Sehrguey Ogoltsoff
The Blog
In the history of any family arrives the point when everything nose-dives into snafu even in the absence of a French governess, as it was the case at the Oblonskys' house by Leo Tolstoi…
In ours, for instance, all got messed up for the more inevitable reason which unavoidably catches on any family: the children had grown up.
Ruzanna wedded a citizen of Greece and moved over to her husband’s country, Ashot got married at the place of residence and started paying off the mortgage for a two-room apartment on the second floor – the life trail for the coming couple decades got clearly determined.
Emma, having just graduated from school, still lived in the house no older than her and, with the principle functions and purposes for our individual cell of society accomplished, it was time to check a little closer who exactly the life was spent with.
The worst property of mine disclosed in the course of check-up was my catastrophic discordance with normal people (damn no! because of my innate perfect politeness, I don’t even give a fuck about their normality! Ever!)
‘Not guilty’ pledge I. Tolerance to the bypassed preterite is my life motto because they are the most challenged segment in the population of this here planet and the most—alas!—numerous.
Nonetheless, such was the deduced reason for my being unable to secure a decent income and stable support for the family, and all I was good at was my willing attitude to reproductive labor (okay, fine, the quality of final products stays undeniable as well, but why don’t I care a bean? After?).
Now, to avoid a possible exposure of my other, equally negative, but undetected, as of yet, shortcomings immorally tucked away, all the time… (No! the basic motive was my desire to keep the beloved off further disappointments, were all of my hidden faults to pop in their shocking pack up suddenly!)
That’s why, to move the object of too close scrutiny out of sight, end August 2013, I put myself forth before the unsuspecting observation by Karina, the Head of People Education of Lachin City and the same-named District, and proposed my pedagogical services to her.
The skin-deep scan was rather hasty and I obtained the post of a teacher at the village school in Yezznaggomer—50 km off the customs on the border with Armenia by the make-believe road which climbed along the Zabukh River valley and, when up there, the right turn for a steeper ascend to 2.5 km above mean sea level…
The following seven years became the most amazing adventure of my life. And anyone familiar, more or less, with parallel worlds will understand me here…
You’ll never find a parallel world on any map, be it even a contour map, which we were tortured with at school.
There is no parallel world whatsoever because it doesn't exist until you get there.
At school, everything is quite simple – you flick the ball of globe to spin: see? Asuncion! and here we have New Guinea, and this is Greenland for you – just a cinch, easy as pie!.
Reality tumbles the seeming simplicity…
I happened to wade through the grasses, which in the world left behind would hardly be knee-deep, but—lo!—they sway their unreachable tops way above my head.
Been choosing my way across mountain landslides that looked like momentarily stopped waterfalls of multi-ton boulders.
If watching yourself through the eyes of hawks hung hovering in the sky – you’ll see an ant who pries for her way over a pile of sand grits – hey! beware! some of those move under your feet with hollow taps and the dickens only knows what damn Ant Lion (preying on ants only?) harbor the depths under…
Flowers… Fields of unknown, unseen colors, and even if they did have been met sometime back, somewhere, still it never were fields deluged with the bloom of that stunning hue.
Hornets… Well, okay, let's call them hornets… the size of a grown-up fella's fist…
Or else. Here’s a plain for you. Yes, I know it’s in the mountains, the altitude of 2.5+ km, but I am smack bang in the middle of a plain which has no end, and the mountains are far off, over there, and I walk for a half-day, and fall, dead tired, face up to the sky, where there are no mountains, nor plains, but just one blazing sun and a pair of hawks waltzing, wingtip to wingtip, synchronously…
And how about a summertime snowdrift?
End June, you are beastly dying of thirst, it’s a one-day walk off the village, the plastic bottle is crackling-empty, and all of a sudden, in a deep pothole with green grass on steep walls, a snowdrift is waiting for you. Yes, darkened by the dust spilt over it, loose, but from under its bottom a tiny brooklet gurgles full of coolness, which will not let you die…
Rivers, in whose rare backwater stretches it’s impossible to make out that border where the air ends and starts the water, and you have to guess that, aha! – those stones over there are already the bottom, overgrown with algae of semi-precious flowers, and the opposite riverbank is so temptingly close, but still unattainable – the glacially cold gushing current will topple you and drag away together with your alpenstock…
And everything around is overflowing with life, over the brim, it buzzes, whistles, rustles, rumbles in the peals of thunder somewhere in the clouds below your boots, plays with the sunlight and gusts of the wind…
Unknown roads, not too difficult, it’s just that at times you have to bypass hefty boulders… and you walk for a kilometer, and one more and… it cut off without a trace, any advance farther only by a chopper—caravan routes from millennia back…
A 3D replica of the Vereshchagin's masterpiece "The Apotheosis of War" – the heap of rounded bleached skulls of boulders as tall as a 12-story building…
And those faces, muzzles, snouts stuck out from inside the rocks? Gigantic forms on thrones?.
