Meanwhile, my dreams were peopled with
…brave soldiers in brand new uniform with brightly shining green (sic!) boots and then all images and views coalesced into one miraculous vision of an electric bulb issuing its homely light…
I got up at six in the morning. My new mode of life was over. The alarm clock never sounded that night.
From nine till two pm, I was at our Site doing hard labor on improving the layout.
At home after a late lunch, I started assembling a handcart. Actually, it was just re-adjusting of a discarded pram. I had found it in the realm of dust, behind the rugs and blankets screening off the habitable part in the Underground compartment.
Putting a 40-liter milk-flask on it I'd be able to bring water from far off water-heads. I hope the queues over there are not so endless.
Mila, a dear friend of Sahtik's, came on a visit. Her husband, Samvel, had enlisted a phedayee group. The day before he returned home after a night in Krkjan with a bullet slash in his wedding trousers. 'And he never brings home a pennyworth of looting' said Mila with the inseparable mixture of pride and sorrow in her voice.
Earlier, in one of the water-queues I heard a story about some phedayee who, after a lucky combat operation, sent home to his father ten sheep, a shotgun and a couple of tooth gold-cases. Loving son is a lump of pride for any father.
(…was that father's pride really unalloyed? If so he's even luckier than his son…)
It's ten past nine p.m. All of my family went to the Underground while I was out after the water. The shakedown test of the handcart proved it's OK.
On finishing this entry, I'll visit them in the Underground and then – to bed.
Therefore, good night to all and everything.
December 20
Tonight well over seventy shells and missiles hit the town, so the local radio. This day saw the final breakdown of the inner telephone service in the town and Krkjan was captured once again by the phedayees.
In the morning I took the whetting hand-mill back to the Carina's. From there I walked to the new headquarters of the gas pipeline constructing firm and talked to Samvel, the head of the firm, asking to lend me nine slabs of reinforced concrete.
As a guarantee for the transaction, I offered a paid-up and endorsed bill from the local manufacturing firm, SMU-12, for 18 such slabs that I had bought but didn't manage to ship over to our Site when the war broke out. As long as I have paid the money, then in a brighter future they'll have to supply the goods. Right now no enterprise operates down here. Neither does Samvel's organization. The slabs are idly stockpiled at his firm grounds. Of course, lending me those nine slabs he wins nothing. Yet, nothing is lost, ain't it? Just a deal of good will on his part, backed up with the bill I'll leave with him.
