Yes truly, a couple of times there were voiced reproofs in the interrogative form: what fucking rascal hooey was I scribbling in that notebook?
But then the City Psychiatrist diagnosed the notebooks case as not stark raving mad and violent, and it could be taken back to lie beside the hefty stiff parcel.
The whistle-blowers played along with the docs recommendation, however, they were not ready to what happened after.
And what? What was that? Tell us, tell! Cut out your darn tries at frigging suspension! Damn coot, you!
Well, not a thing. None! Nothing whatsoever.
The retrieval was met with the deadpan of my poker face (if observed from outside), no comment, total indifference, and since then the number of untouchable idlers on the shelves doubled drastically the mustard-hued mother walrus, and her gray cub immovably advancing towards the equivalence in their pigmentation due to the natural growth of the dust layer of identical thickness.
Both time and place let me in on their mutual incongruity with wanton games at ant domestication and getting schooled in response. Thats the ballgame, folks!
In all fairness to the Twix (time-and-place), the so rigid halt was partly motivated by a vengeful wish to pinch the nose of mess-arounders, whose sporadic and somewhat pensive looks in the direction of dormant walrus colony of two upon their shellacked shelf, as well as random fingerprints detectable in the dust layer over the gray leatherette were telling signs of their, deductively, thirst to know what was to happen next in them those fucking scribbles?
Not a thing. You should of taken it to the psychiatrist and let the wise guy guess the storyline without helpful clues from letter-ants.
Thats how that particular point turned a false start
The following try was flagged off a couple of years later by the pocket-book volume borrowed for a 10-year stretch, which accompanied me over the watershed of the Caucasian mountains
The first winter was lived through inside the tiny Pioneers Room on the second floor in the two-story school building.
Way back, it was an ordinary house expropriated later from the owner living at large or else he, the owner, gave it up in token of his good will, after which move the village obtained the ready-made school for the compulsory secondary education.
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 librarya 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, a score of them in four tiers up to the low ceiling.
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 stovepipe rising from the rectangular-cuboid tin woodburner [60 cm x 40 cm x 40 cm] on 4 tin legs to keep the whole contraption 25 cm clear off the boards in the floor. All the tinin the pipes, and the elbow, and the woodburner itselfgrew the steady crust-layer of brown rust. The round gap to let the pipe out was cut keeping eye on thrusting it thru with ease and generously provided constant ventilation and immediate contact with the outside weather.
The Horn-and-Drum couple sat modestly mum on the stand shelf by the door, in the company of a hefty handbell of verdigris bronze girded with the cast relief running in Russian, Gift from Valdai, a genius of mighty clangor to announce the start/end of a class/break
The firewood for the tin woodburner I cleft nearby the old-tin canopy-shelter in the yard, close to the school privy of 2 doors marked F and M, segregationally.
The ax kept flying off its handle. Old Goorguen, the school watchman from the next-door house, issued an ironic chortle into his white-tabacco-yellowed mustaches to every flight he witnessed, and the Principal, named Surfic, never omitted to compliment my style at wood-splitting that witnessed to my having firm roots in the class of intelligentsia. She admired my forbearance not a single, obscene, 4-letter word after that flying piece of fucking iron
Late in the evening, the tin woodburner 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 from under the thick sheep-wool-filled blanket up into the raw cold of mountain winter. All of the bedding temporary donation by the teaching and cleaning staff at school
I did not plunged into translating Ulyssesright away. First off, employing The Chambers 20th Century Dictionary, I translated The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man(also by Joyce) under the pretext it was necessary to better dig that guy, Stephen Dedalus, the youngest in the Ulyssess trinity of main characters.
Whenever some passage stayed unclear even after The Chambers 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. On the way, in both directions, the fellow travelers amazed me by their indifference to the striking views of the mountainous nature about the rolling bus that kept my nose stuck to the window glass while they yakked at each other in their dark language of who knows what
At the end of academic year I was dished out a room on the second floor of a no mans house at a stone throw from the school yard. The first floor comprised the windowless locked cave for storing the schools tin woodburners 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 slow-go repair accomplishment happened on the eve of the following academic year, and the room was shared with a rookie pedagogical cadre from Yerevan freshly baked and certified by a high education enterprise for teachers production.
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 Ive never seen him any more