The staff included Head of the Press Center, Gegham; his secretary, Agavni; the professional video camera operator, Benik; the PC’s white Niva driver, Razmic, and the analyst/translator, Sehrguey.

The room was constantly submerged into thick cigarette smoke, with both lost in and adding to it multinational media, represented by compact groups and fearless individual correspondents with photo and video cameras, backpacks, and other equipment necessary for visiting the planet's hot spots.

They arrived primarily from the former fraternal camp of socialism, which had collapsed together with the fall of the Berlin Wall and transformed into the free states of Eastern Europe. They were eager to see if the Godzilla Cockroach, aka the USSR, was dead for good.

Although even from outside, it was already evident enough that the indestructible Union of Victorious Socialism with a Human Face (the authentically accurate nickname, to distinguish it from either the Swedish knockoff model or Chinese disgustingly cheap retail goods by Chairman Mao) had suffered a major stroke, collapsed, and properly fallen apart.

All that had already become common knowledge, but the Karabakh Armenians, who were the first to rise up against the Soviet terror machine, gathering in mass rallies on Stepanakert's main square in front of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, have not yet faded from the memories of news providers.

(Predominantly, of so retentive memory could boast the editors in Eastern European countries, it bears repeating. However, wise news mongers of any nationality clearly know that news from hot spots, where people are being cut to pieces by bombs, missiles, and even knives, is in demand constantly. The knowledge that there is someone worse off than you presents with a positive charge and motivation to go on wallowing in the muck of our best possible world. The war of independence, like any other, stimulated news tourism.)

Well, right at the beginning, the crowd filled Lenin Square. People chanted, 'We demand! We demand!' They held placards depicting a clenched fist. In addition, real fists were raised above the crowd to the rhythm of 'Demand!'

In order to comply with international norms for such situations, the Regional Executive Committee of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region adopted a resolution requesting Baku, Moscow, and Yerevan to transfer Nagorno-Karabakh to the jurisdiction of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. Daily rallies on the main square continued, but soon came to an end.

Neither water cannons nor tear gas were used to suppress the demonstrations in Stepanakert. This phenomenon, unheard of during the entire Soviet era, was met with a remote response—in a city 400 kilometers from Lenin Square, where people were holding placards reading 'Demand!'

The Sumgait Tragedy. Three days and three nights of pogroms in a city 35 kilometers (27 to 45 minutes) off Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Three days of murder, torture, rape, throwing people off their apartment balconies, dragging a strangled baby in the noose behind a motorcycle. You name it.

It was unthinkable; such atrocities could only happen in distant Rwanda or Jakarta, but not within the borders of our common and united Homeland.

Three days and three nights of genocide, when they break down the door of your home, commit the unspeakable against your family, before your very eyes, before killing you because your last name ends in '-ian.'

Moreover, there were '-ians' among the brutal gangs, because Sumgait, a city of young oil workers, was built by prisoners, and many remained there after their stretches were done; in the best traditions of Soviet urban planning: the Zone lays the foundations of future cities.

When the ex-convicts and 'chemists' were unleashed, many Azerbaijani citizens joined them, while other Azerbaijani citizens sheltered their neighbors of Armenian descent.

Humanity and nationality are two different things.

After three days and nights of marking time in full combat readiness, Soviet Army units restored order in the city…

End that year, Mikhail Gorbachev was elected the first President of the Soviet Union, which immediately imploded and disintegrated into numerous independent states because in too many places people picked up the chant 'We demand!'

~ ~ ~

In short, the USSR collapsed, and the Armenians of Mountainous Karabakh were forced to defend their land and lives in a war of independence. All sorts of international (mostly European) media correspondents arrived from Yerevan (the capital of the independent Republic of Armenia) to Stepanakert (the capital of the self-proclaimed, but never recognized, Republic of Mountainous Karabakh) by night helicopter flights, so as not to risk being shot down in daylight flying in between the tumbs (Karabakh Mountains).

They arrived at the RMK SU Press Center and handed their business cards to Gegham, who dumped them in his desk drawer, atop piles of the like pieces of paper.

Activists from various political parties and movements that had sprung up in the regions and capitals of the former USSR also arrived on the same night flights (with less regularity) to amass personal political capital useful when back home, like, 'I've even been to Karabakh!'

In Stepanakert at that time there were no hotels or restaurants, but there were plenty of artillery and rocket attacks and air strikes, so visitors of both categories did not stay long.

Except for the two-meter-tall, blond Viking from Holland, who got lost among the tumbs and captured by the Azerbaijani side, only to be brought back to the same forest a week later and shown the way to a nearby Armenian village because members of the international media and the global community had sent a vehement note of protest to the Baku authorities.

