After the break two missile attacks hit the town. Lenic, sheltering in the doorway of the Renderers', tried to talk me into leaving the room: what if a missile bursts in right through the window opposite my desk, eh?
'I'll never be aware of the fact', was my reply.
His advise to at least move over into the corner was also turned down—should a missile dash in I am rather for instant death than any wounds.
About four pm, I finished a rendering and phoned to the Orliana's. Sahtik was just setting off back home. I waited for her and the kids in the desolate emptiness of the Editorial House.
When on our last leg towards the Underground we were passing the Three Taps (Sahtik rather wound-up by the earlier attacks in the day), I detected the pale flame of Alazans
flying on our left.
'Now it'll …' I thought just that much before off went the crash of blasts.
Roozahna—all mad shrieks—bolted towards the flock of water-queuers that froze like a line of wax figures next to the Three Taps. Sahtik followed the suit.
(…it's just so human – to seek safety in a thicker mass of fellow beings: let someone else from the herd be snatched, not me!.)
Ahshaut and I were walking on, hand in hand. Lagging, in fact. He was fairly tired after doing it all the way uphill from the Orliana's.
The crowd shouted at me to grab the child and hare off, lest it got frightened. Defiantly, I kept walking on. In my opinion, Ahshaut would sure get scared if I followed the advise.
Still, I'm not a daredevil—far from it!—that funny feeling of mine never fades away and most of my waking hours I'm busy fighting the willies down. That tiny tearful whimper squeezed in my throat behind the Adam's apple.
At today's yoga my left knee protested painfully when in the Lotus.
Sahtik, on a flying visit from the Underground announced proudly that by Orliana's scales, she's three kilos lighter than before… O, women, not frailty, but vanity is your name. Even the war can't straighten them out.
It's half-past-nine pm, I am alone.
A tranquil night smirks outdoors.
December 20
A nasty night it was, but I stubbornly slept it through. In dreams
…I tilled a kitchen garden on a too boggy mountain slope and then rode a bicycle along a wide path of sand getting finer and deeper and turning the trail into a hopelessly impassable dusthole…
At the workplace I toiled at rendering four articles distracted shortly by a small talk with Rita on her visit to the Renderers' to get warm at the block-stone heater partly jutting from under my desk.
