YEREVAN — This morning, over coffee, I show Rustam from Ashtarak a photo that I found by chance last evening while scrolling through Facebook memories and ask: “Can you tell me what this is, Rustam?”
“Hive frame, beeswax!, he answers after a moment’s look and continues. There are beekeepers in Ashtarak, when the blossoming ends, they move the hive bodies to the mountains of Aparan, and then bring them back in season. “It’s a drone, Rustam. The wing of a drone more precisely”, I explain. When it hits the target, thousands of the little balls scatter with the effect of hunting pallet shot. “It’s like a Hive frame,” Rustam says, bringing his head closer to my laptop. “I think they use these in Ukraine and Russia now,” Rustam guesses. What bees are making, what humans…”, Rustam sighs. “Hive frame” was delivered by Azerbaijanis in 2020.
As a child I remember how much we played with explosives during the first Karabakh war. We didn’t have a yellow excavator or a sports cars for children, after all. We would simply ask for bullets from soldiers (fidayis) we met on the street, some would give them, others would refuse. They carried two bullets on their chest harness belt, for the last shot. “Better the last shot but never Azerbaijani captivity.” We would stand one bullet vertically on the ground, spilling the gunpowder of the other next to it, light it and rejoice in the explosion. It was hilarious when the fighter jet flew too low above Stepanakert. A 10-year-old child can’t understand that it was about to drop a half-ton bomb. We had invented another “fun” game. I don’t know what kind of gunpowder it was, but it really looked like spaghetti. We would light it, it would crackle and jump across the asphalt. However, our “games” were put to an end by my childhood friend’s father, who was a boxing trainer. Once this my friend had made a homemade grenade that had fascinated all the children in the yard, and we all went to the half-built garage to exploded it. We did and fortunately, no one was hurt. But we were punished by the boxing trainer. Listening the sound of the explosion, he went out onto the balcony and ordered everyone to step up to his house without exception. He lined us up in the hallway, and began to slap us one by one. No one could avoid the blows of the master of sports. However, we were lucky but unfortunately, there were many accidents among children because of this kind “toys” and “games.”
During the same years, the boxing trainer’s apartment, on the fifth floor of the soviet apartment block was destroyed by “Grad” multiple rocket launcher projectiles of which was stored in Ghazanchetsots Cathedral’s undercroft in Shushi, but he couldn’t punish them. Thus ended the first Karabakh war.
After the first Karabakh war, thanks to the diaspora, all the buildings destroyed by the shelling were renovated in Stepanakert. When foreigners visited, they could not believe that this city had been bombed and shelled for two years. However, buildings without external plaster and exposed bricks reminded about those years.
“Even a rake hits you in the forehead”
