The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)

At the end of the month in the end of the 90s, one week and a half before the salary, I was borrowing bread from the nearest shop and the seller, Razmik was his name, did not even write me into his ledger of misery debtors. In the pharmacies though the drugs were released only for ready money…

On the payday, straight from the line to the university cashier window, I walked off to pay for that beggarly bread, and then handed the rest of my salary to Sahtic. It doesn't not work to make a private “stash” if in the month end you're begging bread from Razmik…

For the record, there is nothing easier than creating a university. You take Stepanakert Pedagogical Institute and call it State University – enjoy!.

I got a job there when they kicked me out of the Supreme Council. And rightly so, with the officially ended war, the management had all the reasons to find out: who it was that analyst of theirs wearing such a brazen mug.

But that was just an outward appearance, because inside I was afraid like everybody else, only that I restrained myself and didn’t race down to the basement used as the bomb shelter, but kept to the corner of my office room, away from the window, and at 18:00 sharp I left the building of the former regional party committee and walked along the empty streets midst the crushing roar of the cannonade. First, what's the difference? And secondly, it’s quite impossible to predict where the next shell, missile, or bomb would burst up…

Arthur Mkrtchian, the first Chairman of the Supreme Council of the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh, gave me the job of an analyst before they killed him under the guise of suicide so that no one would ever dare disobey Big Brother.

Well, yes, like, after putting a bullet thru my head, I removed the cartridge case and accurately cleaned the pistol. However, a more authoritative investigator flew in from Yerevan and explained how all that was possible, and Arthur’s wife withdrew her testimony about the dark-haired guest who knocked to their apartment door a couple of minutes before the tragedy because she had to raise their son as a single mother…

Now, following his updated version, all that day she spent in the bedroom because of the temperature and didn't hear anything at all. Yes, people from the nearby five-story blocks saw her rushing to the apartment balcony to scream "murderers!" after a KAMAZ truck without the license number which was leaving the common yard, yet the investigation filed no such testimonies because no one bothered to ask people. So, her son will grow up and get the diploma from the local university, and find a quiet nine-to-six in a quiet institution, like, Protection of Monuments or something. He'll get married and then his wife will bear a boy and they'll christen the baby Arthur to commemorate his grandpa, you know. So is my prognostication…

I did not mix with Arthur Mkrtchian in private because all happened way too fast. He called me, a jobless employee of the defunct The Soviet Karabakh (presently Free Artsakh) to his office and gave the position of an analyst-translator at the Press-Center by the Supreme Council of RMK. At second hand, I learned that he was a blithe person and somewhat strange, you know, he could laugh quite unexpectedly when no one had shared a fresh joke.

Stepanakert besieged, half of the city turned to ruins, people live in the basements, Karabakh blockaded and he, all of a sudden, laughs!

Well, whatever, I'm still in debt to him and I keep on analyzing. Free of charge…

Who Killed Arthur Mkrtchian?

The dark-haired assassin from the KAMAZ truck does not count that way you'll end by laying the blame on the metal in the bullet. No, the murderer is the one who points the victim out and puts the weapon into the executioner's hands.

Version 1:

Before the war, in the village where Arthur worked as a school teacher, he displeased someone and, taking advantage of the confused muddle around, that someone settles scores. Squaring up on a district level.

(Falls thru because of the suicide staging.)

Version 2.

The displeased is a big shot in Yerevan who has connections in the local Committee of National Security. Squaring up on a republican level.

(Not impossible.)

Version 3.

The displeased puts to use the Federal Security Service of Russia which, as well as the Committee of National Security of Armenia, is that same KGB in a refreshed make-up. Squaring up on the federal level.

(Not impossible.)

At that particular stage in the struggle for the Mountainous Karabakh independence which started back in the 1920s after General Secretary Stalin generously presented this part of the Caucasus, as well as its Armenian population, to the Soviet Azerbaijan, the Supreme Council of the self-proclaimed Republic of the Mountainous Karabakh was located in the building of the former Executive Committee of the Autonomous Region of Mountainous Karabakh facing the greens in the round square of Pyatachok (‘5-kopeck coin’ in Russian).

The Press-Center by the SC of RMK was one room with one window, one door and two sizable desks (yes, put in the shape of capital ‘T’) on the second floor to the right. The staff comprised the Press-Center boss Guegham, his secretary Aghavnee, the operator of professional video camera Bennic, and the analyst-translator Sehrguey.

