Swimming made her happy. She had no previous experience of skinny-dipping and had no idea how good it felt. Cold water prickled her skin, warmed up her body and warmed up itself. With both hands, Sasha grabbed the buoy and kept still, swaying gently, invisible from the shore.
Perhaps, she didn’t have to go back at all. She could just keep swimming, across the entire sea, toward Turkey….
She flipped onto her back and, lazily moving her arms, swam toward the shore. Sparse morning stars dissolved slowly, like sugar crystals in cold water.
In the changing cabin, Sasha rubbed herself dry with a towel and got dressed. She stepped outside and listened to herself—nothing was happening. She walked toward the beach entrance; the spasms started when she reached the little shack where the lounge chairs were kept under a barn lock. Coughing, sputtering and holding her throat, Sasha vomited four gold coins.
On the third morning of swimming exercises, she threw up back in the apartment, in the bathroom. The coins clanked into the iron tub. Sasha gathered them up, her hands shaking—the coins were exactly the same, with a round three-dimensional symbol. Worth zero point zero kopeks. She smirked at her reflection in the mirror, pocketed the coins, washed up and left the bathroom.
Mom was putting her hair up in curlers. There was absolutely no point to it, since the curls would dissipate in the water, but nowadays Mom spent a lot of time on her hair, makeup, and ironing of her outfits.
“Would you mind if Valentin and I go to a café tomorrow night? Just the two of us?”
Mom asked the question, careful to avoid Sasha’s eyes.
“You can go to the movies… What’s playing right now, in that theatre on the wharf?”
“I don’t know.” Sasha fingered the coins in her pocket. “Go ahead. I’ll stay home and read.”
“But what to do about the keys?” Sasha’s compliance clearly took a load off of Mom’s shoulders. “In case I’m late… I don’t want to wake you up. But if I take the keys—what if you want to go for a walk?”
“Take the keys. I’ll read,” Sasha repeated.
“But what about fresh air?”
“I’ll sit outside on the balcony. With a table lamp.”
“But tomorrow, maybe tomorrow you will want to go to a club?”
“No.”
The next day Valentin took them out to lunch. He seemed like a nice person, with a sense of humor, with a certain charm; Sasha watched her Mom’s happiness and counted the days in her head, twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth. Five days remained. Actually, only four, on the fifth day we’re leaving. And it’ll be all over. I’ll forget everything. Only five more times…
She swam on the next morning, and the morning after, and then she overslept.
The sun woke her up. The sun beat into the window left ajar, Mom’s bed was empty; the alarm clock twisted from underneath her pillow and lay on the rug.
Refusing to believe, Sasha picked it up. The yellow hand stood on half past three. The coil was disengaged. Why didn’t it ring?
“Mom! Did you touch my alarm clock?”
Mom, content, benevolent, and fresh after her shower, brought in coffee on a tray.
“I did not. It fell down, I didn’t pick it up. I don’t want the landlady to think I broke it. Don’t worry about it, you got practically no sleep in the last few days, and you need rest, you’re on vacation, after all… What is it with you?”
Sasha slumped at the edge of the cot, laden with the firm conviction that something terrible has just happened. Something unidentifiable, inexplicable, threatening with the unknown—and thus, her terror grew in a geometric progression.
The dark man stood next to the tourist booth, studying a photo of the Swallow’s Nest. Sasha slowed her step. Mom turned to her.
“Go ahead,” Sasha said. “I’ll catch up.”
Under different circumstances, Mom would argue and start asking questions. But by now, Valentin must have already reserved their lounge chairs; Mom nodded, told Sasha not to dawdle and walked down to the shore.
The asphalt softened under the morning sun. The tires of passing cars and trucks pressed over a puddle of spilled motor oil and left fancy tracks on the road.
“My alarm did not go off,” Sasha said, not knowing what she was apologizing for, and to whom. “It fell…”
His eyes could not be seen through the dark glasses. The lenses reflected nothing, as if they were made of velvet. The dark man was silent.
“My alarm did not go off!”
Sasha burst into tears right there, on the street, from fear, from the unknown, from the emotional strain of the past few days. The passersby turned their heads, staring at the weeping girl. Sasha felt as if she’d dived deep into the sea and was watching a school of pale fish through a thick layer of water.
“It’s very bad, but not terrible,” the man in the dark glasses said finally. “As a matter of fact, it’s even good for you—it’ll teach you some discipline. The second such blunder will cost you a lot more, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
He turned and departed, leaving Sasha sobbing and vigorously shaking her head no to all the questions from the sympathetic passersby. Hiding in a park alley—deserted at this hour— and pulling a handkerchief out of her bag, she was finally able to clean up her tears and snot, but did not manage to calm herself down.
Her own dark sunglasses, the ones she’s had for over a year, with a thin frame, hid the redness of her eyes and her swollen lids. Pushing her hat low on her forehead, Sasha walked down the street, avoiding looking at people, not lifting her eyes from the pavement. In front of her, a girl of about four stomped her red sandals on the ground, holding her mother’s hand.
An ambulance stood in front of the beach entrance. Sasha stopped, and her shoes stuck to the softened asphalt.
Almost immediately, she saw her mother. Mom wobbled on the gravel, a towel thrown over her shoulders, holding onto a stretcher. A very pale man lying on the stretcher vaguely resembled a cheerful, sanguine Valentin.
Sasha sat down on the balustrade.
The stretcher was loaded into the ambulance. The doctor said something to Mom, she nodded several times and asked something in return. The doctor shook his head and climbed into the ambulance. The car beeped at the crowd, pulled back, reversed on a small parking lot into front of the hotel and drove up The Street That Leads to the Sea.
“Very bad, but not terrible.”
“What happened to him, Mom?”
Mom turned around. Panic and grief swam in her eyes.
“Hospital Number Six,” she chanted, like an incantation. “I’m just… I need to change, and then I’ll go. It’s a heart attack, Sasha. A heart attack. Oh god, oh god…”
Like a blind person, she moved through the throng of intrigued beachgoers.
Mom spent the night at the local hospital. Almost all of their cash went to the doctors and nurses, and Mom had to go to the post office and call one of her coworkers who promised to wire them some more money. Sasha spent a sleepless night alone in their room. The alarm clock was no longer reliable.
At three in the morning she left the house. Somewhere the night clubs were still going strong, and the cafés were still lit. Sasha walked down to the dark sea and sat down on the gravel at the water’s edge.
Far away, a ship appeared on the horizon. Cicadas shrieked in the gardens behind Sasha’s back. The sea licked the beach, stole tiny rocks and brought them back, polished them, rubbing together their surfaces. The sea had time. And patience enough for two.
At quarter to four, Sasha pulled off her clothes and stepped into the water, shivering. She swam, constantly looking back as if expecting a monster in dark glasses to rear its ugly head out of the waves.