The City to Love

But that is a completely different topic…

As for me, there remains just to inquire about their outlook on the future.

Oh, things are in perfect order there! Youth is full of optimism.

A couple more years will pass, they will buy out their diplomas, and then they will definitely turn this whole world upside down and make everyone happy, no doubt.

So the world—and I, included—have another two years in reserve.

Though time is an incredibly slippery thing. Even more so in the perplexing Orient, where ripening happens almost instantly. Especially when it clippety-leaps around, you see, back and forth and back again…

What if these two years turn out to be a couple of months? What then, huh?

An adult will manifest disappointment differently, not like juveniles…

And when they realize they were fed empty candy wrappers instead of the filling, I wouldn't want to accidentally find myself in too close proximity to their whereabouts.

Could anyone tell me where the entrance to the exit is around here, please?

* * *

6 A Family Portrait in a Market-Relations Interior

(by way of the second of two introductions)

A Little Fable:

In a certain state located extremely far away from us (I beg you to constantly keep this fortunate circumstance in mind—whatever follows is said about a completely other place over seven seas), democracy bloomed in such a deeply decadent, triple-tier degeneration fashion that the authorities saw fit to completely remove all oversight from the mass media. The directors of said media outlets received an official clarification from above:

"You, comrades-gentlemen-citizens, are not toddlers. You are expected to grasp the full complexity of the unfolding situation yourself, and to know exactly what the sovereign state interests consist of—interests that must be guarded night, day, and kept in sacred stability. Even more so with the transition to self-censorship. We have no forbidden topics, nor do we foresee any, seeing as you are not toddlers and…” (refer back to the beginning of this clarification).

And just like that, the authorities of this highly distant nation found themselves with significantly fewer headaches. It all worked out simply because (and this must be emphasized with special care) the people on the payroll of the mass media possessed a terminally wild imagination. They had over-read, over-heard, over-acquired, and over-drunk from the well of history.

For an imagination like that, scaring itself into pure hysteria is as easy as rolling off a log.

"Oh, what if they drag me into the dungeons of the Secret Police?”

"Or exile me back to 1937, without the right to correspondence?”

"Or send me to the chopping block with Yemelka Pugachev?”

Guided by these terrifying scenarios of their own making, the media organs self-sterilized to such a touching degree that the authorities couldn't have even dreamed of it back in the good old, pre-democratic days.

After all, "state interests" are an incredibly elastic thing, much like the concept of "the state" itself. Sometimes you have trouble wrapping your head around what exactly they are being stretched over at any given moment around us.

A certain Frenchman… (no, this isn't about the count who invented that safely elastic, stretchable little contraption; this is about a different one, the guy who was king).

Anyway, his name was Louis, running under inventory number fourteen.

So this very same Louis, at one of those given moments, deigned to hand down the following clarification:

"The State,” said Number 14, "is me.”

But come on, look how long ago that was! So much water has flowed under the bridge since then that it's impossible to even guess which inventory number fits the most popular size on the market today.

What if the current inventory number suddenly gets it into his head that the State is his left heel?

In such setups, a hyper-cautious approach is absolutely the must, lest you stomp on someone’s corn—because what if that corn suddenly turns out to be a matter of vital state interest? And we are not toddlers, after all; they can effectively belt us up, down, and sideways…

And whenever an employee of a mass-media information outlet was suddenly and unexpectedly hit by inspiration, and—bam!—some line in a supposedly poetic style crawled out (hatched, so to speak) on its own: "How blue the sky is today!”—the self-censoring element in his responsible consciousness would immediately panic, sound the alarm, and vigilantly call him to order:

"Let me ask you this: what exactly are you implying here, huh? The sky, it’s up there. And the higher-ups are the leadership. So, what you’re expressively pointing out here is that our government is a bunch of faggots? Every single one of them?”

And the wretched, half-born creation would be ripped to shreds… To hell with it anyway, otherwise they’ll boot the poet off to the furthest northern reaches of his native region, where they straighten out goats' horns. And who’s going to believe you, after you've been thoroughly processed, that you didn't mean it that way at all?…

But I repeat: all of this took place in a certain very, very distant country, and if anyone gets it into their head to doubt this or draw unhealthy, unjustifiably strange parallels, such a line goes directly against the interests of… well, you know yourselves, we are not toddlers. You probably have children of your own by now, mm-hmm…

. . .

When my long-time benefactor, Maksim Ervandovich Ovanisyan—for the sake and well-being of my children—agreed to give me a job, he knew perfectly well who he was dealing with.

My very first attempt with the pen (that article about the students and their outlook) did not disappoint his worst fears.

