...but this all has certainly been already… a fit of raving déjà vu or what?. by the bye, is the noun of feminine or masculine gender?. depends on the inquirer's orientation… which one would be to our liking?. fooling around with the neutral seems most disturbing, when you don’t know where to, and how, and what… take it easy, love comes with time… but if it hurts?. then have a shoot at whining…

...but all of this has most definitely been already... this complete darkness is way too familiar… “darkness” is feminine in Russian if it makes it easier for you, feel better now? relieved?. can’t tell for sure... after that previous darkness the head was aching awfully… never get drunk over the limits… and where did it hurt most?. the back of the head… so it was not migraine then…

...yes! i remember now!. i have been in this here darkness and packed as tightly as right now… because everything comes back to square one and in the end you plump back into the sperm being squirted by your dad’s dick into the round hole of your mom’s vagina… you’re squarely unnormative in all of your fucked up crown, this will blow up to hell even 18+… 'cause of what was will be again, what has been done will come to be done again…

...truly, truly tell I unto y'all!. all’s definitely that very way and exactly so was I not able to stretch my legs out and this here lid above and I all crammed and confined inside this too tight Pe... Pec… Peccy?.

To use their sense of feel, the fingers pass thru thick, however, imperceptible darkness until they met invisible yet palpable hardness of calcium carbonate in the so familiar concave wall.

Yes, it's her, it’s Peccy. Here is the unmistakable cleavage between her two valves, yes, that lovely shallow split, not even a pinkie goes any deeper, the fucking bitch squeezes them too tight and there’s no space for doubting it any more – it’s nothing else but a déjà vu!

O? But what if he had never left it then and just fallen asleep, exhausted? What if banging the back of your head against something hard works as some sleeping pills, eh?

Three hearty bangs are equal to a couple of Zolpidem. Looking for Triazolam? Keep banging on. Doral is effing painful yet that way you earn a sound sleep for at least 8 hours…

...shut up, buddy! banging for a living is prostitution!. ha! as if digging a hole or sweating at a conveyor line is not the same? don’t they sell their body? ain’t they doing the routine job that makes them wanna puke?. shut up! we’re honest law-abiding sellers of our bodies! not a single article in the criminal code discourage our trade!. and, please, stop entering slippery grounds they can block your account, you do know…

The freaked out fingers recoiled back to the beard. Wa-ait! But where’s the blunderbuss?

The blunderbuss is there no more. Instead they feel some woolen cloth, rather thick yet not drape, maybe, rep, it’s hard to say in the darkness.

The hair is also gone. Well, not completely but shorn pretty much shorter because there’s not a chance to get an upper hand in a tiff with Maya…

...stop!. but who’s Maya?. and more details on this point, please…

Whoa, man! Easy! Easy! We are not rolling out any Kama Sutra here… just use some mnemotechnic knock up… no! hands off! draw your hands back, I tell you!.

There sounds a groan in the darkness, maybe, two… an ill-articulated, ’o! Maya! what a slut you are! ah! yeah! Wow-ow!’

Seems like amnesia has withdrawn about that neck of the woods…

Yes, he phases it out while there again is arising the same question: who am I and where from?

And one more pops up too, a bigger one – how to get back to Maya?

Think, buddy! think… fuck “who” it can wait, the shortcut to Maya lies thru “where from?”...

Think, Nobodya! Do think!

What the feck!. who’s Nobodya?

aargh!. it’s real hard to do business with you!. don’t you know English? or never seen that western with Henry Fonda? Damn!

A London tavern’s interior springs up in the memory… low ceiling, jittery illumination by the torches in the walls… Chris stretched out on the floor… so funny pants on him, skin tight… crumpled mesentery folds around his young neck sprayed with blood… the dagger handle sticking out from the forehead above his right eye… the control hit… no more poems, rhymer… but he was also a fink, eh?. as if there ever was someone who was not, okay, cut it out or else the audience would boo at being bored of... just mark well – anything would pass away besides the Muses that come to visit… now again, take two at beat one…

Chris on the floor… the veins in the whites of his eyes getting paler… Don’s bodyguard nearing with his handgun… and this very moment I catch on the meaning of the parting words by Chris – “escape!” that button in the left upper corner of the keyboard… the way of exodus, last hope when you hang up in no way out, cornered and stuck where it gives no loophole… Esc button or else that one, wide one, press it for 5 seconds and – your monitor’s black, Game over, sucker…

The stream of vehicles… it cannot stop me… whistle of the bullets piercing my beard… fuck it!. ‘Escape!’… the wall darting like a locomotive towards me… ESCAPE!!!

