When because of the truce brokered in Bishkek I got kicked out from the Press-Center by the SC of RMK, my diploma of a Teacher of English from the Nezhin Pedagogical Institute helped me out once again. It substantiated my job application to Stepanakert Pedagogical Institute gift-wrapped already in the spangle-twinkling title of State University.

Rector named Arvat did not turn down my request supposing, erroneously, that I was another white collar from the Supreme Council (in the war years folks used to view me that way) maintained up there by a hairy pow who did not mind my looking for a side job. That conjecture made him not over keen on verifying the truth of such speculations or else he did not give a fuck about these here theories on his hypothetical guesswork and he just gave me that job. Period. Anyway, it feels good to take care of yourself as nobody’s protege.

So, I became a teacher of English at the Department of Foreign Languages by the Artsakh State University because the local cadres of eaters found nothing better to busy their screwed up heads with except for dumping the word “Karabakh” altogether. They kicked up a resolute campaign (up to a referendum) to substitute it with the word "Artsakh" of dubious meaning yet without Turkic roots in it. The blithering dunces all of a sudden turned linguistically aware... The common folks went on naming their homeland Karabakh while the managerial dimwits stuck 'Artsakh' tag on any effing shit…

Having Rector Arvat around (though I never communed with the guy) provoked some deep rooted uneasiness in me, a sort of not quite there déjà vu.

A strangeness out of joint should turn into normality, right? Well, in this case it did not work that way.

I had already had Rector Arvat, back at the Nezhin Pedagogical Institute, although by that one 'Arvat' was his family name and not the given one. And the geezer (the previous Arvat) was a Jew from Odessa. Of course, it made no difference still two Arvats and both Rectors were kinda more than enough for me alone. Such a temporal-cognitive discordance created a sort of tension. It’s like meeting 2 John Lennons and both playing the piano, separately.

There happen namesakes, okay, I can buy that. Job-sakes? In millions. Name-and-job-sakes? Not suspecting of each other? Hmm. What next? N&J-sakes sharing an unaware wife? That’s where the straining entered. Or, say… no, I’d better not go down that road.

However, Arvat (the Stepanakert Armenian) soon got replaced with another rector (they were shifting there like knaves shuffled by an experienced deck sharper) who, fortunately, incurred no allusions to my previous life which brought some alleviation, in part.

No use of concealing the fact that the turnover of Rectors at the ArSU went through the roof. It suffice to note that in the course of just one employee's career (namely, my 14-year stretch there) the Artsakh State University saw somersaults of 8 to 9 of those high-ranking educational officials. Thus, the Frequency of Rector-Rotation (FRR) per clown coincides, on average, with the duration of a conscripts’ hitch in the Soviet Army.

None of them (with merely one exception) demonstrated any savvy as to in what way a pedagogical college is distinct from a university.

Once, I even had to explain to a current one (not my fault though: who ever called that Rector to show up at a monthly sitting of the English Department (because any other foreign language remained in embryonic form of an optional subject)) that a university, in difference to a college, is engaged in scientific research as well.

The amount of the offered information clearly exceeded his cognitive capacity, and the unfathomable extent of the overflowing data plunked the usurper into the prostration of so violent a nature that the efforts of the Head of the English Department combined with the concerted assistance of other Anglo-ladies present at the monthly affair hardly managed to reanimate the poor fellow by the plenteous application of tea and jam.

Well, yes, they did manage to bring him back to life. Yet, the Head of the English Department had never forgiven me the accident. Not for the irretrievable quantities in the amount of the Departmental jam stock yet because of her strong instinct of self-preservation.

It was exactly that monthliness that effed me up immoderately and made me a plumb loco deep in myself. Because menfolks at the State University could then be counted on the fingers of one hand – Rafic at the Department of Russian, Volodya at the Biological, Karen at the Physics and Mathematics, and Yuri at the Department of Geography… Well, maybe a pair of laboratory assistants somewhere but those Rectors my hand does not rise to tally up to the ranks of this glorious cohort…

Ah! Yes! Uncle Kolya the electrician! He kept a spacious, but very cluttered workshop under the main stairs where he repaired just anything: from umbrellas to household appliances, which even a normal woman would not understand, let alone those college bluestocking ladies.

Later, Armen Yuryevich appeared at the Department of Armenian, and justified, in part, the University denomination, because he did undertake a research task compiling The Dictionary of The Karabakh Dialect of Armenian.

The work was accomplished at the level of The Russian Dictionary by Dahl, no kidding. The resulting magnum opus will surely outlive us.