"You write with too much bile. Too much sarcasm. Why?”

He didn’t even bother listening to my tangled explanations about how it’s not me doing the writing, but something writing through me; that it’s the pen doing the work while I’m just being used by some unknown force to spit out the inspired, Beautiful Word. He swept all that bunk straight into the wastebasket hiding under his editorial desk—the one reserved for paper scraps and empty metaphysical delusions.

For a moment, he bored into me with the glinty reflections of his spectacles and made a move that was absolutely brilliant in its virtuosity:

"Then here is your topic. Write about how you survive on your schoolteacher’s salary. Let's say your mother-in-law sends you to the bazaar—and what exactly you bring back from there.”

Oh, he’s a sly one. Damn wise is this heavily experienced Maksim Ervandovich! And his move is as simple as everything genius, and as genius as everything simple.

Here, take your little topic: you and market relations. And from there—knock yourself out! Splatter your bile all over market relations (which have already had so much spooge upon them that a couple of extra spit-takes won't make them hot or cold), or, for a change, you can get sarcastic at your own personal expense.

In short, my dear fellow, did you get the topic? Now trot along out of here—expose it to the best of your talents, heh-heh, or should I treat you to a cup of coffee for the road?

In keeping with the laws of the genre, the coffee had to be declined.

Well, since we’re going all in on this gamble, listen up… Or rather—look. If I'm going to expose myself, I might as well go all the way! Here it is—the promised…

Family Portrait

1)

Full Name: Ogoltsoff, Sehrguey Nikolaevich, 44 years old

Profession and Experience:

Locksmith (2 years)

Bricklayer (9 years)

Miner (¼ year)

Press operator (1 year)

Analyst-Translator (3 years)

English Teacher (8 years)

Monthly Earnings: 30,000 AMD (15k at ASU + 15k at SGU)

2)

Full Name: Tsaturyan, Satenik Aleksandровна, 34 years old

Profession and Experience: Physics and Shop Teacher (12 years)

Monthly Earnings: 10,000 AMD (School No. 8)

3)

Full Name: Baghdasaryan, Ruzanna Arturovna, 15 years old

Profession and Experience: 10th-grade student

Monthly Earnings: 00,000 AMD

4)

Full Name: Ogoltsoff, Ashot Sergeevich, 8 years old

Profession and Experience: 4th-grade student

Monthly Earnings: 00,000 AMD

5)

Full Name: Ogoltsova, Emma Sergeевна, 3 years old

Profession and Experience: Independent researcher of the surrounding environment

Monthly Earnings: 00,000 AMD

6)

Full Name: Ovanisyan, Emma Arshakovna, 72 years old

Profession and Experience: Pensioner

Monthly Pension: 8,000 AMD, including disability supplement

. . .

Also on Hand:

— a hand-built house with a few basic amenities;

— 0.15 acres (6 sotkas) of land on a sharply rugged terrain;

— a rooster (one);

— hens (two)—a gift from one of my sisters-in-law…

Long story short: my mother-in-law doesn't send me to the bazaar; all the finances are held tightly in the hands of her daughter, Satenik.

I set my salaries from the two universities straight onto a glass shelf in the china cabinet (a gift from another sister-in-law), and if I happen to be running late for work, Satenik hands me 30 drams for the marshrutka.

It must be nice, I suppose, to constantly feel a thick wad of high-denomination bills inside your pocket. I wouldn't know; I've never had the pleasure. But happiness isn't found in money. Nor is it found in gold.

The greatest treasure on earth is amber. In Armenian, "Satenik" translates exactly to "Little Amber."

Oh, what a woman she is! What a woman!

A certain poetic soul (with six volumes of published poetry under her belt) helplessly threw up her hands and said: all the dictionaries combined couldn't supply enough epithets to convey just how magnificent Satenik is, and how brilliant, and gorgeous, and… She threw up her hands again.

Well, I can see, feel, and say all of that without any dictionaries.

But Satenik tells in response that it is a cheap, low-grade trick to dump all the responsibility onto her. I bring home my measly thirty thousand drams, stay completely oblivious, and leave it up to her to pinch pennies and cry because the kids don't have this, or don't have that; she has to borrow money for bread and then stand in the bread lines herself. And she says I only mouth those poetic words to her so she won't send me to the grocery shop.

And it’s the truth. Over the winter, I hardly had to freeze for hours on end in the long lines outside the bread shop: she went with Ruzanna, while I sat inside where it was warm, scribbling up lecture texts to be typed next day in the university's computer room, for the students to have something to skip anyway.

