the most final
concluding work

I handed Salinger to Zhomnir and, in return, I asked for James Joyce's Ulysses, 705 pages of dense text without pictures, without divisions into parts or chapters. Zhomnir himself once wanted to translate it, but Joyce turned out way too unsuitable for any conjuncture. I gave my word to return the volume in 10 years.

After a split-second hesitation, he brought the book out of his archive chamber and stretched it generously out. Now I had what with to fill the eternity ahead of me.

"Where are you going?" asked Maria Antonovna.

"To Baku."

With the usual jerk, the train pulled out of the Nezhyn railway station… Everything was behind, ahead was everything. 30 and 3 years.

"It's time for you to work miracles," said I to a saxophonist I knew, when he became 33.

"I have already done miracles," he replied, "And did my time for them as well." And how only do them folks manage to live eventful lives?

I thought that I was going to Baku to pick up a job of a bricklayer of the fourth category, and gradually translate Ulysses after work. As it turned out, I was starting to the Mountainous Karabakh with its war for independence and all the issuing details common for such cases, which I'd rather not dwell on. However, behind the windows of the local train car, there still were running familiar landscapes of 1987, the last year of peace. Before the collapse of the indestructible Union of the Free Republics, there still remained 2 years. Today, they tell me that in 1987 the smack of the new era was in the air already. Alas, I did not scent the brew.

Let some other "I", not a part to my personal monad, strain their brains about this question, because I since long dropped following the brandy lies in this world. Moreover, the predawn twilight, seeping thru the synthetic canvass of my Chinese tent, signals the end to this sleepless night and to this endless letter as well.

You will ask, how did my following life flow, behind the watershed of the Caucasian ridge? You may not even ask it, I will tell you all the same. First, do not ask about my life in the past tense, it still keeps flowing on. I rolled its way as best as I could. Because of the spiral nature of the current, we can only go thru multiple repetitions of what has been and will be.

"What has been will be again," says the new translation of the Old Testament, and Vladimir Dahl in his dictionary recorded the same saying in normal, human, language – "radish is no sweeter than a horseradish". But, if I may ask, have all those wisdom pieces helped a single anyone? And when there comes the moment to feel that I don't care a f-f..er..fleck, I let it rip and go with the flow to the ultimate end.

Life is predetermined like a winding mountain road with the drop-off on the right and the cliff-wall on the left, here you go along, repeating step by step the path passed before you, by you who was also "I". Of course, when I recognize a repetition of familiar situations, I try to avoid ugly deeds for which I'll be ashamed painfully. And up till now I, like, have managed to dodge. Or?.

Yes, like, haven't stepped… If only that bitter son of a bitch in my Chinese tent wouldn't unearth something else…

So, here we are – I and the Varanda. It goes to meet the Araks river and I am passing by and on, to the last limit beyond which there's the boundless blue sea and, probably, that, once lost, tiny sailing boat in it…

Something again carries me off to all sorts of epochs and philologies. But this is, after all, a private letter of a father to his daughter, and f-f..er..I mean, fairly didactic too, well… sort of… at certain passages… Seems like it's a high time to wind up already.

…and then the morning of the following day came, and Scheherazade was suffered to live that day also…

And about myself, dear daughter, I may report that the maxim "I know that I know nothing" is not applicable to me, though there were times when I also scattered this particular pearl. Today, however, I have serious doubts about having even so tiny scraps of knowledge. I doubt that I know anything at all, be it even nothing.

"We understand life only by looking back at the past," announced a lover of aphorisms.

Asshole! You will not understand it even when pulled out of the grave and poked into it with your noseless skull!. And no one will ever understand…

There's just one thing beyond any doubt – life is shorter than even the dash between the dates of birth and death. And I do not care that no one cares about my useless wisdom, because I know better than anyone else that after all that was there, after my stupidities and mistakes, after stepping in all sorts of shit, I am not a hair-breadth wiser, I am still the same naive sucker ready to get underway to the unseen Where-Where Mountains. And let the hull is old like hell, the mast all cracks, and this whole nutshell will not survive the nearest storm – ahead, at full tilt! And let another calypso or penelope (what's the difference?) tearing the blouse on her charms, cries out and rushes along the foamy water edge – full ahead!.

I know that the bigger part of the dash is over so, come what may, the final leg would be passed as well, perk up – we’ll prick thru for sure! Like hell will anything stop a hooey-pricker!.