February 15

During yesterday's water-walk, I met one more me—a cart-pulling figure with a flask of the same make, plodding away through the night from the same some-hell-of-a-faraway quarters.

At night I heard explosions of the GRAD—an advanced weapon of mass destruction, according to the Russian TV news program VESTI. What will come next? An H-bomb?

In the morning I went to the Site. The water hose was stolen there.

I clapped up a rough-and-ready one-wheeled barrow. A robust thing—clumsy but functional.

From ten am till now, the bombardment is going on. They fire five-to-ten missiles at a time every half-hour.

When at the Site, I watched a pillar of thick black smoke from a cottage set on fire by a missile. No crowd around it, no firefighters; only the usual shooting-like cracks of the roof slate devoured by flames.

On the way back, I surveyed recent destruction. In the building of Sahtik's school, there also appeared a fresh hole as wide as a church gate. Lots of glassless windows a-gape above the side-walks littered with debris. Rare cars burn the road. Solitary pedestrians abruptly duck and look around after every thundering crack, some of them keep jogging.

I've trained myself not to pull my head into the shoulders at the bangs of bursting shells. Whenever they start to explode I switch on chanting of the Maha-Mantra in my mind—to secure a one-way ride from this here world.

However, during one of the water-walks, in spite of all my cultivated braveness, I quaked and stooped very low at what I took for the wheezing of a shell fragment, but it was just a loud catcall from the fence over my head.

After lunch I, together with Arto, stopped a couple of rat holes in the Underground room; some other maintenance work was done there too.

One page translated. Yoga.

The mother-in-law baked breads upstairs, in the Nasic's kitchen: the landlady's gas oven is much more efficient.

I had supper all by myself.

The water walk's ahead. Good night...