Mind you, she only delivers these scoldings toward the end of the month, when the salaries have run dry and we’ve borrowed money from anyone who'd give it.

So the trick is simply to survive the end of the month, because during the other weeks… oh, what a woman! I state this with the full authority of forty-four years of experience.

But no amount of experience saves you once she catches a earful of those smart talking heads on television droning about the economy, the consumer basket, and other such bullshit.

That’s when she picks up a pencil and starts calculating our family budget.

Following these computations, I spend a couple of days stigmatized as a villain—capable only of making children, not feeding them.

But I love her anyway. Because—oh!—what a woman! (When she isn't thinking about the budget.)

That is exactly why I despise the television, though I wish it no harm—the more normally it displays a picture, the more eyesight our kids will keep. I honestly marvel at how they manage to make out cartoons through that hazy blur of fuzzy lines and visual static.

As for the budget—well, what of it? You can't account for everything. Every now and then a random, lucky translation gig pops up, or one of my sisters-in-law passes along some groceries.

. . .

The expenses for my own upkeep have been strictly pared down to a bare minimum. Since December of ’91, I switched over to a vegetarian diet and a booze-free lifestyle. I don't waste pennies on pharmacies either—twice a day I repeat a routine of fourteen and a half wellness exercises based on the yoga system.

Though "fourteen and a half" is probably an overstatement; in that half-exercise, I barely contort myself by a third compared to the photo in Ram Kumar's book.

Shaving doesn't inflict the slightest damage on the budget either: I don't shave at all—I let my beard grow wild.

When things get incredibly tight, Satenik cries and says my godforsaken beard is to blame for everything—it scares off potential English students, and because of it, I don't have a single applicant looking to prep for university entrance exams.

But they aren't fools: why pay someone whom they won't see anywhere near the examination committee?

Sometimes, scissors in one hand, she grabs with the other the beard, hung unsuspecting over my chest, and snips it off above her grab. I don't resist much. But afterward, what a woman!…

Essentially, my contribution to the budget is mostly passive—I don't spend on this, I go without that.

Unforeseen budget windfalls usually come through Satenik. She also sews at home, after all. Some months she manages two frocks; other times, it's just a single skirt over two months. Good luck trying to track that.

. . .

Ruzanna is a beautiful girl and a skilled hand, but she flatly refuses to wash the dishes. Such an chore is beneath Miss Artsakh-2000 in two years sharp.

As for her needs: they are exactly what you'd expect from any grown daughter. Sometimes the relatives of her biological father chip in—especially an aunt who emigrated to Greece.

Ashot gets hand-me-down clothes from his older cousins, though we buy things too, or Satenik sews them, but he demolishes the first, second, and third kind with equal speed.

Whenever you look at him, his nose is buried out of sight in books, yet you can't harvest clothes fast enough for him—you’d think he was physically hacking his way through jungles on those lost worlds and mysterious islands.

Our three-year-old independent researcher, Emma, keeps gnawing away at the foundations of the world. Her primary instrument of knowledge is her own teeth, and whenever she gives the world a breather, she starts making conversation:

"Am I a hymn-beenin?”

"Of course you’re a human being, sweetie.”

"I’m a good hymn-beenin! I want to chew tsamon2!”

Grandma Emma Arshakovna maintains diplomatic relations with the outside world in the person of neighbors and acquaintances who happen to pass by our secluded courtyard in the dead-end, and on top of that—she enforces her own order in the house.

It truly leaves you stupified: just how much "order" can be stuffed into such a tiny house. But nothing can shake my mother-in-law's persistancy: karogh a petk ga3.

The hens lay eggs highly occasionally, but where exactly—they refuse to confess.

They use me as an attachment and a motive force for the shovel and other garden implements.

And so it rolls along, right until the dead season hits—summer vacation. Two practically unpaid months, plus another one to coast through until the first paycheck of the new academic year.

And the kids are small, and the prices are high, and the picture on the TV has completely gone to hell, but the mean indiscernible bastard still keeps blabbering on about the consumer basket.

In short, I walked into the newspaper editor-in-chief's office and said:

"I’m a seasonal worker looking for a gig—ready to write whatever you order.”

Maksim Ervandovich took a moment to think it over, but he agreed, even though he knew perfectly well what he was asking for…

Yet Satenik outran me even here; she found a job before I did…

. . .

You can find plenty of discrepancies between the factions in just one humanity—running the gamut from political to aesthetic or even ethnographic. Yet on one specific point, their views converge. How exactly do you look at ice cream when it is an absolute furnace outside?

You look at it with pure lust. Everybody loves ice cream.

