The Blog
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Almost all of the winter 1991 – 1992 Stepanakert spent in the cross-fire from 4 directions. From top it was shelled by the artillery in the Sushi City, from the bottom side pelted the missiles launched at the Khojalu Village, from left the bombardment was carried out by the howitzers positioned in the Malubalu Village, and from right the battery in Janhasan Village added their share to the barrage.
Machine gun and automatic weapon fire from Krkjan (the uppermost, Azerbaijani populated part of the Stepanakert City itself) did not reach farther than the theater building.
We rented a one-(but-wide)-room apartment in Tumanian Street and in the basement of the nearest 5-story apartment block—at a stone throw distance from the house we dwelt in—I had to empty out the space for sheltering of my family in between the walls of bulky concrete-blocks in the building's foundation under the ground.
At the outset of the movement for the independence of Mountainous Karabakh, while there existed yet communications with Armenia, they shipped from up there some relief including garments, deficit food products, and booklets of the Holy Bible adaptation for kids in Armenian.
Conceivably, certain undeclared goods arrived in as well, which is better known to the members of the special Committee formed then in Stepanakert for supervising the said relief and supplements among the local population, after a short-term storing away in the basement of the mentioned 5-story apartment block.
As a result, there grew a huge heap of smashed craters, emptied containers, broken bottles and other vestiges of clandestine orgies of those rats, the Committee members, in one of the basement sections. Nobody of the aboriginal tenants of the apartment block had enough vigor to undertake such a whale of cleansing job and the section had to wait till being liberated by my hands following the lead from my mother-in-law.
However, even I could do only half of the job which half though was enough for the accommodation of my wife and our kids—the 2-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter from her first marriage—plus two unknown females who failed to find room for themselves in other sections of the overcrowded basement-shelter.
My mother-in-law, among a dozen of other ladies from the surrounding neighborhood of predominantly private houses, sheltered in a tailor’s workshop (who had successfully taken away everything but the walls) in the nearby 2-story block of flats in fairly dilapidated state, and I dead refused leaving the one-but-wide room in the first floor of our renters’ house, which was equipped with a cast pig-iron stove for gas-heating, the room was.
The ultimate condition of survival in Stepanakert that winter was water. Having water for drinking, food-processing, laundry, and toilet flashing (if not blessed with an outhouse in the yard) was the foremost challenge because of its all-embracing deficit.
The trunk pipeline supplying water from the river over a dozen of kilometers away had been sabotaged, and the employees at the city water-supplying services guessed (quite understandably) that being engaged in renovating works in the terrain open to pinpointed shooting by snipers would not be much different from an out-and-out suicidal action, and they would blow it up the very next day all the same.
In difference to Leningrad blockaded in WWII, the Stepanakerters did not prepossess the Neva river by their side and had to rely on too few street taps of water running from springs in the nearby slopes… Multimeter noisy queues snaked to those taps to put their pail under a thumb-thick leak of water, to scatter and/or press themselves to the walls of the nearest buildings in another artillery/missile attack.
I, personally, preferred to go after water at night not because late or small hours prevented shelling—artillery men worked round the clock—but in the dark the queues seemed shorter, sort of.
In the morning I went to work though the newspaper, naturally, ceased circulating and no one proposed me to translate an editorial or stuff any more. However, I possessed a skeleton key to the translators' room furnished with three desks bearing scars left by the raw facts of life and two hard chairs.
So at the rare days of relative calm and no shelling (because, say, of another peace-broker team arrival in the region) those of my colleagues who dropped in, yielding to the too deeply rooted habit of theirs or because of having nothing better to do, were pleasantly surprised to fins that there was someone in the building, after all.
The seedy 2-storied editorial office building (a couple of blocks off the printing house) was lost in the shadow of the right wing in the gray 4-storied mighty parallelepiped of the Regional Committee of the CPSU, a kinda towboat by an ironclad battleship. And when the editorial House Keeper tried to introduce locking the entrance door with a heavy padlock as soon as in an hour after opening, I—thanks to being on friendly terms with Rashid, the watchman at the editorial office—managed to obtain the entrance key imprint in a piece of molding clay our kids used to play with. The duplicate key turned out okay because of my skills of a locksmith of the third category acquired at the Konotop Steam-Engine-And-Railroad-Car-Renovating Plant, though in absence of a vice it was not a trivial task.
(For the ethnography lovers.
Well, yes, “Rashid” is not a typical Armenian name, but then, playing with names is a deep-rooted tradition within the Armenian ethos. The parents feel at liberty to use any name as long as it sounds lovely (by their ear estimation) or would be correct politically, or both. Hence these slews of Arthurs, Hamlets, Ophelias, Jameses, Johnics (diminutive-affectionate from Johnny), Lolitas and so forth among otherwise Armenian people.
The teacher of Geography from School 7 was named Argentina (which is not a household-between-us-kids moniker but her legitimate ID-verified handle). Or how about “Chapaev”? Who cares it’s the Civil War and innumerable jokes’ personage’s name, Daddy just liked the sound.
And admire the ingenuity at constructing the following, rather wide-spread in Armenia name from V. I. Len(in) – eliminating dots and brackets you get Vilen.
A woman named “Electrification” all her life had to respond to the shortened form: “Ele”. A lucky strike if you consider the base, eh?