The room was constantly packed with dense cigarette smoke and multi-national media correspondents, both in groups and solo dare-devils, equipped with photo- and video cameras, rucksacks and other traveling necessities, arrived from the former brotherly camp of socialism now transfigured into free European states to witness that the old bogey of the USSR was there no more. Although, even from outside, it was already clear that the great Union of the Republics of Victorious Socialism with Human Face (to distinguish it from the Sweden counterfeit, or the repulsive Made-in-China sham by Chairman Mao) got safely palsied, collapsed and disintegrated, it still was interesting to check how fared the Mountainous Karabakh Armenians. They were the first to throw the spanner under the hood of the Soviet terror machine and rally for the mass meetings on the Stepanakert main square in front of the Regional Committee of the CPSU building. The crowd filled the square, people were chanting, “We de-mand!”, “We de-mand!”, they held the posters of a clenched fist and their own live fists aloof in the air over their heads.

To keep in line with the internationally approved practices for such occasions, the Regional Executive Committee voted for sending to both Baku and Moscow the petition to transfer the region under the jurisdiction of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. Everyday rallies on the main square went on until they were reacted to. No water cannons, neither tear gas was used to disperse the meetings in Stepanakert. The development unheard of in all the time under the Soviet rule was answered in another city.

The Sumgait tragedy. The 3 days and nights of pogroms in the city 36 kilometers, 42 minutes, from the Baku city, the capital of Azerbaijan. 3 days of killings, rape, torture, dropping people from their apartment-blocks balconies, pulling with motorbikes noosed baby corpses, you name it.

It was unthinkable, the like atrocities could only happen in some faraway Rwanda, or Jakarta but not in our united mutual Homeland. 3 days and nights of genocide when they break the door of your home, do unspeakable things to your family before your eyes and finally murder you just because your last name ends in ‘-ian’. Ironically, there were ‘-ians’ in the gangs of beasts too because Sumgait, the city of youthful oil-drillers, was built by zeks many of whom stayed living there after doing their time, in best tradition of Soviet urban planning: Zona breaks the ground for a town to grow up.

When ex-zeks and ‘chemists’ were set loose, lots of ordinary Azeri citizens joined the crowd, other Azeri citizens were giving shelter and hide-outs to their neighbors of Armenian origin. Humanity and nationality are different things.

After the 3 days-and-nights of ticking by, the units of the Soviet Army restored order in the city of Sumgait… End same year Mikhail Gorbachov was elected the first President of the USSR which at once disintegrated into a number of independent states because in too many places people started to chant, “We de-mand!”. In short, they became independent states, The USSR collapsed and the Armenians of the Mountainous Karabakh had to defend their land and lives in the war for independence while all kinds of correspondents from the international (mostly European) mass-media arrived from Yerevan (the capital of the independent Republic of Armenia) to Stepanakert (the capital of the self-proclaimed-but-never-recognized Republic of the Mountainous Karabakh) by choppers flown at night to avoid being shot at in the toombs and finally handed their business cards to Guegham who dumped them in the drawer in his desk full of heaps of the like pieces of paper.

By the same night flights, yet seldomer, there arrived activists of different political parties that hugely proliferated in the prominent regions and capitals of the former USSR to enhance their personal political rating, like, ‘I have been in the warring Karabakh!’. There were neither hotels nor restaurants in Stepanakert but lots of artillery and rocket shelling plus aviation bombardments at that time, so the visitors of both kinds did not stay for long (except for the 2-meter tall blonde of a Viking from Holland who lost his way in the toombs and was captured by the Azeri combatants but a week later returned to the same forest and directed along the road to the nearest Armenian village because the representatives of mass-media and international community presented the Baku authorities with strong demarches on his behalf).

The champion of long-term staying became an engineer from Moscow who arrived to simply see his relatives. He lingered in Stepanakert for about 10 days. His parents moved to Moscow when he was just a child and during his marathon stay, he sometimes visited the Press-Center room to pull a chair from the row lined by the wall and draw it to my end of the subordinate desk so as to chat in Russian which since long had become his native tongue, while the rest Check-Greek-Hollandian-Estonian-(you-name-it) crowd sat around Guegham's desk smoking their cigarettes and exchanging enthusiastic clues in Mass-Median… Oh! Sorry! Not all – the Hollander was a non-smoker.

Anyway, the engineer wanted a gossip without an accent and the relatives he came on a visit to could not provide such a treat for him. Though, there might have been a certain hidden agenda as well because he was pestered by a question he couldn’t find an answer to – Why was he here? So he turned to me, like, for the assistance of a specialist. An analyst should know answers, right?

The case developed as follows: one of many engineers at one of many plants in Moscow, an almost autohtonous Muscovite Armenian, at the end of a working day peacefully leaves his plant thru the check-entrance to be met by an unexpected invitation to get seated into a waiting black Volga car and is taken to the KGB (his tongue was unaccustomed yet to pronounce it as FSS). In a huge office there, he was politely asked to pay a visit to his relatives in Stepanakert, all his travel expenses would be met, the CEO of his plant already signed the papers to present him a leave for an unspecified stretch. And what’s his mission over there? No mission whatsoever, except staying by his dear relatives he missed so much since being taken to Moscow at the age of 4…

And now he’s here, hand-secondly swallowing all that cigarette smoke, looking into my eyes and asking thru the mutual hubbub, ‘What for?’