I was not drunk and I remember everything seen in the parallel, unlike the one which they had been staffing, cramming, ramming into me…
But the main difference between a parallel and the inoculated world is the immeasurable boundlessness of the first, the infinitude which you will find neither among the tombs of Egypt, nor along the musty Venice canals, not even above the abyss of the Grand Canyon, and not at any other well-promoted tourist route equipped with hot-dog booths at convenient joints, and warning signs, and guides wearing smiles wider than natural.
Billy…
The dog is man's friend? Bosh!. The dog is a part of you, that most faithful part, remaining full of trust when even you already have betrayed yourself…
They presented Emma with a small silly puppy, Billy, and when he grew too big to suit the backyard by the house of Emma's age, she asked to move the hiddy mongrel to the village.
To meet her request I hired Karen with his "Niva" vehicle, he’s my neighbor in Yezznaggomer.
On the way back, we stop in Lachin City to buy provender as there are no shops in our village.
The dog leaps out of the car after me.
I fasten his leash at the iron pipes in a road-side contraption, a kinda fence. Okay, wait, buddy, it won’t take long.
With full bags in both hands leave I the supermarket to be met by his delighted lezghinka-dance on all sides of me.
The brand-new leash from a specialized store keeps a-swish-a-swinging, torn in two by this son of a bitch…
Another passage.
Winter, dead night dark around. I leave the village to be in time for the bus, from Moshatagh Village.
It’s 5.30 am, the bus starts at 9 am, and it’s a 15-km leg to get there.
The sky is overcast, zero visibility, I walk on and kinda feel, at times, something shoots past rustling over the snow rind in the darkness.
Only nearby Mekyand Village, after the eight most wolf-dangerous kilometers, he shows up, but keeps off, never coming closer. The SOB damn well knows his wrongdoing because I did have told him to stay home, look after the order! And he kinda obeyed and jumped over the hedge back into the courtyard.
And now what?! I need to urgently visit Stepanakert (100 km off).
A pack of cookies bought from Susanna’s shop in Moshatagh Village for the parting treat, spilled on the roadside, the bus door slams – fare thee well, fucking moron!
Three days later I’m coming back to Moshatagh by hitch-hiking. A lucky strike – Armen from our village is there too by his "Zhiguli" vehicle!
Susanna, the shopkeeper, says, there’s a stray dog about here, I rush out from the shop.
And there he is!. You're a fucking bitch, Billy, though being a male dog!
No room in the car ‘cause Armen has come down after provender. We load the dog into the trunk, there’s an hour drive to Yezznaggomer along the make-believe road, seriously – no way to go on until you believe this here thing is a road.
Whine, Billy-boy, in the dark trunk, complain to the spare tire, be sorry for your misdeed…
Billy, I am guilty of my dead stupid attempts at weaning you off kleptomania. My bad. Unforgivable.
I was not able to get it in time that you were not stealing, that you’re a hunter by your nature. And, yes, I beat you twice (or thrice?) over the loot you had brought home—the slippers or things from the neighbors’ porches—your game, your prey, your hunting trophy which I had to take back with the most embarrassed apologies. The fucking dumb-ass master of the fucking hunter dog…
The village kids are coming, pleading:
"Let Billy go."
"He’s punished."
"Come on, set him free, he’s good, he won’t never more again."
"He’s punished."
The kids all loved him because he endured anything from them, not a bark, not a growl to shoo them off. And a picture of the kid hugging Billy would score at least 20 likes on Facebook *.
(*In 2022 the organization was found guilty of terrorism and their activities banned on the territory of the Russian Federation.)
"The only dog in the village that no one is afraid of," says Gaiane, Edik’s wife.
The rest of the dogs were jealous, they always attacked him, in packs, and though being the size of a mature shepherd dog, he looked so small against the background of those wolfhound-gumprs.
He quickly ran away. At times they caught on. He came home oozing blood, barely moving his paws, bitten in the stomach.
He would keep to his kennel for a week and again go out to the road to meet me from school.
