Sehrguey Ogoltsoff
The Blog
The bomber took an abrupt left turn and I never saw it any more, but the bomb kept on flying exactly towards me and Vanik because we were busy preparing the mortar before the entrance to the house.
It missed the school building and, going on farther, fell into the private sector on the other side of the ravine and blew up someone's house (empty at the time).
The spray of fragments of the house sprang up, and a thick dust cloud rose to screen the sun.
Little by little, the dust began to dissipate but high above it there for a long time coasted a throwaway piece of a newspaper, and it even glided over to our side of the ravine to land somewhere in the bush.
Later I wanted to find it and see which language it was printed in because The Soviet Karabakh was a bilingual paper. A sepia-yellowed Saturday digest in Russian it was…
Vanik put onto his head his wide ‘airfield’ cap to announce that he would not work on that day any more, and went away despite the heap of mortar we had just readied. He, probably, went to get drunk, I would, in his place, but couldn't do it in mine, being myself abstainer for three years already and the following five.
A year later, taking advantage of a certain lull in the situation (shootouts at posts did not grow over into large-scale offensives), Satenic gave birth to one more daughter, Emma and, when the restoration and finishing works of the apartment block we lived in were over, and the independent authorities sent their law-enforcing representatives to expel the unauthorized invaders from the two sections, because in two years our number grew there notably (one especially extended family of squatters lived in two apartments on different floors), then, at a five-minute walk from the illegitimately grabbed lodging, there was already a house for our family of 5.
True, the evictors came not in the police uniform, which they did not have got yet, but in the habitual phedai fatigue – trench coats and Kalashnikov assault rifles that rather scared Ashot, our pre-school son, while they announced politely enough that we had 48 hours to move fucking away. However, the set period allowed for both moving, and disassembling the stove of the refractory bricks, and transporting the materials to our plot.
Since then it’s become very easy to remember the age of our house – it’s as old as Emma and vice versa because everything always happens for the better, as a rule, surpassing any optimistic expectations…
* * *
Bottle #24: ~ The Iron Lady ~
"Can I help you?"
He redirected his stare from the yellow-red waves in the motionless surf squeezed with the geometrical rigidity of the frame keeping at bay the verism of surrounding wall – onto the two strands of hyper-large pearl beads dangling the apex of their quadratic function parabola graph over the wrinkles in the cream vicuna below the waste, rubbing the hem of the flared blouse extended below by a narrower skirt of trapezoid cut, down to the mid-calves, in the blissful style of early Tutankhamen-and-all-that-jazz… Ah! The free of cares belle epoch of Charlestons and Foxtrots – the Great War's left behind already, the Great Depression's not there yet…
"Eh?. W-well…"
"Oh, yes! And I do understand you! Righter than anything I've heard, ever! Impeccable taste and errorless choice! It's one of the finest paintings by La Jue, from his late period. “Playful jerk La Jue” as he was lovingly named in Mont-Mart. At times, I also just stand and watch, and watch, and… As if under some magic spell. The picture is called «The concierge outside her dishabille."
"S-so, it's not the sea then?"
"O? You mean his «Sails near the Fort Bayard», of course? Painted on the back. The artist not always had means to purchase canvas and, when under some unrestrainable afflatus, you know, too uptight with the surge of inspiration, he pulled them backside front. We'll gladly turn it about for you. I felt it at first sight, you are a connoisseur and true aesthete."
"I ain't into pics, you know…"
"Unbelievable! You also read books live? No iPhones, no applications?
Sure enough, we keep quite a few copies for adept gourmets of bibliophily. “The Golden Key”, for instance, “The Golden Rooster” certainly we have. “The Gold Bug”, “The Gold of Kolyma”. "The Empress of Gold", "Golden Gulag for Goldsmiths"…
"Ahem!. Ho… hum… looking for the girl that works here. Name’s Maya…"
"O fuc… ficus' facsimile!". The bob-cut strands of straightened platinum-dyed hair run in ripples over the thick layer of pink plaster in her cheeks. "You should have told at once. A boy-friend, huh?"
"Well, a kinda sort of."
"Okay, cool it. Having a day-off, your Maya. Check her diggings."
"I went there. Locked."
"Use yours, lover boy."
"Well, I'm back from a kinda business trip. Urgent suddenness and stuff. No time to grab the key when departing."
"Save your whoppers, sudden tripper! Wanna take me for a ride? My old man's also havin' the like trips and first thing out of thee can he visits a barber shop to learn his map, where they sprayed it with as shitty cologne as you're wearing now. What's your goes whole, love?"
