Late in the evening, the tin woodburner turned the Pioneers’ Room into a scorching sauna but after midnight the freezing cold harassed me even through the mattress upon the folding bed, and in the morning I got from under the thick sheep-wool-filled blanket up into the raw cold of mountain winter. All of the bedding temporary donation by the teaching and cleaning staff at school…
I did not plunged into translating Ulyssesright away. First off, employing The Chamber’s 20th Century Dictionary, I translated The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man(also by Joyce) under the pretext it was necessary to better dig that guy, Stephen Dedalus, the youngest in the Ulysses’s trinity of main characters.
Whenever some passage stayed unclear even after The Chamber’s 20th Century Dictionary, the following Sunday saw my travel by bus to Stepanakert, the capital of the Autonomous Region to keep a council with BDSE, The Big Dictionary of the Soviet Encyclopedia, in the regional library down there. On the way, in both directions, the fellow travelers amazed me by their indifference to the striking views of the mountainous nature about the rolling bus that kept my nose stuck to the window glass while they yakked at each other in their dark language of who knows what…
At the end of academic year I was dished out a room on the second floor of a no man’s house at a stone throw from the school yard. The first floor comprised the windowless locked cave for storing the school’s tin woodburners in warmer seasons, along with the stock of bits and scraps from ruined school desks.
Part of my salary was spent for gradual acquisition of plywood sheets from the Building Materials Shop in the Stepanakert Bazaar, which I kept nailing up, gradually, in between the paydays, to the planks in the ceiling through which there leaked the earth spread under the roof as the thermal isolation.
The slow-go repair accomplishment happened on the eve of the following academic year, and the room was shared with a rookie pedagogical cadre from Yerevan freshly baked and certified by a high education enterprise for teachers production.
Arthur wore black-rimmed glasses of rigid looks and soft locks of moderately long hair, also black. At school he taught Armenian to kids and coming home shared the woeful tales about the eternal wounds of Armenia with me.
He held on for almost two months then brought from Yerevan a sack of second-hand garments for the village kids, a kinda payoff for his unfulfilled intentions, and I’ve never seen him any more…
And when the shy and soft first snow coated the ground hardened by the first frost, I got it first-hand that possession of a tin woodburner is not enough for wintering if having nothing to stick in and kindle inside it. The room would feel unquestionably cold both for me and the cohabitant family of mice squealing in the stone walls about the built-in cupboard.
So, I grabbed the ax bought in the process of the mentioned ceiling-remodeling and started off to the woods…
On the slope grown with mighty beech trees, something certainly grabbed me by the collar and brought to the tree as large as any other yet almost put away by the deep cave in the trunk, close to the roots.
Maybe, the dryad dwelling up in that tree got sick and tired of the insufficient nutrition through the defective trunk and called me? No way to figure out why and how it still managed standing upright.
