Сергей Огольцов – Rascally Romance. The Vagabond Cherub (страница 7)

She stepped off, disappearing into the darkness that surrounded the heated arguments and the clang of dishes against the night chill in the iron tabletop…

Feeding kids transmuted smoothly into the adults' dinner. The tutoresses, decorously and pedagogically, drank dry semi-sweet wine aged for a year. The sports instructor, the camp director, the local police officer from a nearby village, and I made do with the ubiquitous tutovka vodka. With complete democratic equality, everyone's snack consisted of small fish, which the police officer had banged up in the river during that day with the electric discharge from the generator borrowed from the camp. Then the catch of executed (without trial, without a chair, yet by electricity application) were fried until done by the camp Cook, aka Nurse, aka Director's wife…

A group of activists from the ranks of the younger generation, invisible in the darkness, approached the table with a petition asking permission to dance, and Shavarsh magnanimously deigned to postpone the camp's curfew by half an hour.

His Majesty was clearly in good spirits.

Meanwhile, I asked Ruzanna about Ashot. She said he was already asleep in the boys' tent. She offered to go after him, but I replied, ‘No need. Don't wake him.’

The teenagers gathered in the field around a small fire and danced to music from a speaker hung on a tree next to the bulb-bearing Walnut. At first, it seemed strange to me that everyone was dancing with their backs to the management, still seated at the sheet metal table. Yet gradually it dawned on me—everyone was hip-hopping with their own personal shadow, so dashy, jumpy, pushed by the light of a solitary bulb, into a swift flight over the night field, so far, far away…

Soon, the Camp Director declared they'd had enough, turned off the generator, and retreated to the two-person quarters of his royal tent…

Some of the campers in the "most unique of unique" quietly crept in—in groups of two or three—to sit around the log shedding quiet embers, to tickle each other (to grunts, to yelps, to fits of ecstasy!) with the collection of unrivaled jokes: yes, yes! – the gold reserve holding the palm since the Paleolithic! – or frighten each other with horror stories from the Early Renaissance, under the sympathetic eye of the tutoresses-overseers (their schoolteachers), who took turns on an unofficial night shift…

I held out until the smallest of the small hours before agreeing to a vacant cot in the boys' tent, leaving Satenik to take her turn by the fire, because I had to catch the bus to Stepanakert at six in the morning…

. .. .

Years later, I asked Ashot why he hadn't come up to me that night.

He answered that he'd only been told about my arrival the next day, after I'd already left the camp.

To my inquiry about him the cookies and candy shared with him, like, a dessert completing that dinner, he just shrugged. puzzled…

I don't blame Emma. At six years old, gobbling a handful of cookies that landed in your hands amidst the camp rations is a perfectly appropriate and justifiable manifestation of healthy selfishness.

But poor Ashot! What's it like to grow up with the thought (long buried and securely forgotten, but still undeniable) that your father didn't want to come up to you? Of all the family, only you wasn’t reached for by dad…

Well, let bygones be bygones… or, to quote the daily saying of my final, but most revered mother-in-law, Emma Arshakovna, "kyangya lee!"

Eeeee! This secluded, luxurious expanse, big enough for one, has somehow brought me to the blues…

All together now—what the heck! Enough of the dull routine, let’s shake things up!…

Giddy up, you rascal!

~ ~ ~

Without checking up the thicket that climbs the steep slope, I comb along the field edge, plucking a dry branch here, a withered shrub there, and dropping them onto an old cow path. My progress ends after about a hundred fathoms, I wander back, picking up the dead wood I've relieved the forest from.

With an armful of firewood, wrapped in my brotherly, warm embrace, I return to the former camp, drop the load of my haul to the ground, and go out again—to free the cow path from the not collected yet.

The maneuver is reiterated twice, the distance growing shorter with each repetition. Done.

We move on to the next step—breaking the fuel for cooking the classic dish: "pioneers’ ideal-al-al", also known as the much-praised baked potato-potata, also known as kartofan.