"Two."
"A greenhorn yet. No holding a candle to my old man. Nabbed again. Okay, I'll lend you his wonder-skeleton-key that'll take less than two secs to open the President's Button box. Then you're bringing it back with a big-big "thank you", eh? The hungered stallions are my best-loved".
. . . . .
Seeing off the client in a blue frock coat, officer's fatigue in British Navy end XVIII century, she took off the wall by the entrance the elegant miniature by António de Hollanda "View of Lisbon in 1530" painted collaboratively with Simon Bening for the "Genealogy of Don Fernando" and clapped it over the tablet “Open” hanging against the glass in the door, face to face.
The size matched perfectly and thru the door now was seen the miniature's backside promising in the manner of apian pointillism, "Gone after goods, soon to be back".
Bypassing an eclectically retrograde collection of paintings in the degenerate cubomorphism style distributed wantonly on nickel-plated openwork stands interspersed with figurines of late ozone anomalistic nudes, the owner of “Salon-Exhibition The Easter Eggs" strolled over to a chrome-synthane leather armchair with kirza inserts, in the corner of the hall and slammed open the black square in the wall.
Inside the shallow niche behind the hinged square, she removed the ebony, dildo-shaped powder microphone of the Lorenz system from the mahogany box and flipped the call-speaker switch (two-in-one). Under the melodically elongated beeps, she sank into the gleaming seat.
The vermilion ovals of manicured nails kept playfully filliping the pearls in that rosary of a necklace about the level of her gallbladder concealed under the layers of her blouse and the black silk corset of Secretly Screwed Victoria.
"Yeah", sounded a male voice from inside the well-polished mahogany.
"Hi, Don… How's your priceless vigor and stuff?"
"What's up?"
"Wanna play Fish and Fisherman? Standin' up in the raft, thrusting you pole thru the mossy water weed at the river bed, eh?"
"Having nothing to busy yourself with?"
"O-okay, don't tick off at Ann-Granny. Better tell me, DonKEY, who's popped up in my dream right now?"
"Get to the point, Anna Serafimovna."
"Wow! Our Donkey has turned so businesslike! So seasoned and mature, and even dry behind his long ears…
Hark, bustler! A visitor I had, that same quickie customer who whipped two of your slobs in one go. One's turned a cross-eyed lobotomy victim, the other gives daily interviews to the head doctor at the funny farm about greenish men and how softly them those aliens enter the landing mode, thanks to Vaseline.
However, the verbal description matches not – freshly shaved and wearing The Triple Cologne."
"Then, maybe, it's not him?"
"Maybe not him, then, was looking for Maya".
"And you?"
"Presented him with the golden key to any hindrance in life".
"Now, it's you who's a bustler. Better leave him in the street. Check his connections."
"Don't you ever lecture me, mudak! Even Dented Denny, my old man, is most wary to teach me. Have you forgotten who in the can took Donkey under his wing? Who promoted that go-getter, you, to a business-doer? Who watered your rose with solicitous regularity, huh?! We kinda wives from the same harem, you and I, if you got it, asshole!"
"Whoa! Slow down, lady. I didn't mean nothing."
"Okay, fine. By seven tonight, you'll send a couple of slobs from your fresh recruits here. Some drive test will I give them. A complete feng shui at rug rolling-respreading all over the bedroom, the best activity for scaling up your positivity."
"Would two do?"
"No indecent innuendos in presence of your superiors! Dismissed!"
Don slam-rang off and growled thru his clamped teeth:
"Fucking matriarchy!"
* * *
Bottle #25: ~ Fiddling About Pedagogy ~
When because of the truce brokered in Bishkek I got kicked out from the Press-Center by the SC of RMK, my diploma of a Teacher of English from the Nezhin Pedagogical Institute helped me out once again. It substantiated my job application to Stepanakert Pedagogical Institute gift-wrapped already in the spangle-twinkling title of State University.
Rector named Arvat did not turn down my request supposing, erroneously, that I was another white collar from the Supreme Council (in the war years folks used to view me that way) maintained up there by a hairy pow who did not mind my looking for a side job. That conjecture made him not over keen on verifying the truth of such speculations or else he did not give a fuck about these here theories on his hypothetical guesswork and he just gave me that job. Period. Anyway, it feels good to take care of yourself as nobody’s protege.
