The Blog
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However, back to 'in order of appearance'…
A month later there was another meeting in the village club to collect donations for the victims of the Spitak earthquake in Armenia (the seismic magnitude at the epicenter in the range of 10 to 12, 25 000 dead, 514 000 homeless, 140 000 crippled).
I donated 2 rubles and 50 kopecks, all I could contribute without losing a chance of surviving up to the payday.
The teacher of Biology, Rafic Shakarian, a ready-made Roman senator by his looks, began to carp: “No need for kopecks!” I had to curb his patrician pride by reminding that he, personally, was not the target of my offering, and 50 kopecks were equivalent of 2 bread loaves… The discussion dried up, the kopecks were accepted.
In February, the Lenin square in Stepanakert saw the outset of mass rallies in support of the exit from under the Azerbaijani jurisdiction and unification of Mountainous Karabakh with Armenia. The Regional Council of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region sent petitions on this account to Moscow, Baku and Yerevan…
From the jokes of that period:
“They clear up the heaps of debris in place of the houses tumbled by the Spitak earthquake. The derrick pulls up a huge concrete flooring slab revealing a man still alive, miraculously.
‘Is Karabakh given back to us?’ – asks the survivor.
‘No, man! No!’
‘Drop the fucking slab back then!’"
Some stuff to perk you up, huh? Still, I have heard folks laughing at it…
Laughing even after that beastly carnage of Armenian population in the city of Sumgait, 27 – 29 February 1988.
I cannot write on that. Physiological stoppage. Hands hang, spasmodic clutch at the throat to keep back senseless whine of a small kid. Looks like senility has its say already. Maybe…
The troops of the Soviet Empire did not interfere for three days and nights. When they entered the city to disperse the ferocious mobs, 276 soldiers got bruised.
There followed a bubble of hush for a couple of months, when multi-thousand streams of evacuees filled the highways between Armenia and Azerbaijan: Armenians from Baku to Armenia and Karabakh, Azerbaijanis from Armenia to Azerbaijan. Counter-directed migration of peoples…
A year later, influenced by the common spirit of turbulent times, I married and migrated to Stepanakert to weave the family nest atop of the stirred up volcano.
The job of an isolation-tape man at the construction of gas pipelines to far-off parts of Karabakh was an extensively outdoors and far-off employment so the son was born in my absence.
About half-year later, in August, they attempted at the SCES putsch in Moscow. The Central TV news program Vremya presented a dozen of bureaucratic pans in a consolidated row behind the wide desk of the State Committee for the Emergency Situation (SCES) reading up to the population their orders – the democracy announced null and void, we were to live as before, as we had always been trained, and follow the five-year plans approved by them at the Congresses of their Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).
In the morning, to demonstrate my discontent, disgust, and disagreement, I did not board the truck starting off to carry my co-workers to remote villages but handed in my resignation letter to the personnel department of the Building-Montage Management (BMM) #8:
“…because this here organization is a state firm, and I have no desire to work for the state of SCES, please fire me of my own accord”.
The BCM-8 Chief, Samvel Hakopian, amusedly chortled and signed his approval to satisfy my plea.
Next morning that SCES putsch went kaput and I, having lost the job along with their lost cause, concentrated on building up our family house in the lot allocated by the City Council on the ravine slope behind the Maternity Hospital…
When the walls were raised 1 meter tall, there started bombardments of Stepanakert City with Alazans from the Sushi City and Khodjalu Village, yet in the following 2 months I still laid the walls to the level for spanning them with the concrete slabs because sand and cement had been acquired already and the construction of the running water line of iron pipe (cross-section 0.5”) accomplished.
The money for the slabs had been paid too but the Building Materials Plant never delivered them because of the unfavorable situation.
For about a month I stayed unemployed because the city enterprises were coming to a halt one after another and there appeared a slot to make a dent in Ulysses in earnest.
My mother-in-law spotted that I could write for stretches longer than normal, and fixed me up with a job at the editorial house of the regional newspaper The Soviet Karabakh where she had the position of a janitor and the editor thereof originated from the same village as her, and, as luck would have it, their family names coincided too.
My job come to be translating articles from Armenian to Russian because The Soviet Karabakh daily was published in Armenian and on Saturdays supplemented with a Russian digest, so as Big Brother could check the stuff brought up in the previous 7 days.
My position of a translator did not fall under the category of the mother-in-law-backed nepotism. Not in the least! In two years at the village school I studied all the curriculum textbooks in Armenian Language and Literature from the school library, starting off the ABC Primer.
Learning a language by textbooks is way easier than thru communing with the native speakers because texts allow you more time to get it, and cancels the strain of tries at catching serendipitous shreds in the over fluent, non-stop twitter of those who use it from their crib.
However, I was not paid for the month of work at the newspaper because the city got blockaded and bombarded on a regular basis with heavy artillery pieces, and the population switched over to dwelling in the basements of the five-story buildings, for the most part. Often blackouts worsened the situation, before the electricity was cut off for good. In the basements, they used oil-lamps or candles. When a candle melted away completely, the wax drippings were used for production of a new one, though of lesser size, of course.