...The tight, pitch black darkness filled with the hollow beating of the heart—tah-da! tah-da!—which has been right now dashing within the runner’s body. But how can be possible all that? Don’t ask and just believe – There is no Might and Power but by Mnemotechnic the Great and Omnipotent and Adrenaline is the Prophet of It.

Fuck! I’ve really stepped into! It’s so tight in here and I wanna pee so what am I to do? To recollect the pampers of my childhood? But were there pampers? Were there pampers? When you do not even know if your mommy had money-money for pampers or if there was any mommy at all, maybe, you were just another foundling in a refugees camp?

Yet it is of no importance... for the time being... The task is to understand why…

...no one will ever understand why because the question “why?” has no answer. Well, just for the record, it has, however, not one but infinity power infinity, you know, and anything at all can be the reason for anything at all, even absence of a nail in a smithy to shod a hoof, so chew a banana and relax or, if you wish, I can treat you to an apple, huh?. do have a look, so ripe and juicy! — Ѽ…

You? Again at your damn tricks? When or where will I get rid of you?. There are heaps of other shells, not enough for you? Go and hiss there your serpentine lullaby…

...you have to open this one, first off, before to say “Get out!”, you, sclerotic one… and be quick too not to be wakened up by the yell outside, “Get out, Lazarus!”

But why-why-why had no one vehicle run him over? They were just sliding thru him… Or was it he to slide thru the car interiors and their drivers? And possibly thru the passengers too?.

Why did the bullets fly from his plexus with welcoming “phew-phew!” without setting his beard on fire? Not even combing it for that matter? Such things cannot happen, right?

There’s something not there… yes, really amiss… nothing but some creepy virtuality… but who?. Scurrying autos, them those bullets or he himself?. Who was virtual?. Or—and—here enters the most horrible godawful possibility—what if all of them at once?.

...well, well, well, welcome back again... copy-pasting Matrix season 7, eh?. shame on you, Ekibastuzenko! plagiarizing Poles?. while having such a good mom who sings about the revolutionary locomotive… oops!.

A-ha! Have blurted it out? You Prince of Darkness!

Now I know who I am – Inokenty, Kenty, Kesha-sunny and nothing of that Western Nobodya!

With hectic acceleration revved his thoughts shooting ever faster like a squirrel in the wheel in his cage…

I’ve got the squirrel syndrome?

...hold on, not everything at once yet nobody will ever bypass the inevitable…

And in the rumble of the squirrel’s plaything’s rolling rotor there grows and widens new rhythm over the mariana trenches of dismay, some full of hope dancing beat the shaggy horse fetlocks stomp out in the mincing step of claps and clops which they play up clip-clop-clap-cluppingly:

No trumps in the deck any more remains!

All of them are swept off by my virtual Ace!

As to when exactly the Lieutenant-General arrived in Karabakh the sources keep mum, and only mention scantily that it happened in 1992.

A Teacher at a military school in St. Petersburg aged 72, he left his wife, his job and the city on the Neva-River to fly to Karabakh. That’s how he worried about the motherland because he was born in Tbilisi (Georgia), both like Sayat-Nova (1712 – 1795), the great master of amorous lyrics, and Mikhail Loris-Melikov (1824 – 1888), the Minister of Interior in the Russian Empire, and the famous film director from Hollywood Ruben Mamulian (1897 – 1987), and the Soviet composer Aram Khachaturian (1903 – 1978), and lots of other differently praise-worthy Armenians.

Yet, about the date of his arrival in Karabakh Google keeps zipped sternly, which is a pity because it's interesting, anyway to me, personally.

I like his photo in the company of the Minister of Defense of Armenia, and a couple of local Lieutenant-Generals scratching their head-gear in a puzzled manner. He’s so unrestrained and ritzy there in his T-shirt and no cap at all.

My prying attitude is warmed up by the ambiguity – did he come before or after the capture of Shushi City?

I maintain a firm suspicion that it happened before the affair. Unfortunately, this opinion cannot be substantiated without Google and, on the other hand, I am reluctant to bother his relatives or venture knocking at the germane archives doors because of my sloth and timidity – why leaving a wrongly prejudiced impression of myself in certain structures of appropriate security organs? The like thirst for knowledge can very easily invoke a boomerang response and eff squarely across my skull holding this here inquisitive mind. Do I really need that?

