The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов

Anyway, the engineer wanted a gossip without an accent and the relatives he came on a visit to could not provide such a treat for him. Though, there might have been a certain hidden agenda as well because he was pestered by a question he couldn’t find an answer to – Why was he here? So he turned to me, like, for the assistance of a specialist. An analyst should know answers, right?

The case developed as follows: one of many engineers at one of many plants in Moscow, an almost autohtonous Muscovite Armenian, at the end of a working day peacefully leaves his plant thru the check-entrance to be met by an unexpected invitation to get seated into a waiting black Volga car and is taken to the KGB (his tongue was unaccustomed yet to pronounce it as FSS). In a huge office there, he was politely asked to pay a visit to his relatives in Stepanakert, all his travel expenses would be met, the CEO of his plant already signed the papers to present him a leave for an unspecified stretch. And what’s his mission over there? No mission whatsoever, except staying by his dear relatives he missed so much since being taken to Moscow at the age of 4…

And now he’s here, hand-secondly swallowing all that cigarette smoke, looking into my eyes and asking thru the mutual hubbub, ‘What for?’

2 days after the Arthur’s murder, he dropped in to say good-bye because they signaled him to come back to Moscow and off he went taking away the puzzlement in his eyes, ‘Why am I here?’

For my personal operational usage, I handled him ‘a weather balloon’, they use such balloons to send special devices to upper atmospheric layers to register meteorological situation up there. When back to Moscow, he’d get another free ride and a polite conversation in the huge office. A quite desultory talk of this and that and nothing in particular because a weather balloon is not supposed to know the data brought back by the recording devices. But then the talk might turn out even a short one, a pure formality, you know, there's no need to go deeper about an accomplished mission. Well done, brunette from the Armenian KGB… damn!.. well, CNS, for the Committee of National Security of the independent Republic of Armenia…

A classified session of the Supreme Council of the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh is under way. The Mountainous Karabakh got locked within unsurpassable blockade, Azeri forces widely apply GRAD installations for bombardments of Stepanakert, villages change hands in stubborn fights… Especially bad news – the enemy acquires consignment of ground-to-air thermal missiles the use of which blazed away the Russian intervention to Afghanistan… Here they are a deadly threat to the delivery of fuel and ammunition by choppers.

(Later, it turned out that the buyer was Chechnya, then at their first war with Russia, yet two Chechen emissaries were killed in London by an agent of Armenian CNS. The British police managed to arrest the agent, however, in prison he poisoned himself with potassium cyanide passed to him in a bread loaf from a visitor. ‘I don’t want my family suffered, the KGB’s hands are too long,’ were his final words before successful application of the transferred dose.)

A ‘road of life’ is the must, some surface communication between the Mountainous Karabakh and the outer world, a 'corridor' towards Mother Armenia is needed urgently, which calls for capture of the Lachin city that controls 50 km dividing Karabakh from Armenia…

At that point Arthur laughed. Who needs that Lachin? We’ve got hundreds of kilometers of common border with Iran, cutting a corridor in that direction would cost no casualties. Thus we create communication with the world outside, with the Diaspora…

A fortnight later Arthur was murdered because he wanted way too much. He wanted to make his own decisions how to struggle for the independence of his homeland but Version 3 still remains Version 3, even in the Mountainous Karabakh…

That is why the next, incumbent, Chairman turned to the KGB, whose structures remained alive and kicking in the debris of the collapsed Soviet Union and turned supranational (despite its renaming all over the former Soviet Republics), retaining its single and indivisible Center and the incorruptible KGB archives.

So, the mentioned officeholder could very possibly get his ass kicked by Big Brother for so sloppy attitude to the selection of accessory personnel for the Supreme Council of the newly independent Republic of the Mountainous Karabakh. Or else, so as not to pose myself for more than there can, actually, be, the decision was based on the old good xenophobia.

In any case, I was pink-slipped as a commodity extravagant in the peace time. A month later, instead of me, the analytical department of 30 employees was created and approved, headed by the local renown amateur philatelist, but very clever. Maybe, somewhere in England, an official is a servant of society, but by us it's the beard of bloodsucking lice that plagues the rest of people. And you can't ditch the bitches because it is what they’ve been trained for…

The glass in each and every window at the State University was, naturally, smashed by all those bombardments. Yet, the 3 windows in the Rector's office were restored and all the rest just got sealed with vinyl. The wind, predictably and freely, frazzled the translucent patches whose remains snappily applauded with their jagged tatters whenever it grew fresher.

In the classrooms, they installed the tin boxes of wood burners and in winter mornings the University House Manager forked out 2 logs to each group monitor, from his shed in the yard.

By the middle in the second class, the wood burners became as cold as ice, the useless rusty boxes of dead ashes, and the student girls began their protestations that they were freezing too. The student lads did not complain though, because there was none of them, they were freezing in the trenches on the front line, well, so what if the