So, I became a teacher of English at the Department of Foreign Languages by the Artsakh State University because the local cadres of eaters found nothing better to busy their screwed up heads with except for dumping the word “Karabakh” altogether. They kicked up a resolute campaign (up to a referendum) to substitute it with the word "Artsakh" of dubious meaning yet without Turkic roots in it. The blithering dunces all of a sudden turned linguistically aware… The common folks went on naming their homeland Karabakh while the managerial dimwits stuck 'Artsakh' tag on any effing shit…
Having Rector Arvat around (though I never communed with the guy) provoked some deep rooted uneasiness in me, a sort of not quite there déjà vu.
A strangeness out of joint should turn into normality, right? Well, in this case it did not work that way.
I had already had Rector Arvat, back at the Nezhin Pedagogical Institute, although by that one 'Arvat' was his family name and not the given one. And the geezer (the previous Arvat) was a Jew from Odessa. Of course, it made no difference still two Arvats and both Rectors were kinda more than enough for me alone. Such a temporal-cognitive discordance created a sort of tension. It’s like meeting 2 John Lennons and both playing the piano, separately.
There happen namesakes, okay, I can buy that. Job-sakes? In millions. Name-and-job-sakes? Not suspecting of each other? Hmm. What next? N&J-sakes sharing an unaware wife? That’s where the straining entered. Or, say… no, I’d better not go down that road.
However, Arvat (the Stepanakert Armenian) soon got replaced with another rector (they were shifting there like knaves shuffled by an experienced deck sharper) who, fortunately, incurred no allusions to my previous life which brought some alleviation, in part.
No use of concealing the fact that the turnover of Rectors at the ArSU went through the roof. It suffice to note that in the course of just one employee's career (namely, my 14-year stretch there) the Artsakh State University saw somersaults of 8 to 9 of those high-ranking educational officials. Thus, the Frequency of Rector-Rotation (FRR) per clown coincides, on average, with the duration of a conscripts’ hitch in the Soviet Army.
None of them (with merely one exception) demonstrated any savvy as to in what way a pedagogical college is distinct from a university.
Once, I even had to explain to a current one (not my fault though: who ever called that Rector to show up at a monthly sitting of the English Department (because any other foreign language remained in embryonic form of an optional subject)) that a university, in difference to a college, is engaged in scientific research as well.
The amount of the offered information clearly exceeded his cognitive capacity, and the unfathomable extent of the overflowing data plunked the usurper into the prostration of so violent a nature that the efforts of the Head of the English Department combined with the concerted assistance of other Anglo-ladies present at the monthly affair hardly managed to reanimate the poor fellow by the plenteous application of tea and jam.
Well, yes, they did manage to bring him back to life. Yet, the Head of the English Department had never forgiven me the accident. Not for the irretrievable quantities in the amount of the Departmental jam stock yet because of her strong instinct of self-preservation.
It was exactly that monthliness that effed me up immoderately and made me a plumb loco deep in myself. Because menfolks at the State University could then be counted on the fingers of one hand – Rafic at the Department of Russian, Volodya at the Biological, Karen at the Physics and Mathematics, and Yuri at the Department of Geography… Well, maybe a pair of laboratory assistants somewhere but those Rectors my hand does not rise to tally up to the ranks of this glorious cohort…
Ah! Yes! Uncle Kolya the electrician! He kept a spacious, but very cluttered workshop under the main stairs where he repaired just anything: from umbrellas to household appliances, which even a normal woman would not understand, let alone those college bluestocking ladies.
Later, Armen Yuryevich appeared at the Department of Armenian, and justified, in part, the University denomination, because he did undertake a research task compiling The Dictionary of The Karabakh Dialect of Armenian.
The work was accomplished at the level of The Russian Dictionary by Dahl, no kidding. The resulting magnum opus will surely outlive us.
Although who for? Meager 6 million people use Armenian nowadays, of which one half populates the Diaspora who use the Istanbul Dialect of Western Armenians, the remaining 3 million live, speak, and write in the Republic of Armenia applying the Eastern Dialect of the language, but neither of them have as worthy a Dictionary where each entry brims with the poetry of life in folk sayings some of which still make me neigh all stops pulled.
It’s only that the compiler exploited juvenile labor demanding from the students to stick down, whenever visiting their villages, everything heard from their granny-grandpa-uncle-ants. Anything at all: proverbs, swearing, jokes…
And the students were only happy to do the job. I saw heaps of their sheet-and-scraps on his Departmental Desk because that way they felt themselves students and not just the sheep for whose sake the tuition fee was shorn off their respective parents.
