In the history of any family arrives the point when everything dives into snafu even in the absence of a French governess, as was the case at the Oblonskys' house by Leo Tolstoi...

In ours, for instance, all got messed up for the more inevitable reason which unavoidably catches on any family: the children had grown up.

Ruzanna wedded a citizen of Greece and moved to his country, Ashot got married at the place of residence and started paying off the mortgage for a two-room apartment on the second floor – the life trail for the coming couple decades got determined.

Emma having just graduated from school still lived in the house no older than her and, with the principle functions and purposes for our individual cell of society accomplished, it was time to check a little closer who exactly the life was spent with.

The particular feature disclosed about me was my catastrophic discordance with normal people (damn no! because of my innate perfect politeness, I don’t even give a fuck about their normality! Ever!)

‘Not guilty’ pledge I. Tolerance to the bypassed preterite is my life motto because they are the most challenged segment in the population of this here planet and the most—alas!—numerous.

Nonetheless, those were the deduced grounds for my being unable to secure a decent income and stable support, and all I was good at were labors in the process of reproduction (okay, fine, the quality of final products is undeniable, but why don’t I care a bean? After?).

Now, to avoid a possible exposure of my further, equally negative, but undetected yet shortcomings because they always and immorally were tucked away... (No! the main motive was to save the pains to close people were my faults to pop up all of a sudden, in their all-out shocking pack!) And so as to remove the object of investigation out of sight, end August 2013, I put me forth before the unsuspecting look over by Karina, the Head of People Education of the Lachin City and same-named District, and offered my services.

The scan was skin-deep, hasty and I obtained the post of a teacher at the village school in Yezznaggomer — 50 km of a steep make-believe off-road taking start by the bridge next to the customs on the border with Armenia which climbed along the Zabukh River valley and, when up there, to the right for a steeper climb to the height of 2.5 km, all in all…

The following seven years became the most amazing adventure of my life. And anyone familiar, more or less, with parallel worlds will understand me here...

You’ll never find a parallel world on any map, be it even a contour map, which we were tortured with at school.

There is no parallel world whatsoever, not at all, it doesn't and won't exist until you get there.

At school, everything is quite simple – you flick the ball of globe to spin: see? Asuncion! and here we have New Guinea, and this is Greenland for you – just a cinch, easy as pie.

Reality tumbles all this simplicity...

I had to wade through the grasses, which in the world left behind would hardly be knee-deep, but—lo!—they sway their unreachable tops way above my head.

Or be crossing mountain landslides that look like momentarily stopped waterfalls of multi-ton boulders.

Look at yourself through the eyes of hawks hovering in the sky – you’ll see an ant who chooses her way over a pile of sand grits – hey! beware! some of them move under your feet with hollow taps and dickens knows what damn Ant Lion (preying on ants only?) harbor the depths under...

Flowers... Fields of unknown, unseen colors, and even if they did have been met sometime back, somewhere, still it never were fields deluged by the bloom of that colors.

Hornets... Well, okay, let's call them hornets... the size of a grown-up fellow fist…

Or else. Here’s a plain for you. Yes, I know it’s in the mountains, the altitude of 2.5+ km, but I am smack bang in the middle of a plain which has no end, and the mountains are far off, over there, and I walk for a halfday, and fall, dead-tired, face up to the sky, where there are no mountains, nor plains, but just one scorching sun and a pair of hawks waltzing, wingtip to wingtip, synchronously...

And what about a summertime snowdrift?

End June, you are beastly dying of thirst, it’s a one-day walk off the village, the plastic bottle is crackling-empty, and all of a sudden, in a deep pothole with green grass on steep walls, a snowdrift is waiting for you. Yes, darkened by the dust spilt over, loose, but from under it a tiny brooklet gurgles full of coolness, which will not let you die...

Rivers in whose rare backwater stretches it’s impossible to make out that border where the air ends and starts the water, and you have to guess that, yes, – those stones over there are already the bottom, overgrown with algae of semi-precious flowers, and the opposite riverbank is so temptingly close, but still unattainable – the glacially cold gushing current will topple you and drag away together with your alpenstock...

And everything around is overflowing with life, over the brim, it buzzes, whistles, rustles, rumbles in the peals of thunder somewhere in the clouds below your boots, plays with the light of the sun and gusts of the wind...

Unknown roads, not too difficult, it’s just that at times you have to bypass hefty boulders... and you walk for a kilometer, and one more and – it cut off without a trace, any advance farther only by a chopper—caravan routes from millennia back...

A 3D replica of the Vereshchagin's masterpiece "The Apotheosis of War" – the heap of rounded bleached skulls of boulders as tall as a 12-story building...

And those faces, muzzles, snouts stuck out from inside the rocks? Gigantic figures on thrones?.

I was not drunk and I remember everything seen in the parallel, unlike the one which they had been staffing, cramming, ramming into me...

But the main difference between a parallel and the inoculated world is the immeasurable boundlessness of the first, the infinitude which you will find neither among the tombs of Egypt, nor along the musty Venice canals, not even above the abyss of the Grand Canyon, and not at any other well-promoted tourist route equipped with hot dog booths at convenient joints, and warning signs, and guides wearing smiles wider than natural.

