Sehrguey Ogoltsoff
The Blog
"Well, you are past that dangerous age and until having seven kids you're safe. Seriously, Chris, marry someone! We'll get drunk at your wedding.
Still one thing escapes me, both here and there is a bar – does it really matter at which of the two they stab you?”
"Here and there are different by the probability estimate. Chris Gugensian from Second Parallel Street had made up a theory on that matter while doing his third stretch for improper use of a lever in a burglary case falling under the Article 158, aggravated by the involvement of a juvenile kid, Jack Bernullin. This here establishment is under a Don's man supervision and, therefore, the probability estimate is more favorable because the crowd keep their emotions under much better self-control, which even excludes the need for keeping a bouncer around. But why d'you keep the beard when cutting your hair, I wonder?"
"Maya does not allow cutting the beard, she likes it this way… And what kind of a bird that Don is?"
"A quadruped.”
"Well, I'm serious, man. Do you need to horse around every frigging thing? Take my advice and get yourself a PC with video games, it'll make a normal man of you. Whenever feeling you're lost, just hit Escape Button in the left upper corner of the keyboard instead of straying helplessly…"
"How can YOU know?”
"Dunno. It's blurted out just of its own accord.”
"Don is natal in the street. Attended the same school as I, only way later. Too underweight for bullying anyone, just a smart getter for a reasonable price and wide assortment of anything, he was. In his late teens they nabbed him for some trifle, stealing a car or sitting in a car while it was being stolen. A leniently short stretch of absence, for about a year or something. While up the river, he acquired the experience and proper connections, and when out, first off, cut his handle in two.
From the school years his handle was 'Donkey', and now he retained just the first half. Whoever used it unabridged, be it a slip of tongue or in the way of jesting, in a day or two was collected DOA, well-stuffed and the control shot in between the brows, and his ear sliced so as to flap out longer. Like in a certain quadruped.
To put it short, the street began to show circumspection, even talking to a bro they were reluctant to add '…key' to 'don…', follow me? You can't be over-cautious among the bros, you know, today's bro will turn you in tomorrow. They even bypassed the use of “ass” word, just in case, the two animals being from the same family in the classification. Saying “kiss my ass!” they looked back to check who could've heard. One generation later, the street got used and forgotten that Don was titled otherwise way back. Except for a couple of old wind-brokers not good at amnesia.”
"And why d'you tell me all this?”
"Dunno. Blurted out just of its own accord…
This area previously was under another tough's control, Otter by his handle, until one morning they came after his body in his big time apartment, and to collect his bodyguards there, all in the irreversible nirvana. No sliced ears though, yet everyone knew who grilled the water-loving critter and—lo!—Don is the heir.
And this here bar is his turf, so the visitors filter their ejaculations and keep to balanced manners in their interpersonal communication. That's why I may stay sure, to some extent, that no random blade will pierce my bile sack and turn clockwise like a big padlock key, albeit I'm Chris Marlov."
A waitress neared their table, all in black and no libertine flashes, a loose sportswear, in fact, – to take away the rejected food and to present her shining smile to Nobodya who was 'no, thanks, just fine'. Then she walked off pumping up the standard pomp of a juicy floozy.
"So why d'you look for me in You'll Get It, dare-devil Nobodya?”
"No idea, Chris, but that Maya wants to have a talk with you. It was on her commission.”
"What talk?”
"Wish I knew. She's too stubborn, 'I need to talk to Chris, can you arrange?'”
"A quiet nook, nice and cozy, what else would buddies need?"
They both looked up to watch a middle-sized man sporting a black fitted coat in retro style. Glistening black hair stretched tightly from his forehead to the back of his head sticking closely to the skull like by a swimmer slowly emerging from under water with their face up.
The light from the nearest lamp under the certainly too high ceiling coalesced in slick blurry spots in his shoe noses stuck out from under his black wide trouser cuffs. Dazzling white scuff shielded his throat like a hals-tuch in the parade portraits of the baroque period.
"Hi, Don”, said Chris.
