Never again Stepan went out for a ski walk, but I liked skiing and started to glide down the hillocks and knolls nearest to the road surrounding the two blocks. And, of course, I volunteered to participate in the ski competition held at school, for which occasion, on the eve of the cross-country race, I asked Dad to change the worn-out rubber bands on the leather loops in my skies. He casually dismissed the problem saying they’re sturdy enough to hold on, and there’s nothing to bother about.

The start was given from the glade where in autumn they pulled down the barrack on the Sunday of Collective Free Work. From the start point the ski track went into the forest and after zigzagging there for a couple of kilometers returned back, start and finish at the same point: 2 in 1.

Our group of fourth-and-fifth-graders was flagged off all at once, with a senior schoolboy running ahead of us so that we wouldn’t go astray among other ski tracks there. I was getting overtaken, and I was overtaking others yelling at them eagerly, “The track! The track!”, so that they would give way along the two narrow unbroken ski prints in the snow. And when they shouted “The track!” behind my back, I reluctantly stepped aside into the untrodden sticky snow, because that’s the rule.

We ran, and we glided, and we ran again. Down one especially steep slope, we piled in over each other. I got from the pile one of the first and frantically rushed ahead, but some two hundred meters before the finish that meanie rubber band burst up and the ski slid off from my felt boot. Keeping back scorching tears, I reached the finish in only left ski, driving the right one with kicks along its part in the ski track. The refs liked it, they laughed, but I, on coming home, burst into tears, “I knew it! I warned! I asked!”

Mom went on at Dad, who wanted to talk back but couldn’t find what to say. The next day he brought from his work and fixed to the ski leather loops some elastic band of ivory color, as thick as a pinky finger.

(…that fixture never failed, and even twenty-two years later the band served as it should.

Skies, on the whole, are doggedly long-liver creatures…)

With so reliable fasteners, on Sundays I was taking to the woods all day long. The endless well-trodden ski track stretched from beyond anything to out of everything. At times, the ski track branched off and two tracks ran along, side by side.

I liked the snappy claps of skies against the ski track behind my back. On the way, I sometimes met single soldier-skiers enjoying their Sundays with their greatcoats left at the Regiment, flapping the loosened uniform shirts not girded by the army belt.

The unbending ski track led to my favorite gliding grounds—a deep combe where the speed gained by the onrush down one slope took you up about one-third of the opposite one. I was delighted and proud that I could plunge like those solitary soldiers, although at times I had mind-blowing falls, especially at the jump ramp they built of snow for their jumps…

One day I noticed a secluded ski track forking from the mainline which—as I gradually figured it out—was running along the former controlling clearing of the Mailbox-Zona-Object-Detachment before its expansion.

The fugitive ski track led me to an astounding ski-plunge slope in the depth of the thicket. Though the slope was grown with perennial Fir-giants dictating an abrupt turn at its foot, yet, if you did not fall at that point, the plunge took you amazingly far with the speed squeezing tears from your eyes and making repeat the drive over and over again…

Following Sunday I almost did not fall at that tricky turn and rode the slope till very late, when the deep violet shadows began to trickle down from the dense branches of Fir-trees laden with the thick snow layer.

Then all of a sudden, there came a strange feeling that I was not alone, that someone else was watching me from behind the backs of the mighty Firs. At first, it was scary but giving heed to the benevolent silence of the trees around, I realized that it was him, the forest, friendly spying on me because we were one—me and the forest… The twilight deepened and I remembered that Block was more than two kilometers away.

(…of course, I got home in the dark and bore the brunt of Mom’s displeasure, yet until now when recollecting that winter purplish twilight and the good-willed quietude of the forest, I know that I lived not just so…

The same feel of dissolving and turning into a part of everything else around when you cannot say where your “I” ends and turns this or that “not-me”, I've lived thru once again and much later, in Karabakh already. Only that time it was I who watched, and it happened in summer instead of winter.

Even though telling this story disrupts the linear flow of narrative, in full violation of the classical time-place-action-unity canon yet, after all, it is my letter and it’s my life, and why not to take turns to my liking?

So…)

~ ~ ~

In Stepanakert, I am not to be seen a day or two before my birthday and about as long after it because for that period I enjoy the freedom of hiking.

(…dig it? Summertime is the most advantageous season to be born into not only because fish are jumping and your daddy is rich…)

My local relatives have already given up to be surprised or get angry. They concluded that it’s an old, odd but firmly established, Ukrainian tradition—to go away for your birthday and just walk following a random look of your eyes. And so it was in August (I don’t remember the exact year) end nineties’. Yes, no later, because of this here tent was bought in the last year of the last millennium.

That August I went north thru the woods over toombs where there were no villages but the views of enthralling beauty. Exactly as in the age-old warning by Mom, “You’ll be there alone.”

After a day-long climbing up to ascend a toomb-ridge where the woods got replaced by the alpine meadows, I came across some soot-black pieces of slate and a bunch of charred poles. Apparently, before the war shepherds were coming there with their flocks, and they brought the construction materials to build a hovel. And who burned it? Well, you never know… why always to find fault with humans? could be a random lightning after all… Anyway, nothing of my business.

So, I passed and went on, higher, and in a saddle bridging two toombs I discovered an ancient toomb. How did I guess at its antiquity? An easy question… It was excavated, unearthed by scavengers greedy for a buried treasure who left a hole in the ground and 4 to 5 roughly-hewn stone slabs, half-ton each. People weren’t buried that way under socialism, nor in the capitalist epoch. The nearby ridges were not rocky so the slabs had to be transported from afar. But what for?

Well, one look around would remove the question— What a sweep of incredible beauty! The sky without any limit, the placid wavy chines of toomb-chains all around, the distant ones covered with dark woods, and those nearby with Alpine meadows… Now, bringing the slabs from as far as I could not suppose where would call for a plum sum of money, or real power, or both. Which made more than enough of clues for the unbeatable guess: it was one of the Karabakh melique-princes who one day rode out hunting, reached that place and fell in love with it, and didn’t want to get parted from it even after his demise. The only nagging flaw in his calculations— the greed of ashes desecraters was not taken into account.

See? No historical enigma can escape its ultimate solution when we apply to it our tall tales in the absence of any opponent…

I passed over to the next toomb and, on its summit, got under the rain. Not a big deal though, because for such occasions, I’ve got a thoroughly worked-out and pretty practical technique.