Still and yet, all my pros are for “before” and here are my circumstantial evidence —

While phedais were busy fighting to defend Armenian settlements, in the rear (Stepanakert City), in defiance to the blockade and bombardments, went on the process of creation of the elitist-political superstructure titled the Committee of Self-Defense. As a result, the phedai groups were automatically handled the Mountainous Karabakh Self-Defense Forces, although they did not give a fuck about change of stickers being constantly on the go to fight the Turks (in Mountainous Karabakh they never had learned to call Azerbaijanis otherwise) back off this or that village, to catch on a herd of cattle stolen and driven away from one or another kolkhoz farm but not clear yet by whose assistance and/or permission and so forth, and so on.

And even if taking the village of Khojalu with such a motley company might seem feasible (moreover when supported by machine-guns of 3 armed vehicles) then capture of a city situated on the commanding heights by employment of the yesterday's barbers and auto mechanics is quite another kettle of fish.

OK, fine, there was present a military specialist of the brave nom de guerre – “Komandos”, a Major from Yerevan who besides his experience in straightening out the Czecho-Slovakia's deviation (1968) was active in Afghanistan too (true, not the all 10 years 1979-1989, but...), however, (in the way of a buddy-to-buddy talk) even a Major is not qualified for capturing cities.

That’s why before storming Shushi his function consisted of visiting villages in the Askeran District (Stepanakert, by the bye, has no district of its own and is situated in the aforementioned one) where mujiks were happy to entertain Komandos during which proceedings he assured them that everything would be all right, and together with the present in the village house of celebrations drank tutovka under the flowery toasts to the imminent victory.

Nope. Only a man with a General’s past could codename the battle for Shushi “Wedding in the Mountains”.

I was not invited to the celebration and had to observe it from aside, from Stepanakert, where in the main square they set 1 (one) GRAD installation that each half an hour fired a singleton missile in the direction of Shushi.

Take my word, the launching thunder is not a grain less disgusting than the explosion concluding the flight.

At two-hour intervals, the building of the former Regional Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, whose basement was used for the hospital, saw arrival of another KAMAZ truck with a load of wounded in its dump.

The truck got at once surrounded by the shrieking crowd of relatives to those who left their homes to storm Shushi. Heavily wounded and unconscious were taken inside on the stretchers, those who could make it plodded to the entrance on foot replying to their friends and relatives in the crowd about who they had seen up there of their mutual friends and relatives.

Some answers caused lamentations which usually sound at the cemeteries.

Up there, khakied formations ran to attack supported by 2 tanks (God only knows how they managed to get up there yet they did the trick), and among them Mykola the Ukrainian, who arrived a day earlier to boost his rating at the “Rukh” movement in Ukraine.

So was the common practice in those days. Representatives of vehemently proliferating parties, organizations, and associations from all over the former, newly collapsed Soviet Union flew to Stepanakert to take shots of themselves among the ruins so as when back home use the pics in the way of a kinda trump card, ‘I visited the spot of the kickoff for the Soviet regime disintegration!’.

Those politicians are so monotonous in aping each other, you know.

However, Mykola, besides being a political activist, was also a stardust lover. He asked for an AK, they fixed him with one and in the outskirts of Shushi he caught a whole clip of bullets, into his belly.

No wonder, a two-meter giant among the bantam, against the backdrop of Mykola, welders and carpenters – anyone would imagine him to be the decisive factor in the battle.

When the chopper laden also with him took off in Stepanakert, Mykola was still alive yet only up to Yerevan.

A week later another Ukrainian dropped in, by chance, to the PC of the SC of the RMK, who worked at an anti-aircraft gun Shilka. We talked of life, he complained of being paid irregularly.

It took him just a week to make a legend of Mykola, of his heroically supernatural qualities. Say, when he began to talk, you unconditionally fell under the spell all over, like entranced by a murmuring river you turned, “Kobzar” thru and thru, I swear…

I kept back boasting of the half-hour personal communication with Mykola who preferred to use Russian and (which was especially captivating) in the same tongue-tie curse of a manner as my ingrained one. Although after a couple of shots it kinda lessen and you like feel, well, you know, to kinda give out, er, some, well, toast, hum, and stuff, you know…

Phedai Valyo did not participate in storming Shushi. Three hours before the battle his group began attacking Kyusalar Village east of Stepanakert with the since long deployed artillery battery up there. An elementary trick from a military school textbook on strategy. The reinforcement sent to Kyusalar from Shushi were several times impeded with machine-gun fire on their route and eventually they were called back without reaching the village and for the battle they also were late. That way the village of Kyusalar fell and Shushi City too.