* * *
Bottle #13: ~ Not Humans' Fault ~
Humans and war do not go together. You won’t find man there, in war. Battling, man goes beyond oneself, becomes another entity, possessed, non compos, both I and you and any other one are fused into a new, unprecedented, unclassified organism chained together by one and the same aim – to kill. To kill and survive by dint of it, and only after that to fall apart into separate individuals, which a moment back were not humans but spare parts of a… machine? a beast?. Well… of something beyond classification. Something which had been running, shooting, hollering, not feeling oneself, being impersonal ueber-individuum…
“…we ran to attack, shooting, in a united rush, but they shot back real hard and then I got it I’m somewhat overmuch ahead and where are ours? why falling back? forward we go! attacking! and I looked back and saw myself, my body dropped behind, on the ground over there, that’s when I lost consciousness…”
They pulled him out, he stayed alive, became a human…
“…it was a leave for two days, I came home, our apartment on the third floor, not destroyed, my wife was there, our two-month-old son, but all the same I couldn't just relax, too uptight all the time, the baby start squealing and I hardly keep myself back not to grab and smash it against something, anything, and drop from the balcony…”
He did manage to keep himself under control, it’s his baby after all. And were it not his?.
Alexander Matrosov, Unan Avetisian and many others, who repeated their deed, posthumous Heroes of the Soviet Union, they did not plug with their bodies the bullet spitting embrasures of bunkers to save their attacking buddies from being mowed down by the machine gun fire. No. They were thrown into the hole by the mutual need of the rushing machine-beast to survive, used by the collective subconscious they were.
There is no individual human in war but components in the war composition.
There are no atheists in the trenches where every one is at god’s disposal and knows it too well. It’s not the god they teach about at madrasah or seminaries, who they kindle smelly substances for, offer prayers to, sing up in their hymns. This god is bigger than any of religions. This god is mightier, more merciless and senseless than them all. There is no use to pray to him, no way to understand, even less to avoid. This god is Chance.
Were I asked if Armenians had perpetrated beastly atrocities, my answer is: but they were not Armenians then!.
Were I asked if Azerbaijanis had perpetrated beastly atrocities, my answer is: but not Azerbaijanis were they then!.
Non-humans from both sides, just war-components.
Azerbaijanis were the passengers burning inside the petrol torch of a bus, Armenians were whose torn-out hearts were stuck into the spirits-filled three-liter jugs and put by the tombstones in Baku cemeteries.
And lots of other things I know of, which I have no wish to ever know yet still know and this knowledge chokes me. Mercy please! Finish me off! I know too much, much more than I am capable of carrying on!.
I disseminate this here ethnic strife? It was disseminated and fanned up long before me and go on and on and on because war-components are not only those carrying assault rifles.
I don't care for knowing who was to start the fire. I am for the Zero Option canvassed for by Popkov who came in summer 1992 to Baku and later, over Yerevan, to Stepanakert to wander about the elitist offices, pleading: let’s start from zero, let’s try at being humans.
Who did hark him, that god’s fool, unshaven, uncombed, in a bum’s raincoat and no necktie?
There are no sacred wars, any war is dirty and when it is over (that’s a lie, it is never over but withdraws for tactical considerations, regrouping its components), and when there comes a seeming respite, the dirt and shit get varnished over, some or other spare parts get dangling flops and are proclaimed Heroes of Nation, they get inserted into History textbooks so that the secondary education would have tools for preproccessing the next portion of cannon fodder with…
And those who lost the war are announced war criminals and passed over to some or other Hague to be sentenced, even though they also were fighting for their Homeland and saving the world at large, and if in the process there happened some crimes against humanity then you just can't have one without the other, there is no medal of just one side, ask any order awarded warrior if in doubt…
People! Be vigilant! I love you! People! Hey!
Damn! The parents missed baptizing me properly, John-Desert-Crier would suit me better or at least Johnny-Who-Hoots…
(Abridged content from Link 1 at the current bottle bottom):
"Khojalu City and its two suburbs were populated by 7000 civilians, hundreds of whom were killed at the storming on the night 25 to 26 February 1992 by hands of Armenian bandits and the 366-th Motorized Infantry Regiment personnel or frozen to death fleeing over the mountains…"
Then follow graphical descriptions of mutilated bodies of Special Police Officers and simply shot and killed civilians;
– testimonies of foreign (predominantly Russian) mass-media correspondents;
– a lengthy discussion whether there was a humanitarian corridor left for the exodus of civilians before the battle;
– details of the case of an Azerbaijani journalist pledging that such a corridor existed, and 15 years later sentenced for 8 years of imprisonment for that erroneous opinion, yet after 4 years of incarceration he was granted amnesty;
– samples of the appropriate reaction by the international community to the genocide in hand;
– list of fiction and other kinds of works based on the events;
– presentation of the selected viewpoints from both sides to the conflict.)
