Sehrguey Ogoltsoff
The Blog
To which with all befitting soberness I declare – fuck, no!
Were they even to convert each and every printed volume into an audio book or turn it into a movie, just what they did to poor Harry Potter, and The Steel Was Hardened That Way, or steep it in all kinds of widgets to reproduce of the prairie in bloom aroma or the stench off your dorm buddy drunk blind (to follow the storyline), and send the X-rated impulses of tactile impressions in passages with the sex orgies served by the whores at The Red Mill (as depicted by the seasoned author), or even letting you feel, virtually, taste of any delicacy, up to Zhigulevsky beer when snacked with a briquette of molten cheese for 13 kopecks a piece, still and yet – fuck, no!
Because there is some (what would I call it?) magic (yes!) in books which is beyond imitation by any 3D (or be it +696D if they choose it)!
Got it what I’m about? Quite so! The words! Those black ant-like-critter-signs in the white field without smell-taste-color, like the distilled water, but making you tighter than all them sweet wines… But then again, if only you know the trick of getting the adequate intoxication from them those ants, sure thing.
Good news, that skills could be developed when you need it, which lately brought about my getting high from classical music, at least on certain pieces. Take The Hairless Heights by Mussorgsky, if you please, where witches fly to, to land under the soundtrack cooler than the chopper’s Ride Of The Valkyries over Nam…
Yet, Alfred Schnitke still remains as remorseless guts ripper as he always was…
No doubt, freedom captivates anyone but since that villain Hegel had shackled the world with his unbreakable chain of unity-of-opposites, it (freedom) got turned into prison as well.
Handcuffed by the edging smartphones, teeter poor Juliets about never spotting their Romeos who—their brows vindictively downcast—keep flicking the beans of Steve Job’s HER’s or someone else’s Samsungs.
Each medal has its backside. The Dark Side of the Moon in action.
However, let’s drop the subject for some other guy to blow up the Net with, because this morning, by the try and error check, it was confirmed that you can stuff no more than five A4 sheets into a bottle. Which is not a cinch, on top of it.
And do not forget leaving some room for them (A4s) to piggyback because of oceanic dampness. Some booked, so to say, volume.
As for bottles it’s not a crunch on Island since that maverick wreck of galleon got stranded by the storm last week. No crew, no nothing but the screwed-up vessel driven into the bay nearby the northern cape. However, the chest in the Captain’s cabin stayed intact with all the stuff inside. Jamaican gin, bottled, follow me?
Well, one of those had to be emptied for the experimentation tries, to see the bottle’s capacity, when you start stuffing it with A4 rolls. No more than five, as it was mentioned. Exactly where I plan to shove this here part of my blog up.
The uninhabited environs have since long streamlined me into a thoughtful expert in practicality because not every day a fried dove glides over to you, served by the favorable breeze adding a snack to the freebie galleon… You know what I mean, huh?.
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Bottle #3: ~ Prince Kurbsky Too Was Not Ashamed Of Taking To The Hills ~
What was it all kicked off with? No way to find out. As in anything at all.
When thinking deep enough, you do behold that any point in your grab might serve the start. Any one and readily.
How about that point, when the gray-covered notebook was taken over to the City Psychiatrist for the evaluation of sanity (if any) still present in the person, and/or how dangerous could the doodler of the like stuff be for innocent civilians?
Or take that pivotal moment, marked by the ample pocketbook of deep sepia tinge in the pages seen through the press in 1968, changing hands?
My Teacher outstretching it (no pathetic blah-blah attached to the book) for me to grab in awe and greedy gratitude? Does it draw a shorter straw to be the start?.
The justification for the gray notebook to pop up at all was, in the first place, provided by the weighty parcel in the mustard-hued coarse paper for postal deliveries, corded about and sealed up with chocolate-like blobs of stamped wax which I hadn’t broken. Ever.
Any use of breaking if you know what’s inside? Translations there were, that’s what. Translations from English, 35 stories, 472 pages typewritten in Ukrainian.
These, like, randomly collected figures do not repeat each other in their summing up of 6 years’ work—… (eh? gee! and this one coincides with not a single one of them!)
Six years deftly wrapped in the mustard-hued paper, bound-sealed up by the skillful hands of a post office service-lady: shrrsh-frisst-trunt-slamp – next, please!