Wolfhounds, damned impostors to the title. At night, as the wolves closed in, they would hide in their household yards and bark in three-four-five voices all night long. Every night…
Then Anna, Armen’s wife, came to school to my class.
"They killed Billy in our yard."
I went on till the break bell. What’s the use of hurrying. Or doubting Anna’s words.
In their yard Billy’s lying on the trampled snow. The fangs bared, no look in his eyes.
"They were two," reported Anna. "Ambo’s Pitbool and one more."
Pitbool, the champion of the village in dog fights, when mujiks from the fucking nothing better to do pit their wolfhounds. Pitbool, who even Ambo, his "master", is afraid of, that Pitbool attacked not alone but together with a sidekick sixlet.
A no-man's dog entered Anna's yard, sniffed the body, commenced the wailing requiem:
"Open, o, the Gates of Valhalla! He fought bravely to the very end!"
Two empty cement bags took Billy's body in.
I corded the yielding coffin with a length of rope and dragged it along through the snowfall.
When we reached the water spring, the dogs from the nearby yards set on a mournful howl.
"He died young, but free! And you, dogs you have always been and that's what you’ll remain!"
Our procession left the village, then I dragged on for another hundred meters, down the slope.
In between the stone walls of a ruin dropped was it – no iron breaker could crash the ground in the wintertime Yezznaggomer.
See you, Billy!
I am guilty before you which is dead sure.
So intelligent I am when it’s too late, when all the smarts are of no use, when you will not run up, clapping your ears, will never lean your paws on my shoulders, and never will you rub your forehead against my palm to get a pat…
Yet all that comes later, but at first…
No, not now… I cannot today.
Eehh, Billy…
* * *
Bottle #32: ~ O, Sport! You Be Life’s Ought! ~
The breath shoots out in sharp whizzes in time with the crazed breakneck run.
The mind is turned off, not needed, nothin' to do for it right now, the receptors-muscles-body act-react faster than the speed of thought in this mad dash through the jungle’s thickets – dodging a branch popped athwart the way here, jumping over the trunk of a rotten windbreak there, hopping up past a treacherous bump.
He’s darting for his dear life.
Who’s he? Forget! Only his instincts matter right now – to flee, get away, escape.
Well-trained they are, the instincts, the relay baton gift from his forerunners in the endlessly rotating generations of ancestors for millions upon millions years.
Those too clumsy for the race did not add to the heirloom – squashed, torn, killed, blocked off from adding to the gene pool…
So, run, Nobody, run!
Shshihk!. And the trees around went rolling topsy-turvily. BUT?. Wha-at?.
Thundering pulse-throbs, harsh wheeze-groans, the sinews strained to hop up for running on…
But what's this thick net? Unbreakable wrap all around? What the…?
A scolding heat-splash in the surge of panic and the sound of one more run, not his, scurrying ever closer, clapping moistly at the drenched jungle soil of the rain season…
A pair of legs pop up in his vision field. Barefoot. Brown. He’s arching his neck to see what’s above those knees…
With a thundering discharge, the blindingly black lightning crackles across the crown of his skull…
Run over…
A creepy rumble from the invisible, distant horizon rolls nearer in stirred indistinct clusters of sound rotating tardily… some croaking of a pterodactyl… no… human speech, reaching over-slowly, the syllables drag on for years through the darkness in the closed eyes, through this pain in the crown but, strangely, not in its usual spot—the back of the head…
"Wwrreerr… aamm… I-i?"
"Coming to senses, Kenty? Attaboy! Come on! Wake up! We don't have no time."
Thru the gap in the squint of the too heavy eyelids, a blur of a face cranes over, vaguely. Incipient heat in the cheeks from the restrained regular slaps in the face…
"An’… you… who… are?"
"Much closer to the matter in hand. Well done." The naked torso turns sideways to present the forearm, where, spurning any snazzy vignettes, full of calm self-confident simplicity, stands: “UF-1”.
"Athos? But you’re swallowed by the greenshit… UF-2 told me."
"Firstly, no shit but slime and, secondly, that has not happened yet, so take my friendly advice – no frigging flashforwards. Mind firmly, since I'm still alive – you haven't met Chris yet, don't count on no virtuality, bro. Any try to buck a wall and you’ll adorn it like a sloppily clapped sticker until they scrape you off."
"Ouch… My head's a-crack already."
"Because the habit is not there yet. It’ll develop. Just no fucking up with the back of your head again, it's against the rules. When caught, you’ll get it from Them in full. Inexorably."
"They again? And where is our Parthos?"