Still, on the other hand, it’s reassuring that no matter how hard a teacher would tyrannize you, they could not jump higher their own ass because the university should systematically fulfill the plan of harvesting with no reduction of the fleeced cash allowed. So you’d sure pass a test, and get your ‘three’ at the exam, and screw their bullying.
True, time and again you could stumble at those who’re eager to learn indeed. I met such unique ones at the reading hall…
O! the ArSU Reading Hall is certainly a pearl. The Diaspora had dumped there whatever books you want. Some treasure hoard starting from the two last reprints of The Britannica and so on alphabetically…
The uptake not for the critters present? But then, maybe, for those growing yet, for some of the following, future generations. Some huge 'maybe' though…
And that Rector, recuperated by means of jam and tea, never forgave me for the attempt at shuttering the foundations of his inert ideas and, full of vindictive villainy, he ordered the Head of the Computer Room—O my! That's real sweetie! a generous gift from some overseas millionaire—to keep me out of the gift Hall on the basis of hypothetical probability of my sending spy reports to Baku by means of the Internet.
She had to only follow her orders, and I had to await the idiot’s demobilization…
My relationships with the colleagues were characterized by evenness, always. Although the Head of the Department, with her hypertrophied instincts, could not conceal her fury that at their monthly jamborees I kept yawning, repeatedly and even with a distinct howl.
But that was unintentional reaction due to physiologically irresistible stimuli. I tried to restrain my jaw, faith! I did! – even with my both hands, for keeping good manners… To no avail though. You just can't kick against physiology…
To curb the volume of her orations, it took only one adjustment. After another of her accusatory declarations as regards me, I took out the flash drive (alike to WALKMAN yet of smaller dimensions) which I used for listening Tina Turner on my way to the university when the bus driver turned his music too loud. However, this time I pretended it was a Dictaphone and said to the flash drive: “Recorded on February 2, at 13.38”
She got fuc… fully, that is… flabbergasted, being unable to recollect what exactly got shot off her mouth a moment before.
It's after that recording was I banned from the Computer Paradise…
Vice-rector Styopa also, once, in the presence of students in the corridor, began to reprimand me employing an unrestrained tone of voice:
“You’re kept here only because of being a foreigner!”
But those are slanderous rumors that I retorted:
“What can you know of foreigners? Wanna get mine to play with?” Because tongue-tiedness somehow disappears, at times…
The only rector that I did like, from aside, was Episkoposian, who immediately after the war arrived from Moscow and even moved his household furniture down here.
Under him, Anna Alexandrovna, the Library Manager, forgetful of her advanced age, shed off the heed to decency rules endemic in the backwaters, and began to wrap her throat with a chiffon scarf in the romantic manner of the singer Maya Kristalinskaya, especially on days when she went to the Rector's appointment.
Of course, given the difference in their age and similarity of marital status, her dress code did not lead to the slightest office affair, and everything looked an example of love purely platonic and touching to watch…
And what was his idea of spending vacations? Huh? In the hole!
Near the village of Mektishen he dug up a skeleton with strange decorations, which, by all scientific beliefs, were impossible to share that hole with the stiff.
He’d better ask me, when we’d been constructing the gas pipeline nearby Chldran Village, before the war it was, the back hoe dug up a hell of a lot of bones of all kinds of sorts there.
But on the second summer they pulled him out of the hole and clarified that, if his furniture was dear to him, he’d better fuck off out of here.
Meekly moved Episkoposian to Yerevan, it very well may be up to this day gathers he his flock there to lecture on strange Karabakh artifacts, and in summer, some place in the Ararat Valley, exhumes he spare parts jettisoned off Noah's Ark, because Armenia is a mighty ancient land…
Besides, in the eyes of the university administration, I had decrying connections with doubtful citizens from abroad. Not those who’d appear for a day or so to pass another grant or a donation, but of the kind they didn’t get it what those needed about here at all.
Take, for instance, Nick Wagner and our friendship for about twenty years…
A break it was and he walked the corridor along the second floor in the New Building. No rubbing his shoulders neither elbows with anyone, so delicate a passer-by. But his being an American was too obvious because nobody would sport the beard like his in the surrounding whereabouts.
"Hey!" sez I pacing in the counter direction and kept going.
So he U-turned, caught up and said: “Who are you?”
Well, it’s not my custom to make secrets of nothing:
“The last of the Mahicans,” sez I, taking into account my uniqueness at the Department, as well as my status along this second floor plus divers other sadly associated factors.