Although who for? Meager 6 million people use Armenian nowadays, of which one half populates the Diaspora who use the Istanbul Dialect of Western Armenians, the remaining 3 million live, speak, and write in the Republic of Armenia applying the Eastern Dialect of the language, but neither of them have as worthy a Dictionary where each entry brims with the poetry of life in folk sayings some of which still make me neigh all stops pulled.

It’s only that the compiler exploited juvenile labor demanding from the students to stick down, whenever visiting their villages, everything heard from their granny-grandpa-uncle-ants. Anything at all: proverbs, swearing, jokes…

And the students were only happy to do the job. I saw heaps of their sheet-and-scraps on his Departmental Desk because that way they felt themselves students and not just the sheep for whose sake the tuition fee was shorn off their respective parents.

Still, on the other hand, it’s reassuring that no matter how hard a teacher would tyrannize you, they could not jump higher their own ass because the university should systematically fulfill the plan of harvesting with no reduction of the fleeced cash allowed. So you’d sure pass a test, and get your ‘three’ at the exam, and screw their bullying.

True, time and again you could stumble at those who’re eager to learn indeed. I met such unique ones at the reading hall…

O! the ArSU Reading Hall is certainly a pearl. The Diaspora had dumped there whatever books you want. Some treasure hoard starting from the two last reprints of The Britannica and so on alphabetically…

The uptake not for the critters present? But then, maybe, for those growing yet, for some of the following, future generations. Some huge 'maybe' though…

And that Rector, recuperated by means of jam and tea, never forgave me for the attempt at shuttering the foundations of his inert ideas and, full of vindictive villainy, he ordered the Head of the Computer Room—O my! That's real sweetie! a generous gift from some overseas millionaire—to keep me out of the gift Hall on the basis of hypothetical probability of my sending spy reports to Baku by means of the Internet.

She had to only follow her orders, and I had to await the idiot’s demobilization…

My relationships with the colleagues were characterized by evenness, always. Although the Head of the Department, with her hypertrophied instincts, could not conceal her fury that at their monthly jamborees I kept yawning, repeatedly and even with a distinct howl.

But that was unintentional reaction due to physiologically irresistible stimuli. I tried to restrain my jaw, faith! I did! – even with my both hands, for keeping good manners... To no avail though. You just can't kick against physiology…

To curb the volume of her orations, it took only one adjustment. After another of her accusatory declarations as regards me, I took out the flash drive (alike to WALKMAN yet of smaller dimensions) which I used for listening Tina Turner on my way to the university when the bus driver turned his music too loud. However, this time I pretended it was a Dictaphone and said to the flash drive: “Recorded on February 2, at 13.38”

She got fuc… fully, that is... flabbergasted, being unable to recollect what exactly got shot off her mouth a moment before.

It's after that recording was I banned from the Computer Paradise…

Vice-rector Styopa also, once, in the presence of students in the corridor, began to reprimand me employing an unrestrained tone of voice:

“You’re kept here only because of being a foreigner!”

But those are slanderous rumors that I retorted:

“What can you know of foreigners? Wanna get mine to play with?” Because tongue-tiedness somehow disappears, at times…

The only rector that I did like, from aside, was Episkoposian, who immediately after the war arrived from Moscow and even moved his household furniture down here.

Under him, Anna Alexandrovna, the Library Manager, forgetful of her advanced age, shed off the heed to decency rules endemic in the backwaters, and began to wrap her throat with a chiffon scarf in the romantic manner of the singer Maya Kristalinskaya, especially on days when she went to the Rector's appointment.

Of course, given the difference in their age and similarity of marital status, her dress code did not lead to the slightest office affair, and everything looked an example of love purely platonic and touching to watch…

And what was his idea of spending vacations? Huh? In the hole!

Near the village of Mektishen he dug up a skeleton with strange decorations, which, by all scientific beliefs, were impossible to share that hole with the stiff.

He’d better ask me, when we’d been constructing the gas pipeline nearby Chldran Village, before the war it was, the back hoe dug up a hell of a lot of bones of all kinds of sorts there.

But on the second summer they pulled him out of the hole and clarified that, if his furniture was dear to him, he’d better fuck off out of here.

Meekly moved Episkoposian to Yerevan, it very well may be up to this day gathers he his flock there to lecture on strange Karabakh artifacts, and in summer, some place in the Ararat Valley, exhumes he spare parts jettisoned off Noah's Ark, because Armenia is a mighty ancient land…

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 latest 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…"

* * *