The digits mentioned so far (undeniably non-uniform) do bear certain meaning, albeit not graspable at a fleeting glimpse, because socialism is, first and foremost, inventory, to cite the aphoristic definition by Lenin at the sitting of All-Russia Central Executive Committee on p.57, vol. 35, Complete Collection Of Works in 55 Volumes (four repetitions here but these are not from me)…
In the Publishing House they also did not bother to open the translations, toe-kicked them on the fly instead. A one-touch shot.
Yet why multiplying them? The half-back was seated all alone at his desk in the second office to the left down the corridor. Sedentary way of life made of that Sitting Bull a blob of blubber. Unhealthy obesity, not fitting a soccer player.
Let him thank me for the opportunity offered by my benevolent visit—no excruciating push ups, just taking to the post office 472 pages plus their cover—to throw away a sliver of his fat at that exercise, and the Publishing House would reimburse the expenditure confirmed by the post office bill slip.
Not a chance. A courier was sent by the slug. Screw him!.
The long and short of it, the translations returned to where they had initially started from and stilled there, like a mustard-hued tombstone, to crown 6 years of mental toil rewarded with the cobweb-light lines across the forehead to deepen later, when the good-looks period is over, into uneven contemplative wrinkles.
And why not to lie leisurely enjoying such a sound prop? The DIY book-shelves coated with translucent shellac—tranquil and soft environs for a serene slumber?.
Yet, the pages in the package upon the homemade shelf not only weighed down the item of interior but, on the side, were drip-boring my brains in defiance of the coarse steady wrap, the pages were. Their comatose presence made still acuter the inertia amassed along 6 years of handling them those antlike-black-critters-in-the-white-field, at first so effing obstinate but getting tamer, bit by bit, until they hooked me too, in their turn, up. A text-book case of situation-conditioned addiction. Jejunely christomathical exemplification…
And after the Game-Over, in the stiff stillness that followed, there remained nothing to waste myself away. Plodding donkeys and as well as circus horses are incurable… Fucking Sir Isaac Newton and that First Law of his!. Although the inertia thing he cabbaged from Galileo.
The evenings lengthened. Noticeably. Finding a shim to fill and dwindle them away turned out not a cinch. Like, no quick fix, brother, but go and learn playing melodeon squeezebox and, when it gets dark, off you stroll about the hood lanes outpouring some hit air or another, announcing, “Can’t buy me looo-ove!“. Don’t forget to shine your black pair of high boots, and stick a fluffy flower (Portulaca oleracea) in the visor-cap so that the chicks would tag along and fall over themselves to treat the musician to the sunflower black seeds they gobble up spitting non-stop the husk out…
Sad pity but the idea about a squeezebox failed to hook me up effectively, you know, and I bypassed buying high boots.
As for the girls, cute and saucy, they’ll always find who to give their seeds to in this or that, or some other feasible way in any concurrent settings.
Squeezing all the above-said together, instead of a two-row A-major/D-minor melodeon there, by the forlorn heap of paper within the stiff cask-like shell of wrapping (somewhat already softened with the growing layer of the virginal pollen of dust), yes, right next to it, possibly too nigh to, stretched out a notebook, rather thick and of a certain hint at brash boldness in its pale-gray leatherette cover.
The purpose of the stationery bad ass, at first, had rather fuzzy outlines, however, definitely slanted to the ant-like-signs-and-so-on-and-forth private games (because no computer games had existed yet and computers themselves were named Machine-Computer Engineering Tools that necessitated construction of reinforced concrete foundation to mount them (the Tools) upon and on that solid basis they thundered like locomotives spinning the spools of their perforated tapes hither-thither and backward again).
Yeah, buddy, be kind to patiently endure the games of my mind spilt in your grid-ruled pages where the well-schooled ant cohorts would crawl on bringing up the grim story of how I could possibly get to so morbid life style. Yet, those crossed-out lines do not count…
At that exactly moment came to me the radiant clearance as to how slippery was this question: where to start from?
However, the notebook did not give an eff about the complicated nature of the issue and with the arrogant gusto and nonchalance of a bro-to-bro talk revved forth about innocent lads hanging out on the screechy door-porch to a seedy half-hutta at calm starry nights, neither sharp nor fussy about uncouth strumming of Vasya (The Red) Markov’s guitar—who seldom showed up but everybody knew the instrument was to be picked respectfully—the assemblage full of perk, and jives, and gags understood by only partakers in the guffaw…
Everything as it was and always is to be in a one-horse burg of N…
That way, at nights, the notebook became the time-machine to which they flocked hurriedly, those a hundred times already mentioned ant-critters to turn into a fixed scrawl in another white field (small-scale-grid-ruled), until they stole the machine, not ants of course.
