For nearly a week I was following the slow progress of the cone of a red bucket from a firefighting emergency stand. Today it was at only a meter and a half from the Right Tap. Tomorrow, on reaching the water squirt, the pawn-owner (if neither killed nor gone to a village) will bring and fill up all his and his relatives' buckets, pails, canisters and other vessels.
It's twenty past ten pm.
No water-walk today. Just – goodnight to each and everyone.
Dece…
Holy shit!! Just this very moment I got it that quite for a while I kept to false dating. Nah! It is –
January 27
Dreams also full of war. This night
...ten-year-old fourth-graders from the Hndzristan Village School were keeping the front-line against the Vermacht troops…
Morning at the Club. Ahlya described how her five year old boy didn't want to understand that one piece of bread is enough for one person.
Araic related about their training squad. They have only two guns for forty would-be phedayees and no maps of this country. For map-reading classes they use an odd map of some Belorussian region in it.
Rita asked me for a book to read. She'd rather have a love story.
After lunch, I was Arto's hand in the woodburner manufacture. However, perforation of the basement wall was mainly my concern.
By the combined efforts of the skilled (Arto) and unskilled (me) workforce the woodburner got duly produced and installed. Arto furnished the pipe-passage with a wooden frame and partly glazed it leaving a gap for the pipe only. Now they don't have to use an oillamp in the daytime down there.
Presently, the number of shelterers in this Underground is estimated at about three hundred people. May easily be so. They dwell in segregated compartments. Just like in ancient Sparta – barracks for males and barracks for females and kids.
Supper. One page.
The water-walk was stupendously short today; when passing the neighbor quarter—the starting leg in my long and winding rout to the far-off water-head—I saw there was no queue at their street water-hose.
So, let's call it a day and wish good night to all good, and evil, and those in-between, ones.
January 28
Dreams bring no relief.
...war and pitch black darkness full of stampeding crowds and endless water-carrying…
At times it's hard to say dreaming from reality to discern their border-line and see where I am at a given moment.
In the morning I went to the Club. The red cone of the firefighting-bucket has commenced another slug journey from the end in the pawn line towards the Three Taps.
