The seedy 2-story editorial office building (a couple of blocks off the printing house) was lost in the deep shadow from the right wing in the gray, 4-story, 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 it or so, Ithanks to being on friendly terms with Rashid, the watchman at the editorial officemanaged 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.
No, yeah, 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 on, and so forth among otherwise Armenian people.
A 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 its the Civil War and innumerable jokes personages name, Daddy just liked the sound.
And admire please 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, right?
Or take, for instance, the story behind the name of my sister-in-law? Her mothers mother-in-law (the mother-in-law of my mother-in-law), while on a visit to her relatives in Moscow, was impressed by something she heard in a radio-play about Jean DArk from Orleans. (Radio-play is an audio soap-opera broadcast over the radio because it was in 50s when the USSR hadnt got television yet, and the fact of TVs entering the Americans life in 30s serves another proof that the West started to rot before us.)
Now, she asked her Moscow relatives to scribble something she had heard and liked from the radio on a paper slip, my mothers-in-law mother-in-law did.
And who are you or am I to deny the beauty in Orlee-Anna name?
There happens a certain admixture of prejudice too, and if a family is beset with stillbirths or babies lacking real stamina, they would use a Muslim (more often than not some Turkish) name for a newborn, which quick-fix usually helps because they believe it should work.
All that renders pretty common the presence of a watchman whose given name was Rashid with his always at ready smile full of square teeth. Besides, I once met a small kid Elchibey (his parents had used the name of the belligerent president of Azerbaijan from 90s for that quite quick and able mischief))
In the morning our family were getting together in the one-room apartment or, if it was shelling outdoors, I took a kettle of water boiled on the gas stove to the underground basement, before starting off to visit the families of two more daughters of my mother-in-law to pass them, in the basements of the respective five-story blocks, the bread baked by her the previous night in the gas-oven of our one-(but-wide)-room flat.
They answered with a jar of cream or mittens for Ashot that had become too small for his cousin already the hand-me-downs were not quite our sons size but of a manly cut and hue
The usual in-extended-family circulation understandable to them who lived thru the realities of the USSR era of deficits
And then, alleviated and full of feeling of my duty done, issuing tiny starch-creaks off my immaculate integrity, I opened the massive padlock on the entrance door to the editorial office building to latch it from inside because the House Manager (not present) had uneasy misgivings about the Russian and Armenian typewriters in the typists pool on the second floor, you know.
The translators was on the first floor and when they knocked or pulled at the entrance door from outside (about once a week), it was not a long wait till I came along the corridor to check whats up.
Once it was Sylva the typist, who had believed the wild rumors of the editorial office got hit by an Alazan missile and burned up. Seeing it was all bullshit, she felt happy and immediately decided to take home her slippers from the drawer in her desk in the pool's room because its easier for her to type when they are on, somehow, yes, you know.
Or it could be an outsider veteran graphomaniac (you would not make out the exact age thru his stubble but no less than eighty), who brought a parcel of material prepared by him for the paper dead for at least two months already. Which is not papers fault with all the newsstands locked up or destroyed.
Carried away by his creative efforts the writer failed to notice the trifle
At too near explosions the building hopped, and the window panes spilled, with the parting tinkle, the glass fragments over the floor. I raked them with the broom borrowed from the toilet room in the end of the corridor, and helped Rashid to seal the gaping window frames with the vinyl tape from the House Managers keeps. The watchman was stinking with wine and bitching bitterly to his hammer about the janitors who had ceased coming to do their job.
I acted a deaf stone to his harangues because I had no desire to guess who he was hinting at
Actually, Alazans produced more noise than effect. The missile could not pierce a stone wall 40 cm thick. Well, yes, the walls outer surface would go kaput, the inside turn all cracks and crevices but still and yet the missile lacked might to penetrate and sky in. No, yeah, if it hit in through the window or balcony door then, no arguing, the place is smashed into a useless trash for sure, all the partitions felled down. However, were it some crummy house of wood, then one hit of an Alazan would turn it into a shitty heap of nothing.
But then, at night, when going after water, I could enjoy a mesmerizing opportunity to admire their beautiful flightfrom purely aesthetic point of viewa lazy yellow comet falling from Shushi in a languid arc onto the city (too high this time to get at me) welcomed from the ground with long stitches of tracing rounds from Kalashnikov or two to burst it up, across the flight course, useless, unable prevent its final crash midst the city, and all of it against the backdrop of the full moon lo! here comes another! and the colorful stitches again! Vain try, of course, yet the surrealism of the picture simply awesome
And after Stepanakert was left not only by the special troops of the Soviet Army but the primordial regiment as well, they unleashed bombardments by the missile installations GRAD, and those things you couldnt play down undeniably powerful beasts. The hit of just two rockets was enough to level the three-story wing in the City Council (where there had been the TV studio).
The blast left low hillocks of crushed masonry and some aggravating stink of burned rubber. I cannot definitely state whether it was the smell of the explosives or from the buried, smoldering TV equipment
* * *
Bottle #8: ~ From the Alternate Angle ~
First off, the darkness did not seem absolute, some pin-prick scintillas still oscillated here and there, and extremely dark but still a sliver gray-hued streaks retained their static position along the edges of actual blackness.