I didn’t report the vehicle theft and never showed any surprise, outwardly, so as to skirt dour declarations that I’d been warned it was to happen.
Yes truly, a couple of times there were voiced reproofs in the interrogative form: what fucking rascal hooey was I scribbling in that notebook?
But then the City Psychiatrist diagnosed the notebook’s case as not stark raving mad and violent, and it could be taken back to lie beside the hefty stiff parcel.
The whistle-blowers played along with the doc’s recommendation, however, they were not ready to what happened after.
“And what? What was that? Tell us, tell! Cut out your darn tries at frigging suspension! Damn coot, you!”
Well, not a thing. None! Nothing whatsoever.
The retrieval was met with the deadpan of my poker face (if observed from outside), no comment, total indifference, and since then the number of untouchable idlers on the shelves doubled drastically – the mustard-hued mother walrus, and her gray cub immovably advancing towards the equivalence in their pigmentation due to the natural growth of the dust layer of identical thickness.
Both time and place let me in on their mutual incongruity with wanton games at ant domestication and getting schooled in response. That’s the ballgame, folks!
In all fairness to the Twix (time-and-place), the so rigid halt was partly motivated by a vengeful wish to pinch the nose of mess-arounders, whose sporadic and somewhat pensive looks in the direction of dormant walrus colony of two upon their shellacked shelf, as well as random fingerprints detectable in the dust layer over the gray leatherette were telling signs of their, deductively, thirst to know what was to happen next in them those fucking scribbles?
Not a thing. You should of taken it to the psychiatrist and let the wise guy guess the storyline without helpful clues from letter-ants.
That’s how that particular point turned a false start…
The following try was flagged off a couple of years later by the pocket-book volume borrowed for a 10-year stretch, which accompanied me over the watershed of the Caucasian mountains…
The first winter was lived through inside the tiny Pioneers’ Room on the second floor in the two-story school building.
Way back, it was an ordinary house expropriated later from the owner living at large or else he, the owner, gave it up in token of his good will, after which move the village obtained the ready-made school for the compulsory secondary education.
However, all the above-supposed had taken place before my arrival from over the Caucasus and I had no desire to inadvertently chafe the sore spot by ferreting the details out.
The Pioneer Room was equipped with the ubiquitous mark of such cubbies – the compound attribute of the Pioneer Horn-and-Drum, and furnished with a nondescript desk inserted by the wall opposite the entrance, bearing the cross of the school library—a couple scores of books worn to tatters.
The heaps of happy kids in pioneer red ties hung from two walls in the cardboard visuals for teaching Armenian to the elementary kids and English grammar to the students at secondary schools because the third wall (opposite to the library) was barely wide enough for the wooden door from the corridor, which ran along the Teachers’ Room (the former living room) towards two itsy-bitsy classrooms sliced out by the plywood partitioning from the erstwhile bedroom (five more partitioned classrooms were on the first floor). The fourth wall in the room was a complex of small glass panes in the wooden window binding, a score of them in four tiers up to the low ceiling.
The square sheet of tin, substituting glass in one of the panes in the middle of the laced structure, had a round hole in its center, cut to let out the 5.8-inch-wide tin stovepipe rising from the rectangular-cuboid tin woodburner [60 cm x 40 cm x 40 cm] on 4 tin legs to keep the whole contraption 25 cm clear off the boards in the floor. All the tin—in the pipes, and the elbow, and the woodburner itself—grew the steady crust-layer of brown rust. The round gap to let the pipe out was cut keeping eye on thrusting it thru with ease and generously provided constant ventilation and immediate contact with the outside weather.
The Horn-and-Drum couple sat modestly mum on the stand shelf by the door, in the company of a hefty handbell of verdigris bronze girded with the cast relief running in Russian, “Gift from Valdai”, a genius of mighty clangor to announce the start/end of a class/break…
The firewood for the tin woodburner I cleft nearby the old-tin canopy-shelter in the yard, close to the school privy of 2 doors marked “F” and “M”, segregationally.