. . . . . .
[The following is an aside commentary by me, who was not an eyewitness and construed the events on the basis of the basements’ rumors though not just on them.]
Starting 1987, I regularly passed Khojalu Village on my bus trips to Stepanakert City and back watching a village of about 400 cottages, and three 3-story apartment blocks of 2 sections each, two more same-sized buildings were underway, plus two nearby hamlets of a score of cottage-hut-barn.
The 366-th Infantry Guards Motorized Regiment was pulled out from Stepanakert a month before the storm of Khojalu, having left a handful of petty officers at the regiment quarters.
“The Regiment Commander Political Deputy called us to his office and said, 'I can’t give you a direct order but you have to stay…'”
(The statement was heard not in the basement but on the 2nd floor of the house traded by the owners of our one-room flat (located on the 1st floor) for their house in Baku in the aftermath of the Sumgait tragedy. At the dinner table was seated (among the others) a mercenary, whose armored personnel carrier had not entered Khojalu yet supported the storm with his machine gun fire from outside the village limits.)
“…about 1 am. I saw one stalking nearer with a 'stovepipe' (MPATS), he did not know I had a night vision gizmo…”
The humanitarian corridor certainly existed which practice was employed throughout that war because it allowed to exponentially decrease casualties born by the attacking force.
According to independent Azerbaijani sources (on the Net), the proposed humanitarian corridor was used 24 hours before the storm for driving to Aghdam (the nearest Azerbaijani city) herds of cattle and sheep to their owners, who had already been evacuated to Aghdam (and this is absolutely beyond any comprehension! Spies and spies everywhere! However, working for the wealthy owners only).
The official site dedicated to the Khojalu Tragedy mentions curtly the participation of petty officers of the 366th Infantry Regiment (!) in the unsuccessful advance from the Azerbaijani Aghdam City against the Armenian Askeran City.
[Aside: some ubiquitous regiment indeed, battling on all sides against all sides. Were it them shouting back over the radio from their tanks advancing to Askeran city, ‘Where are your fucking infantry men? Prod those sheep! I am not going to the MPATS burrows without your fighters!’?
Because a tank attack against a well-trenched forces is a raw suicide.]
(Abridged content of Link 2 at the current bottle bottom):
"A year before the storm of Khojalu the Soviet leadership arrived at a decision to resolve the problem of Mountainous Karabakh by means of military punitive efforts code-named 'Ring Operation'.
(Below follows a schematic description of actions pattern in day to day carrying out the operation, as presented in the wiki site dedicated to the “Ring Operation”.)
“Early in the morning a village would be surrounded by soldiers of the Internal Troops of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR. Then the blockaded village was entered by Azerbaijani Troops of Special Police to start searches for weaponry and terrorists, and check the IDs of the villagers', (which actions were) accompanied by beatings, rape and robbery. At times, together with the Troops of Special Police the villages were also entered by Azerbaijani civilians for marauding. The local inhabitants were presented with the ultimatum to leave the village forever. As a rule, this actions were repeated for two or three days before the actual deportation.
The execution of “Ring Operation” resulted in plunder and destruction of 19 Armenian villages, murder of more than 100 civilians (for the most part kids, women and senior citizens), 600 people were wounded, hundreds missing…”
No I am neither disseminating nor in search for who was to start it all and the above quotation is just to visualize the means and ways of a war-components production line process.
. . . . .
At the end of the humanitarian corridor, about 700 meters from the Azerbaijani city of Aghdam, the crowd of refugees from Khojalu Village were hit by a volley of GRAD missiles.
Phedais did not use that military equipment yet, all the attackers were equipped with were assault rifles and white bandage fastened over the khaki trench coat sleeve.
Those rockets burst far away from the Khojalu battle. That night the fleeing civilians from Khojalu walked 20 km, there remained just 700 m to the city of hope, security, life… It was a full discharge of missiles from a GRAD installation which did not participated in the storm of Khojalu. It was a bloody dawn.
In a couple of hours mass-media correspondents were brought to the spot of the tragedy, on a helicopter.