Since that moment we’ve been friends because he also had read works by Fenimore Cooper, although they’re absent from the American school curricula…
Nick himself was working then in Yerevan, at the American-Armenian University or, maybe, vice versa. However, he felt inclination to a less spoiled, by the civilization, nature. That’s why he came to Stepanakert, though without knowing the language.
So I escorted him to meet the current Placeholder. Nick wrote his application at the personnel department and went back to Yerevan to give his lessons at the AAU there. Damn no! AUA is the correct name! Whatever…
A month past, he comes again to say there was no answer.
Again, as an interpreter, went I with him to the personnel department.
"Why d’you grill the man? One whole month there’s no answer!"
"Not true! The answer was there."
"Where?"
"Right there in my safe."
O YOB… O MOTH FUC EFF BLIAD SCRE…
No, even for me it's hard to pick the right word, at times…
In short, there was the refusal to his application, in that steel safe, on the grounds that his Californian pronunciation plus degree from the University of Nevada State were not congruous with the aspirations of the ArSU English Department staff who wished instruct the RMK students in strictly British English. So was their ambitious design and predisposition.
Yet, Nick turned out a slippery customer and moved to Karabakh all the same. Became an Instructor of English at a private university. Yes, there were birdies of that feather too (2) in Stepanakert, not only the State was born to fleece.
Besides, he got some means, his Dad was a popular barber and Mom a scion of refugees from the Western Armenia. But she did not undertake to teach her three sons Armenian…
And I can understand him, in Yerevan I also would not survive…
Well, as for Mike Newman, then yes, everything’s in full view, an inconcealably epitomic spy for you, I have to admit.
A Briton himself, he lived in Paris, and had worked thru Russian language courses to a level with a charming accent. Not enough? How about his visits to Karabakh? Not every year, yet periodically, although instead of books on the BBC order he wrote poetry, and even sang his own songs playing a guitar, simultaneously. Not bad, by the bye.
No need for a diagnosis from the KGB here – some undeniable spy.
Thanks to him, I saw the meaning of that dry British humor, you know. It’s when I kinda flashed my Britannica fostered erudition:
(britannica.com/biography/Saint-John-Henry-Newman).
"Mike," sez I, "are you aware, if we pick the subject of possibility of weird coincidence, that you've got a namesake who's also a Newman?! That same one who later became a cardinal. How about that?"
Not a single feature twitched in the face of the handsomely attractive manly man, James Bond (nothing like that ugly Quasimorbid from the most recent series), and Mike Newman (ahem!) very calmly, with a perfect coolness remarked:
"I forgive him".
The dagger-and-cloak men are lenient enough to absolve the sinful clergy…
Considering all that, when Nick and I am getting together to celebrate another Saturday, he always starts one and the same, rehearsed to the level of virtuosity, number, both frivolous and futile:
"The educational system in Karabakh failed!"
And I comfort my friend with the no less profoundly practiced, delicate diminuendo:
"Not just here, Nick. Not just here. It’s a fucking global fiasco…"
* * *
Bottle #26: ~ The Re-Union ~
The day got doggone from the very start. At breakfast, after she put sugar in her tea cup and lifted the bowl to shove it up onto the shelf, it suddenly slipped from her fingers and leaped to the floor drawing the white mare’s tail of grit all over the kitchen, loose and wide…
Clutch the broom, Maya, here’s a job for you, bitch!
The only consolation was it was a day-off. That batty floozy, the mistress of that salon-bookstore loony bin, told Maya yesterday not to come next day.
That slut’s kooky in her head, beyond repair. Changing three times a day.
Hoopskirt in the morning or else in the Elizabeth Virgin Whore style from the Tudor dynasty, unless, of course, not in a mini-bikini.
Do all women at that age bust their nuts so wholly? The only sane thing about her that she's made Maya learn to read and write.
At first it was knotty hard – oh! that fucking "Golden Key"! but then it gradually began to move on and somehow turned even interesting what that bitch Malvina, the puppet show prima pussy, dyed her hair with, eh? Not laundry blue, for sure.
Then she wanted to cook a soup. No, yeah, no go. There’s just a spoonful of dry pasta shells in cellophane, on the shelf.
Some familiar ring, eh? Why to leave there that scant pinch? When you see it’s just a nip left then dump all of it in the pot on the stove with everything else to finish it off. But no! Wrapping back in cellophane and storing on the shelf.
Sometimes it’s hard for Maya to understand her herself.