And this part in the toil has to be done barehanded, because I don't even have a knife…

Sometimes people are literally offended by the fact that I'm wandering unarmed, and in retaliation, they start threatening me with wolves and bandits. However, so far, in all my escapes to freedom, I've only encountered deer and foxes, and a couple of bear tracks.

Well, the bandits are clearly too lazy to ambush me in the tumbs. Smart buggers.

The only, yet inevitable, tension is when, in the middle of the night, my asshole twitches sharply because of a sudden forest shreak, a couple meters off the tent.

A bit later, in retrospect, you realize that someone has grabbed someone else, but who the hell knows who whom exactly. And I'm not a vegetable, nor Chingachgook, and neither Dersu Uzala, not to start up at heart-rending decibels. In short, it's one of those cases for which no medication has yet been developed.

Even if, say, I'd been schlepping a fully loaded Kalashnikov along, my reaction to unexpected nighttime screams would have remained the same, physiologically speaking, but the tent canvas could have been damaged irrepairably by gunfire from inside…

True, there once happened an attack. That time, I was sleeping under a shrub near the village of Mekdishen, within my sleeping bag, wrapped in a piece of blue synthetic burlap, just in case.

(… this burlap is absolutely useless crap—it gets soaked in seconds in the rain, but that was before 2000, when I bought my one-person Made-in-China…)

Sometime after midnight, a pair of wolfhounds—the security escort for a belated rider—stumbled upon my nest under the shrub. Whoosh! There they were, barking right above my head!

Their owner, as soon as he rode up with his flashlight, also gasped, I mean… got stunned by this unprecedented sight in his native village outskirts.

However, the blue-burlaped clump yelled at him from under the shrub that I was a tourist from Stepanakert and let him calm his beasts down quickly.

The guy started spouting the same old hooey about wolves and bandits, which I just bear anymore, and I replied with all possible brevity that after his bitchy gamprs, I couldn't give a f… well, not anyone would scare me, I suppose…

. .. .

And while camping overnight on Dizapayt (the third-highest mountain in Karabakh), the guys from the Halo Trust climbed up there half an hour later.

(… The Halo Trust is an international organization with British registration that funds and trains the natives of this planet's hotspots in mine clearance techniques, because conflicting sides on any continent have a nasty habit of planting countless minefields to kill enemy personnel, supposedly military, but many civilians die as well.

A side effect is the genocide of animals—both wild and domesticated—the poor creatures, as a rule, have no idea about the political situation in their habitat. But we are responsible for those we tame, aren't we?…)

In short, local sappers, trained by British natives, climbed Dizapayt during their off-duty hours, due to the darkness that followed their workday. To combine relaxation with usefulness, they decided to make a sacrifice of supplication, as a stone chapel has stood at the top of Dizapayt since time immemorial. You must walk around it three times, and in return, receive the go-ahead from the rulers of fate, whatever you asked for.

Of course, the guys from Halo Trust didn't come empty-handed; they had tacked on a sacrificial rooster to butter up the deal, disguised as a matagh.

However, they had set out to pay the bribe without warning, and spontaneously forgot to grab a knife for the rooster. Naturally, my lack of such equipment annoyed them…

But the lads didn't lose their nerve, and quickly invented a new technique, chopping off the sacrificial head with a shard of a vodka bottleneck, found in the trash heap left by previous climbers…

And only that year, when I climbed the second-highest (and completely clear) peak, Kirs, did I have with me an imitation Swiss Army knife—a gift from Nick Wagner.

It holds a whole bunch of ends and odds in its handle: a fork, a corkscrew, and even a nail file… I can't remember where I later misplaced it.

However, no matter how much PR self-promotion I've put forth here, the number one regional peak is missing from the peacock's tail of my vagabond achievements. The front line of the hang-fire war between Azerbaijan and Armenia runs along that mountain. So, if not one side, then the other won't let me pass, or maybe they'll blast off in concert, no questions asked.

. .. .

All this is to say that breaking dry branches by hand isn't technically too difficult, and I soon prepared two sufficient piles of firewood for the upcoming fire. When the first one burns down, you bury unpeeled potatoes (so is the recipe) in the hot ashes, and dump atop the second pile for it to also burn down.