The ax kept flying off its handle. Old Goorguen, the school watchman from the next-door house, issued an ironic chortle into his white-tabacco-yellowed mustaches to every flight he witnessed, and the Principal, named Surfic, never omitted to compliment my style at wood-splitting that witnessed to my having firm roots in the class of intelligentsia. She admired my forbearance – not a single, obscene, 4-letter word after that flying piece of fucking iron…
Late in the evening, the tin woodburner turned the Pioneers’ Room into a scorching sauna but after midnight the freezing cold harassed me even through the mattress upon the folding bed, and in the morning I got from under the thick sheep-wool-filled blanket up into the raw cold of mountain winter. All of the bedding temporary donation by the teaching and cleaning staff at school…
I did not plunged into translating Ulyssesright away. First off, employing The Chamber’s 20th Century Dictionary, I translated The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man(also by Joyce) under the pretext it was necessary to better dig that guy, Stephen Dedalus, the youngest in the Ulysses’s trinity of main characters.
Whenever some passage stayed unclear even after The Chamber’s 20th Century Dictionary, the following Sunday saw my travel by bus to Stepanakert, the capital of the Autonomous Region to keep a council with BDSE, The Big Dictionary of the Soviet Encyclopedia, in the regional library down there. On the way, in both directions, the fellow travelers amazed me by their indifference to the striking views of the mountainous nature about the rolling bus that kept my nose stuck to the window glass while they yakked at each other in their dark language of who knows what…
At the end of academic year I was dished out a room on the second floor of a no man’s house at a stone throw from the school yard. The first floor comprised the windowless locked cave for storing the school’s tin woodburners in warmer seasons, along with the stock of bits and scraps from ruined school desks.
Part of my salary was spent for gradual acquisition of plywood sheets from the Building Materials Shop in the Stepanakert Bazaar, which I kept nailing up, gradually, in between the paydays, to the planks in the ceiling through which there leaked the earth spread under the roof as the thermal isolation.
The slow-go repair accomplishment happened on the eve of the following academic year, and the room was shared with a rookie pedagogical cadre from Yerevan freshly baked and certified by a high education enterprise for teachers production.
Arthur wore black-rimmed glasses of rigid looks and soft locks of moderately long hair, also black. At school he taught Armenian to kids and coming home shared the woeful tales about the eternal wounds of Armenia with me.
He held on for almost two months then brought from Yerevan a sack of second-hand garments for the village kids, a kinda payoff for his unfulfilled intentions, and I’ve never seen him any more…
And when the shy and soft first snow coated the ground hardened by the first frost, I got it first-hand that possession of a tin woodburner is not enough for wintering if having nothing to stick in and kindle inside it. The room would feel unquestionably cold both for me and the cohabitant family of mice squealing in the stone walls about the built-in cupboard.
So, I grabbed the ax bought in the process of the mentioned ceiling-remodeling and started off to the woods…
On the slope grown with mighty beech trees, something certainly grabbed me by the collar and brought to the tree as large as any other yet almost put away by the deep cave in the trunk, close to the roots.
Maybe, the dryad dwelling up in that tree got sick and tired of the insufficient nutrition through the defective trunk and called me? No way to figure out why and how it still managed standing upright.
Hacking the trunk leftovers through did not take long, before the tree fell with the bye-bye snap-and-crackle.
However, the fall was intercepted by a neighboring beech. Which situation called for climbing the felled tree and cutting it into separate pieces, for then to fall again and reach the pretty askew ground, one by one now: the crown, the pillar, the foot.
Some exquisite picture! No fuc… famous circus will ever reproduce! The Magic of Ax-Acrobatics!
The audience got frozen by awe and horrified admiration, in their seats.
Houdini! Houdini! Cast a look from wherever you are at the poor wretch, one of the crazy dare-devils, you followers!
Hugging the tree up there—so too high!—with just one hand, uses he remaining one to cut the other, on-leaning tree—felled but not fallen as of yet.
That’s a heck of an uphill job, fair ladies and kind gentlemen! Sure it is!
The man is shedding hot sweat and frightened farts, when another of cut off pieces threatens to pull him off and down in their final plunge…
After all the pieces of the quartered tree plumped down around the propping trunk, the executioner dropped his ax to the ground and descended clench-hugging the freed prop…
When on the slanted woods floor, my hands a-jitter and the knees a-tremble after all the strain up there in the Sweat-Circus Dome, I felt like widdling, and unzipped the fly, and craned over – what the heck! Where’s my doodle?
