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The autumn came and, soaping myself in the bathhouse, I suddenly discovered a bulging stomach on me, kinda rigid fore wings of a May beetle, and similarly unyielding. Soon, my mother noticed that I was turning double-chinned. After one of the late evening dinners at 13 Decemberists, she put her hand on my shoulder to victoriously announce, "You're getting fat, Brother Rabbit! Relax, so it should be, you're from our breed."

I did not answer to the smile in her round face under which—I knew that without looking—a much rounder figure was expanding, so I just kept silent. I did not want to be of such a round breed and turn a blubber guts. I would not succumb to their iminazine! Some radical measures were the must.

If, for a start, we consider those same dinners at 13 Decemberists, my mother skillfully piled no less than two servings of rice or potatoes onto a plate. At the same time, everything was so delicious, that you imperceptibly ate all of the humongous portion.

Repeal of bread became the first step in my struggle to keep lean. Okay, I eat as much as you care to load, but I'm not obliged to eat bread along with it, and I will not. So, I cut it out from my diet even at canteens.

As for the "will not" that was a sham, because I always liked bread, especially rye bread, moreover when it's warm. I was able to finish off a loaf of such bread at one sitting, without any spicing stuff, except for the byword learned from my father: "Soft bread and mouth wide make the heart rejoice at every bite."

A month later, marking that the breadless diet was of no help, I just dropped going to canteens at the midday break which move brought equilibrium to the previously impaired balance. Breakfast in the canteen plus two servings at the late evening dinner stood for traditional 3 daily meals. As for the midday havvage, I devoured, by our team's definition, Vsesvit, brought once a month by me to the bricklayers' trailer for reading at midday breaks. As a result, by the New Year Eve, in the same city bathhouse behind Square of Konotop Divisions, I proudly observed my sunken, like on a healthy wolf, stomach. I always preferred that form… Some concave-bellied Narcissus.

(…there are lots of words you seemingly know because you have heard, read, and even pronounced them more than once. Sure, I know the word!.. until asked about its meaning. But overly inquisitive bastards are of seldom ilk, and you continue to interpret seemingly known words the way you vaguely feel they should mean, sort of…

The word "asceticism" is one of the brightest examples of how people do not understand what they themselves are about. 90 percent of the population, to whom the word, like, yes, clear, would imagine a man of wildly lambent eyes above a hirsute ungroomed beard, weary with his self-inflicted tortures and privations. This is just as wrong as applying the word "athlete" exclusively to sumo fighters.

In fact, the root meaning of "asceticism" is conveyed by the word "training". If, cherishing ambitions to win a beer tournament, you keep putting away 3 liters of beer daily, so as to train and keep yourself in proper form, you are an ascetic. As well, as the neighbor's girl that every day rushes violin scales thru your apartment wall. Damn her asceticism with all those f-f..er..flats and sharps!

On the whole, an ascetical ascetic, preparing themselves for future life in heaven, is nothing but a special case among all other sorts of asceticism manifest in manifold patterns, both short and long-term, depending on the purpose of training…)

And what—if I may ask—were the goals that made me so rigorously guard my being thin as a rake, and every weekday write out unfamiliar words from the newspaper Morning Star? As I have tried already to explain, my general plans were always marked by ungetriddable vagueness in their details. I simply felt that this or other something had to be done and, therefore, I did so…

The extracts from the Morning Star called for a keen attentive self-cross-checking. When meeting in the newspaper some incomprehensible word about which I definitely knew it had been met and more than once already, there rose temptation to neglect it because it was exactly same bugger! Okay, and what's the meaning, eh?

To rummage thru the pile of scribbled up copybooks seemed way too tedious, much easier was to look it up anew in Chamber's Dictionary and write it out one more time. As a result, more than once I happened to look up a word whose entry page number I could say by heart, but not its meaning. Some colander of a memory. That's what asceticism does to a person, making you go thru a certain set of actions hardly knowing why you have to…

For me, the incident of that evening was not a temptation, I rather felt amazed. And she, on her part, was not seducing me and only tried to claim fulfillment of parental duty because I was grossly indebted to Lenochka. I never took her in my arms, nor kept her in my lap, nor raffled caressingly her hair, nor fondled her cheek, not to mention other “nors” of what I owed her. We just lived in the same khutta, where she had once been told that I was her dad, yet who would earnestly consider me a father? Just some dry abstract formula, a contactless, symbolic, dad.