"But where else could he be? On the Champs-Élysées, our Parthos-boy… Have a look!" The UltraFucker Number One nodded over his shoulder at the full naked, if not for the loincloth, body stretched out in serene prostration on the sand of the floor by the blank wall in a spacious cell if not a cavern.
"He also fucked up the back of his head?"
"Nopes. The guy’s got high with lilies. Right now, he's in the middle of his interview with Bolon Yokte or, if lucky enough, with Awilix herself."
"What FUCKING… (ouch, my head!.)… LILIES?!."
"Stop yelling, I can hear… Water lilies, when applied properly, take you on high cooler than peyote, you know.
Welcome to Mesoamerica, dude! Okay, we’re cutting out the official inauguration… They’ll presently bring us equipment and stuff. When it is full moon these here Mayas have an olamalistli match, never called off nor postponed. The main thing about the event is to avoid losing."
"Why us?"
"We are prisoners of war, haven’t you guessed yet? A kinda guest team.
The locals are all pros, hefty bulls and well trained for the game. The rules are simple – never let the ball touch the ground, same as in volleyball, however, no net. Besides, no touching the ball with your hand, neither is kicking allowed…"
"What the fu… what then to play with?"
"Use anything that remains there – a hip, a shoulder, may be your head, which is strongly inadvisable though because the balls are up to 7 kilos.
It’s only I can’t figure out who we are to represent – the gods or the underworld?.
With these here Maya, everything is so ritualized and anything—whether you sneeze or fart—is on the fly invested with a deep religious meaning."
"Aha! I remembered! The Maya were the guys whose calendar ended in 2012 and the worldwide crowd started to globally prepare for the end of the world. But how do you know all this?"
"Slime-swallowing… in lots… Damn! But who can we be for: the gods or for the underworld?"
"Much of difference?"
"Not exactly. Just to know beforehand… If the lost game was played for gods they simply cut your head but for the underworld all team’s hearts are torn out including that of the couch's."
"Let me guess: you’re the coach."
"Bingo!"
Some noise of movement outside was nearing the entrance to this spacious cell or, maybe, a cavern.
Four brown-skinned Maya Indians entered, the puckered lips bulging like in mum contempt because of gemstone piercings drilled into their upper incisors.
Two of them schlepped sports equipment, the rest in their company (4 – 2 = 2) kept their personal weaponry (shapely yet massive clubs) on their shoulders.
Three headgear were flung onto the sand, three kinda aprons woven of twigs, and three what-you'd-call-them resembling the arc in Russian one-horse wagon harness (yet no shafts), not of wood but of stone covered with intricate carvings and emanating the poignant smell of cinnamon.
Three lengths of manila hemp rope flopped atop of everything.
"What the hell!" said Inokenty. "This garbage with feathers is passing for a helmet here? What am I to them – a feathered friend? Or is it a gay parade in kind?"
"Moron," with fatherly instructive softness explained the coach, "in first three minutes, these feathers will cushion the hits."
"And then?"
"Then you grow wiser and your head starts to jerk-dodge on its own, reflectively."
"And why the wagon arc?"
"OK. Get up. I show it just once. The apron shields your front to save your balls and stuff," explained he donning Kenty. Then he pushed the arc from behind, the bend over the kidneys, the horns thrust ahead stuck out by the sides at the navel’s level. Athos connected them with with a tightly tied rope, which girdle also fixed the twigs. "It should sit tight over the hips, and the rope keeps the apron to protect your reproductive capability. While the feathers, you guessed it, go on top."
Outside sounded a spurring bell-ring like at a run in trotting race or in the Bolshoi Academic Theater.
"The last call, it's time to raise the midfield."
"UF-2? What will you get him up with? He's out and beyond."
"What with, huh?. It’s not a problem. The spike from a sea stingray tail, that's with what. The only question is where to prick?"
From the front tatters in his loincloth Athos drew up what looked like a nib pen, half a finger thick, with its sharp point slightly flattened and serrated on both sides.
"Wait! Wait! It's toxic!"
"Okay, fine. I'll wipe it off with the sand."
Hurriedly poking the sea cat's spike into the sandy floor of the cell or, maybe, a cavern, UF-1 went into detail:
"Now you can raise him only by bleeding… Traditionally, there are just three points to use – tongue, lips, and groin. What would you suggest?"
Not waiting for an answer, he strummed the unsuspecting lips of UF-2 prostrated in his blissful blackout. Then, making of his thumb and index finger a pincer-like tool, Athos pulled the buddy’s tongue between his inert teeth, gave it a doubtful askew glance and let spin back.
