Almost all of the winter 1991 – 1992 Stepanakert spent in the cross-fire from 4 directions. From top it was shelled by the artillery in the Sushi City, from the bottom side pelted the missiles launched at the Khojalu Village, from left the bombardment was carried out by the howitzers positioned in the Malubalu Village, and from right the battery in Janhasan Village added their share to the barrage.

Machine gun and automatic weapon fire from Krkjan (the uppermost, Azerbaijani populated part of the Stepanakert City itself) did not reach farther than the theater building.

We rented a one-(but-wide)-room apartment in Tumanian Street and in the basement of the nearest 5-story apartment block—at a stone throw distance from the house we dwelt in—I had to empty out the space for sheltering of my family in between the walls of bulky concrete-blocks in the building's foundation under the ground.

At the outset of the movement for the independence of Mountainous Karabakh, while there existed yet communications with Armenia, they shipped from up there some relief including garments, deficit food products, and the booklets of the Holy Bible adaptation for kids in Armenian.

Conceivably, certain undeclared goods arrived in as well which is better known to the members of the special Committee formed then in Stepanakert for supervising the said relief and supplements among the local population after a short-term storing away in the basement of the mentioned 5-story apartment block.

As a result, there grew a huge heap of smashed craters, emptied containers, broken bottles and other vestiges of clandestine orgies of those rats, the Committee members, in one of the basement sections. Nobody of the aboriginal tenants of the apartment block had enough vigor to undertake such an enormous cleansing labor and the section had to wait till being liberated by my hands following the lead from my mother-in-law.

However, even I could do only half of the job which half though was enough for the accommodation of my wife and our kids—the 2-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter from her first marriage—plus two unknown females who failed to find room for themselves in other sections of the overcrowded basement-shelter.

My mother-in-law, among a dozen of other ladies from the surrounding neighborhood of predominantly private houses, sheltered in a tailor’s workshop (who had successfully taken away everything but the walls) in the nearby 2-story block of flats in fairly dilapidated state and I dead refused leaving the one-but-wide room in the first floor of our renters’ house which was equipped with a cast pig-iron stove for gas-heating, the room was.

The ultimate condition of survival in Stepanakert that winter was water. Having water for drinking, food-processing, laundry, and toilet flashing (if not blessed with an outhouse in the yard) was the foremost challenge because of its all-embracing deficit.

The trunk pipeline supplying water from the river over a dozen of kilometers away had been sabotaged and the employees at the city water-supplying services guessed (quite understandably) that being engaged in renovating works in the terrain open to pinpointed shooting by snipers would not be much different from an out-and-out suicidal action and they would blow it up the very next day all the same.

In difference to Leningrad blockaded in WWII, the Stepanakerters did not prepossess the Neva river by their side and had to rely on too few street taps of water running from springs in the nearby slopes... Multimeter noisy queues snaked to those taps to put their pail under a thumb-thick leak of water, to scatter and/or press themselves to the walls of the nearest buildings in another artillery/missile attack.

I, personally, preferred to go after water at night not because late or small hours prevented shelling—artillery men worked round the clock—but in the dark the queues seemed shorter, sort of.

In the morning I went to work though the newspaper, naturally, ceased circulating and no one proposed me to translate an editorial or stuff any more. However, I possessed a skeleton key to the translators' room furnished with three desks bearing scars left by the raw facts of life and two hard chairs so at the rare days of relative calm and no shelling (because, say, of another peace-broker team arrival to the region) those of my colleagues who dropped in yielding to their habit of too deep embedment or because of having nothing better to do were pleasantly surprised to note that there was someone in the building, after all.

The seedy 2-storied editorial office building (a couple of blocks off the printing house) was lost in the shadow of the right wing in the mighty gray 4-storied parallelepiped of the Regional Committee of the CPSU, a kinda towboat by an ironclad battleship. And when the editorial House Keeper tried to introduce locking the entrance door with a heavy padlock as soon as an hour after opening then—thanks to being on friendly terms with Rashid, the watchman at the editorial office—I managed to obtain the entrance key imprint in a piece of molding clay our kids used to play with. The duplicate key turned out okay because of my skills of a locksmith of the third category acquired at the Konotop Steam-Engine-And-Railroad-Car-Renovating Plant though in absence of a vice it was not a trivial task.

(For the ethnography lovers.

Well, yes, “Rashid” is not a typical Armenian name but then playing with names is a deep-rooted tradition within the Armenian ethos. The parents feel at liberty to use any name as long as it sounds lovely (by their estimation) or would be correct politically, or both. Hence these slews of Arthurs, Hamlets, Ophelias, Jameses, Johnie (diminutive-affectionate from John), Lolitas and so forth among otherwise Armenian people.