Instead of the dick I used to, there’s a lean pod of a kindergarten kid’s willy.
That’s why on the ancient Greek amphorae depicting the round dance of sportsmen and warriors, this particular part in the man’s frame was drawn so dinky – your body cannot concentrate in all directions and for all purposes at once.
Not that I really needed a dick in the bleak empty wood on the winter eve, but pinching that medicine dropper out from its sheath of the muffler of non-artificial skin with your shaking, inflexible fingers is a hard nut to crack, which is not a circus any more but some fucking porno thru and thru…
The next day, they snatched me to the village council, from midst the classes. The chairman started his bullying. In Russian but with a noticeable Caucasian accent, “Why da tree da cut? Dey uud prison send you.”
“Felled”, sez I, “as to winter thru because”.
And the wood watcher was also present, Dad of Garrick from the 4th form, putting a good word in, in Armenian, that the tree had been long since kaput already.
In short, the following day they gave me a truck and a couple of young hands to fetch the cut over to the one-room two-storied house. True, on the way some part of the booty was dropped by another house too, yet the remainder still lasted to the next summer…
And the 4th was the most populated grade at school, by the bye. Two boys and two girls. But later Arega’s parents moved to Armenia and took her over as well.
So, when the The Portrait… was finished, I did not instantly switch over to Ulyssesbut felt some inclination for that rascally scribbling once again.
The payoff on the try amounted to 11 pages, however, not a sequence to what had stayed back in the gray notebook, yet from a period ten years later.
Well, I saw they hit it off well, the pages, and only then I plunged into Ulyssesbecause there remained just 9 years of the stretch stipulated.
Thus I put my self-made doodling off, for fifo remains fifo in the Caucasus too, and if you want to get it indeed what it could mean then ask your system administrator.
However, as it turned out, my own writing was put off for 29 years and till some absolutely offbeat village…
What the heck! See? To find the point for a start is just half the battle because the question of equal vagueness and importance is to shut up in time. A lil bit more and this here blog installment would call for a whole keg instead of the routine bottle…
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Bottle #4: ~ The Skedaddler ~
But let the things said up till now create no illusion nor vain anticipation that this here Island will serve just at a snap whatever is your want delivering it on a dish of great artistic aptitude and antiquarian value. Damn no! Prepare yourself for a plain earthenware and no rim embellishments in curly blue vignettes. Just for the record, at times you’d better keep in check your expectations, firm and proper. Don’t drip your mouth water within other guy’s property while having no idea who’s who in the turf of this particular neighborhood…
To start with, Island, if you are fit to recollect, is Uninhabited, and besides, the over-indulgence in colors like blue color or, say, pink, not to mention their dazzling combinations with other catchy daring hues, would result in a closer attention of folks digging the slant of your orientation. Roger that? No prescriptions intended though, just a friendly hint that the like services stayed way back, in the past, sweet, innocent, naive, and fucked up with all kinds of deficits, past, straight and strict, past which wouldn’t tolerate your finicky nitpicking about rim color and stuff but slurp whatever was ladled out and dished to you, asshole!
To wit, don’t ever count on any dainty dishes here. Yet, on the other hand, they won’t take you for a bird of their feather, them those faggy parrots in their gaudy horny, epidermal outgrowth all aglow and—look! ah! dearie cuties!—see those whoopee tails on them?! So big, and long, and simply yummy!
Besides, no, not everything is here in heaps and plenitudes. The calendar, for one, is what Island lacks, in toto. Though yes, who gives a fuck smack bang among the everlasting tropical summer?.
Or is it winter, after all? Well, you sure feel the switch of seasons when they are taking turns, but it is still hard to say if we are drenched with Cancer’s non-stop winter rains or they are Capricorn’s similarly unceasing summer downpours, eh? Right now?
Then, secondly, watch your mouth as regards “fuck” because OBPS (check Bottle #1 in this here blog for the explication) perlustrate your bottle messages and whenever you glide into talking the natural way they substitute your words with asterisks like this “****” and that’s their way to fucking filter your stream of conscience out and expose it as an unnormative lexical anomaly. So if you take aim at presenting human emotions whole-hog then go and break the orthography rules.
