At first, the village mujiks were betting on whether I last for 10 days or until the end of the month.

And only I knew already that it was forever because two-meter-tall wall of grass stood along the road sides, and herds of cows and bulls roamed in the distant slopes above those walls before they would be driven back to the village for the night.

And when I asked the school's principal what that bright spot could be there in the distant toombs, he answered it was snow.

Snow in August, huh? Come on, it's not Everest.

Truth, snow it is, hiding in so cunningly twisted a gorge that summertime is not enough for the sun to melt it…

The main provider of romanticism in Yezznaggomer is marahoogh. Folks also call it "the wolf weather", but it's not the fog, because it doesn't swirl or flow, it's standing like a solid wall.

The first time I got lost in it was in the leg between home and school, where I had already worked for more than a month. True, it was already the dark part of the day, and therefore the torch of the “head-dick” type, on its elastic band, was beaming from my forehead.

The ray of light cut a neat tunnel before me, the space within its round walls clogged with the suspension of particles the size of tiny snowflakes which did not fall though. To set those particles in motion, you need to move your head sideways and back, and while the lighted tunnel moves, the snowflakes stray in this or that direction, yet the tunnel itself remains just as narrow, and having the same dark smooth walls, and still crammed to the utmost with that same luminous suspension entering thru one wall to vanish in the opposite.

Haha! It was the beam that moved, not the “snowflakes”! Another gull cheated! Thanks to the theory of relativity.

It's like in childhood, when you roll your head back, face to the sky, so as to see only the falling snow until it looks like you are flying upward past the irregularly standing snowflakes.

As for the density of moisture hanging up inside the marahoogh, on average, were you wearing a scuba gear, you could easily swim along like Yves Cousteau around the corals, but as you don’t put flippers on then go on foot yet very slow and twice checking each familiar landmark, so as not to get lost even worse.

Blizzards happen too, it’s not for nothing that the mujiks had in their households motorcyclist mask-glasses in case they needed to take hay to the cow house in the middle of crazy mixture of wind-and-snow-grit...

The bus was coming once a week, on Fridays, but that was only the first six months, before the bus driver Armen ultimately dropped straining both the vehicle and himself.

He lived in Moshatagh, 15-18 km down into the valley, and never liked the idea of 30+ km surplus run for the sake of a couple or two of passengers.

The number of passengers was so small because just 12 families and a loner teacher was all the population in the village, while the make-believe road so difficult that two or three passengers threw up on the way, especially kids too eager to be treated to ice cream in Lachin City.

While going there, they threw their breakfast up, and on the way back – the ice cream. The prose of life onto the roadside, if they were quick enough to jump out of the stopped bus, but in case of a too short notice – there’s the back of a passenger on the seat in front of you.

So, the first year was the most difficult because there was no electricity in the village. Well, not exactly a year, a little more than that…

But at first I had to ask Nick Wagner to take me to Yezznaggomer Village for the start of the academic year.

Which he did...

But at first we had to find a roof rack for his "Niva" in Stepanakert. And we did find it in the rehabilitation center named after Baroness Cox. Thanks to the center’s Director Vartan. No, the Baroness had nothing to do with alkies and druggies, the center catered for the people maimed in the war too heavily.

At that both the first and the last transportation by Nick’s “Niva” to Yezznaggomer, I managed to fetch there some provender (cereals, pasta, salt, etc.), as well as the most necessary hand tools: shovel, crowbar, ax, saw, and a bunch of smaller ones.

You can’t lift everything at one go, so the welding-machine-grinder-drill were left for later, moreover, when there’s no electricity in the village.

However, there was no building material either, but only stones in the ruins overgrown with grass around, and the nearest forest in seven kilometers downwards, if you need a pole or some kind of a prop. Yet on foot, of all the means of transportation...

But at first I had to find some lodging, because there were only ruins around, except for 12 houses and their adjacent cowsheds.

However, the school principal indicated there was a 13th at the very top, but he was certainly embarrassed to hand me the key, although in Lachin he had been assuring Karina, the Head of the District People Education Department, that I would be provided with housing...

But at first we in duo, the principal and I, had to convince Nick that his “Niva” was designed for coming up so crazy slopes too and she would certainly climb up to that house.

After a lengthy hesitation, Nick succeeded.

I dumped the cereals and the tools onto the porch, said goodbye to Nick, we parted with a handshake and I entered…

But at first, I had to break in, tearing the padlock off...

And right behind the door saw I a meter-deep pit or rather a quarry. Welcome to the kitchen!

The floor’s earthen, pretty bumpy. However, the following, bedroom’s, level one meter higher than the kitchen and thus, fortunately, even with the stone porch outside the house, from which (the porch) there’s a footbridge to the bedroom. I did tell I was chronically lucky, didn’t I?

The bedroom’s floor’s of handmade boards, thick and sturdy, not quite even and you had to pick your way in between the floor gaps and look out where to plant your foot, preferably not into a gap.

