Aram was reverences itself, always addressed me with honorific "Uncle Syrozh" and he asserted hotly that never even heard my village handle "Tsogl", though to my face they did not call me that.

To counter his hyper-politeness, I hold back my dislike of his adding volume in tries to sound more convincing, which gives out folks not really certain of themselves.

However, visiting my turf on that day, he was unusually quiet and in our usual run of the rehash of village news, just to add another detail or an afterthought, like, what a sore asshole was that new Chairman of Community Council (who, actually, lived in Lachin City, yet neatly listed there as a resident in one of 3 neighboring villages that constituted our community), how many calves were slaughtered by wolves the day before, at Ambo's turn of shepherding and now he was to repair the damage with his, as well as the news in the nearest villages—Aram wore a sort of inexplicable half-smile and, when he switched over to inquires of my future plans: what structure was I to build next, and how many liters of alcohol were already stocked in the basement cell, I even felt some leniency in him, towards me…

Some uncanny conceited aloofness. As if he already knew…

That morning Emma got up early and not at 11 am, as was her habit on Sundays, and she stood in the yard when there started these strange “thumps”.

She was standing on the porch in the sun and knew it already, but still unwilling to guess, she asked her mother, and Satenic, with a hardened look in her face, replied:

"This is war, Emma."

Stepanakert was being bombarded…

Mom told Emma to go down to the basement under the kitchen.

Crazed cars rushed along the streets, heedless of the color in traffic lights.

People were running in all directions, screaming. Where? Who to?

Clouds of dust and smoke were rising into the blue sky.

The third Karabakh war went off.

A month and a half of the strange war.

The war of drones against the legendary Kalashnikov assault rifles.

A war in which generals gave orders to leave the fortified area and withdraw the military personnel.

"Well, the commanders should know, eh? Probably, some clever maneuver. For strategy’s sake."

Then they were thrown to attack at the surrendered positions. Fortified. Until there was no force left to throw to attack.

And after, the Prime Minister shared the titles of Heroes of Nation, to the generals. For the precise execution of their combat duty…

A Colonel handled Qyokha, as stubborn as a Karabakh donkey, by his obstinacy made the Prime Minister call him directly, to which phone call the headstrong Colonel replied:

"Send me a written order."

So unrefined, indecorous a boor. No manners…

Qyokha never received any order from the Commander-in-Chief and was ignored throughout the war in which he didn’t retreat a meter. However, neither became he a Hero of Nation…

Two battalions were positioned in the open field to defend the approaches to Stepanakert.

There they stayed for one third of the war, not even having shovels to dig trenches. Short of water supply. No food except for packaged pasta.

Drones flew over their heads loaded with cluster bombs for the city, never dropped anything at the idling force.

Lucky SOB's…

While on the other, far-off edge of the war, four days and nights a detail were lying in a dugout, never leaving it, suffocating in the stench, their own and of their comrades-in-arms'.

Those bitchy drones with infrared rays, even at night were they capable of figuring out from the posture of a soldier on his haunches that there was a dugout at hand…

The war, in which the Armenian Army did not take part, leaving the RMK Army (40% of which were conscripts drafted in the Republic of Armenia) and the local reservists to stand against the combined Azerbaijani-Turkish-Israeli-Syrian-Tunisian military efforts and, in the same breath, to report to Yerevan, to execute strategic directives from there…

The war, which, when mentioned in TV and radio news, made faces of Yerevan citizens tighten and darken, and look back at all those bill-board pictures of boys in camouflage fatigues decorating the city thoroughfares above the streams of traffic thronging along.

Pretty boys from the army of Republic of Armenia against the backdrop of viewy, conceptual landscapes.

And the picture of one soldier without views screened completely by the flames thrown up from the firing gun behind his back, his mouth open to save his eardrums. He was as young as them, those war propaganda models, that boy named Albert, however, in the picture he looks a strangely ageless, timeless soldier with his cheeks and uniform coat blown out by the air concussion at the discharge. The citizens did not know that Albert had been long since blown up by a drone together with his howitzer gun, and Yerevan City continued to live as before, for the majority of its population Mountainous Karabakh remained as unknown backcountry as for Moscow citizens was Sapozhok District in the Ryazan Region, except for those whose sons were at their hitch in the RMK Army of Self-Defense…

The progressively informed world community were full of indignation regarding that war, in between two slurps of Pepsi or beer in front of their monitors, after which they clicked over to the details of the marital life of the singer Googgie or onto the mass grave unearthed in the cellar of the otherwise unremarkable ranch in Texas, while the bulk of the remote control holders had not even switched from their X-sites and live baseball matches…

Members of the KVN* team “Moscow Armenians”, in a jolly group, ran cheerfully out onto the Theater of the Soviet Army (TSA, we keep sacred traditions and names) stage in the games of the 1/4 finals of KVN and an assimilated Jew-Azerbaijani on the jury board, flushed up his grade marks for the wit of their jokes…

(*Russian Central Television show-pacifier considered a supreme spring-board for a stand-up comedian career.)