So, who turns out now a real lover and who’s the asterisked perverter of the language alive?
How come them OBPS guys see thru thick ocean waves obscured, additionally, by the dim bottle glass? No problem at all. They keep a computer program out there to run down and eradicate from texts the very roots and footing.
Can you imagine? Teaching an innocent machine all the “bad” words and mutilating her lamb-like immaculate psyche? Those purity champions, they!
Now, who’s bitched here in the back “metal has no psyche”? You? Then it's your likes, the so-called Church Fathers, who for more than 300 years rated woman into the class of soulless household utensils/beasts of burden and even voted on this issue in one of their summit get-togethers. One “aye” exactly made woman into human being…
So, dogs also have no soul? Eh? Like any other animal that you maim and torture for your experimental ends? Huh? You, cloned clowns of vivisectionists!.
Taking all the above-said into consideration, you may safely call this areal, populated by me alone, the Island of Freedom from Time because when you struggle thru the preliminary 2 Levels your connection with time breaks up, and you can’t get ball rolling even by knife-slits on the post as advised by the Robinson Crusoe's hack. For which reason right now it is Unknown month in the year of **** here.
Well, not that I’m much concerned on that point. No sweat. Not even in this here tropics. It's only for the sake of curiosity and stuff.
And it’s just a pity that I can’t wield the astrolabe or else by juxtaposing meridian to longitude you would see which of the Tropics your tan is from, namely.
Nope, I’ve been anything but a navy cadet…
The matter is that last week this atoll’s lagoon (how on earth could it pop up here at all? the island 2Bsure is 100% of volcanic origin) was visited by The Flying Dutch. You easily can see it by her sails torn and fretted to hankie size and the bowsprit adorned with the brassiere XXXL large, also in tatters…
So, their boatswain wanted to peddle me an astrolabe for just three piastres.
No, he did not venture ashore and only waved to me ‘come aboard, bro!’, yet I abstained from taking risks because the holes in his singlet allowed for glimpses of his skeleton, well-gnawed and brightly polished in the process.
Next morning the vessel was no more in the lagoon and neither any trace of her. Hard to say the reason for their visit. Not to replenish their supply of fresh water anyways.
The lagoon’s water body might be a junction in their traffic routes or else a rendezvous spot to hang out with seals in divers suites. I dunno…
However, to decide the day of week is easy as pie, each and every day here is Friday. Ha! And no less. The most best of the best days in the week full of yummy expectancy to live a little at long last, since you’re thru the working week.
So now, precisely last Friday, that is yesterday, in harmony with my constant pre-dinner habit, I came down to the beach and stretched out in the palm-tree shade because the sand temperature beyond it is too scorching in the sun. And there lay I enjoying peace of mind, and the general state of imperturbation as it usually is on Friday nearing the dinner time and rather evidently so. The fingers of my both hands laced under around the back of my head, I watched from the supine position the vast serenity of the brine expanse behind the monumental sight of the sea shell stuck in the middle of the beach.
It’s a bivalve, as the majority of its fresh-water counterparts which, as an inquisitive kid, you scraped out in the shallows of ponds and rivers, but the selfish shellfish latch themselves from inside and there are no means to break in until you let them bask for some time in the fire embers.
But this here mollusk beats them all, some overseas wonder, you can’t grab it – whew! caliber 1.5 meters, and the corresponding weight of over 500 pounds. However, the valves are rounded, not oval as by their tribe in the fresh water. And watch this exotic finishing, both luxurious and equatorial, fanning off from the hinges that connect the two half-spheres, running all the way to the rounded edges in a kinda basso-rilievo of cable-thick gimp trimming worked over with the finest polish, as if Ural serf artisans were sharing the know-how of malachite processing based on the local raw materials.
Deep in myself, I’ve baptized this ogres with the name of Pec-tin-din and it baffles me to guess why. The scallop-like bottom of this huge cauldron has half-buried in the sand, sunk as deep as the Peccy’s weight forces it to enter, and the lid remains somewhat raised, like for airing.
But there’s nothing inside to air. Peccy had passed away to better world before my getting to Isle of No Time, not a shred of her mantle stayed behind in between the valves, all's shell-lifted, looted, scraped, gnawed, swept up and taken away, and only this bare calcium structure still tarries in the sand of the beach…