At home half a page from ULYSSES.
Instead of yoga I tried to cut off the bottom of a milk bottle and convert it into an oil lamp chimney. The fragile spare part of our lamp crashed one day ago when in the Underground they were chasing an arrogant rat away.
The project turned out to be a hard nut to crack, I only spoiled two milk bottles at no avail. It's just a 'no go'. I'd better think of something else.
It's ten past nine pm. All are in bed; the candle next to my blocknote is almost burnt up.
Good night to all, be they of wealth or misery.
December 10
And this night too the two of us were making love, not war.
In the morning I went to the work place. It was open but in complete "no-work" conditions—neither electricity, nor warmth, nor materials (as they call there the articles to render).
For a nice starter I had a small talk with Ms. Stella. She narrated about five Armenian policemen from Hadroot burned alive. Later, with the mediation of the Russian border guards their corpses were transferred to the relatives.
Then Ahlya, the cautious typist, embarked upon a discourse that there existed some righter practices for keeping your family as well as more promising principles for trusting in God. At half past eleven am I felt I was fed up and went home.
Presently the most endemic figure in the streets is that of a man with pails carrying water or else in search of a not-too-long water queue.
After lunch I equipped our one-but-spacious room with a kind of gas-torch by constructing a thin-gum pipeline running from the gas range in the hall-aka-kitchen all the way up to the top of the bookcase. I hope it won't convert the room into a gas chamber.
Why did Azeri side not cut off gas for the town? Very siple. We are on the trunk-line pipe reaching the town of Shushi with its considerable population (presently only Azeries) depending on this same gas.
One page from ULYSSES. Yoga. Supper. Water.
Most good night to all.
December 11
Tonight in my flashback dreams not of lions was dreaming I but of
…night trains and unloyal friends…
In my wake hours, till noon I, poetically speaking, was converting swords into plowshares, which, practically, looked like one more avid peasant horsing around the baling wire (that served the core string in the barber-wire coils left behind by the pulled out Red Army troops) by the CPSU District Committee Block grounds.
I was not the first in the undertaking, folks had been collecting the wire for at least a couple of weeks. However, if you're not particularly interested in the barbs you can still find a considerable amount of scrap wire there.
