March 5

In tonight dreams I wrestled with a student from that provincial Pedagogical Institute where I spent four years gambling and smoking cannabis. The bugger had been, as I later figured it out, a grass-root KGB informer just like any other mother's son, including me.

Dreams went on, and in the sequence parts I resisted three temptations: to steal a pile of nice flag-stones, to drink a glass of gin and to make love, that doesn't dare to call its name, with Armo, the landlord.

At the Club the chess-players from the editorial stuff gathered for their subtle preoccupation, but Lenic chose to visit me in the Renderers'. We had a long talk.

He hotly mustered the list of the offenses and injuries Azeries had inflicted to his compatriots since the Sumgait tragedy. In his harangue he freely used his store of printable curses.

I had to point out the importance of self control, especially for a representative of one's native intelligentsia.

(...the greater harm you inflict to someone, the bitterer is your hatred towards them...)

Lenic's attitude indicated there really had been a bloodbath in the captured Hojalu and the rumors of slaughtering war prisoners with knives must be true.

PhedayeesPHEDAYEE —
     (Armenian borrowing from Greek) "freedom fighter". will stop at nothing to drag all the Armenians into their boat. The image of eternal victims entertained by generations of Armenians has started to rub off revealing that of a pack of savage scalp-hunters—the very image they used to label Turks/Azeries with.

No wonder Lenic got baffled, and shocked, and horrified being pulled into an upside-down world he's not accustomed to. He has to provide a justification for Armenians. He has to find faults with Azeries, something like: "Those animals have made us turn brutes after all!"

He doesn't want to see that all of us are made of the same stuff and we differ only in family names.

(...by the way, I can't recollect a passage where Christ preaches patriotism of any kind.
Ergo: sing-a-song about one's holy native land is not Christian, neither in style nor in spirit...)

After lunch, the three of us took a walk for about an hour.

Then I did one page from Joyce.

Two hours of picking out old tunes on the guitar.

Yoga. Supper.

At our evening walk to the Underground, Ahshaut asked me where Roozahna was. Actually, he was repeating this very question every night on our way over there, but only today I—at long last—stumbled on the meaning of this particular piece in his prattling.

How could I possibly explain to a two-year-old kid his sister's evacuation?

The water walk is ahead.
Good night.