"Yep. I agree, the groin suits best. It’s like frigging acupuncture – the main thing is to pin through the meridian point."
He raked aside the scraps of the loincloth from over the crotch of the limply spread-eagle body, took aim with his ray spike and, hollering “company, reveille!”, pricked in.
"MothFucShiDickAssBitcher!" screamed the up-rocketing body, the bugged eyes ready to leap from their sockets, unable to grasp what’s what.
(“Oho! How fucking fluent," thought Inokenty enviously, “Parthos did have command of this here Mesoamerican.”)
"Shut up, all! Keep at ready!" the coach yelled, flicking a stone arc (that kinda fatty hoop cut in two) over the wobbly sacrum of Parthos and tying a rope across his front.
Then, in the blink of an eye, he also donned the standard player outfit to give the team the final exhortation:
"Let’s do it, bros! Make or mar!"
Out of step, the magnificent 3 slogged to the exit from the cavern or, which easily may be, a cell with the skylight opening positioned too high above, irrationally so…
The playing field resembled a wide corridor of sheer masonry walls roofed with the sky above.
At both ends of its 50-meter span there were additional stretches even wider, but a great deal shorter, of the same, trampled, actually, out of existence, grass.
On the whole, the sports arena looked like a lying Roman One or a Ukrainian capital «i», similarly supine.
A crowd of fans raged along the edges of the six-meter-tall corridor walls, their shrieks were cut through by a discordant orchestra of pipes, fifes and flutes performing asynchronously the immortal hit:
I’d rather be a sparrow than a snake, yes I would if I only cou-ou-ould…
"And why are they all naked except for their turbans?" asked Inokenty gaping up.
"Rags and expensive jewelry were pawned at the bookmakers in betting on the outcome of today’s match, but don’t gaze too much at the ladies, they're in the usual sham of body color tights from Secretly Screwed Victoria on.
And that clown in the feathers of a kquetzal-bird, in the center, the local king Kalomte, however, very soon his widow, Kaviila, will replace him becoming the queen of Chichen Itza. Still as of yet, he is the ruler and the referee."
"Burping up the swallowed slime, you?"
"Yep, yet just in general terms, no details. We have to learn the game tricks from the opponents, catch on along the way."
"And what’s that wheel for? Stuck out from the wall, over there, just below the fans, also of stone and with a hole. O! And over there too! In the opposite wall, another!"
"Forget it, they are not used, just architectural embellishment in memory of the Twin Heroes. Check their maps, carved in the stumps of your arc. The guy on the left once scored a ball thru the like hole and – Game Over, immediate You Win!, however, mere mortals are not up to that."
They had to shout to hear each other and be heard in the hubbub of the flipping out crowd and the out of time trills of the winds on the walls.
Two Indians with a brush and bucket ran up over the clay bare ground and, offering no explanation, slap-painted the bodies of the UltraFuckers’ team into white parallel stripes, wherever wicker aprons and stone arcs allowed it.
"Fuck! Off on the wrong foot!" the coach shouted. "We are for the gods today!"
From the opposite end of the corridor, the team of local bulls, already painted in yellow and black stripes, were approaching in an imposing jog.
Without tossing, the home team began to play the ball. The referee in the expensive green-scarlet plume was clearly pulling for them from the wall…
For a starter, they showed off their dribbling, and mincing, and passing the ball (half a meter in diameter) from the thigh of a player to the thigh of another, and other, and back, and again…
Inokenty opened his mouth in fascinated admiration – it’ll take at least a score of years to train yourself for the like hip-work!
Then the center received a pass from the left, for convenience he threw it slightly above himself (with just a hip clap!) And, sharply spinning thru all 360, hit the ball with the right prong in his arc-girdle whose ends stood out forward on his sides.
The cannonball of hard black rubber in a split sec grew to a planetary size, screening the entire field of vision, substituting blackness for his sight… already so too familiar, so fucking painfully familiar bl-a-c-k-n-e-s-s…
Then the hands of his comrades raised Inokenty up and put him on his feet for him to stand on his shaky, weak at the knees, pins.
He saw their mouths screaming mutely, like in a silent movie.
The stands were also silent and only kept swinging… hither-th…-thither… along with the strips of a couple of muslin-transparent clouds … there in … in the… the sky …
The imprints of what followed, Inokenty’s memory retains in fairly smudgy form. A kinda blurred rubber spanking, sort of.
Each hit whipped to the bone. The protective weaver work did not save, he felt the bruises heat spilling under the twigs.