There was no massacre of civilians when they captured Shushi because of the road leaving the city at the opposite end in the direction of Lachin City and from there another road (without any asphalt though) to Kalbajar and farther on to Ganja.

The practice from the first war for independence proved it more than once that existence of a way out pours oil on the attackers efforts.

By 5 pm on May 8 phedais captured the city...

Later in the evening in Kyusalar, captured by the phedai group where Valyo belonged, arrived the ‘goat’-Willis with commander Karen sporting his swanky white boots who called Valyo aside.

He got it at once it was an ominous sign and did not mistake. His elder brother, Vladic, mechanic-driver of one from 2 tanks in the battle of Shushi, when they busted the left track, got out thru the bottom hatch under the tank and was hit with a bullet through his chin. The exit hole was in the opposite jugular.

The fighting raged on and Valyo’s brother died under the tank…

One murder happened though after the battle, when a journalist from the local television, Borik, ascended to Shushi by his Niva vehicle to collect factual materials and was roaming thru empty, winding lanes until he ran into a couple of Azerbaijanis.

They either did not know that Shushi was captured or else on their way out recollected something forgotten at home and decided to go and fetch it quick, on foot.

They were a middle-aged mujik and a guy about 20 with an AK. He slung up his assault-rifle yet Borik was faster to draw his AK and shoot, without harming the elder one though.

Phedais ran up to the sound of a burst round and grabbed the alive man.

At that time man-trade went at full swing, the captured hostages were exchanged for money or for the compatriot hostages kept by the hostile party, variously.

The major merchant on the Azerbaijani side, handled Fantômas, even created a private prison for the purpose, and his Armenian counterpart in charge of live goods exchange was a former KGB officer whose handle and rank I do not know or, maybe, have completely forgotten.

I did not keep a journal at war except for the winter of 92, and that one in English so as to keep in check my garrulousness by means of a not native language, yeah, which is another weak point of mine – I just cannot pull up my cacography but only trot and trot on without any periods. Possibly to counter-balance my oral tongue-tiedness when every next word has to be born in phonetic spasms same way as by Mykola killed in Shushi battle, but that copybook was over long before the storm and I never picked up another.

Told by Ashot (the Head of a field medical battalion at that war)

'I had to become a surgeon, yet my dentist kit kept by me, the hand fairly used to those tools.

You never can tell by a wounded. Say, they bring a couple of them, just a scratch on one, the other entirely in khkhrots (‘agony’ in Karabakhi Armenian). Late in the evening you ask, "How’s the guy with a superficial?"

"Died."

"And the other?"

"Got up, went to dinner. Should I fetch him?"

Once they’ve brought a Turk, young.

"Check him, eh?"

What’s there to check? Unconscious, a massive fragment stuck out from the skull.

"I ask you brotherly, check him, eh?"

On the table with him. The fragment anchored tight, I had to pull with mandibular molar forceps. Cleaned the bone fragments off the brain. Treated the wound. And the guy survived.

Yet, some gyrus suffered, obviously. Time and again he starts to shriek, "You Armenian bastards! This is Azerbaijani land!"

The nurses couldn’t calm him down, always called for me. Of me he was afraid. I says, "Ara! Behave!"

"Doctor, doctor! I’m fine!", says he.

Then he was traded for two of our hostages, for he had rich parents. When they were taking him out, I was told, "You also go, eh? In case he wanted to die on the way? But you’re a doctor."

The exchange was on the road between Askeran and Aghdam. An ambulance from their side and we by the same brand UAZ vehicle.

Stopped at a distance from each other. I go on with him and from that side his parents and two ours who could hardly move, the chest of one burned with dry ice and the second man is all like a balloon, minces each footstep. They made him eat raw clover, the shepherds, they know what it does to sheep.

But mine does not move at all, stands still and watches those mujiks. His mother calls, "Sunny! Sunny!"

And he cries, "I don’t go! We, Azerbaijanis, are not human! We’re beasts!" Tried to run away.

Phedais caught him by our ambulance, brought back.

"Ara!"’ says I. "Do behave!"