Of course, I never gave her the cold shoulder, and at times I could even get carried away by talking to her, but for a child that, probably, is not enough. And for me, as a father, that surely is not enough but just so turned out my relationships with each and every one of my five children…

When Lenochka was born, I simply was not ripe yet for the role of father. Dad at eighteen? With all due respect to Swan of Avon, that’s just ludicrous. Then followed the years at the construction battalion and the institute…

When you were born, I was already fit to be a father, and I loved you selflessly, but not for long enough – my reputation separated us.

I met Ruzanna at her seventh year. She called me "daddy" all along, and I loved her as my daughter but, for the first time, I hugged her when she was departing to Greece, to her husband Apostolos. The consequences of that same chronic, cursed, contactlessness…

Cuddling of both Ahshaut and Emma, born after him, was impossible before Ruzanna, their elder sister, because she'd seen from me nothing of the kind, so caressing them in front of her wasn't right, it would be a glaring iniquity. That’s how the father of five children remained just a formal dad. Poor kids!. Yet, taking pity on them only is not just, what about me, who lived a life devoid of children's warmth and fondness?

Except for that occurrence, when four-year-old Emma busted her head in the courtyard of our unfinished house when trying to repeat the number of Chinese circus actors seen on the TV. The oozing blood soaked her hair and stained my shirt sleeve when I was carrying her in my arms to the former regional, and now republican, hospital. A weightless, frightened birdie clinging to my chest in anticipation of something terrible, unknown, she didn’t cry at all, believing everything would be fine since Dad was by her side.

(…children at that age look up to their father as to God, and later they grow up and become atheists because the Almighty, as it turns out, is just a stubborn wrinkled curmudgeon who does not understand a thing…)

The nurse at the traumatic unit treated the wound, the on-duty doctor prescribed antibiotics and 2 days later, when I brought Emma for a second inspection, he yelled at me for being a penny pincher saving on medicine for my own child! Stupidity is incurable, even a diploma is of no help here…

At the end of the month in the end of the 90s, one week and a half before the salary, I was borrowing bread from the nearest shop and the seller, Razmik was his name, did not even write me into his ledger of misery debtors. In the pharmacies though the drugs were released only for ready money…

On the payday, straight from the line to the university cashier window, I walked off to pay for that beggarly bread, and then handed the rest of my salary to Sahtic. It doesn't not work to make a private “stash” if in the month end you're begging bread from Razmik…

For the record, there is nothing easier than creating a university. You take Stepanakert Pedagogical Institute and call it State University – enjoy!.

I got a job there when they kicked me out of the Supreme Council. And rightly so, with the officially ended war, the management had all the reasons to find out: who it was that analyst of theirs wearing such a brazen mug.

But that was just an outward appearance, because inside I was afraid like everybody else, only that I restrained myself and didn’t race down to the basement used as the bomb shelter, but kept to the corner of my office room, away from the window, and at 18:00 sharp I left the building of the former regional party committee and walked along the empty streets midst the crushing roar of the cannonade. First, what's the difference? And secondly, it’s quite impossible to predict where the next shell, missile, or bomb would burst up…

Arthur Mkrtchian, the first Chairman of the Supreme Council of the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh, gave me the job of an analyst before they killed him under the guise of suicide so that no one would ever dare disobey Big Brother.

Well, yes, like, after putting a bullet thru my head, I removed the cartridge case and accurately cleaned the pistol. However, a more authoritative investigator flew in from Yerevan and explained how all that was possible, and Arthur’s wife withdrew her testimony about the dark-haired guest who knocked to their apartment door a couple of minutes before the tragedy because she had to raise their son as a single mother…

Now, following his updated version, all that day she spent in the bedroom because of the temperature and didn't hear anything at all. Yes, people from the nearby five-story blocks saw her rushing to the apartment balcony to scream "murderers!" after a KAMAZ truck without the license number which was leaving the common yard, yet the investigation filed no such testimonies because no one bothered to ask people. So, her son will grow up and get the diploma from the local university, and find a quiet nine-to-six in a quiet institution, like, Protection of Monuments or something. He'll get married and then his wife will bear a boy and they'll christen the baby Arthur to commemorate his grandpa, you know. So is my prognostication…

the most final
concluding work

:from the personal
site
of
a graphomaniac