Sometimes a misty, detached self-consolation surfaced, that eventually, with his head severed, bruises would cease hurting.
However, the head, as predicted by the coach, was already jerking off, reflectively, from the ball whizzing by.
At some point, he realized – that's that, he’s done with all it. He can go on no longer, that the dead feel no shame and turned his butt to the next cannonball…
Vzhzhzzz!… And the rubber ball banged the stone arcs tied to Kenty’s waist above his ass. He fell on one knee and over his shoulder followed the ball’s ricochet into the wall and then, unhurriedly rotating as if in slow motion camera, it swam up to be swallowed by the memorial hole in the stuck-out wheel. Boy, o boy! Some glorious swish shot!.
"Will you ever stop kicking?" Maya muttered with displeasure, turned her round (not rubber) bottom to him and fell asleep again.
Holding the painful groan back within his body, crushed like on the cursed coronation day in the Khodynka field, Inokenty gave off a muffled sigh:
"Hooeyhhh…"
* * *
Bottle #33: ~ But At First… ~
At first, the village mujiks were betting on whether I last for 10 days or until the end of the month.
And only I knew already that it was forever because two-meter-tall wall of grass stood along the road sides, and herds of cows and bulls roamed in the distant slopes above those walls before they would be driven back to the village for the night.
And when I asked the school's principal what that bright spot could be there in the distant toombs, he answered it was snow.
Snow in August, huh? Come on, it's not Everest.
Truth, snow it is, hiding in so cunningly twisted a gorge that summertime is not enough for the sun to melt it…
The main provider of romanticism in Yezznaggomer is marahoogh. Folks also call it "the wolf weather", but it's not the fog, because it doesn't swirl or flow, it's standing like a solid wall.
The first time I got lost in it was in the leg between home and school, where I had already worked for more than a month. True, it was already the dark part of the day, and therefore the torch of the “head-dick” type, on its elastic band, was beaming from my forehead.
The ray of light cut a neat tunnel before me, the space within its round walls clogged with the suspension of particles the size of tiny snowflakes which did not fall though. To set those particles in motion, you need to move your head sideways and back, and while the lighted tunnel moves, the snowflakes stray in this or that direction, yet the tunnel itself remains just as narrow, and having the same dark smooth walls, and still crammed to the utmost with that same luminous suspension entering thru one wall to vanish in the opposite.
Haha! It was the beam that moved, not the “snowflakes”! Another gull cheated! Thanks to the theory of relativity.
It's like in childhood, when you roll your head back, face to the sky, so as to see only the falling snow until it looks like you are flying upward past the irregularly standing snowflakes.
As for the density of moisture hanging up inside the marahoogh, on average, were you wearing a scuba gear, you could easily swim along like Yves Cousteau around the corals, but as you don’t put flippers on then go on foot yet very slow and twice checking each familiar landmark, so as not to get lost even worse.
Blizzards happen too, it’s not for nothing that the mujiks had in their households motorcyclist mask-glasses in case they needed to take hay to the cow house in the middle of crazy mixture of wind-and-snow-grit…
The bus was coming once a week, on Fridays, but that was only the first six months, before the bus driver Armen ultimately dropped straining both the vehicle and himself.
He lived in Moshatagh, 15-18 km down into the valley, and never liked the idea of 30+ km surplus run for the sake of a couple or two of passengers.
The number of passengers was so small because just 12 families and a loner teacher was all the population in the village, while the make-believe road so difficult that two or three passengers threw up on the way, especially kids too eager to be treated to ice cream in Lachin City.
While going there, they threw their breakfast up, and on the way back – the ice cream. The prose of life onto the roadside, if they were quick enough to jump out of the stopped bus, but in case of a too short notice – there’s the back of a passenger on the seat in front of you.
So, the first year was the most difficult because there was no electricity in the village. Well, not exactly a year, a little more than that…
But at first I had to ask Nick Wagner to take me to Yezznaggomer Village for the start of the academic year.
Which he did…
But at first we had to find a roof rack for his "Niva" in Stepanakert. And we did find it in the rehabilitation center named after Baroness Cox. Thanks to the center’s Director Vartan. No, the Baroness had nothing to do with alkies and druggies, the center catered for the people maimed in the war too heavily.
At that both the first and the last transportation by Nick’s “Niva” to Yezznaggomer, I managed to fetch there some provender (cereals, pasta, salt, etc.), as well as the most necessary hand tools: shovel, crowbar, ax, saw, and a bunch of smaller ones.