The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
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…oh, shut up, man!. such stuff is not for female tender ears… hmm… seems, like, I’d better give it a start over…)
~ ~ ~
Hello, sweetheart
Though our brief live meeting did not bring you to calling me “Dad”, I can’t help being sentimental addressing you…
The day before yesterday in the late afternoon, executing the plan shared in my latest email, I climbed the heights in the neighborhood of the ghost village of Skhtorashen to pay a call on the local immortal—two-thousand-year-old Plane tree, the oldest denizen of the Mountainous Karabakh.
The walk along the scorched ruts in a desolate dirt road winding up the slope would be a pleasure but for the oppressive August heat and my eyes kept unwarranted scanning the steep ahead to pick out the signs of the water-spring asserted by all who had ever visited the place.
Most springs in the Mountainous Karabakh are supplemented with the water-managing structure traditionally made up of a retaining stone wall carved into the slope to protect a 5-6 meter long trough of roughly hewed stone slabs, the other wall (short, just to befit the trough’s width) meets the longer one at the right (and only) corner and is rigged with a stub of iron pipe stuck out from its middle above the trough butt. The softly lapping stream of cool clear water runs from the pipe to fill the stone bowl embedded in the wall for thirsty cupless people, and falls from it into the knee-deep trough for cattle and other animals to drink. Brimming up the trough, the water flows over its left end and moseys meandering down the slope.
However, the water-spring by the giant tree was uncustomary flipped, with the water running in reverse—from left to right. And one more surprise by the backward spring, inability to quench my thirst which, all along the climb started at the roadside diner by the turn to the town of Karmir-Bazaar, prodded me on with the alluring visions of gently bubbling current, but no… Because I ran into a mahtagh.
(… the two most frequently used and thrilling with their depth and beauty bywords in Armenian are:
1. tsahvyd tahnym; and
2. mahtagh ahnym.
Of which the first means, “I’d haul your pain”. Literally. Just 2 words, yet what abysmal, unfathomable profoundness!.
As for the second pair, it make a vow of doing sacrifice—mahtagh. Normally, they do a mahtagh as the confirmation of happy outcome. For instance, when a dear relative was dangerously ill, yet recovered or, say, survived a car jump down a gorge, then it’s high time to do a mahtagh for which end any variety of domestic animals can be slain and offered as a sacrifice reflecting the bypassed danger’s dread, as well as the prosperity of the person in charge of mahtagh-doing.
The sacrificial flesh must be shared among the relatives and neighbors to which they would proclaim the traditional felicitating formula, “Let the offer be accepted,” or else it's not a mahtagh. Still and all, the mahtagh’s being edible is not the point; you may do it even with a second-hand outfit, donating a pair of worn-out but still sturdy jeans to some poverty-stricken wretch. Giving is the essence of mahtagh, some kind of offering to be registered by the unseen, unknown forces that are in control of fate, aka chance, aka fortune…
It does not take exorbitant IQ to figure out, that sacrifice to so murky figures calls into question the omnipotence of Acting Gods from leading religions in this best of worlds. However, the reverent religions have long since checked and learned from their bitter experience what hopeless waste of efforts is straining to eradicate certain pigheaded customs that still have a pull among the irresponsible segments in their respective congregations, a hell of a lot of an uphill job to get just a fig if any, so they wisely turn their blind eye to jumping over the fires built on the shortest summer night or round dances designed for seeing the winter off, or mahtaghs and other suchlike activities. What can’t be cured must be endured. Dammit!
Unrestricted repetition would dull anything and any, however profound, byword would turn a gutted fat-chewing stripped of poesy, beauty, meaning:
–Tsahvyd tahnym (I’d haul your pain), how’s ’bout paying for the potatoes? Forgot?!.
–Mahtagh ahnym (a sacrificial offering on me), 2 secs before I gave you 6 a-hundred-drahm coins! Check in your pocket.
–Tsahvyd tahnym (I’d haul your pain), I stick here since morning, there are handfuls of those coins in my pockets.
–Mahtagh ahnym (a sacrificial offering on me), I’m not paying twice for the same potatoes. Don’t wet your whistle too oft when trading.
In the bazaar of Stepanakert, the capital of Mountainous Karabakh, even at a hassle, folks maintain correct, as well as deeply poetic, stance…)
As it was said, a long cool drink from the so-much-longed-for water-spring was not my lot that day, because in the shade of the giant patriarch of a tree there was a huge mahtagh-doing in full swing around two rows of tables for a hundred of participants, and from the thick of the festivity there came a loud yell, “Mr. Ogoltsoff!” And presently my arm got grabbed gently, yet irresistibly, by a burly gray-haired mujik who led me up to a young stout woman sitting at the head of the females’ table. “You were teaching us! Do you remember me? Who am I?” (…well, anyway, she was taught the word “Mister”, but what, on
