Сергей Огольцов - The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)

Something made me look back and eye-contact the beastly intent stare… A jackal? Dog? … ah, none… look at this brush of a tail… a fox no doubt… or maybe a vixen… and surely a young one, never met hunters yet…

“Hi, Fox. I’m not Prince. I am not young. Go your way.”

I moved on, dodging the long web-threads, bypassing and sometimes scrambling through the prickly brier; the fox followed. Who invented the bullshit as if animals cannot withstand your fixed look and have to turn their eyes away? Faking quack!.

And so went we on. Occasionally, I addressed him with one or another conversational clue but he never picked gossip. At one point, I took off my haversack and opened it to angle and throw him a piece of bread.

At first, he didn’t seem to know how to approach it but then wolfed the treat down, and quite efficiently too, keeping me all the time under his most vigilant surveillance. Considering the donor for a potential prey? Easy, schemer, we don’t need no hurry… And only when between the trees ahead there stretched a sunlit clearing, he began to cast evasive looks behind himself and soon blend into the woodwork. Fare thee well, Young Fox from the young forest…

I went out into the clearing to realize that I had almost completed a rough circle about the summit never finding the passage over to the next toomb . A couple of decayed roofs peeped from under the distant cliffs. Enough was enough, fed up with the search for an imaginary trail running along the ridge, I switched over to looking for a way to reach the ghost village of Skhtorashen.

The steep footpath soon showed up and brought me to an abandoned orchard of hulking Mulberry trees from where I proceeded to the village spring of delicious water superior to that back by the long-liver Plane.

Then I walked the thirty-meter-long street of two or three houses lost under the crashing overgrowth of blackberry bushes. The cobblestoned street cut abruptly replaced by a barely discernible trail tilting down the slope which faced the Karmir-Bazaar valley.

(… the village of Skhtorashen was deserted before the Karabakh war, that’s why the houses were not burned down and though barred by blackberry still keep their rotten roofs up.

The village, like many others, got killed by the dimwit decision of the Soviet Leadership on the Resettlement of Population from High Mountainous Areas to lower places. The USSR, over its seventies by that time, was sinking into senile dotage because political systems tend to follow the life circle of man, their creator.

Servile authorities of the then Mountainous Karabakh Autonomous Region, along with the like polities in other Caucasian regions obeyed loose-brain Big Brother’s injunction and finished off more than one village.

I mean, with all due respect to septuagenarians I’d rather skip entering their venerable funny club… )

On the way down the slope, like an incurable bolshie, I made two more attempts at finding at least a minor shortcut, yet both deviations were blocked by deep gorges and sheer cliffs, so the highway met me exactly where I left it two days before, near “The Old Plane Diner”.

(… gently is a docile kid led ahead by fate, while stubborn brats are dragged along gripped at their forelock to unavoidably get to their destination… )

After several turns in the smooth serpentine, the highway took a beeline to the pass out from the outspread valley of Karmir-Bazaar.

Up the tilted roadside I trudged along through the repulsive yet somehow fetching stench of the sun-thawed asphalt. Panting, sweating, plodding ahead, I had to move the haversack straps to different positions over my shoulders more and more often, ridiculously often, but all the same at any place after a few steps they dug into the flesh anew and hurt to the very bone. The salt of sweat ate into the eyes that ceased their joyous frisking around to catch a beautiful view or 2, the dull weary gaze crawled along the coarse asphalt under the worn army boots stomping my shadow, which began to gradually grow longer. And yet, at times my eyes took the liberty of casting wishful glances uphill seeking some shady tree nearby the highway, though I knew perfectly well there was not a single such one all the way up to the pass top.

Once or twice, I left the asphalt to slacken thirst with blackberries from the bushes below the road shoulder, looks like this year we’re facing the blackberry crop failure or else it was the stretch of barren bushes ‘cause I hate to be a bearer of bad tidings… And again my heavy boots were tramping uphill along the steady tilt…

~ ~ ~

To obtain and develop your skills at clairvoyance, don’t look for a better coach than mountains… So, when the endless straight ascend of the highway reached the pass top to transform from that point on into horizontal bends and twists dictated by the relief of the toombs outside the valley left behind, I could predict with an awesome degree of accuracy that half an hour later the already indiscernible (if watched from this here position) speck of a pedestrian, this here me, would be taking the indiscernible turn to disappear over the farthermost slope of that distant toomb and, after ten-to-fifteen-minute walk, before reaching the Sarushen village, I would fork off the highway to follow the dirt road tilting to the bottom of the Varanda River valley. And there it would be really nice, with lots of shade under the trees, and the spring of cool water running from the rocky river bank…

All happened exactly as foretold, and when the dirt road brought down to the shallow ford across the gravel-filled riverbed before the sharp rise to the village of Sarkissashen, I split and went along the river bank through the live tunnel passing over a Hazel thicket to come out into the wide expanse of an unusually level field stretched matching the foot of the steep toomb on the opposite bank.

Try to imagine a football field put almost straight-up, and overgrown with broad-leaf wood up to the very top of that wheeling stadium. Because the steep is so rampant, the tree crowns do not screen each other but climb higher and higher in succeeding rows, each crown sending forth the shimmer of its own—a little bit different—shade of green. Can you imagine this daydream? If so, then you can easily see me too down on this riverbank, stretched on my back under a huge Walnut tree, on the thick mat of moldered foliage from the years past—brittle, soft, dried out.