In Stepanakert, there are two workshops that produce ice cream: the since long established one at the state dairy plant, and the private newly constructed othe in the suburb named Myaly-Byahlu.

The heat rolls in—the season opens, and the workshops need female workers: to fill, to remove, to pour, to pack, so that by tomorrow the pedestrians on the streets of the capital city will have something to enjoy.

I don’t have info regarding the dairy plant, but in Myaly-Byahlu, work runs in two shifts, and ninety percent of the workforce consists of female schoolteachers from the city schools.

For the owner, the benefit is twofold: first, there's no need to spend ages explaining the production process to the new workers—they all have higher education and catch on instantly; and second, teachers have the gift of gab, so now the entire conversation in the city at the middle-educated level is strictly about the types, varieties, and high quality of the ice cream coming out of the new workshop.

For the production of a single portion of ice cream, a worker is entitled to one dram, but they provide the advertising free of charge.

My mother-in-law was categorically against it at first. I mean, of course—the centuries-old foundations of the East going straight to hell!

The second shift finishes past midnight: one in the morning, two, three o'clock at night, and the woman isn't home. Then she comes back and talks about a hitch on the production line, or how the vehicle of the driver who shuttles the second shift home broke down. And it’s not like he drops her off right at the front door.

A woman. Alone. In a night city. Without proper protection and due supervision.

Look where these market relations have dragged us!

It’s bad enough that you gave up money, and meat, and alcohol—now you have to give up your wife too, while you, waking up at one or two in the morning—alone in an empty bed—toss and turn like a lunatic loner, fighting off the fiercely bold hooey of a sleep-deprived imagination.

Not every husband is cut out for such an ordeal. Some forbid their wives from engaging in this daily—or rather, nightly—seasonal temp work.

And such a lack of civic consciousness, by the way, leads to problems in the process of manufacturing delights for daytime pedestrians…

. . .

But I'll give it to you straight, fellow males (though this also applies to any other strutum of society): if you doubt your wife, it means you aren't sure of yourself—of your own, shall we say, capabilities.

A dangerous sign. Out of insecurity, you risk truly failing to measure up, and then—yes, there's no getting around it, she's left with only one way out: skipping to the left. And you can find that kind of action much closer than Myaly-Byahlu…

Unfortunately, I don’t possess precise statistics on the matter at hand, but elementary life experience won't argue that the percentage of cuckolded husbands is exactly identical: both among the spouses of "stay-at-home" women and among those whose wives are employed in the sphere of production, services, and other "out-of-home" economic activity.

If there’s a demand, suppliers will pop up. In other words—jurn ir chamban kgitni4.

Remember how the fairy tales of The Arabian Nights begin?

There was this one dumb genie who locked a woman inside a chest, wrapped chains all around it, and slapped a padlock too. What's more, he didn't dare leave this cargo at home; he lugged it around with him everywhere he went—just for a guarantee that this woman was his absolute, total property, because he had supposedly prevented all other options…

Well, and how did that turn out?

What, do you think I signed up to tell you fairy tales here? You are not toddlers. Go back and re-read it yourselves.

As for me, I have more important things to do. Look, I need to flip on the light bulb out in the yard.

Then I'll come inside, and crawl into an empty marital bed, and fall asleep if I'm lucky. And around one or maybe closer to two—I'll wake up: waiting to hear the clicking shoes of Satenik, marching from the gate to the front door; the captivating, enchanting, indescribably beautiful Satenik.

Well, no, not mine, of course—just a woman.

But oh, what a woman!

* * *

7 (1) The Genies of Vital Cleanliness

When the retreating night slowly gives way to the pre-dawn haze—wherein the wavy contour of the ridges surrounding Stepanakert begins to emerge, and then, over the crest of the tumb-chain on the eastern side, the pale pink fingers of Eos, the ancient goddess of the dawn, stretch out (not to feel or pinch anything—heavens, no!—but to physically check the cleanliness of the skies over the city: Oh, this night! No matter how many times you explain it, it's completely useless—look over there, on the left side of the vault, someone went and scattered fluffy cloud strands again!)—the Dravants spouses, Ashot Vartazarovich and Hasmik Arzumanovna, are already on their feet.

And in the early hour of the dawn’s birth, while the young and old are still peacefully asleep in the city's houses, this married couple (and they are not alone) is already breaking bread and washing it down with tea, before switching off the artificial lights and stepping over the threshold of their home into the streets, untouched (for now) by the rays of the radiant sun.

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Примечания

1

Karabahi Armenian: 1) Be well; 2) Behave well.

2

Armenian: Chewing gum.

3

Karabahi Armenian: May be needed.

4

Armenian: Water will find a way.