"It’s me, Mommy."

"You? Pumpkin? Go on, dear! Pee, sugar, pee!"

* * *

Bottle #9: ~ Ay, Phedai-jan, Phedai! ~

The screechy deafening discharge at launching of a GRAD missile is heard from afar yet the missiles themselves are nearing unheard, exactly the way ALAZANs do, and only when they brought to Aghdam City the cannons from the Caspian flotilla battleships and those started bombardment of Stepanakert from there, the sound track grew richer – you heard the 'boom!' of a cannon at about 20 kilometers off and in a half-minute from the same sector in the horizon there nears and widens the scream of the air torn apart by the purposeful flight of the shell, until it bursts somewhere in the city – GRHDAHKB!

Everything attuned to the technology of admiral Togo, who sent the flotilla of admiral Rozhdestvensky to rest on the bottom of Tsushima straits on May 27 1905, and—who could ever predict!—exactly that very day 70 years later I was set free after my hitch at a construction battalion in the Soviet Army of the USSR.

Still, the explosions of any sort sounded equally disgusting…

After lunch they always found some urgent work for me and, as a rule, in the underground shelter, my family did – to fix the section with the electric wiring (though all knew the electricity would be cut off all the same), to install the door, to seal the openings between foundation blocks with masonry of cubics meant to stop the chilly droughts as well as the raids of brazen rats, 2 in 1, you know. The task called for fetching cement from the box at our house building site while cubics (limestone blocks of 20 cm x 20 cm x 40 cm) were an easy find about the basement.

On completion the proposed job (intended, presumably, to keep me down there, in the underground's relative security) I retired to our rented flat and plunged into translating of Ulysses. The daily quota was set at 1 page, sometimes I knocked out one and a half, yet hardly a half page was the much more oftener output.

Then it was getting dark and the time to go out after water.

No, I never took the Joyce’s masterpiece with me to the editorial office—you never can tell, and the book was a borrowed property—that's why at the paper's facilities I scribbled a translation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Earth, a si-fi throwaway in the chewing-gum style,still and yet you have to somehow kill time, be it even at war. The undertaking served a practicable distraction though explosions of any remoteness from the scarred desk in the translators' room caused equally dismal contraction of the asshole…

At times I paid visits to the site of our future house, put away till more favorable conditions for construction works. Because you simply can’t let everything just drift by itself left to good will of your neighbors, who have enough of their problems.

The fact of 3-tonne water container being emptied and ladled out to the last crumble of ice was understandable, completely so, on my part. But where the heck disappeared the bundle of the barb-wire collected by me around the CPSU Regional Committee building after the special troops of the Soviet Army abandoned it for good?

The twigs and boughs chopped off the pine trees in Chkalov Street by the fragments at cover shelling were used for the construction of a passable Xmas tree so that the kids would receive divers impressions at their childhood and not only the monotonous panicky alertness of the adults around them in the miserly flicker of a candle dripping molten wax tears in the murky basement vault…