Today a nineteen-year-old girl was killed by a missile hitting their flat; her mother and a younger sister got heavily wounded.
(…who's in luck?…)
In the morning I spent about two hours in the empty Club.
After lunch one page from ULYSSES. Then, on Roozahna's request, I taught her playing "The Sea Battle".
After today's yoga I had a rare and delightful feeling of well oiled joints and cartilages in my lower extremities.
Supper.
Sahtik and the kids went over to the Underground. The mother-in-law stayed to bake bread.
I have already brought water from the nearby Three Taps. No one there. Every fifteen-twenty minutes, missiles are coming in twos or threes to hit the town with crashing bangs. It is cloudy today, no fanciful views.
The mother-in-law finished baking and I accompanied her to the Underground's entrance.
At home I heated half a bucket of water and washed up all the parts of mine within my reach.
It's high time (11 pm) to say – Good night.
December 22
And even in dreams
…missile attacks went on though with much gaudier rainbow colors until an Azeri paratrooper entered the room and put a razor against my beard…
Deafening silence and feeling that something was fatally wrong awakened me.
At the Club only Veelen, a reporter, dropped in. We had a small talk about the local parliament.
I finished reading of THE BHAGAVAT-GITA. The real thing.
At home Ahshaut was sleeping, the mother-in-law and Roozahna gone to some close relatives in the downhill town. Sahtik was on top of the situation and really perfect in performing. I, for my part, rather dutiful than ravished.
Then I took THE BHAGAVAT-GITA back to Lydia and exemplary paid for it by playing along with her twenty minutes' monologue on the local politics. After unfurling her opinions as to who was guilty of bringing the current situation down here and whose faults and mistakes still hamper the proper handling of it, she produced and read to me her letter to the three Presidents—Armenian, Azeri, and Russian—asking why they're doing nothing about it.
(…thanks to yoga, I haven't got a crick in the neck after half an hour of nodding along sympathetically…)
One page from ULYSSES. Yoga. The pencil game (I was humiliatingly defeated). Supper.
Now all are safely over in the Underground. The water-walk is ahead.
It might seem a dull routine but these water-walks are virtually filled to the brim by confluent stream of fantasies. For instance, the day before yesterday while taking water, in proud solitude, from a spring almost beyond the town I was shot dead by a sharp-shooter from the nearby hill and collapsed into the mud on the brooklet bank mingling my blood with its running waters. And quite often in the course of fantasies at my water-walks, I bury one or another member of my family before fleeing with all of them alive to a secure place in some peaceful state.