However, (lucky as always!) the room was furnished with an iron bed, even though without the net between the sides. Yet the mattress present! On the floor.

I took it up to take over the footbridge and throw away because of too many holes in its torn-up sides.

At the mattress' takeoff, a mouse fell out of one of the holes, looked at me disgustedly “fucking intruder!” and plopped into the nearest gap.

No! He didn’t dashed or flushed but lazily, over his elbow, without ever getting to his feet, deigned to plop out of sight…

In general, some fairy-tale hut on chicken legs, only of stone and the tin roof fixed with wire so that the upcoming winds would not blow it away, like in the forester’s case from the neighboring village who opened his eyes in the morning to the overcasting rainy clouds full of the shower to perk him up.

So, that winter I spent in a teepee, nothing doing.

No bison or buffalo lost their skin for that teepee. Cellophane film brought from Stepanakert was used for the teepee walls put up within the bedroom. The teepee door was made of plywood and closed tightly to let no wind from under the floor. The bed got new net (the window grates pulled from the nearby ruins) and even a Made-in-Iran gas stove was installed in between the transparent walls together with a 20-liter gas container.

However, the stove was switched on only on Saturdays, when I drank wine in the light of one candle and Louis Armstrong was singing:

What a wonderful world!.

from the player with a battery presented me by Ashot.

My mobile phone was to be charged at homes of the colleagues who came to the Yezznaggomer school from two nearby villages (they had some kind of electricity there) to give their classes, bringing along in their vehicles (yes, “Nivas” mainly, yet one UAZ van too) students as well, to have who to teach.

The school at Yezznaggomer had 24 students half of whom were itinerants. The students were not distributed equally between 12 grades, but in every possible way and some of the grades might remain unmanned in certain academic years.

However, the second half of the kids at school were provided by our village, as also was the principal and Anahit, the teacher at elementary grades, the mother of Spartak, Mariam and Andranik…

Lavash bread I was buying from Lachin, 50 pieces at once. After it was brought to Yezznaggomer, I hung sheets of fiberboard in the kitchen on strings fixed at the ceiling beams and spread lavashes upon them.

Mice cannot fly and the bread leafs were drying up undisturbed, and then I stored the stock in a secure box, where the critters could not get into.

Before use, wrap a lavash in a cloth towel and sprinkle water over it, from the wrap's dampness the lavash would soften and – bon appétit!..

It was interesting to live – one problem followed another, you wanna survive?.– find a solution...

That winter ended on April 28...

In the summer that followed I was building me a house. For the purpose, was chosen the wreck nearest to the water spring. It was the only water source for the entire village.

Fetching water to the place occupied by me on the arrival in Yezznaggomer, I had to haul it in pails up a 9-story-tall toomb, rather steep and, naturally, having no stairs.

When the toomb slope got ice-coated, same height had to be climbed in zigzags. So I did know how to choose the right location for a house.

The chosen ruins had almost four walls, collapsed door jambs and two window openings in the same conditions, all of which I restored and spanned with reinforced concrete lintels, then raised the crashed parts to one common level.

Inside, I laid another longitudinal wall and in the end it turned out a kitchen, with two windows and the entrance door, and the blank-walled bedroom. All in all 18 sq. m.

All the timber for spanning beams and roof rafters were brought over 100 km from Stepanakert, everything second-hand, but I had no other choice.

Only the roof was not imported but collected among other wreckage in the village.

That whole area in 1920’s was Red Kurdistan, populated by Kurds, but later the Soviet Azerbaijan annulled that autonomy, the Kurds were given passports of Azerbaijani citizens and were assimilated.

So nowadays the word “Kurd” is considered a rude offense by the descendants of the assimilated Kurds, just like in Turkey, and Turkey is Azerbaijan’s Big Brother by the political orientation.

Viewing Yezznaggomer from an even taller height, I counted up to 150 ruined houses and sheds or so, all of stone, but a couple of times went astray in reckoning.

At the time of the war for independence, there were no fighting in the former Red Kurdistan, the civilians fled over Kalbajar. Then pauper looters from Armenia came to plunder abandoned poverty, followed by richer looters who brought equipment to dig up and take away the piping for running water, so there remained just one water head in the village, 50 meters away from my building site.

Subsequently, when I had constructed a 3-ton water pool near the house, with ceramic tiled walls inside a tin hut, whose walls were insulated from within with polystyrene sheets bought in Stepanakert and carpet-flooring discarded at the Satenic & Rosanna's business, I was attaching a rubber garden hose to the iron pipe stump, thru which the stone trough for cattle got filled with ever running water, and my pool got full just overnight, thanks to the gravity.

I couldn’t replenish it in the daytime, although cattle, and horses, and smaller living creatures did not mind (the trough was pretty capacious), but the human residents of the village every day came to the spring by their “Nivas” or tractors bringing empty canisters and barrels, and then my hose would be in the way because not only I needed water for washing and other needs...

