December 26

Dreams awash with

soldiers garlanded with batches of pails, canisters, buckets, flasks and suchlike water containers

In the morning I went to the Site. Someone had slewed the scaffold boxes between the walls. There was a huge dog's body half buried in a snowdrift outside the doorway. The baling wire balls (that I had extracted from the tangled up coils of the barbed wire around the CPSU Block) were stolen from behind the Tool Booth.

After restoring the order, I descended to the bottom of the gorge and cut down fifteen saplings to make stakes for the retaining wall of the projected terraced kitchen garden on our Site's slope to the gorge.

(...I'll show to the converted-wire thief that he's not the only guy about here going to survive!.)

Under the thundering cracks of another bombardment, I cut stairs in the frozen clay of the steep slope and hauled the stakes up there to our Site.

At one pm I returned to our one-but-spacious-room flat. All, of course, were in the Underground. Carina and her kids, having come on a visit, got also jailed there by the fierce shelling and rocketing outside.

When there happened a lengthy lull in the bombardment, I saw the guests to their place pulling the sledge with Tiggo and Rita in it. A downhill job.

Lunch. One page.

Then I again visited the Underground and was suggested to manufacture a woodburner for the room down there. They introduced me to the husband of one of the room's inmates to team up in the undertaking. Husbands to the rest of the sheltererixes are of no use for the purpose – they are representatives of soft-ware castes.

Arto and I undid a huge rectangular ventilation tube from those left in the realm of dust. That way we got tin sheets necessary for the project. We also started to bore the outer wall of the basement with a bar-pick to make a hole for letting the projected woodburner's pipe out. However, the final break-through was postponed till the woodburner be ready, so as not to let the cold in ahead of time.

About noon, a missile or a shell hit a house in this street, just opposite the mother-in-law's. The explosion killed an old woman and wounded her daughter-in-law; while a half-year-old baby didn't get a single scratch.

The inner town telephone communication is restored.

At the Three Taps, alive water-queue transformed into that of pawns. People—reluctant to leave their pails as the markers—put sundry things to secure their place in the queue. You come to the line of flower-pots, used tires, chipped cups, mere stones, thrown away boots and other whatnots to add your marker in the end.

For nearly a week I was following the slow progress of the cone of a red bucket from a firefighting emergency stand. Today it was at only a meter and a half from the Right Tap. Tomorrow, on reaching the water squirt, the pawn-owner (if neither killed nor gone to a village) will bring and fill up all his and his relatives' buckets, pails, canisters and other vessels.

It's twenty past ten pm.

No water-walk today. Just — goodnight to each and everyone.