Here am I to enjoy the orgy of the upward stream of green running over the toomb across the river, and relish the deep blue of the sky above, and admire the canopy of broad Walnut leaves sun-bathing in the soft breeze over my head.

Ho-ho! It’s damn good to be alive, sprawling like this, thinking thoughts of this or that, or of nothing at all. The only jarring note is the absence of anyone who I could share all this surrounding beauty with… whoops! Forget, cut this one out… I’ve got used since long that the moments of the like delight only happen when there’s no one around… Yet, it’s never overmuch to make sure you keep your megalomania in check, tight and proper, and no seemingly harmless thoughts are taken for granted, like, the more space is forked out to a single person, the higher is their position…

Once upon a time, I was flipping thru a discarded relic of a glossy magazine in German. The feature article inside was all about a certain Hoheit Herzog, the owner of a giant chemical concern. In short, he’s one of those Highnesses keeping aloof from the political rat races for they’ve left that petty sport to presidents, prime ministers, contesting parties und so weiter , yet the slightest turns of rudder within their enterprises are of the most decisive import for the political course of Germany.

The article was full of eye-candies around the Herzog's close-up against the backdrop of his personal backyard park—a crashing vast scope of trimmed grass interspersed with old well-groomed trees and the couple of the blond-lock cupids of his grand kids playing toy bows between the trees next to his left earlobe.

His forefathers, wandering Jew paddlers, hauled consumer goods from as far as China itself to trade with feudal dukes, and barons, and any other titled medieval bandits. Gentile barbarians paid the sidelocked Shylocks with all sorts of base abuse. And now he’s the upper dog, the monarch of a wealthy industrial kingdom. Yet, is he happy? Looked doubtful to me considering Herr Herzog's facial expression smack-bang in the middle of that paid-for-by-humilated-ancestry-and-fully-deserved-by-his-own-merits park of his…

OK, but leaving in peace all them those royals, what about me? Am I happy here, lying on my side beneath the arboreal awning, enjoying whiffs of the soft breeze cooled by the river stream, with all this hell of a lot of space for me and me alone?

Some huge domain, indeed, this field under the thigh-deep rank grass, spiked-mace-like bluish spherical thorns peeping here and there, and that grand Camelot- toomb over the stream, as tall as the residential towers bulking up alongside the highway between Kiev and the Borispol Airport. What else would you ask for to feel appropriately happy, eh?

A pretty interesting question if you come to think of it. Alas, no looking-glass in my haversack to knock out a self-diagnosis from the smart expression of my silly mug…

~ ~ ~

This empyrean grabbed my attention six years ago when the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh—newly independent, self-proclaimed, and never recognized by the world at large avoiding pain in the ass except for this or that Mayor Hall scattered in different states and hemispheres—arranged sort of a Pioneer tent camp in this spot for school kids of Stepanakert.

That time Sahtic worked there thru all the camp sessions, back-to-back. My modest proposal to leave our dearest scions to my fatherly care and custody was, quite predictably, scoffed at… not that I pressed for it too much, just making the suggestion was a self-evident token of my good will, right? That’s why Ahshaut and Emma had to while away the whole summer by their mother’s side, all the three sessions, back-to-back, in the camp platoons befitting their respective age and gender.

The eldest child in the family, Ruzanna, after passing the university exams for her sophomore year, joined them there and picked up the job of self-styled Pioneer Leader. Which position, of course, was made obsolete by the collapse of the Soviet Union leaving alive pioneers only in old movies produced by the Soviet cinematography, but… well, yes, if Ruzanna wants something, I am ready to impart my solace to the relatives of any force major inadvertently popping up in her way… So, she became the Pioneer Leader for everybody at the camp, never paid for doing the job but she didn’t care.

After a couple of weeks spent home alone, I got bored stiff by the goddamn mum evenings about our house, and one late afternoon I left the city in the direction of the Sarushen village. On the way, I bought a pack of cookies and some candies from a petty shop in the town outskirts. (By that time in my life I grew wise enough to realize that the joy of seeing Daddy needs a proper follow-up, the sweeter the better.) Hitchhiking, I traveled 20+ km to the village and at dark reached the camp.

Just about the same spot where I am lying now, there stood the folding canvas stool of Camp Director, Shahvarsh, on which no one ever dared get seated except him, kinda local species of the frigging Coronation Boulder in Scotland. And on the broad trunk of this Walnut tree, even then lightning-split already, there hung a single bright lamp, fed by the generator whirring softly from behind the trunk, the light spilled into the black darkness revealed two long tables of sheet-iron lined head-to-head by the field edge, long narrow benches of the same chilly material were dug in the ground on both sides of each table. Solid black silhouettes of two squat pyramids of army squad-tents bulked in the dark field: one for all the girls at the camp, the other for the boys and Gym Teacher. A little to the left there stood a six-person tent of Caretakers. The formation was concluded by a two-person tent for Camp Director Shahvarsh and his wife, who also embraced the positions of Cook and Paramedic. Deeper in the field, some thirty meters to the right from the tents, a tame campfire was licking lazily with quiet tongues of flame the end of a sizable log—a tree-trunk, actually—cleared of boughs and propelled, as needed, into the gleaming embers of the burned down wood…