March 11

Why did I do it? Well, as a rank-and-file-existentialist, I should (and did) conceive the shell cutting that tree in front of me as a test: How would I act under the circumstances? Would I just pass by or take part in the happening?

Exactly like ten years ago I had to make and made my choice and was arrested by the KGB for staging a wildcat sit-in at a state construction firm.

A workmen going on strike in a land ruled by the working class is an instance of sheer inconsistency. So, my case was an unquestionably medical one, and—perfectly logically—they locked me up in the madhouse.

Day after day I was lying on my back, stretched out in the shaded part of the walking-ground enclosure at the 5th Unit of the District Mental Hospital, with my eyes shut, trying not to think that an hour later they would come back with their syringe needles to make me wiser through my ass already turned into one bleeding sore by pricking it week after week no less than three times a day.

One day, I suddenly felt something dropped onto my stomach; I opened my eyes—it was a candy-kiss and no one nearby except for a couple of permanent inmates, of those submersed, past recall and return, into their respective inexplicable parallel worlds.

That also was an existentialistic test: what would I do to the untraceable candy? Well, I did just what you would do to any explicable sweets—I ate that candy from the blue.

(...yesterday's incident demanded my reaction, and I answered the challenge. But what if the shell-felled tree was a bribe from the war? And—accepting it—am I not a rotten collaborationist?
To hell! Whatever happens just has to happen; what's done has to have been done. And, as a reward, I received one more apocalyptic visual impression for my collection: that of the glassless blast-ridden rows of school-house windows stretching out in despare their slim white frames lashed by a ghostly pale blizzard piercing the pitch-black night....)

But, today, it was sunny: merry melting everywhere and glaring streams.

At the Club there was a usual exchange of casual remarks with the staff-members dropping into my room. (Gee! I called it 'my'!)

About twelve am, a phedayeePHEDAYEE —
     (Armenian borrowing from Greek) "freedom fighter". -looking visitor appeared in search of paper to roll up a cigarette.

I gave him the paper issue dropped on the Wagrum's desk, dated last October, and then remembered that Wagrum was keeping it as his diploma piece, his masterpiece—a mock program of Azeri television.

After lunch, the mother-in-law sent me to see if they were selling the coupon-due flour at the Corner Shop.

The flour was on sale indeed though not in the shop but in the back yard providing the lee from a possible shelling. Some sixty men (elderly for the most part) and a dozen women crowded about. The feminine queue was much shorter.

(...all the queues down here except for those to water-heads are traditionally segregated according to queuers gender...)

The mother-in-law brought ten kilos of flour.

One page from Joyce.

Guitar-playing coincided with a prolonged GRAD volley detonating in the town. My mother-in-law was at that moment baking bread.

Yoga: my knee seems to be rebounding after the slip—the pain is not too acute, and the poses are nearing the norm.

The water-walk is ahead. Good night.