The teacher of Geography from School 7 was named Argentina (which is not a household-between-us-kids moniker but her legitimate ID-verified handle). Or how about “Chapaev”? Who cares it’s the Civil War and innumerable jokes’ personage’s name, Daddy just liked the sound.

And admire the ingenuity at constructing the following, rather wide-spread in Armenia name from V. I. Len(in) – eliminating dots and brackets you get Vilen.

A woman named “Electrification” all her life had to respond to the shortened form: “Ele”. A lucky strike if you consider the original, eh?

Or take for instance the story behind the name of my sister-in-law? Her mother’s mother-in-law (the mother-in-law of my mother-in-law), while on a visit to her relatives in Moscow, liked something she heard in a radio-play about Jean D’Ark from Orleans. (Radio-play is an audio soap-opera broadcast over the radio because it was in 50’s when the USSR hadn’t got television yet and the fact of TV’s entering the Americans’ life in 30’s serves another proof that the West started to rot before us.) Now, she asked the relatives to scribble something she had heard from the radio on a paper slip, my mother’s-in-law mother-in-law did.

And who will deny the beauty in “Orleana” name?

There happen certain admixture of prejudice too and if a family is beset with stillbirths or babies lacking real stamina they would use a Muslim (more often than not some Turkish) name for a newborn which quick-fix helps because they believe it should work.

That renders pretty common the presence of a watchman whose given name was Rashid as well as his always at ready smile full of square teeth. And I have also met a small kid Elchibey (they used the name of the belligerent president of Azerbaijan from 90’s for that quite quick and able mischief).

In the morning our family got together in the one-room apartment or, if it was shelling outdoors, I took a kettle of water boiled on the gas stove to the basement and then went out to visit the families of two more daughters of my mother-in-law to pass them, in the basements of their five-story blocks, the bread baked by her the previous night in the gas-oven of our one-but-wide-room flat.

They answered with a jar of cream or mittens for Ashot that had become too small for his cousin already, the hand-me-downs were not quite our son’s size but of a manly cut and tinge…

The usual in-family circulation understandable to them who lived in the era of deficits…

And then, alleviated and full of feeling of my duty done, giving out tiny starch-screeches of the immaculate integrity, I opened the massive padlock on the entrance door to the editorial office building and latched it from inside because the editorial office House Manager (not present) felt uneasy alarms about the Russian and Armenian typewriters in the typists’ pool on the second floor, you know.

The translators’ was on the first floor and when they pulled and jerked the entrance door from outside it was not hard for me to go and check (once a week) what’s up.

Once it was Sylva the typist who believed wild rumors that the editorial office got hit by an Alazan and burned up. Seeing it was all bullshit she felt happy and decided to take home her slippers from her desk in the pool's room because it’s easier for her to type when the are on, somehow, yes.

Or it could be an outsider veteran graphomaniac (you would not make out the exact age thru his stubble but no less than eighty) who brought a parcel of “material” prepared by him for the paper dead for at least two months. Which is not paper’s guilt with all the newsstands locked up or destroyed.

Carried away by the creative efforts the writer omitted noticing the trifle.

At too near explosions the building hopped and the window panes, with the parting tinkle, spilled the glass fragments over the floor. I raked them with the broom borrowed from the toilet room in the end of the corridor and helped Rashid to seal the gaping window frames with the vinyl tape from the house manager’s keeps. The watchman was stinking with wine and bitching bitterly to his hammer about the janitors who had stopped coming to do their job.

I acted a deaf to his harangues because I had no desire to guess who he was hinting at.

Actually, Alazans produced more noise than effect. The missile could not pierce a stone wall 40 cm thick. Yes, the outer surface would go kaput the inside became all cracks and crevices but still it lacked might to penetrate and sky in. If it hit in through the window or balcony door then, yes, no arguing, the place is smashed, all the partitions rammed down. However, if it were some crummy house of wood, then one hit of an Alazan would make a heap of trash of it.

But then at night, when going after water, I had a charming opportunity to admire their beautiful flight—from purely aesthetic point of view—a lazy yellow comet from Shushi descending in a languid arc onto the city (too high this time to get at me) and up from the ground long stitches of tracing rounds from Kalashnikov or two burst across the course to its final crash in the city, and all that against the background of the full moon – lo! here comes another! and the colorful stitches again! no use whatsoever yet the surrealism of the picture looked awesome.

And after Stepanakert was left not only by the special troops of the Soviet Army but the primordial regiment as well, they unleashed bombarding the city by the missile installations GRAD and those things you just couldn’t play down – undeniably powerful beasts. The hit of just two rockets was enough to level the three-story wing in the City Council (where there was TV studio). The impact left low hillocks of crushed masonry and some assaulting stink of burned rubber. I cannot definitely state whether it was the smell of the explosives or from the buried TV equipment…

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