~ ~ ~

The champion in holding out became an engineer from Moscow, who came to visit relatives. He stayed in Stepanakert for 10 days.

His parents had taken him to Moscow as a child, and during his marathon stay, he would occasionally pop into the Press Center room to pull a chair from the wall to my end of the desk reserved for subordinates and chat in Russian, which had long since become his native language.

The rest of the Greek-Czech-Dutch-Estonian (or whatever) crowd huddled around Gegham's desk, smoking their cigarettes and chatting animatedly in Mass-Median lingo.

Oh! My apologies! The Dutchman turned out to be a non-smoker…

So, the engineer wanted someone without an accent, and his relatives didn't provide him with such a luxury. Although, perhaps there was a hidden agenda, too, namely, to find an answer to the nagging question:

Why is he here?

So he needed my help, as a specialist, so to speak. After all, an analyst's job description requires finding answers, right?

~ ~ ~

The case unfolded as follows: one of many engineers at one of many Moscow enterprises, an almost-native Moscow Armenian, peacefully leaves the plant through the gate at the end of the workday and receives an unexpected offer to get into a waiting black Volga.

They take him to the KGB (his tongue isn't yet accustomed to pronouncing it 'FSB'). In a very spacious office, they politely invite him to visit his relatives in Stepanakert. Travel expenses have been allocated, and his plant management has already signed an order granting him an indefinite leave.

And what's his assignment? No assignment, other than to stay with his relatives, whom he's longed for since moving to Moscow at the age of four.

And here he is, swallowing the foreign cigarettes smoke, looking me in the eye, and asking amidst the general hubbub: 'Why?'

Two days after Artur's murder, he came to say goodbye; he got the signal it was time to come back to Moscow. And so he leaves, carrying a puzzled look in his eyes: 'Why?'

~ ~ ~

For my strictly personal use, I gave him the working nickname 'Weather Probe.' There are these balloons equipped with a bunch of sensors for launching into the upper atmosphere to record current meteorological conditions in said layers.

When he returns to Moscow, he'll be given another free ride to a polite interview in a spacious office. A meaningless conversation about this and that, because a weather balloon has no need to know the data delivered by its recording device.

Or maybe the conversation will be very brief, a pure formality, you know. What's the point of delving into a completed mission? Good job, that dark-haired guy from the Armenian KGB! O, rocks! Again?… What was that? Aha! The NSS for the National Security Service of the independent Republic of Armenia…

~ ~ ~

A secret meeting of the Supreme Council of the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh is underway.

Karabakh is under tight blockade. Azerbaijani forces, using GRAD rocket launchers are extensively shelling Stepanakert. Villages are changing hands in fierce fighting. They need fuel, they need ammunition…

Particularly alarming news: Azerbaijan is trying to negotiate the supply of surface-to-air missiles, the very same ones that kicked the USSR out of Afghanistan. Helicopter deliveries of fuel and ammunition are under threat.

(As it later turned out, the buyer was Chechnya in their first war with Russia, but two Chechen emissaries were killed in London by an Armenian NSS agent. British police managed to arrest the agent, but he poisoned himself in prison by potassium cyanide, received in a bread delivery from a visitor. 'I don't want my family to suffer; the KGB's reach is too long,' were his last words before successfully swallowing the dose.)

A 'road of life' is needed; a 'corridor' linking Karabakh with Mother Armenia is urgently needed, and for that, the city of Lachin must be captured; it controls the 50-kilometer stretch of highway to Armenia.

And then Artur laughed. Who needs Lachin? We have Iran right next door. Opening a corridor in that direction won't require human losses. That way, we'll establish communication with the outside world, with the Armenian Diaspora…

-.-

Two weeks later, Artur was gone. He wanted too much—to decide for himself how to fight for independence, rather than execute decrees from spacious offices that would inevitably lead thousands of young men to the slaughter.

But Version 3 is Version 3 in Karabakh, too.

~ ~ ~

That's why the next acting Chairman turned to the KGB, whose structures weren't buried in the debris of the collapsed USSR, but had become supranational (despite renaming its brunches in the former Soviet republics). A single and indivisible Center and the incorruptible KGB archives remained.

So, the aforementioned acting head most likely got a slap on the wrist from Big Brother for such a careless approach to selecting analytical personnel for the Supreme Council of the completely independent Republic of Mountainous Karabakh. Or, to avoid presenting myself as effing Omniscience, the decision was made at the local level, based on good old xenophobia.

Especially since, as a foreigner, I should have shown more restraint.

Back then, everyone was really into creating state paraphernalia: ministries, legislative assemblies, anthems, flags, and all that crap. So, a high-ranking official approached me for advice from a professional analyst: 'Does the RNK have a chance of becoming internationally recognized?'

