In five minutes, the car stopped at a small stone wall. Two shaggy dogs came hurtling out of the yard and set up a deafening bark.
Elkin jumped out onto the road. “That’s enough, you damn pests! This is Softie, and this is Oink,” he said, introducing the dogs to the ladies. “Welcome to the House of Glory!”
“Why Glory?” asked Kitty
“It’s a joke on my aunt’s Bulgarian name, Gloria.”
Nina and Kitty thanked the chauffeur and walked up the path to a curious lopsided building with a large terrace and a number of little balconies on which washing had been hung out to dry. There were apricot trees growing in the yard and an enormous kiln next to the wall of the sort used for firing pottery. Beside it was a whole array of ceramic pots painted to look like faces with handles in the form of ears.
On the porch stood a large elderly woman with dark eyebrows, dressed in a long threadbare smock decorated with brightly colored embroidery. Her pointed slippers had upturned toes, and she wore a colorful shawl wrapped around her head like a turban. She was smoking a long pipe mounted in rough silver from which came clouds of a sweet, fragrant smoke.
“So, you’ve brought them, have you?” she boomed down to Elkin. “All the holidaymakers are down at the beach. Go and call them for dinner.”
A large shadow fluttered behind the hostess, and a white cockatoo settled on her shoulder and began to shriek, to Kitty’s great delight: “Glory, Glory, Glory! Two rubles a bed!”
“Come on—let’s get you settled in,” said the old woman as she gestured for Nina and Kitty to follow her.
Inside, the house resembled some luxurious dacha that had not been refurbished for twenty years. The walls were hung with bookshelves, homemade cloth dolls, plates, and the same pots with painted faces. The windows were wide open, and from far away came the sound of waves and children’s laughter.
Gloria led her guests to a small room that had only a chair, a chest, and a bed covered with a brightly covered blanket.
“This is great!” shouted Kitty excitedly and threw herself sprawling onto the bed.
Nina looked out of the window. Down below rose up rocky outcrops of the cliff washed by a dazzling sea glittering in the sun.
Gloria explained that she did not have a bathroom. The holidaymakers bathed in the sea, all water had to be drawn from a well, and the lavatory was a wooden hut in the yard between the house and the cliff. There was no lock on the door but a railroad sign at the path, announcing “Track Closed” or “Track Open.”
Nina paid for a month in advance, and Gloria tucked the money in behind the wide belt of her pants.
“Are you here for your health?” she asked, looking into Nina’s eyes.
“No,” answered Nina. “It’s Kitty who’s ill.”
“Your little girl is healthier than all of us put together,” said Gloria. “But you look more dead than alive.”
“Communications on the left flank are out!” the cockatoo squawked. “Run out a line, damn you!”
The old woman shook her head and shuffled downstairs.
Nina was amazed. Was it really so obvious how broken she felt inside?
The other guests had all been coming to the House of Glory for years, and Nina felt at home with them immediately.
Nobody there asked what you did for a living, observed Bolshevik rituals, or showed any curiosity about what was going on in the wider world. For these people, the most important news was that somebody had caught an enormous fish, and the worst fear was that there might be a gale that would interfere with the day’s swimming.
There was something delightful about the simplicity and modesty of this life with its lack of worldly cares. At dawn, all the holidaymakers would go to the beach, to the green-blue sea. Nina would stretch a sheet between two rocks and put an old counterpane down on the pebbles to make a comfortable tent.
She and Kitty would sit in this shelter, staring at some wispy cloud in the sky and trying to think what it looked like. They would swim or lie on their stomachs, searching for semi-precious stones in the shingle—orange carnelians, translucent chalcedony, and red jasper.
The guests would all gather on the terrace for lunch around the enormous table scarred with knife cuts. They would pour out the semi-precious stones they had found on the beach, and an avid session of swapping, trading, buying, and selling would begin.
“The field kitchen is here, lads!” the cockatoo would shriek, flying onto the terrace.
Gloria would sweep the stone bartering chips to one side and set the table with enamel bowls, flatbread and mustard, and a large copper pot full of a mess they called “soldier’s joy.”
Elkin also ate at the House of Glory—his workshop was only a two-minute bicycle ride away. He would bring the holidaymakers little gifts and immediately set about mending something in his aunt’s ramshackle house.
He made a swing for Kitty and presented Nina with a small figurine of a giraffe carved from a shell.
“This is to bring you luck,” he told her, smiling. “You can put it on a lace and hang it around your neck.”
Nina was both touched and embarrassed that Elkin was trying to court her. She predicted that one day he would try to have a serious talk with her, alone, and was already worrying about it. How could she turn down such a good man, break his heart, when he had already gone through so much? But what else could she do? While she felt the warmest affection and the utmost respect for him, she did not and could never feel any passion for him.
After dinner, everybody would rest, and then they would laze on the beach again. Toward evening, Elkin would gather all the guests around a bonfire. They would sing to the guitar, drink strong homemade wine, and make up detective stories.
“A quite unheard-of crime has taken place in the House of Glory,” announced Elkin menacingly. “Somebody has run off with the sign ‘Track Free,’ putting our freedom in grave jeopardy. But we will flush out the criminal. We need to think about who had a motive for this crime. Confess to your weaknesses!”
Obediently, each of them owned up: one guest had a habit of flicking at his teeth with his fingernails, another liked to gnaw chicken bones and suck out the marrow, yet another wrote terrible love stories. Nina admitted that she liked to balance on fallen logs.
“Let’s take a note of that,” said Elkin. “Our young friend Nina is looking for balance in her life. I think we have a chief suspect. She is the only one of us who needs to be told which way to go.”
Then, the missing sign was found in the dogs’ kennel, and to general laughter, Elkin wrestled it away from Oink, who had already chewed it half to pieces.
The night air was full of the sound of the cicadas, and now and again, a bird chirruped in one of the apricot trees.
Huddling under a colorful blanket, Nina gazed at the fire and relived the day’s most vivid memories: the green line of the surf, the little crabs scuttling away from her shadow, and the water in the rock pools so crystal clear that she could see every grain of sand below.
Opposite Nina sat a young couple from Kiev—fair-haired Alyosha and round-faced Ira. They had recently been married and had come to Koktebel for their honeymoon. It was always a pleasure to see them walking around hand in hand, completely absorbed with one another, young and happy with dazzling white smiles.
But I’ll never be like them, thought Nina sadly.
Klim had sent her a cable informing her that he was already in Arkhangelsk. The rescue of the Italian expedition had become the latest big news story, and the Soviet government had announced that all news of the polar explorers would be conveyed free of charge. Klim and Nina were brazenly taking advantage of this to send one another free telegrams.