"That’s life, see?" used to repeat my mother-in-law, Emma Arshakovna, while she was still here…

The bloggers who arrived in from Russia (yes, there were some), wearing heavy-duty helmets and bulky body armor, sang from the front-line trenches their praises, full of awe, to the incomparably outstanding human qualities of Armenian Soldier.

A French correspondent on a fleeting visit to the deep rear, not even reaching Karabakh, with his hair strands collected loosely into a debonair knot atop his crown, explained, full of resentment, to his smartphone:

“Une putain de maison de fous”…

A few Armenian volunteers from the CIS countries and overseas Diaspora were sent by the Ministry of Defense of Armenia back to their respective places of residence.

Those of them who, ignoring MD of RA, still made it to Karabakh, were sent home by the local commanders reporting to Yerevan.

The volunteers felt offended and humiliated, however, they stayed alive…

Some outright bad asses, refusing to grasp the requirements of the globally current moment, merged with the local militia of one or another of the villages, managed to temporarily disrupt the plans agreed upon, for a day or two, but then the situation returned to the outlined track…

Who knows, some of the most stubborn might have survived and in 30 years, on their deathbeds, they would say:

"Yes, I’ve been there then!"

We all remember Mel Gibson's famous pep talk before the Scots lined up for the battle with the out-numbering force of the British enslavers in The Brave Heart.

Some topnotch action movie, right?

Sometimes I think, would all the Roman legions be able to resist a battalion of paratroopers armed with modernized Kalashnikov assault rifles for 45 days?.

. . . . .

The village emptied out, the younger folks taken to the front, except for Armen, the father of seven kids.

The village children (except for those of Armen) were transported to Armenia, the homeland of the Yezznaggomer settlers.

Out of 12, life still went on in 3-4 houses.

Briefly, the principal of school appeared, who deserted and arrived in the village to drive his cattle over to Armenia.

The cannonade rolled in from the horizon, day by day more and more audible…

Meanwhile, I moved earth with the wheelbarrow to cover the back wall of the workshop shed with an earthen rampart so that the rains would not flood in thru that wall, a not overly urgent task but you have to do something to fill the days up.

It was a good wheelbarrow, two-wheeled, homemade 6 years ago. The box of rotten tin rigged for the job was, sure enough, younger.

After the day work I got seated at my desktop PC and translated Pynchon's novel.

Well done Thomas, the real thing, decently produced...

(http://sumizdut.narod.ru/volume-2/pynchon/index.html)

Then Melsik came to visit with a bunch of some home-pickled grass.

Not that he avoided eye-contact, he did look into your eyes, but in his stare there was nothing except for some not seeing emptiness.

"In all of the village he respected only you," said he, “so he said.”

Melsik’s Aram’s father.

I had rice and bread for dinner. We drank alcohol of double distillation, yet we could not get drunk.

Thirty years ago, in the first war, Melsik was a phedai, and in this one, he arbitrarily came to the artillery unit of a wide-range gun by which Aram fought. Together with his son he was retreating from Fuzuli to Amaras.

It was a good gun, covering up to 20 km, only you couldn’t see where it hit.

Once upon a time it partook in the Battle for Berlin firing shells at the Reichstag.

In Karabakh, there were only six such guns. Nearby Amaras, the drones finished off the last of them.

Melsik talked calm, evenly, without the slightest emotion.

The gun personnel commander allowed him to stay, since his son was there, and the officer even listened to Melsik's advice, but he died anyway.

Because they see from above where to hit and how.

Of the entire battery personnel, only three troopers survived, one of them Melsik, yet he was not wounded like the other two…

Aram died before his eyes, about a hundred meters off. They were setting the gun up and there banged that blast.

Melsik ran up, began to turn over the corpse of his son, as he had been turning over his comrades-phedais thirty years ago.

Two fragments killed Aram, one through the heart, the second through the temple to the neck. Probably, he didn't have time to feel anything…

The night is nearing. The kitchen windows wide open. Melsik sits haggard-faced, his eyes are empty.

He lists the mistakes in tactics and strategy. That when the civilians were evacuated out of Hadrut City, there remained nothing to fight for, no one to protect.

A column of empty buses came from Armenia and Komandushchi (yes, that same one) shouted thru a megaphone for people to get on.

The Prime Minister sent him as a representative who’d be listened to.

"Just as Turks fled from us in that war, so now we are from them, there are too many Kalash assault rifles dropped on the roadsides."

Melsik took his 33-year-old son and buried him in his native village (he did not know that the village was planned to be handed over), then he came to Yezznaggomer to drive Aram's cattle to Armenia, where his widowed daughter-in-law, Amest, had already gone to with both of her preschool kids.

