guys because I am too unstable for that. One day I might be as tenderhearted as you can wish, but the following one… well, I don’t know…

When my bachnagh (this term in Karabakh Armenian means “husband of a sister-in-law”) was getting ready for the wedding of his eldest daughter, the relatives helped out with anything they could. Not with money though, because he wouldn’t accept it— the expenses for such an occasion are born by the happy father. That’s the tradition.

The acceptable assistance comprises, mainly, cookery work. While the staple set of wedding chow at the city House of Celebrations is paid in cash, the standard snacks might be diversified by additional courses cooked by aunts, grandmothers, mothers, sisters, daughters of the immediate and distant relatives. Kinship, aka clan relations, is verily alive and kicking in Karabakh. The culinary help in wedding preparations is a sort of love labor performed using the products purchased by the celebration organizer.

However, certain products call for preliminary treatment, and you can’t but agree that slaughtering a dozen chickens on the balcony in a five-story apartment-block is a way more toilsome undertaking, than executing it at a private, albeit still under construction, house. That’s why the chickens were brought to me.

They dumped them in the vast unfinished hallway and left, busy with innumerable other wedding-preparation chores. Jedem – seiner, quoting a popular German saying.

So, those fifteen living creatures lie in dust on the ground with their legs tied, and I am towering over them with a freshly whetted knife in my hand and all of us are fully aware of what for.

Fifteen are not a single one and there is a definite deadline when distaff clan members will come to pluck the initially processed products clean of their feathers. But each of the would-be products, while alive, has its own coloring and age, its personal point of view on what is happening, its individual reserve of energy, which determines the loudness of protestations as well as the protraction of the flutter with the already chopped off head.

You can’t do such a job without being methodical. So I turned into a robot methodically repeating a set of the same movements… fifteen times…

Sometimes, I looked thru the window-opening, still lacking its frame, at a white fluffy cloud high in the blue sky… So clean… Immaculate cumulous curls…

Just so a robot with a kinda sentimental wrinkle in its program.

Since that time, my attitude to executioners has somehow changed. Probably, I understood that nothing in their nature was outside me…

Well, in a nutshell, at that wedding I was a vegetarian.

Coming back to the assertion that in the case of the Fir-tree killing the weight of guilt was on the ax, who pressed me into the destruction of the innocent plant, then there’s nothing new about it, “I was carrying out the orders…”

A commonplace low-grade zombie-simulation…)

~ ~ ~

In the fifth grade, instead of just one Mistress, we had separate teachers for different subjects because our elementary education was over.

The new Class Mistress' name was Makarenko Lyubov … er… Alexeevna?…Antonovna?…I don’t remember her patronymic. Between us, we called her just “Makar”, yes, checks with the handle of the most popular army pistol of 12 charges.

“Atas! Makar is coming!” (In the school lingo "atas!" meant “beware!”)

But all that came later, and for the first time, I met the would-be Class Mistress the day before school, when Mom brought me there to copy the curriculum and get acquainted with my new Class Mistress.

Makarenko asked me to help her about the class wall newspaper on a big sheet of Whatman paper, which had to be adorned with a frame for which there already was the mark of a pencil line five-centimeter offset from the edges. She gave me a brush and a box of watercolors and warned to use only the blue one before going out together with my Mom to further improve on their acquaintance.

Proud of being trusted with so important a job, I started immediately, dipped the brush in the glass of water, dampened the blue and began to paint the strip of the Whatman paper between its edge and the pencil mark, trying not to trespass it. The job turned out an up-hill one – you paint, and paint, and paint but there still remains so much to paint yet. The main problem though was that each watercolor stroke differed from others by its shade of blue, making it hard to keep the uniformly. I persevered in earnest because not every day a boy gets a chance of making frames on a sheet of Whatman. However, by the return of Mom and Mistress, I had only finished about a quarter of the frame.

The teacher said at once that was enough, even more than that because all she had wanted of me was just passing the brush along the pencil line, but now it’s too late. Mom promised to bring a sheet of Whatman paper from her work, but the teacher said “no-no!” Then I came up with a proposal to mount strips of paper on glue over the superfluously painted areas, but the idea was also turned down, I didn’t know why.

We left, and Mom did not rebuke me on our way home for it was not my fault if the new teacher had never in her life seen sturdy frames of plywood, but only those of thin lines as around the words of Marx and Lenin in the Regiment Club…

When school began there was a wall newspaper hanging in our classroom. Probably, I was the only schoolboy to study so carefully the blue line borders in the paper…

Nevertheless, our new Mistress retained some confidence in me and a month later entrusted with a verbal message for Seraphima Sergeevna in our former classroom.

I knocked on the familiar door and recited the message to my first teacher, who was sitting at her desk facing the new growth of first-graders. She thanked me and then asked to close the upper window leaf, thru which droughts got in whenever someone opened the door.

I readily climbed onto the windowsill and, standing on tip-toes, reached out and slammed shut the vicious leaf. The mission done and, rather than to kneel back on the sill and then lie on it with the stomach, I just jumped down on the floor. The jump turned out classy deft, and full of pride I strutted out of the silent classroom past the delight and reverence in the eyes of the small ones at their desks. How could I have thought those first-graders on a visit to my kindergarten group were so unreachably grown up? Arrogant swaggers!.