Some inhuman war-spare-parts did not want at all to let the conflict die out…
"When leaving Azerbaijan (another quote from the official Azerbaijani site about the Khojalu Tragedy) some servicemen from the 366th Motorized Infantry Regiment attempted at taking outside the Republic big undeclared sums in foreign currency…"
[And again, in the best traditions of the Soviet Army, the personnel got fucked up by the Commander Political Deputy! Although it’s not quite clear which side had paid the confiscated dollars. Were they ripped off the tank men who failed to capture the Armenian Askeran City? Or the money was on those who fired from their armored personnel carrier at Khojalu? Were the petty officers not smart enough to get out of the region via Yerevan? Why to come to Azerbaijan with Armenian bribes on them?
In a nutshell, some complete lunacy in the style of post-reconstructional absurdity, where no Thomas de Vaal will ever find any ends in or out.
Although the guy was nobody’s fool in his a within-limits-red scuff, when he came to collect material for his book. I noted it back in 2002, a Holland family name and a job at the BBC, both at once. And the work was produced in so streamlined manner of statements that both sides quote him at their sites now in innocent belief he pulls for their side.]
Later on, the 366th Guards Motorized Infantry Regiment was dissolved… (Which is fucking dishonesty at all! Not fair way to treat guardsmen!)
The storm was started at midnight sharp, as planned. Valyo the Phedai, when forcing the river in the western outskirts of the Khojalu Village, slipped off a boulder and fell. The end-February-mountain-river water felt dead cold but he got up and ran after his comrades-in-arms.
As a component to the current war-machine he ran and fired and hollered although being drenched thru and thru.
At about 1.20 am, in a village lane he was lucky to come across a burning house which fire gave him an opportunity to dry up his sides. An hour later, in a deserted house at some other place in the village still echoing with stubborn shooting out, he found a casserole of hot barmy borshch. He ate it, not all but until got warmed inside.
His mother, of course, wouldn’t approve of the action. All her 4 children were born in Baku where she worked at a factory, packing baby perambulators, while her husband wandered about the USSR as a seasonal construction worker.
In 1989, so as to stay alive, they moved from Baku to Stepanakert.
Next year Valyo finished School 9 there and a year later he was already a full-fledged phedai in the group fighting in Krkjan. When in the storm of Malubalu besides the nasty mortar battery they captured also a big farm, he was awarded 4 sheep and a horse, all of which prize he brought home.
‘No’, said his mother, ’take them all back, we don’t own the animals’. If you ever try to drive 4 sheep and a horse from the School 9 neighborhood to Malubalu you would understand Valyo’s frustration, but he did it, he always was an obedient son. However, on that tragic night, he ate that borshch not cooked by his mother because he was too cold.
At 4.40 am, he caught a hostage (not a special police officer). He felt swoony and sat on a bench with his back to the hedge, and demanded of his prisoner to behave (which that promised) yet, just in case, he took the clip from his AK and shoved it in the inner pocket of his trench coat, before dozing off.
His sleep was disturbed with an AK barrel prodding at his forehead, he pushed it away and said, ‘Stop it, moron!’.
In response, the iron barrel hit hard and he awoke to see the stardust lover Gavo from Yerevan lying on the ground, and his buddy Syamo standing over Gavo whom he had just knocked out.
"It’s Valyo! He’s ours! Can’t you see the bandage, you fool!" shouted Syamo.
"He talked Azerbaijani, not Armenian!", whined the comer from Yerevan…
Valyo and his group stayed quartered in Khojalu. His hostage together with 5-6 other ones were kept in the same house (but in the room with a grated window). The prisoners were made to feather the fouls caught in the village to make the noodles tastier. In a month the Red Cross took them away…
But it was a flash forward, so back to February 26 –
From Khojalu they brought a pregnant woman to Stepanakert. Both the hospital and the maternity hospital was then in the city's safest basement – under the previous Regional Committee of the CPSU.
The woman gave birth to two babies. I never asked if they both were boys or girls, or just twins. Too late we grow wise enough to inquire about the most important…
______
List of links:
1.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A5%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B6%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B7%D0%BD%D1%8F
2.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%BF%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D1%8F_%C2%AB%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%86%D0%BE%C2%BB_(1991)
* * *
Bottle #14: ~ Bye Dear Chris! Be Back Whenever Feeling Like That! ~
“Hi, Don”, was delivered by Chris evenly, perfectly stripped of any emotion, however, too impartially and colorless as if by a theater school student articulating the lines learned by rote before a mirror to control the output.
