Bypassing thickets on the steep slope, I explore the underwood along the field edge, pulling a broken bough here, a dead sapling there onto the desolate cow path. After advancing in that manner some two hundred meters, I turn about and go back picking up the firewood scattered over the path. With an ample armful of fuel, I come back to the former campsite, then re-track to fetch another bundle; and one more. Thats that.
The next step is breaking brushwood for the fire to process pioneers favrite food-ood-ood, as a sometime jolly Soviet song baptized baked potatoes. Which piece of work I had to do by bare hands equipped not even with a knife. At times the fact of my hiking unarmed astounds people, and they start to pour forth their stock of horror stories about hungry wolves and cruel robbers. As it stands, in all my annual escapes to the wilderness, Ive only seen deer and foxes, and a couple of times bear steps, but no robbers ever bothered to ambush me in the toombs.
The only but ever present inconvenience is getting jumpy at close unidentified shrieks in the night forest, still Im not sure if the possession of a loaded AK would improve symptoms. Yes, once I got attacked indeed, while spending the night under a bush nearby the Mekdishen village in my sleeping bag additionally wrapped into a piece of blue synthetic burlap. (The shoddy crap drenches thru in the rain before you say knife, but that had happened before 2000 when I got this Made-in-China tent.)
It was about midnight, when two wolfhounds, escorting a belated horseman, ran into me nestled under that bush. Damn! What a hell of barking broke loose over my head! Their master arrived at the scene with his flashlight and was stunned by the unseen sight in his native quarters, yet the blue bundle yelled from under the bush that it was a tourist from Stepanakert and let him call back his bloody beasts.
The mujik started the all too familiar hooey about wolves, for which I was not in the mood and just retorted curtly that after his gumprs nothing would ever scare me anymore
And at the sleepover upon the Dizzuppaht, which is the third highest mountain in Karabakh, half an hour after me there climbed up a party of guys from the Halo Trust. So is named the international organization headquartered in Great Britain, who finance and teach techniques of mine clearance to the natives of hot spots at war all over the globe because different conflicting sides have the same nasty habit of setting up lots of minefields to kill as many people from the opposite side in the conflict as possible. The side effect is genocidal decimation of animal populationsboth wild life and domesticatedthe poor creatures, as a rule, are fully unaware of the areal political situation. We are responsible for who we housebreak. (whom?. Hmm Im not a Sir Winston Churchill, man)
Now, the local sappers (instructed by native Britons) climbed the Dizzuppaht on their off-duty time at night closing in after a day in the field to perform a pleading mahtagh, because atop that mountain, from time immemorial, there stood a stone chapel which you should walk around, thrice, for your request to get approved by the authorities of fate.
The Halo Trust guys, naturally, did not come empty-handed, they brought a rooster with them for the sacrificial offering. But because of the somewhat impromptu nature of their mahtagh-doing, they missed to bring a knife along and were expressly disappointed to learn that neither had I Yet, the resourceful fellas on-the-fly invented a novel technique and chopped the birds head off with the piece of a broken bottle collected from the heap of garbage solicitously piled up by all the previous mahtagh-doers
Its only that year when I climbed the second highest (and clean completely) peak in the region, the Keers, I had an imitation of a Swiss army knife, a present from Nick Wagner. It had a whole bunch of things in its handle: a fork, a corkscrew, and even a nail file. I cant remember where I misplaced it afterward.
But, however long were I patting myself on the back, the regions peak number one remains beyond the peacock tail of my vagrant achievements. The front line of the unfinished war between Armenians and Azerbaijanis runs across that mountain. So, if not one side, then the other wouldnt let me pass up or theyd just bang from both sides synchronously.
The point is that manual breaking of dry branches is not a big deal, and before long I readied up two sizable heaps of fuel for the fire. With the first one burned up, the unpeeled (so is the recipe) potatoes are buried in the hot ashes and the finalizing heap goes in the fire restarted upon them. But not right now, first, I have to put the tent up; the sun already gone behind this wheeling football field of a toomb, the dusk begins to slowly creep in from over the river
(in every human there sits a pyromaniac
and then the pyromaniacs partook of pies with Pirosmani
Looks like a half-baked jaw-breaker, eh?then, gradually, a creepy disjunctive question crawls in: was Pirosmani among the banqueters or, after all, inside the pies, turned into toothsome filling?.)