The next morning he told me that the capitulation had been signed at midnight…

Three days later I took a hot bath in the tin hut (of thermically isolated walls) and left Yezznaggomer at 10.17 am.

The door I did not lock, so that the marauders would not break it in vain. Still, a "euro" door brought over 100 km from Stepanakert, pity the thing.

On the two-wheeled wheelbarrow I cinched a sack with sweaters that my daughters and Satenic once knitted for me, also a backpack with a one-liter container of absinthe and a pair of shoes, a pair of jeans and a pack of cookies.

Atop of everything else was fastened the guitar. All other belongings were left behind, even the Solzhenitsyn's three-volume work with his autograph.

And I had already managed to distribute alcohol away in the village. The things of halidom should be disposed of in awe and deferential devotion. And in time.

So, with a light heart and not too heavy a wheelbarrow, moved I forward without looking back, past the house of Anna and Armen, which was built only a year ago on grants from the Diaspora because of their seven children.

Armen was still dismantling tin corrugated boards and roof beams for taking them over to Armenia to his kids already evacuated there…

Over the pass to west from the Ishkhana-Sar mount, at 3.48 pm next day, already without the wheelbarrow, but still grabbing the sack, the backpack and the guitar, I entered the empty dormant lobby of the Sisian City Hall (Armenia) with a big square clock on the wall. 47 km away from Yezznaggomer.

On the way, Satenic called, scolded me for being inaccessible 4 days already. She said that our village and all of the Lachin District had been surrendered by the capitulation and I shouldn’t sit and wait for Turks there, they would not ask my nationality…

Two days later, at still young night, I arrived in Stepanakert by taxi from Yerevan via Vardenis, before the peacekeepers handed that highway over to Azerbaijan (as arranged) and got astonished by the lack of destruction in the city. In the main street, for example, only one store was smashed and burnt out, not a single government building was damaged in the downtown.

Everything went on as agreed upon. In Shushi, on the heights above the city, the Azerbaijani army, in Stepanakert – peacekeepers' vehicles sporting jolly tricolors.

By the City Hall, to the noisy queues of retirement-aged civilians they fork out refugee rations from the Red Cross—cereals, pasta, confiture, toothbrushes, 2 kg of flour, 2 cans of beef stew per a cardboard box.

Only one fragment of a cluster bomb fell into the backyard of the house, which turned 25 years old.

Yet, that bitchy contraption of a bomb is designed so that its fragments explode too, on and on, into smaller buckshot.

The glass in the bedroom window got shot through as if by a bullet and one sheet of the corrugated slate in the roof got broken, so I had to fix it with a patch on silicone glue…

Ode to Sensitivity Numbness

By and large, they were on the march to defend their Motherland, because each of them was a Soldier and God was with each of them …

Well, specifically, they had a combat mission to climb the hill, gain a foothold there and prevent the forward movement of the advancing enemy forces. So, on they went, upward, in a march column, united by the common mission, one and the same goal.

However, while climbing up, under their individual helmets, there spun personal thoughts or, rather, some fragments of thoughts, by each one his own, about what a handsome goal Barcelona scored in that game, the sock in the right boot should be neaten tighter otherwise the bitch will rub the foot to bleeding, to tell the younger brother to look well after the horse, but that girl from the parallel class at the prom, in her pink blouse, really beautiful and gave a kinda personal smile, like, in a grown-up way, a sort of…

Each about his own, but outwardly only heavy abrupt breaths, almost hoarse wheezing, is heard, yours and of your comrades.

So they marched and did not know that the cup with coffee grounds at the bottom had already been set aside and the fingertips habitually lay on the slippery back of the mouse in the monotonous calmness of the control room, wrapped into the cozy even hum of computer technology…

The drone in the sky left the stand-by position and followed the given course to drop a cluster bomb…

They did not complete their combat mission, they died on the march. All of the platoon. 25 people…

Later the parents will post photos of their boys in soldier uniforms on Facebook*.

‘Help find the missing person’.

Only in vain. Everyone who knew him lay around in riddled camouflage with patches darker than the darkest khaki, jagged holes torn in helmets.

All of the platoon…

Thoughts are gone, the sock does not bother anymore, the bay horse Booyan crunches the faded grass of autumn, Barcelona runs out to train, a beautiful girl, not in a pink blouse, without a smile, enters the subway car, the operator hands over the shift to his partner…

More and more often I am accused of callous heartlessness. I hope this is true: I have strangled out the empathy secreting organ in me, otherwise my heart would have burst long ago.

But still, even so, by the end of a day, it feels squeezed nastily…

Forgive me, boys—let, after all, at least someone will ask... just because at least a single one should... beg you for forgiveness…

DC WDB

(Displaced Civilian in the War of Doomed Boys)

(*Facebook is an allegedly terrorist organization, its activities banned on the territory of the Russian Federation.)

* * *