The stare of his African eyes shot with the meandering snakes of venous blood twined, unyielding, with the frozen steel-hued glare of the man looming close by the two buddies table…
...In a London tavern, the blades of two daggers clang, tangled up to the scraping jingle of their cross-handles, the crowd of drunks shut up, a-gaping, the flutter of the torches in the walls grew in volume…
The counterparts paused their exchange of conversational clues to expertly check-up the overtones in the greeting by Chris. Was there a treacherous strain of discarding the fatal “key” in the name?. Nope, not a slightest hint, it sounded OK, the piece, like, rehearsed well enough.
"With your kind permission, gentlemen."
Don pulled out and bestrode the third chair at their table, the right profile of his face opposite Chris’ stare turned to its reflection in the cold glass partitioning from the street dark, from the cars dozed off by the sidewalk in the slow thick snowfall.
Two slobs in long black coats, like that on Don—lacking though the exceeding elegance of the outfit which, on them, smacked of a uniform, sort of—without doffing their slouch hats got seated at two different tables nearby.
"Tell you what, Chris? Seeing you never fails to make me think of ol’ good times."
Don lied and they both knew that he was lying. The needless lie told Chris that the meeting was not accidental and in the past week they did inform Don of a new patronizer at Make Or Mar, just in case, because the boss always showed interest in the movements of old-timers. At times he even helped them to move on. To the better world.
Why it was so, his hitmen did not know, it was not their concern, they just were doing their job so as to live on, and go on doing their job, and retire to a warm place with a beach and palms or long-needle pines of Sochi, and there, to the sound of the surf, which they couldn't bare to watch for longer than 6 seconds, to go thru the routine dying of desiccating cancer or bloating obesity, you know, if only a bullet with their name on it had not rendezvoused them on the way to that happy end, the control shot in the brow eschewed.
However, the number of those reaching the juncture of feeding the cancer was somewhat higher.
Don lied and he knew that Chris knew that he was lied to or, maybe, even got it that the meeting was arranged to plumb how deep he, old Chris, apprehended the extent of Don’s hatred to the "ol’ good times".
'That Bugger Donkey, he would get you anything – pills, weed, snow, intravenous,' knew all the advanced dudes at school.
Donkey had a reliable provisioner, his step-father brought home by his Mom who fucked Donkey for a change, when bored with effing her or if his high fancied that tack.
In time, Donkey's map became familiar to the provisioner's provisioners, and when discharged after his stretch for the shitty car stolen from a relative of the judge, he tore his step-father. Literally. In four parts.
Which makes him sorry, at times, now. The bugger died way too fast.
Turning to his own person, Donkey cut off only “key” in his handle. By that small literary trick he blessed himself with a huge title, and the title obliges, the title it was to bring about the drastic death-rate among the street’s old-timers.
Chris was the last of Mahicans, yet Don still tarried – without Chris all that remained there for him, personally, was the routine rut to cancer-feeding at an estate in the south of France or the Swiss Alps.
"You look like a groom from London, Chris. What shit is your fix? I'm curious, just out of envy."
"You dream of sticking me into your collection? There’s still a spot by the gramophone: 'Chris, the golden age of the street, no screwing up the exhibit’."
To bypass answering, Don laughed in a measured laughter, almost not parting his narrow lips. The two were swapping words which had no purpose any more. They both knew that Don dropped in just to say good-bye to his past.
"You’re a good guy, Chris, but I must be getting back to the mill."
"Would you imagine? I know the uncut version of this byword. In the golden age they used to say, 'You’re a good guy who lives unpardonably long’."
Don chortled, got up, pinched his ear lobe and made for the exit.
The bodyguards started after him.
After marching along for a couple of meters the rear lout made a turn around, neared Chris’ table and, standing behind Nobodya, with a movement trained to automatism slung up a pistol from under his coat and shot at the Chris’ chest. Twice.
Chris, together with his chair, swayed back and collapsed onto the floor to disunite. The victim's legs stretched out under the table.
The black automaton took a step forward and raised his hand with the pistol over the face of the felled man. A program glitch prevented the control shot.
The cause of the glitch—a bulky boarding pistol—bounced off his head and dropped onto the table. The black-coated figure banged face-first on the floor tiles.