Billy…

The dog is a friend? Bosh!. The dog is a part of you, that most faithful part, which will not betray even when you yourself have already betrayed yourself...

They presented Emma with a small silly puppy, Billy, and when he grew too big to suit the backyard by the house of Emma's age, she asked to move the hiddy mongrel to the village.

Her request was met by the means of Karen's "Niva" vehicle, he’s my neighbor in Yezznaggomer.

We stop in the Lachin City to buy provender as there are no shops in our village.

The dog leaps out of the car after me.

I fasten his leash at the iron pipes in a road-side contraption, a kinda fence. Okay, wait, buddy, it won’t take long.

With full bags in both hands leave I the supermarket to be met by his delighted lezghinka-dance on all sides of me.

The brand-new leash from a specialized store keeps a-swish-a-swinging, torn in two by this son of a bitch...

Another passage.

Winter, dead night dark around. I leave the village to be in time for the bus, from the Moshatagh Village.

It’s 5.30 am, the bus starts at 9 am, and it’s a 15-km leg to get there.

The sky is overcast, zero visibility, I walk on and kinda feel, at times, something shoots past rustling over the snow rind in the darkness.

Only nearby Mekyand, after the eight most wolf-dangerous kilometers, he shows up, but keeps off, never coming closer. The SOB’s full aware of his wrongdoing because I did have told him: stay home, uphold the order! And he kinda obeyed and jumped over the hedge back into the courtyard.

And now what?! I need urgently visit Stepanakert (100 km off).

A pack of cookies bought from Susanna’s shop in Moshatagh Village for the parting treat, spilled on the roadside, the bus door slams: fare thee well, fucking moron!

Three days later I’m coming back to Moshatagh by hitch-hiking. A lucky strike – Armen from our village is there too by his "Zhiguli" vehicle!

Susanna, the shopkeeper, says, there’s a stray dog about here, I rush out from the shop.

And there he is!. You're a fucking bitch, Billy, though being a male dog!

No room in the car ‘cause Armen has come down after provender. We load the dog into the trunk, there’s an hour drive to Yezznaggomer along the make-believe road, seriously – no way to go on until you believe this here thing is a road.

Whine, Billy-boy, in the dark trunk, complain to the spare tire, be sorry for your misdeed...

Billy, I am guilty of my dead stupid attempts at weaning you off kleptomania. My bad. Unforgivable.

I was not able to get it at once that you were not stealing, that you’re a hunter by your nature. And, yes, I beat you twice (or thrice?) over the loot you had brought home—the slippers or things from the neighbors’ porches—your game, your prey, your hunting trophy which I had to take back with the most embarrassed apologies. The fucking dumb-ass master of the fucking hunter dog...

The village kids are coming, pleading:

"Let Billy go."

"He’s punished."

"Come on, set him free, he’s good, he won’t never more again."

"He’s punished."

The kids all loved him because he endured anything from them, not a bark, not a growl to shoo them off. And a picture of the kid hugging Billy would score at least 20 likes on Facebook *.

(*The organization is identified as a terrorist one, its activities on the territory of the Russian Federation are prohibited.)

"The only dog in the village that no one is afraid of," says Gaiane, Edik’s wife.

The rest of the dogs were jealous, they always attacked him, in packs, and though being the size of a mature shepherd dog, he looked so small against the background of those wolfhound-gumprs.

He quickly ran away. At times they caught on. He came home oozing blood, barely moving his paws, bitten in the stomach.

He would keep to his kennel for a week and again go out to the road to meet me from school.

Wolfhounds, damned impostors to the title. At night, as the wolves closed in, they would hide in their household yards and bark in three-four-five voices all night long. Every night...

Then Anna, Armen’s wife, came to school to my class.

"They killed Billy in our yard."

I went on till the break bell. What’s the use of hurrying. Or doubting Anna’s words.

In their yard Billy’s lying on the trampled snow. The fangs bared, no look in his eyes.

"They were two," reported Anna. "Ambo’s Pitbool and one more."

Pitbool, the champion of the village in dog fights, when mujiks from the fucking nothing better to do pit their wolfhounds. Pitbool, who even Ambo, his "master", is afraid of, that Pitbool attacked not alone but together with a sixlet.

A no-man's dog entered Anna's yard, sniffed the body, commenced the wailing requiem:

"Open, o, the Gates of Valhalla! He fought bravely to the very end!"

Two empty cement bags took in Billy's body.

I bound the yielding coffin up with a rope and dragged it along through the snowfall.

When we reached the water spring, the dogs from the nearby yards set on a mournful howl.

"He died young, but free! And you, dogs you were always and that's what you will remain!"

Our procession left the village, then I dragged on for another hundred meters, down the slope.

In between the stone walls of a ruin dropped was it – no iron breaker could crash the ground in the wintertime Yezznaggomer.

See you, Billy!

I am guilty before you which is dead sure.

So intelligent I am when it’s too late, when all the smarts are of no use, when you will not run up, clapping your ears, will never lean your paws on my shoulders, and you never rub your forehead against my palm to get a stroke...

Yet all that comes later, but at first...

No, not now... I cannot today.

Eehh, Billy...

* * *