The Blog

Besides, in the eyes of the university administration, I had decrying connections with doubtful citizens from abroad. Not those who’d appear for a day or so to pass another grant or a donation, but of the kind they didn’t get it what those needed about here at all.

Take, for instance, Nick Wagner and our friendship for about twenty years…

A break it was and he walked the corridor along the second floor in the New Building. No rubbing his shoulders neither elbows with anyone, so delicate a passer-by. But his being an American was too obvious because nobody would sport the beard like his in the surrounding whereabouts.

"Hey!" sez I pacing in the counter direction and kept going.

So he U-turned, caught up and said: “Who are you?”

Well, it’s not my custom to make secrets of nothing:

“The last of the Mahicans,” sez I, taking into account my uniqueness at the Department, as well as my status along this second floor plus divers other sadly associated factors.

Since that moment we’ve been friends because he also had read works by Fenimore Cooper, although they’re absent from the American school curricula…

Nick himself was working then in Yerevan, at the American-Armenian University or, maybe, vice versa. However, he felt inclination to a less spoiled, by the civilization, nature. That’s why he came to Stepanakert, though without knowing the language.

So I escorted him to meet the current Placeholder. Nick wrote his application at the personnel department and went back to Yerevan to give his lessons at the AAU there. Damn no! AUA is the correct name! Whatever…

A month past, he comes again to say there was no answer.

Again, as an interpreter, went I with him to the personnel department.

"Why d’you grill the man? One whole month there’s no answer!"

"Not true! The answer was there."

"Where?"

"Right there in my safe."

O YOB… O MOTH FUC EFF BLIAD SCRE…

No, even for me it's hard to pick the right word, at times…

In short, there was the refusal to his application, in that steel safe, on the grounds that his Californian pronunciation plus degree from the University of Nevada State were not congruous with the aspirations of the ArSU English Department staff who wished instruct the RMK students in strictly British English. So was their ambitious design and predisposition.

Yet, Nick turned out a slippery customer and moved to Karabakh all the same. Became an Instructor of English at a private university. Yes, there were birdies of that feather too (2) in Stepanakert, not only the State was born to fleece.

Besides, he got some means, his Dad was a popular barber and Mom a scion of refugees from the Western Armenia. But she did not undertake to teach her three sons Armenian…

And I can understand him, in Yerevan I also would not survive…

Well, as for Mike Newman, then yes, everything’s in full view, an inconcealably epitomic spy for you, I have to admit.

A Briton himself, he lived in Paris, and had worked thru Russian language courses to a level with a charming accent. Not enough? How about his visits to Karabakh? Not every year, yet periodically, although instead of books on the BBC order he wrote poetry, and even sang his own songs playing a guitar, simultaneously. Not bad, by the bye.

No need for a diagnosis from the KGB here – some undeniable spy.

Thanks to him, I saw the meaning of that dry British humor, you know. It’s when I kinda flashed my Britannica fostered erudition:

(britannica.com/biography/Saint-John-Henry-Newman).

"Mike," sez I, "are you aware, if we pick the subject of possibility of weird coincidence, that you've got a namesake who's also a Newman?! That same one who later became a cardinal. How about that?"

Not a single feature twitched in the face of the handsomely attractive manly man, James Bond (nothing like that ugly Quasimorbid from the most recent series), and Mike Newman (ahem!) very calmly, with a perfect coolness remarked:

"I forgive him".

The dagger-and-cloak men are lenient enough to absolve the sinful clergy…

Considering all that, when Nick and I am getting together to celebrate another Saturday, he always starts one and the same, rehearsed to the level of virtuosity, number, both frivolous and futile:

"The educational system in Karabakh failed!"

And I comfort my friend with the no less profoundly practiced, delicate diminuendo:

"Not just here, Nick. Not just here. It’s a fucking global fiasco…"

* * *

Bottle #26: ~ The Re-Union ~

The day got doggone from the very start. At breakfast, after she put sugar in her tea cup and lifted the bowl to shove it up onto the shelf, it suddenly slipped from her fingers and leaped to the floor drawing the white mare’s tail of grit all over the kitchen, loose and wide…

Clutch the broom, Maya, here’s a job for you, bitch!

The only consolation was it was a day-off. That batty floozy, the mistress of that salon-bookstore loony bin, told Maya yesterday not to come next day.

That slut’s kooky in her head, beyond repair. Changing three times a day.

Hoopskirt in the morning or else in the Elizabeth Virgin Whore style from the Tudor dynasty, unless, of course, not in a mini-bikini.

Do all women at that age bust their nuts so wholly? The only sane thing about her that she's made Maya learn to read and write.

At first it was knotty hard – oh! that fucking "Golden Key"! but then it gradually began to move on and somehow turned even interesting what that bitch Malvina, the puppet show prima pussy, dyed her hair with, eh? Not laundry blue, for sure.

Then she wanted to cook a soup. No, yeah, no go. There’s just a spoonful of dry pasta shells in cellophane, on the shelf.

Some familiar ring, eh? Why to leave there that scant pinch? When you see it’s just a nip left then dump all of it in the pot on the stove with everything else to finish it off. But no! Wrapping back in cellophane and storing on the shelf.

Sometimes it’s hard for Maya to understand her herself.

So nothing doing and she decided to go out to the supermarket.

Moreover on that TV they sow their stupid oats all day long – how could Ukrainians be so fascists and not even spare their own civilian population…

Well, not right away, of course, it takes time before you decide on which rags to put on after all…