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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.
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 smoke pipe rising from the rectangular-cuboid tin stove [60 cm x 40 cm x 40 cm] on 4 tin legs to keep the contraption 25 cm clear off the boards in the floor. All the tin grown with brownish crust of rust and the round hole (cut thru with the convenience of thrusting the smoke pipe out in mind) had generous gaps for the ventilation and immediate contact with the outside weather.
The Horn-and-Drum couple kept mum on the stand shelf by the door, in company with a weighty jingle-bell cast of bronze with the relief molding, which ran around its wall, in Russian: “Gift from Valdai”, distinguished by the knack for mighty clangor to announce start/end of a class/break…
The firewood for the tin stove I cleft in the tin-roofed shelter nearby the two-door outhouse in the yard.
The ax kept flying off the handle. Old Goorguen, the school watchman from the house next door, ironically chortled beneath his white-yellow mustaches to every flight he witnessed, while the Principal, named Surfic, instantly announced that my style of wood-splitting disclosed my roots in the class of intelligentsia. She obviously admired my forbearance – not a single 4-letter word after the flying piece of fucking iron…
Late in the evening, the tin stove 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 up into the mountain raw winter cold…
I did not set off translation of Ulysses right away. First off, employing The Chamber’s 20th Century Dictionary, I translated Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man pretending it was the must to have a closer look at Stephen Dedalus, the youngest in the trinity of Ulysses’s 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…
At the end of academic year I was dished out a no man’s house in the village, comprising one room on the second floor level above the locked up store cave for keeping the tin school stoves 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 plywood repair accomplishment coincided with the start of the following academic year, and the room was shared with a rookie teacher arrived from Yerevan, where he had been freshly baked and certified by a pedagogical institute.
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 stove for wintering, yet having nothing to stick in and kindle inside it, would feel unquestionably cold.
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 collared me 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 the 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 fucking 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 of you followers!
Hugging the tree up there—so too high!—with just one hand, uses he remaining one to cut the other tree—felled but not fallen as of yet.
That’s a hell 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…