2 days after the Arthur’s murder, he dropped in to say good-bye because they signaled him to come back to Moscow and off he went taking away the puzzlement in his eyes, ‘Why am I here?’

For my personal operational usage, I handled him ‘a weather balloon’, they use such balloons to send special devices to upper atmospheric layers to register meteorological situation up there. When back to Moscow, he’d get another free ride and a polite conversation in the huge office. A quite desultory talk of this and that and nothing in particular because a weather balloon is not supposed to know the data brought back by the recording devices. But then the talk might turn out even a short one, a pure formality, you know, there's no need to go deeper about an accomplished mission. Well done, brunette from the Armenian KGB… damn!.. well, CNS, for the Committee of National Security of the independent Republic of Armenia…

A classified session of the Supreme Council of the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh is under way. The Mountainous Karabakh got locked within unsurpassable blockade, Azeri forces widely apply GRAD installations for bombardments of Stepanakert, villages change hands in stubborn fights… Especially bad news – the enemy acquires consignment of ground-to-air thermal missiles the use of which blazed away the Russian intervention to Afghanistan… Here they are a deadly threat to the delivery of fuel and ammunition by choppers.

(Later, it turned out that the buyer was Chechnya, then at their first war with Russia, yet two Chechen emissaries were killed in London by an agent of Armenian CNS. The British police managed to arrest the agent, however, in prison he poisoned himself with potassium cyanide passed to him in a bread loaf from a visitor. ‘I don’t want my family suffered, the KGB’s hands are too long,’ were his final words before successful application of the transferred dose.)

A ‘road of life’ is the must, some surface communication between the Mountainous Karabakh and the outer world, a 'corridor' towards Mother Armenia is needed urgently, which calls for capture of the Lachin city that controls 50 km dividing Karabakh from Armenia…

At that point Arthur laughed. Who needs that Lachin? We’ve got hundreds of kilometers of common border with Iran, cutting a corridor in that direction would cost no casualties. Thus we create communication with the world outside, with the Diaspora…

A fortnight later Arthur was murdered because he wanted way too much. He wanted to make his own decisions how to struggle for the independence of his homeland but Version 3 still remains Version 3, even in the Mountainous Karabakh…

That is why the next, incumbent, Chairman turned to the KGB, whose structures remained alive and kicking in the debris of the collapsed Soviet Union and turned supranational (despite its renaming all over the former Soviet Republics), retaining its single and indivisible Center and the incorruptible KGB archives.

So, the mentioned officeholder could very possibly get his ass kicked by Big Brother for so sloppy attitude to the selection of accessory personnel for the Supreme Council of the newly independent Republic of the Mountainous Karabakh. Or else, so as not to pose myself for more than there can, actually, be, the decision was based on the old good xenophobia.

In any case, I was pink-slipped as a commodity extravagant in the peace time. A month later, instead of me, the analytical department of 30 employees was created and approved, headed by the local renown amateur philatelist, but very clever. Maybe, somewhere in England, an official is a servant of society, but by us it's the beard of bloodsucking lice that plagues the rest of people. And you can't ditch the bitches because it is what they’ve been trained for…

The glass in each and every window at the State University was, naturally, smashed by all those bombardments. Yet, the 3 windows in the Rector's office were restored and all the rest just got sealed with vinyl. The wind, predictably and freely, frazzled the translucent patches whose remains snappily applauded with their jagged tatters whenever it grew fresher.

In the classrooms, they installed the tin boxes of wood burners and in winter mornings the University House Manager forked out 2 logs to each group monitor, from his shed in the yard.

By the middle in the second class, the wood burners became as cold as ice, the useless rusty boxes of dead ashes, and the student girls began their protestations that they were freezing too. The student lads did not complain though, because there was none of them, they were freezing in the trenches on the front line, well, so what if the war was over?

And then I ordered to the girls, "Fall in! March in a circle!" And they marched around the frozen Woodburner, chanting one or another exercise from a paperback collection, yellow with age, printed for the USSR universities in 1958. And when they grumbled that their heads were dizzy from that circling, I commanded to turn around and march in the opposite direction. They giggled but obeyed and chanted on… Kinda Peripatetic Methodology of Feldwebel Ogoltsoff, however, it helped to hold on until the coughing clangs of bell thru the windy corridor…

O, my!. Where have I drifted off again?!. Aha, I remembered – children are the flowers of life…