The Blog

The cardinal took his silence for the confession and signing of Inokenty’s own accord the honest-to-God protocol stating his perpetration of the unlawful act…

"Fine. Now, let's turn to the defense of French interests.

You know as well as I do, that the king is still too young to be the Sun. And his widowed mother, Queen Anne of Austria, a juicy woman…

(Aramis, in a spontaneous body-language response, crossed his legs alertly and pressed across the lap the double-layer lid of his hands—right palm put firmly upon the left hand back)

…yes, sure… but more on that later…

so, she’s too weak to look after the state.

My biggest worry is the British MI6, that baked by the late Sir Walsington layer-cake where a James Bond’s overlying another and so all the way from bottom up.

Yes, of course, raw sodomy, but the smart asses do know the trade. And, take my word, quite penetrating bastards they are.

To out-smart them, we will offer Chamberlain the French fig version in the form of our secret weapon.

MWWTW: em-dub-dub-tee-dub : Man Who Walks Through Walls!

How about that? And Batman’s ass got kicked around!

The man who slips into the safe of the King of England containing the accountancy report for the fiscal year!

Who visits the Escurial vault full of the Aztec gold nuggets…

A flying excursion to the Pomegranate Chamber in the Kremlin—damn it! Can you keep up with those shifty Russians?.

A call to the Vatican's collection of paintings…

Do you follow the alluring nature of perspectives, mon cher?"

"Well, I dunno… need to consult with my friends… what will Athos say? and Parthos too…"

"Stop making monkey out of you, citizen suspect. You do know, Count De la Fere got gulped by the green shit, and Parthos has become a wheeled gimp under the investigation by Down Syndrome Scrutinizers.

To put it curtly, you’re allowed 48 hours to think, for the sake of humanism and all that jazz."

"But what about Maya, citizen cardinal?"

"The chick will be returned for the period specified and, as a former straight man, I advise you to purchase un preservatif.

The cutie’s just crossed the English Channel, but those British bulls are so too stupid—not realizing that Covid is an STD, they hook the masks onto the wrong piece in their anatomy…"

His Eminence approached the window and, like the most low-grade son-of-a-motherfucking-bitch and sadist, threw the unfinished Hong Kong fag end—at least of a couple of full drags yet—into the rainy dark night.

"Keep in touch, Aramis. And don't you try at getting lost, no use – the cardinal's spies know their stuff."

Slamming his brown hood back over his red skull-cap, accompanied by the pair of Guardsmen with drawn swords, the Duke du Plessis de Richelieu left the room with the obscenely lax gait of a gouty courtier and behind-the-scenes sneak..

* * *

Bottle #31: ~ To Struggle And Search, To Find And Not Surrender It ~

In the history of any family arrives the point when everything nose-dives into snafu even in the absence of a French governess, as it was the case at the Oblonskys' house by Leo Tolstoi…

In ours, for instance, all got messed up for the more inevitable reason which unavoidably catches on any family: the children had grown up.

Ruzanna wedded a citizen of Greece and moved over to her husband’s country, Ashot got married at the place of residence and started paying off the mortgage for a two-room apartment on the second floor – the life trail for the coming couple decades got clearly determined.

Emma, having just graduated from school, still lived in the house no older than her and, with the principle functions and purposes for our individual cell of society accomplished, it was time to check a little closer who exactly the life was spent with.

The worst property of mine disclosed in the course of check-up was my catastrophic discordance with normal people (damn no! because of my innate perfect politeness, I don’t even give a fuck about their normality! Ever!)

‘Not guilty’ pledge I. Tolerance to the bypassed preterite is my life motto because they are the most challenged segment in the population of this here planet and the most—alas!—numerous.

Nonetheless, such was the deduced reason for my being unable to secure a decent income and stable support for the family, and all I was good at was my willing attitude to reproductive labor (okay, fine, the quality of final products stays undeniable as well, but why don’t I care a bean? After?).

Now, to avoid a possible exposure of my other, equally negative, but undetected, as of yet, shortcomings immorally tucked away, all the time… (No! the basic motive was my desire to keep the beloved off further disappointments, were all of my hidden faults to pop in their shocking pack up suddenly!)

That’s why, to move the object of too close scrutiny out of sight, end August 2013, I put myself forth before the unsuspecting observation by Karina, the Head of People Education of Lachin City and the same-named District, and proposed my pedagogical services to her.

The skin-deep scan was rather hasty and I obtained the post of a teacher at the village school in Yezznaggomer—50 km off the customs on the border with Armenia by the make-believe road which climbed along the Zabukh River valley and, when up there, the right turn for a steeper ascend to 2.5 km above mean sea level…

The following seven years became the most amazing adventure of my life. And anyone familiar, more or less, with parallel worlds will understand me here…

You’ll never find a parallel world on any map, be it even a contour map, which we were tortured with at school.

There is no parallel world whatsoever because it doesn't exist until you get there.

At school, everything is quite simple – you flick the ball of globe to spin: see? Asuncion! and here we have New Guinea, and this is Greenland for you – just a cinch, easy as pie!.

Reality tumbles the seeming simplicity…

I happened to wade through the grasses, which in the world left behind would hardly be knee-deep, but—lo!—they sway their unreachable tops way above my head.

Been choosing my way across mountain landslides that looked like momentarily stopped waterfalls of multi-ton boulders.

If watching yourself through the eyes of hawks hung hovering in the sky – you’ll see an ant who pries for her way over a pile of sand grits – hey! beware! some of those move under your feet with hollow taps and the dickens only knows what damn Ant Lion (preying on ants only?) harbor the depths under…

Flowers… Fields of unknown, unseen colors, and even if they did have been met sometime back, somewhere, still it never were fields deluged with the bloom of that stunning hue.

Hornets… Well, okay, let's call them hornets… the size of a grown-up fella's fist…

Or else. Here’s a plain for you. Yes, I know it’s in the mountains, the altitude of 2.5+ km, but I am smack bang in the middle of a plain which has no end, and the mountains are far off, over there, and I walk for a half-day, and fall, dead tired, face up to the sky, where there are no mountains, nor plains, but just one blazing sun and a pair of hawks waltzing, wingtip to wingtip, synchronously…

And how about a summertime snowdrift?

End June, you are beastly dying of thirst, it’s a one-day walk off the village, the plastic bottle is crackling-empty, and all of a sudden, in a deep pothole with green grass on steep walls, a snowdrift is waiting for you. Yes, darkened by the dust spilt over it, loose, but from under its bottom a tiny brooklet gurgles full of coolness, which will not let you die…