Nobodya standing on his knees by the Chris’ body, his hands steeped in the sticky blood oozing thru the victim’s rags shouted:
"Chris! You’re a good guy! Wake up, Chris!"
"Ss…kep…", mumbled numbing lips.
"What? Chris? What?"
"Ess..cape…", the eyes turned over up and to the left.
Nobodya followed the last gaze – along the aisle between the table there was scuffling the second oaf in black, aptly drawing the gun from under his coat.
"Aaaa!", sprung to his feet Nobodya grabs the pistol off the table and hurls it into the widow glass throwing himself after it in a side somersault over the tabletop, and falls thru the jingle of the widening gap onto the snow-clad sidewalk outside.
The black-coated slob runs up to the table. Fuck! It’s in the way. One mighty push sends it aside, the gun handle in his right hand finishes off the sharp fangs of sheet glass in the crashed window, and he jumps out into the imprint of Nobodya’s body in the soft snow.
Meanwhile the fleer rushes across the nightly-thick stream of the traffic, screaming:
"ESCAPE! Chris! ESCAPE!"
The pursuer, without a moment’s hesitation, runs after him to take over, shoots on the run into the fleeing black-and-yellow checker. He’s paid for the accuracy of fire, for doing his job as it should be done. Nobody had ever given him a slip. Navigating thru the screeches of brakes he shortens the distance.
With a hoarse kamikaze-like yell, Nobodya dashes ahead. Is he fucking mad? Running to kill himself?
Never veering, darts he across the sidewalk to plunge himself against the building wall…
A split second later arrives the black-coated hitman hardly panting at all. Cluelessly stares he at the stone surface of the wall. Then under it.
There’s just intact snow. His hat moved to the back of his head, he looks around.
Nobodya’s nowhere…
* * *
Bottle #15: ~ A Step Up ~
The spring that followed generously brought me a job at the Supreme Council of the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh and again, by the bye, by protection. You swiftly make a habit of accepting things to be conveniently arranged by your mother-in-law or thru some other channels.
This time it was Guegham, who I’d seen a couple of times at all-out briefing-meetings in the office of the Head Editor of the paper where Guegham had a job of journalist. He came to our rented apartment in between bombardments, when Satenic was there, and said I had to visit the Reception Office of the Chairman of the Supreme Council on the second floor in the "White House" (which previously accommodated the Regional Executive Committee). Of course and sure enough, I went there, you just can’t spurn such openings.
In the ante-room to the Reception Office there was sitting Vera, the Chairman's Secretary, fairly advanced into the venerable age, yet the vestiges of her former fairness still traceable, who told me to wait because Arthur was busy at the moment.
And at the long desk next to hers there sat two phedais, opposite each other, playing Scrabble with a pencil in a ruled sheet of paper as a fix for having neither board nor letter chips. They also had to kill time in any way till Arthur becomes available.
But what shocked me, personally, was their sloppiness regarding the fair sex. Now, he’s taken his AK off his shoulder and dropped it on the desk by his side, to sharpen his skills at Scramble comfortably, and pays no attention that the weapon’s barrel got directed smack bang at Vera’s belly. Some tactless jerk, I swear.
So, I got up, as if tired of sitting, and that AK quite unobtrusively I turned 90 degrees for the barrel to watch the view thru the window. And all the present played along as if nobody saw nothing. Except for Vera because, when some geezer left Arthur’s Room, she dropped in, went out and invited me to enter although those two phedais had been waiting there before I came.
Arthur, a squat guy in his glasses, asked if I would like to take the position of a translator-analytic at the Press-Center by the Supreme Council of the RMK headed by Guegham, who had visited our rented apartment. How could I turn down the proposal with my diploma of a Teacher of English, from the Nezhin Pedagogical Institute? Letting down the people who had wasted their time and energy on me 4 years at a stretch? I'm not that kind of a guy.
Thus we came to a consensus and Arthur undertook to carry out all the formalities…
And I parted the paper with no regrets, almost, moreover that Isaac Asimov’s grand nothing was over and, besides, I felt kinda hurt by the attitude regarding me displayed recently on the part of the paper employees by a certain part of the editorial office staff. Well, just a fraction of them…
The matter is that after the fall of Khojalu the airport started to operate and JAK-40 jets began landing there. 150 rubles for a ticket and you become unreachable by the theater of militarized hostilities.