Сергей Огольцов - The Ficuses in the Open

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

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.