I was doing my yoga when the last gas in the heater gave out. Yet, like a real yogi, I kept my cool and pretended being too much taken up with asanas to let so earthly trifles impair my listless tranquility. And the trick worked! For a few blissful moments, I felt a complete indifference to anything. However, the chill in the room grew too nasty and my make-believe bliss evaporated. Besides, it's not an easy task to see the Parathma inside your heart when they kick up such a hell of noise outdoors.
It's five-to-ten pm. Thick fog outside mixed with oppressive silence.
December 29
No gas, no electricity… Once upon a time in my heady youth, I was ardently revealing to what-was-his-name that no life is possible without playing the guitar three evenings a week at the dance-floor. However, in my later curriculum vitae, I did manage to survive without so an indispensable necessity sometimes for years at a stretch. How long can one last out without gas and electricity?
Missile attacks and artillery shelling raged all the day. Random shell bursts are most unnerving. Scattered glass splinters spread the sidewalks; walls of the buildings cracked open with meter-wide holes. Axes sound all over the town. People fell trees in the streets to get fuel for their tin woodburners.
From the morning and till four pm, I shoveled clay planing the Site's layout. When I came back, the mother-in-law was baking breads on a round sheet of iron put over the open fire in the yard.
Sahtik and the kids spent all the day in the Underground. It's dark and dusty down there. Galloping rats. Smoking lamps.
Perversely, I felt some kind of smug satisfaction out of the thought that our kids had seen not only all that but also the glimmer of a Christmas Tree lights.
The mother-in-law trusted me with the delivery of hot bread to Carina and Orliana. I ran the errand willingly and gladly. Desolate streets. Din of bursts. A cloth placard 'All to vote!' wired over the street trembling in the sharp wind. The gaudy slippers in the much too wide Department Store windows looked ridiculously defenseless.
Sashic responded to the delivered bread by sending over a baton of sausage and a jar of bland.
On my way back, I caught up with Valeric, a worker from the pipeline construction firm. Stately strutted we uphill together, talking of things through the peals of thundering cannonade. He narrated how the day before yesterday a couple of local cops were beating inside their windowless mini-bus two Azeri prisoners of war bleeding with wounds, freshly captured by
