Dad went into the parents’ bedroom to estimate the damage and very soon entered our room. “Ew, you!” was all he told me.
For a few days, the apartment had a strong smell of smoke. The runner from the parents’ bedroom was cut up into smaller pieces. The remnants of the tulle curtain and burned bed were taken out to the garbage enclosure across the road. A couple of years later I could read already and whenever coming across a matchbox with the warning sticker: “Keep matches away from children!”, I knew that it was about me too…
~ ~ ~
This question puzzles me till now: what at that tender age made me so cocksure that in future they would be writing books about me. The certainty was spiced by a pepper-hot pinch of shame that set my cheeks a-glow at the thought that future writers when touching my childhood years would have to admit frankly that, yes, even being a big boy, a first-grader actually, I sometimes peed in bed at night, though Dad just couldn’t hold back his exasperation because at my age he no longer made puddles in his bed. Never!
Or take that terrible occurrence when on the way from school my tummy got squeezed by unbearable colic which made me run home to the toilet room, but there everything stopped halfway, in spite of all my straining, until Grandma, terrified by my heartrending howls, rushed from the kitchen to the toilet and, snatching a piece of newspaper from the bag on the wall, ripped the stubborn turd out.
Who would ever dare write things like that in a book?!..
(…already in another—my present—life the current wife of mine, Sahtic, went to a fortune teller in the war-destroyed city of Shushi when our son Ahshaut fled the local army because of harassment by his company commander and regular beating up at the guardhouse.
In the year of Ahshaut’s birth, the USSR was ripping apart at all seams, some new life was promising to start, instilling hope that before he grew of age there would be no army drafts but only contract enrollment of volunteers. And why not? “You never know the Devils’ next joke,” quoting a Russian byword. Well, in my dream’s case, the SOB was not in the mood for joking.
The commander of the company, handled Chokha, picked on Ahshaut because of his own dissatisfaction with the unfair arrangement of life—after the Karabakh war his combat bros became generals with hanging stomachs and personal Jeeps equipped with drivers while he, Chokha, was still rotting at the front line.
After Ahshaut was missing for eight days, Sahtic went to Shushi, to the popular fortune-teller who assured her that everything would be alright. And so it happened. Ahshaut came home, we took him back to the place of his service, to higher ranked officers in the chain of command than Captain Chokha, and our boy was transferred to another regiment, in a hotter spot, where he served the remaining year, though already without the sergeant stripes in his shoulder straps…