Luckily, I was not able to break this long thick bough when crushing the firewood and now, so as not to set the field and all ablaze, I systematically use it to kill the fugitive spillovers of lively flames. When the bonfire gets bounded by the black ring of burnt grass, the club-armed sentry becomes an idle onlooker considering the merry dance of fire atop the piled wood pieces while the club transforms into a staff to lean my locomotion apparatus onto
And what do you see in the rollicking tongues of flame or in the sedate embers scintillation?
(we were a seed, then a germ, then buds, then branches)
Now, turning the staff into a poker, I rake their smoldering reminiscences, push them aside to open a hole for a dozen potatoesdinner and breakfast, 2 in 1 The fire eats wood, I eat potatoes, mosquitoes eat me
(who do not eat, they do not live. Even considerate and prissy crystals devour space when growing.
But no one can ever eat up time because it does not exist at all. Time is nothing but a red-herring for distraction of innocent suckers. What they call time is just a series of different states of space. Some place sunlit from the left is morning, the same place sunlit from the right is evening. As simple as that. Day as a unit of time? Bullshit! Day is just the difference between two states of space. An apple adds to an apple to make a pair of them and not a unit of time, damn!.
Oh, sorry!. There, there! Dont be afraid, sweetheart, gray wolves gone to their forest, no loose ends, alls under a strict control
Well, yes, its no use denying that space and time, when brought up, make me a bit spacey, quite a very tiny little bit, not noticeable, almost, especially if you dont watch too closely. Yet, a brush in passing with that sweet couple andta-dah!a short circuit sizzle and Im emitting some folly accomplished. Kinda reincarnation of that crackpot God's fool, Vasily the Blessed, only cocked up by more earthly matters.
Still and all, I am not a violent case. Not in the least! I swear! And both Devil and God, (alphabetically) might absolutely safely attest that in the course of seizure no one gets harmed in any way because the hooey I pour forth is quite enough to tangle myself completely andvoilà!here am I, the same submissive genteel yahoo, ready to carry on whatever they see fit to load onto the beast of burden)
Still and all, I am not a violent case. Not in the least! I swear! And both Devil and God, (alphabetically) might absolutely safely attest that in the course of seizure no one gets harmed in any way because the hooey I pour forth is quite enough to tangle myself completely andvoilà!here am I, the same submissive genteel yahoo, ready to carry on whatever they see fit to load onto the beast of burden)
~~~~~
~ ~ ~ The Genesis
More likely than not, your ken of your own lineage on the paternal side feels kinda rickety, right? In the same breath, I feel comfortably confident in your Moms family tree being properly watered and presented to you in detailed feeds by your grandmother. About 2-3 generations, if not deeper.
The reasonable belief that my pedigree was a taboo subject when you were around took a firm root after a surprise letter from your mother breaking the sudden news of my death. Not too sharp though, the impact was softened by a kind roundabout introduction: you were told that your Dad was dead and I should prevent exposure of the childs fragile psyche to any chance running into the revenant ghost of her drifter parent
As a spook of quality, I politely kept to my grave ever since. Yet, when in a pub a fella next to me got in the mood for bending my ear with a plaintive tale of his being nobody these days while in his prime he walked the bridge of a nuke submarine as her Chief Mate, I felt a solid right and no scruples to cut his lamentation and drive it back that I used to be a famous pilot tragically killed at the shakedown flights of a jet fighter starting the newest, highly secret, brand For which unparalleled achievement I was honored, by the way, with the title of Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded the Gold Star medal. Posthumously, of course, and thats a sad pity the decoration didnt find the hero because those lazy sons of bitches never search in earnest
The bullshit, to be honest, was not an instance of my snappy creativity but a commonplace mass-product because in that romantic epoch, when a single-mothered kid exacted the reasons for the incomplete composition of their family, Mom dished out the traditional stopgap, Your father was a pilot and he crashed.
The brute facts of life were saved for her bosom lady-friends, He was a junior bookkeeper, guys, and spread me on his office desk, O, my! Never will I forget that fucking abacus trundling back and forth under my ass
Nonetheless, dont expect of me a fine-grained presentation of your roots because my knowledge of the matter is way too shallow and fuzzy because the interest in eugenics was truly frowned at then in no less degree than now
The name of your fathers mothers mother was Katerinna Poyonk and she was brought from Poland by your great-grandfather, Joseph Vakimov, a commissar in the 1-st Cavalry Army of Semyon Budyonny, as a trophy, or maybe a keepsake of that period in the Civil War when the Budyonnys cavalry all but turned Warsaw their spoils.