At home, we already had a TV set in which announcers read the news against the background of the Kremlin walls and towers, and hockey players rushed from one goal to the other at the European and World Championships. There were eagerly awaited for programs of Kinopanorama, and the Club of Jolly and Resourceful, and, of course, movies!

I would never have supposed that there could be a film longer than 2 sequels. The 4-sequeled “Bombard the area I’m in!” became an eye-opener. Only I did not like Italian cinema, because when Marcello Mastroianni suggested a possible abortion and I inquired what that word meant, our neighbor, auntie Paulyna, laughed out loud and Dad ordered me leave the parent’s room because that movie was not meant for children…

The arms race took place not only in the TV box but in our boyish life as well. We reached the stage of using sophisticated weaponry: crook pistols, crook rifles.

There’s hardly any need in a detailed explanation what a slingshot is, however, I’d like to point out that there are two types of slingshots: for shooting pebbles, and for shooting crooks.

(…pebble-shooters are a lethal weapon, in the hungry post-war years in Stepanakert, the boys were knocking sparrows down from the trees for their meal…)

Crook-shooting slingshot is almost a toy made of aluminum wire and a round rubber band for aircraft-modeling (instead of rubber straps cut out from a gas mask for pebble shooters). The non-lethal slingshots shoot with a small piece of aluminum wire bent into a narrow arc-like crook. Catching the rubber band within the crook’s bend, pull the band and let the missile go. It doesn’t kill but it is felt alright, bad news if the crook hits the eye.

Now, if instead of the slingshot the round rubber band is fixed upon a piece of planed plank and you pull the crook along its even surface, the accuracy of the hit grows exponentially because the crook takes off the firm guide. The rest, cutting out of that piece of plank a sub-machine gun or a pistol, is up to you.

By the point in the plank side to which the readied crook is pulled, you add the trigger-frame of the same aluminum wire strung crosswise so as to keep the crook in place until you pull the trigger. The pressure for keeping the trigger-frame in place and holding the cocked up crook at ready originates from a common rubber band, like that in underpants, stretched taut from the trigger to the screw in the downside of the planed plank.

The boys armed with such weapons do not run about yelling “ta-ta-ta!” as in War-Mommy. They leave those naive games for kindergarten kids and go down into basements and start hunting each other in the dark. Metallic “dzink!” of a crook against the cemented floor, or the wooden walls, hints that the enemy is near and opened fire at you. But securing the position in the pit above the floor at the end of the corridor, you are as safe as in an impregnable bunker. You have to just sit tight up there and send crooks to the sound of stealthy steps, and if you hear “ouch!” from the dark, then you have targeted him okay…

In autumn, they finished construction of the five-story apartment block across the road surrounding Block. The happy tenants were moving into their flats while deep down, in the endless basement corridors of so big a building (the first of that height and size at the Object), there unfolded unprecedented combat actions with the employment of crook weapons of all types.

Initially, the huge underground basement was illuminated with electric bulbs placed rarely but evenly, they lived but a short life: long-range crook shots burst them up, one by one, into fine splinters. Perhaps, the only drawback of the crook weapons was their almost complete noiselessness. For real self-assertion, you need your arms to do some major bangs…

(…life just cannot stand still, it has to flow. Where to? The direction conforms to the dearest dreams of those swimming in the flow, sort of…)

More and more often, the evening quietude in the Courtyard got disrupted by sharp snaps alike to gun reports because the boys had armed themselves with peelikkalkas but I, as usual, straggled behind the advanced trends in the flow of social life, which made me beg for instructions to manufacture a peelikkalka.

Take 15 cm. length of a narrow section (0.5 cm.) copper tube and bend till it resembles letter L. The foot of the resulting L is flattened with a hammer. Thru the remaining orifice, pore a small amount of molten lead into the tube to form a smooth leaden bottom by the angle to L’s foot.

Find a thick long nail reaching the leaden bottom and still sticking out from the tube for at least 5 cm. and bend the nail at 4 cm. from its head (you’ve got another L now).

Insert the nail into the tube (the contraption resembles the left bracket “[”, or right bracket “]”, depending on your point of view) and as a result, you have a working piston-cylinder shebang.

Connect the bent nail head and the flattened tube foot using a common rubber band, like that used in underpants, now the whole construction looks like a small bow and your peelikkalka is ready.

Pull the nail halfway out from the tube, the tension of the band forces the nail rest against the copper wall of the tube at the point to which you pulled the nail out.

Squeeze the peelikkalka in your palm, the band pressed to the tube makes the nail slide inside and sharply hit the leaden bottom. So much for a trial blank shot.

Now, it remains only to load the firearms, for which purpose the nail is fully taken out and the tube loaded with scrapings of sulfur from a couple of match heads.

Insert the nail back, cock it up with the band and “Hello, world!” with a live shot from your weapon. Bang!…

In the evening dark, the splash of flame shooting out from the tube orifice looks quite impressive. On the whole, it’s the same principle as in toy pistols with paper pistons, yet distinctly enhanced in decibels…

On learning the theory, I wanted to manufacture a peelikkalka of my own, but Dad did not have a copper tube of the right size at his work.

Still and all, I had it. Probably, one of the boys gave me an odd one of his.