Yezznaggomer was populated with immigrants from Armenia, because the RMK legislation forebode Karabakh people move over there, so as to prevent outflow of the much reduced already Armenian population of Mountainous Karabakh.

For that reason, besides me, only two men from Mountainous Karabakh landed in the village: Aram, on the grounds that he had married a daughter of Edic, a settler from Armenia, and Arthur, who left his wife in Stepanakert and made his way to Yezznaggomer illegally, because he all his life was a shepherd.

Aram sometimes worried as regards the local ethnography. He would ask then whose was our village and the toombs around: Kurdish or Armenian?

Well, the cemetery on the toomb in the village outskirts was certainly Muslim, but in the ruins inside the settlement I happened to find khachkars (carved Armenian tomb stones) way too heavy to dispense with them in the masonry of walls, so they survived and were just kicking around. Besides, the Armenian temple in Tsitsernak (below Moshatagh village) was being built from the 10th into the 12th centuries, and had the look and feel of the Reims Cathedral (it certainly had, although I never paid France a live visit).

Do you really need it? Live your life for your own pleasure, shovel the bullshit out from your father-in-law's shed, and enjoy sex with your wife, while having sufficient strength and desire…

But later, Aram and his family split off into a house above the water spring, after repairing it, of course.

That’s why tin in the ruins was an easy find, although pretty rotten and crumpled, throwaways, as a matter of fact.

Out of them I had to cut usable pieces and gradually mastered the profession of a tinsmith.

The tin went to the roof in my house which I tinkered myself as well as the roof over my workshop, whose walls were provided by a cowshed ruins. Although, on the second thought, the Azerbaijanis, who no longer were Kurds, kept sheep there, probably.

Not to mention the hut over the 3-ton water pool and the 60-meter-long aqueduct of tin…

The plot about the house was spacious, bordered with a hedge on three sides, with breaches at some places, so that pigs would have direct route to the fourth side – the ravine with the brook running from the common water spring.

The breaches in the hedge walls I, of course, filled with masonry, the pigs got disgruntled but learned to bypass the whole plot for the mud baths in the brook relieving them from blood-sucking insects.

In the household territory along the high bank of the ravine, I planted a vegetable garden: garlic, tomatoes, potatoes, for crop rotation, and upstream, where the brook had the banks of certainly volcanic origin, I built a dam.

The construction lasted 3 years because erection of a dam to block a channel with the constant water-flow along its bottom is not a trivial engineering task.

And when the dam began to work, came the time for a tin aqueduct propped by columns of rebar hammered into the ground because the dam was outside the plot, away from my kitchen garden.

Well, there also was added a basement cellar to stock the crops, a laundry room and a shower room both outside the house. And the bath, cut out of a 400-liter plastic tank, was placed in the insulated hut next to the tiled water pool. And the outhouse in the yard, 20 meters off, but with the warm seat of polystyrene foam.

Three apple trees grew there above the ravine inherited from the Kurds, previous inhabitants of Yezznaggomer. No, they sooner were Azerbaijanis already…

Yet the grapes that I planted did not take root in 4 years of my endeavors, although I had been warned beforehand of the impossibility of such undertaking in the climate at that altitude.

However, the plum tree matured.

That way I turned a kurkool, a malicious representative of the counter-revolutionary class eliminated still in the early years of the USSR. Especially when I started to distill grain alcohol in the insulated tin hut from wheat bought in Stepanakert, yet, on Saturdays I continued to drink only wine, such was my habit instilled by Louis Armstrong.

No, I didn’t trade in alcohol, but just for curiosity’s sake and subsequent processing it into absinthe, since a cellar had been made already.

And for the repair of throwaways (hairdryers, kitchen utensils etc.) brought by the village womenfolk because their husbands were too busy to check and put the trifles aright, I charged a tolerable fee, the purely symbolic couple of liters of milk to uphold the glorious traditions of the class of artisans.

The bedroom walls were plastered completely and paint-coated with latex so that mice would not come to visit through the masonry in the ancient walls.

Then I had a go at the kitchen. The window frames were constructed of (again) a second-hand material, but the glass panes I had to bring from Stepanakert being nothing of a glass cutter.

All the floors were of laminate, and all the furniture, except for the table, the stool, and the chair, added swiveling casters for the convenient wet cleaning, you drive the furniture in one half of the room and work your mop unhindered over the floor in the liberated half...

Quite a hell of a lot of what-nots you are capable of accomplishing when not distracted by wars and stuff, you know…

Once Ashot brought his wife Gaiane, and Satenic with Emma by his swanky SUV.

We celebrated the occasion. Aram came with his wife and a baby.

The next morning mine left.

I was sorry for the SUV though, one more such a picnic and the poor critter would need a luxury hearse…

The house seemed small compared to the plot area, but I didn’t need anything bigger, it served me a springboard for starts off to the parallel world, from where I was coming back dog-tired, yet seeing the houses' two windows beneath the roof of throwaway tin I perked up – home at last.

It's good to have a place where you can return from parallel worlds...

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