So nothing doing and she decided to go out to the supermarket.
Moreover on that TV they sow their stupid oats all day long – how could Ukrainians be so fascists and not even spare their own civilian population…
Well, not right away, of course, it takes time before you decide on which rags to put on after all…
. . . . .
At the supermarket of her former kinda colleagues there stayed only Nastya, the cashier.
Because of her obesity she’s too lazy for looking for a decenter job…
And that mudak in the line behind with his gaze riveted to Maya’s bottom as if it's his first time throughout his miserable life to see a woman’s ass.
Though yes, her ass is the coolest one in both this and the next hemispheres. Not fat yet round. Exactly what is lacking them those bitches in the podium that wiggle their skinny pelvic bone back and forth like empty scales.
Well, were you the only of the kind, then okay, fine. But not battalions of cloned Masha-Dasha in different rags and wigs of any hue on the march – left-right! left-right!
The dressage training, an Olympic sport.
And when already coming back home, the left spike broke off clean, as she was nearing her tower-block entrance.
Some damn well out of luck day and no doubt! With one foot you’re normal while keeping your right one on tiptoe as if sneaking up… Some lame duck with her sack of bad luck…
And then the elevator was not coming down for half an hour. Some bastards rape-holding its door in the upper floors.
Finally arrived, a couple with a baby came out.
The little baby’s such a cutie, the eyes so round, lips open in a small “o”. O, sweetie!
Maya got out on her seventh floor, opened the door, and still in the hallway she realized that something was not quite there.
She kicked her ruined heels off and looked from the corridor into the room.
Yep! So it is, some bum in a blue pea jacket is snoring on the couch by the balcony door.
Happy-New-Year-and-heat-your-ass-in-sauna!
It’s not that Maya freaked out completely. Nopes. She knew a trick or two from the bouncers at the bar “You’ll Get It”, some hard stuff so that kicking the guy in his balls was a kids' game, in comparison.
Yet just in case, she quietly went to the kitchen after the meat hammer.
How ever could that bum get in?
"Hey you! Reveille!"
He jumped up, batting his eyes and rubbed his lips with the heel of his palm.
"How d’you intrude? What’s your want?"
"Maya…"
Her eyes contacted his stare.
"Nobodya … And … the beard … where?"
The hammer slipped out the clutch and tapped at the floor, slightly…
"Actually, I’m Inokenty."
"What are you talking about? Inokenty the Who? The First? Second? Third?"
"The third… UF-3."
"Yeah. Unparalleled Fool. Can be seen in the dark too."
"Wait! Where so too many Inokenties from? Your exes’ count?"
"Too many or under many is for me to size up… The employer at the bookshop got me hooked on reading. When there are no clients, I leaf through everything. Lately The Sacred Puppet Show it was by the French blogger named Taxil.
O, Lord! They did jump bones in their shows! Did indeed! Even with their daughters…
You rarely come across the like porn even at X-sites.
Inokenty The Third’s the coolest of them Popes. It’s him to train all the princes and emperors in Europe kissing his shoe."
"A faggot or what?"
"The tribute of respect! You, fool! And no yo-yoing here! Where’s the beard?"
"Well… hum… see… Esma undid me in the morning… then UF-2 told about Athos, and he himself worse than a skinhead… it all got me somehow… and there’s a barber shop, well, I just went in… er… only they didn’t have change from a piastre…
"A tough case… seems like not just the beard was lost."
"Worried sick about that beard? Why so keen on it?"
"Having even the nerve to ask! Ha! Why am I keen? Yeah? Why? Got lost for so long and God only knows where. Then rolls in with his mug shining! Where have you been?"
"On the Island."
"Boy, o boy! A fucking bucket of steam! Which one? Vasilyevsky Island? Or Honshu?"
"Come on… Chris got killed. When you told me meet him."
"How d’you mean killed?"
"Two shots. A slob of Don’s."
"But you?"
"The bastard hit from behind my back. I didn’t see nix. Nothing at all."
"You not hurt, Nobodya?"
"It’s Inokenty. I’m Inokenty! Too hard to remember?"
"Again? The Third? Or you’ll share the last name too after all?"
"There’s nothing to share. I know nothing."
He got up on his feet and in few steps reached the glass door to the balcony, leaned his forehead on the transparent hardness. Keeping her eyes on him, Maya downed onto the couch.
"Look, if you're on the run, speak openly."
Still with his back to her, the still silhouette against the backdrop of the dim light of the waning day answered: