However, all the above-supposed had taken place before my arrival from over the Caucasus and I had no desire to inadvertently chafe the sore spot by ferreting the details out.

The Pioneer Room was equipped with the ubiquitous mark of such cubbies – the compound attribute of the Pioneer Horn-and-Drum, and furnished with a nondescript desk inserted by the wall opposite the entrance, bearing the cross of the school library—a couple scores of books worn to tatters.

The heaps of happy kids in pioneer red ties hung from two walls in the cardboard visuals for teaching Armenian to the elementary kids and English grammar to the students at secondary schools because the third wall (opposite to the library) was barely wide enough for the wooden door from the corridor, which ran along the Teachers’ Room (the former living room) towards two itsy-bitsy classrooms sliced out by the plywood partitioning from the erstwhile bedroom (five more partitioned classrooms were on the first floor). The fourth wall in the room was a complex of small glass panes in the wooden window binding, a score of them in four tiers up to the low ceiling.

The square sheet of tin, substituting glass in one of the panes in the middle of the laced structure, had a round hole in its center, cut to let out the 5.8-inch-wide tin stovepipe rising from the rectangular-cuboid tin woodburner [60 cm x 40 cm x 40 cm] on 4 tin legs to keep the whole contraption 25 cm clear off the boards in the floor. All the tin—in the pipes, and the elbow, and the woodburner itself—grew the steady crust-layer of brown rust. The round gap to let the pipe out was cut keeping eye on thrusting it thru with ease and generously provided constant ventilation and immediate contact with the outside weather.

The Horn-and-Drum couple sat modestly mum on the stand shelf by the door, in the company of a hefty handbell of verdigris bronze girded with the cast relief running in Russian, “Gift from Valdai”, a genius of mighty clangor to announce the start/end of a class/break…

The firewood for the tin woodburner I cleft nearby the old-tin canopy-shelter in the yard, close to the school privy of 2 doors marked “F” and “M”, segregationally.

The ax kept flying off its handle. Old Goorguen, the school watchman from the next-door house, issued an ironic chortle into his white-tabacco-yellowed mustaches to every flight he witnessed, and the Principal, named Surfic, never omitted to compliment my style at wood-splitting that witnessed to my having firm roots in the class of intelligentsia. She admired my forbearance – not a single, obscene, 4-letter word after that flying piece of fucking iron…

Late in the evening, the tin woodburner turned the Pioneers’ Room into a scorching sauna but after midnight the freezing cold harassed me even through the mattress upon the folding bed, and in the morning I got from under the thick sheep-wool-filled blanket up into the raw cold of mountain winter. All of the bedding temporary donation by the teaching and cleaning staff at school…

I did not plunged into translating Ulyssesright away. First off, employing The Chamber’s 20th Century Dictionary, I translated The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man(also by Joyce) under the pretext it was necessary to better dig that guy, Stephen Dedalus, the youngest in the Ulysses’s trinity of main characters.

Whenever some passage stayed unclear even after The Chamber’s 20th Century Dictionary, the following Sunday saw my travel by bus to Stepanakert, the capital of the Autonomous Region to keep a council with