But when they reached the apartment after a half-hour of fast walking and one or two wrong turns in the old town, Krustev was gone and the only sound in the house was the monotonous and unintelligible buzzing of the TV in the landlady’s room. Sirma couldn’t imagine Krustev keeping the desiccated old woman with the aquiline nose company in front of the TV, but she still held her ear to the door and listened for the sound of a second person. She shook her head. He took the guitar, Maya noted. Nothing else was missing. Hmm, Spartacus put in, I wonder if he decided to take off just like that in the car again, actually he would have every right to do that, Sirma added, but I doubt it, I say we look for him on the beach. As they made their way out of the old town and set off on the coastal road along the harbor, which was piled with the overripe fruit of yachts and tourist boats, she asked herself why they were even looking for him, but they didn’t have anything else to do in any case and certainly none of them felt like going to bed just now, so the three of them continued quickly striding along the sea, it was still cloudy and when they reached the zone where the hotels were not yet completely full, a few of them hadn’t even opened yet, beyond the bright circles of the street lamps you couldn’t see much of anything. And so they had almost made it back to the hill they had come down earlier and surely they were all thinking it, but no one said it aloud. They took the last sets of stairs from the road down to the beach, took off their shoes and set out over the coarse brown sand. He might not even be on the beach at all, Maya said, he might not be, Sirma agreed, but then again he might, it depends on which time we’re in, which time, Maya was confused, never mind, she replied, it doesn’t matter. The sea murmured pleasantly and its black mass rocked slightly, in the dark it looked like a huge, living, gentle monster. Here at the very end of the beach, there were no umbrellas or chaise longues, in fact, there wasn’t anything, but right when she was telling herself there’s nothing here, Spartacus suddenly said what’s that? In the darkness, which was disconcerted by the distant lights, they could make out some lump in the sand, they headed towards it and finally saw that it was the guitar, with jeans, a shirt and a beach towel carefully set on top of it. Fuck, Sirma said and suddenly felt afraid, fear hit her like a punch to the stomach, she felt herself dissolving into the surrounding darkness and collapsing to the ground like a handful of sand. Spartacus and Maya were already getting undressed in feverish silence, she followed their example, but never before had her fingers unbuttoned her clothes so clumsily, she found herself in some terrible slow time, which trickled like rough sand from the globe of an hourglass, and she wanted to say something, she wanted to curse Krustev and his flippant whim to go into the sea alone at night when he couldn’t swim, then she was seized with the total certainty that he had gone in to drown himself, fucking Mr. Depressed, to drown himself in the sea and to slip away from everything, from his dead wife and his distant daughter, the sight of his bloated body floating all too calmly on the waves hit her right in the eye, the drowned Herr Burgher, a luxury-loving corpse, a lump of death upon the funereal dance of the sea. Spartacus and Maya were already running down the beach, racing into the water and quickly swimming out, growing distant, and she followed them, going in a little to one side so they would be spread out in their search for him, perhaps he was still alive, perhaps they would find him in the darkness, drag him out by his seaweed-tangled hair and pump his stomach until he spit out all the black water he had swallowed, but it was dark, fiendishly dark, the fucking clouds hadn’t budged; and without stars and the moon, with only the city lights reflecting on the black sea, a greasy semi-darkness spread, in which she could no longer even see Spartacus and Maya’s heads, but she suddenly saw something next to her, she jumped, screamed and Krustev’s voice, offensively alive, said, well now, fancy meeting you here. You’re here, she shouted, well, yes, said Krustev, adding proudly, I was swimming. She felt like kissing him and slapping him, a mother to this man twice her age, she tried to call to the other two, but a sudden wave filled her mouth with water and as she spit angrily, Krustev, who had remained on the surface, yelled out loudly, hey, I’m over here, and they soon saw Spartacus and Maya’s heads swimming towards them from different directions.
As they came out of the water together, Sirma was still shaking from fury and relief, even though, she told herself, the three of them were not supposed to be here at all, and if everything had gone according to plan they wouldn’t be here, then this whole scene would never have happened, but in that case every moment and every action gave rise to and at the same time ruled out countless possibilities, tiny grains of sand, indistinguishable from one another they all dried off with the same towel which Krustev had prudently brought along, how had the thought that he would go and drown himself ever crossed her mind, given that the man had brought a towel, and they sat down on the ground. You brought the guitar, said Spartacus. Yes, said Krustev, I brought it, yes, and he drummed his fingers on the body, scattering the brief buzzing of the strings in the air. He finally made up his mind, picked up the guitar, put it on his lap and tested the strings, sighed, and started playing some melody, Sirma didn’t know it, maybe Spartacus did, given his obsession with rock music and his ability to fish out all sorts of things that had been crammed helter-skelter into the depths of his memory, she looked at him, but he didn’t respond, he was just listening and watching Krustev’s hands, the melody was nice, lively, and somehow charmingly infantile, it crumbled out from under his fingers and settled crystallized onto the sand, and when it was done, Krustev laughed and carefully set down the guitar. What was that, Spartacus asked, there was no way you’d know it, he replied, an old melody of mine that never made it into a song, I wrote it when Elena was born. Sirma jumped, suddenly jerked back to her repugnant dream from the previous night, but the image of the monstrous baby shoving its way inside her immediately scattered into the air and Krustev’s melody returned, completely ordinary, such a soothing ordinary melody, she called me tonight, Krustev added. She did? Sirma felt a coldness in her teeth. She decided to come home without telling me, Krustev explained, and when she didn’t find me there, naturally she called. So that’s it, said Sirma, Krustev seemed to drift off somewhere, but he soon started talking again, I remember, he began, I remember how once she got lost as a little girl, at a market, her mother and I were out of our heads with worry, we turned the whole market upside down, it was awful, I’ve never been so scared in my whole life, but in the end we found her; and where did we find her, on a side street, sitting and watching some boys fighting, I couldn’t believe it, they were just kids, eleven or twelve years old, wailing away with their fists, two boys were beating a third, they pushed him down to the ground, they were kicking him, it’s like a black-and-white movie in my memory, them kicking the boy on the ground, and Elena, just a little girl, was sitting on the curb, watching them and smiling, she was entranced, I yelled at them, only then did they see me and run away, and the boy they were beating up, I wanted to help him, but he jumped up and ran off, too, while Elena was just sitting there smiling. They hung there in awkward silence, like wet laundry on a clothes line. So, he said finally, you want to head back tomorrow? Spartacus coughed. Yes, said Sirma, and it was as if the whole sea burst into her and filled her when she repeated yes.