But I, naively, answered wholeheartedly, wanting the best.

Yes—easy! You, as a legislator, create such wise laws that all of Azerbaijan will spit on its rulers and come rushing, racing to ask you for Karabakh citizenship. And then the rest will follow, from Moscow to the very outskirts on the sixth part of the globe.

He was probably offended, but I wasn't joking. I believed what I was saying; I didn't imagine that independence would result in 35 ministries for 50,000 draft horses of working-age folks…

It’s a shame he’d taken offense.

-.-

Be that as it may, I got kicked out. As a too extravagant an excess for peacetime conditions.

A week later, an analytical department of 35 female employees was created in my place, headed by a well-known local philatelist. Male. But a very smart one.

And, of course, the staff didn't stop at that, to keep up with the times, as not all relatives had yet returned from exile in Moscow and Yerevan…

Perhaps in England, a civil servant serves the public, but here, he's a bloodsucking nit on the people's body. And no way to pick off the biting bitches—they've been trained for that for ages…

~ ~ ~

All the glass in every window of the State University was, of course, shattered, after all those bombings. However, three windows in the Rector's office were restored, and all the rest covered with vinyl film.

The wind—quite predictably and easily—torn through all these translucent patches, and as soon as it picked up, the vinyl shreds enthusiastically applauded their hero from every window frame.

Tin wood-burner boxes were installed in the classrooms, with tin pipes led outside. Each morning, the University's Quarters Manager would hand out two pieces of cleaved wood to the group leaders from the shed in the yard. It was winter, after all.

By the middle of the second period, the boxes were ice-cold, idle, rusty tin chests of dead ashes, and the female students would start complaining they were frozen too. The male students, however, didn't complain, due to their absence. They were freezing in the trenches on the front lines, so what if the war was over?

And then I would give the girls the order: 'Form up! Walking in a circle… Forward, MARCH!' And they would march around the wood burner, chanting one or another exercise from a brochure, yellowed with decrepitude, published for Soviet universities in 1957. And when they started whining that they were getting dizzy from walking in circles, I commanded: 'Turn around! MARCH!' In the opposite direction.

They giggled, but obeyed and continued chanting… A kinda Sergeant Major Ogoltsoff's Peripatetic Methodology, but it helped them hold out until the hoarse from a cold ringing in the wind-swept corridors.

-.-

Damn! Where have I come to all this from?!

Aha, I remember—children are the flowers of life…

~ ~ ~

But enough of this, let's get back to Lenochka's attempt to correct my blatant inviolability and her lack of a normal father…

She entered the room and sat on my lap, wedged between the table (with an open dictionary, notebook, and copy of Morning Star spread out on its top) and me.

Turning her face upward, she raised her hand and placed her small palm on my each-morning-shaved cheek. She probably wanted to teach her ascetic father the way it's done.

(… what put me off? Fear of slipping into incest? Impossible, with my built-in robotic self-control.

Most likely, the pitiful smile on her face, which said 'Oh, you poor thing!', raised my fur…)

'Well, that's enough, Lenochka, I have to work.'

The smile gave way to an expression of sullen anger, and she began to jump up and down vengefully, still sitting on my lap.

'What?! Dreams of sweet pies? Isn't it too early?' And I rose to my feet, a soulless robot, destroying the launch pad and the possibility of further jumps.

-.-

A couple of days later, when I returned from work, I noticed a change on my shelves. A black hole had appeared.

The high cheekbone in Eerah's face (10 cm x 15 cm, an amateur photo in the middle of a stream) had been pierced right through. The instrument of this vandalism, or maybe even Voodooism, was a sharp pencil or perhaps a ballpoint pen. The question 'who?' didn't occur to me. What difference did it make?

‘Lenochka, come here!’

‘What?’

‘As a father, I'm obligated to ensure your education, so you know what's what. Look at the photo on the shelf.’

‘What?’

‘That's called 'meanness'.’

‘It wasn't me.’

‘I'm not saying you did it. Just remember what 'meanness' is. And who did it make no difference.’

-.-

I had to take the photograph to the photo studio on Club Street across from Lunatiс. The photographer, Arthur, a young Armenian who specialized in transferring wedding portraits to ceramics, said it was fixable. I asked him to enlarge the restoration to the size of a wall portrait, leaving everything as is, including the stream…

For the restored and enlarged photograph, I bought a cardboard frame and put it back on the shelf.

Seeing the portrait in the same place, but significantly more prominent (20 cm x 25 cm), my mother gave out a mocking cackle, which was her only comment.

I didn't rise any follow-up pedagogical discussions, and the photograph sat there, completely undisturbed, in the quiet process of gradually accumulating dust…