"Doctor, I’m fine! I’m fine, doctor!"

Came up to his parents. They’re hugging him, crying. Each ambulance drove back to where it had come from.

Later a man spoke up to me at the bazaar. "You know me, doc? I was the one fed with clover."

Well, had come back to himself already, looking like a man. But about that Turk boy I know nothing whether he’s alive or not.'

. . . . .

A day later a crowd of civilian marauders ascended from Stepanakert to Shushi. What was impossible to loot they set on fire. Some crying idiocy – their homes ruined by bombardments and here they got an intact city but no – burned it up. Emotional incontinence of paupers robbing other paupers.

On their way back the crowd was caught in a scel (it’s a torrential rain of a major meteorological proportions, you’d feel pity for your enemy getting under such a downpour).

Yet one marauding old woman was lucky to loot a washing tub. So she turned it over and kept above her head and plodded home that way under her enamel umbrella, bypassing the streams along the broken road…

I saw Borik in a week after the Shushi capture and I couldn’t recognize him, his hair turned ghostly white and later on he left the region for good…

Inside the Shushi Temple of Savior (of XIX century) they found an arsenal of GRAD missiles, some huge warehouse, actually, based on logical premises that Armenians would not shell their temple.

In 2 days after the storm there came a jet to hit the temple so as not to leave such huge ammo stock to the opposing side. Yet the raiding jet missed and later there was no reason for further tries because the ammo was moved from the holy building.

And that jet had been coming so belatedly because in Baku they for a long time could not believe in the capture of Shushi, it’s a citadel on impregnable cliffs and they had brought so much artillery there together with manpower and stuff…

Valyo’s mother told him to bring a cow from Kyusalar Village because her daughter, a sister of the two brothers, alive and dead, lost her milk and her baby stayed unfed – the children hospital bombarded and no milk kitchen for newborns around…

Another consequence of the successful completion of the “Wedding in the Mountains” became seeing off the Major, vet of Afghanistan, after the exhortation voiced by the commander of a Self-Defense group handled Izho.

The handle got stuck still at school because of the Teacher of Russian. After a dictation, she censured him before all of the class for failing to write the word «ещё», wrong in each of the three letters! She laughed, fucking bitch, and exposed his variant.

So he got hurt and dropped out after his eighth grade but the handle stuck firmly. He became a petty punk then got the job of a car washer and married, and what else would you do in such backwaters?

But then the Movement started up, mass rallies in the square, and the one-horse burg became a hot theme on TV. After the Sumgait carnage and ‘Ring Operation', the region washed in arms, who but hoods had to take it under their control?

He threw together a group of his likes, not as invincible fighters as the Fragment’s group but not the last too.

When Izho visited Komandos and without diplomatic equivocacy said, ‘Fuck off out of here!’, Major did not dare to speak up because even though smelling no gunpowder in Afghan (well, in fact, he was a supervisor at a big ammo warehouse there, inventories, accountancy, you know) he knew it pretty well – do not kick against a war component if you wanna stay on the safe side.

Like a wise pussyfoot, packed he up and departed to Yerevan. There sage Major lived to his pension, becoming a Major-General on the way and getting government awards regularly. For Armenians in Armenia he still remained the legendary Komandos, the Captor of Shushi with minimal casualties.

It’s only that the official sources, to spite me, moved the storm of Shushi from May 8 to May 9 which happened later though to synchronize the event with the totalitarian Day of the Great Victory celebrated yearly by Big Brother. But I did not take offense at all – everyone does his job at his workplace and puts their signature in the payroll of their kolkhoz.

In September the Self-Defense Forces were reorganized (read renamed) into the Army of Self-Defense of the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh.

Izho became the Commander-in-Chief although wise people abstained already to use the handle and even in their private conversations preferred to use his rank: “comandushchi” (from the distorted Russian word because Armenian, however rich in its phonetic system (some of the 36 sounds I cannot pronounce up till now), does not have the Russian «щ» and staging dictation tests where it is present is an example of outrageous pedagogical sadism).

The Lieutenant-General remained in the shadow as an adviser (no, not in vain I liked that photo of him!) and was driving it home to the General Staff of the Army of Self-Defense what the hell was that fucking logistics about and all that stuff.

Later they built a house for him in Stepanakert, where he did not dwell, of white cubics, and renamed Khojalu, captured not by him, after his name – Ivanian.

What was then? Whoever is interested might google it out.

* * *