Part One – There
(Eastern Hemisphere)
CHAPTER FIFTY SEVEN – THE BLACK SEA AND THE LOVE
And now I want to talk about the Black Sea. Not about a separate trip to the sea with Nataly (See Chapter 56), but about several completely different and unrelated visits and flashes of memory. I don’t know why, but I want it like that.
On the one hand, the linear narrative will be interrupted, but I’m not writing a chronicle. On the other hand, it will be possible to analyze not a single phenomenon, but a whole class of homogeneous events. Maybe this will clarify something in the nature of the sea and a man, or at least in my nature…
I first became acquainted with a sea a year before school. And I continued my acquitting with it in the summer before school. I’ve got unforgettable impressions: a ball of fire going over the sea, and blue sea waves, and a white steamer, and the salty smell of the sea. At the same time, I learned parental love and care in the wonderful places of this world, and the fear of death when I swallowed sea water in the underwater kingdom.
Next time, I got to the Black sea only sixteen years later, after graduating from the university (See Chapter 35). It was like a reward for years of study. My deceased grandmother was absolving me of my sins,
“Rest at the seaside, my dear grandson. You worked out well, I saw it. To scare you that they will expel you – well… that was necessary, but that you hit me – it’s out of love, I haven’t been angry at you for a long time!”
On this trip I became a real man for two weeks! But during this period I learned a lot about myself and believed in myself.
These two encounters, childhood and youth, with the sea, from where all life on earth came, were associated with strong emotions in me, and then it always happened in my life this way – when I found myself on the warm sea, I experienced deep emotions, mostly good ones – love, joy, happiness…
I wonder was this is an accident or predestination?
I’ll probably tell you a few stories from different years to illustrate this. I haven’t even started yet, but I’m already having a festive mood!
When Maya did not get to a college, we went with her to Sukhumi. I don’t remember how this place emerged into our summer plans. Perhaps because my friends-physicists worked and vacationed there, or our aunt Ella and her family attend there. In a word, someone praised it, and we decided to check it out.
We settled near the station: as we arrived, we ended up in the “clutches of the private sector” (B&B), but in fact, it was not close from the city center. We had to take a trolleybus there and to the “Medicine Beach”, which became our favorite. But we were young, walking or driving was not a problem, and we plunged headlong into seaside life. Usually, the morning started early for me. I grew up in pioneer camps, so I jumped up early in the morning, ready to run, do exercises and clean the territory. Maya was getting up late.
Although I was irritated by the waste of wonderful morning hours not at the sea, I was accustomed to protecting other people’s sleep. At home, I walked silently, like a cat, past my sleeping grandmother and mother, and always defended the right to sleep for my little sister. What was I supposed to do with this habit here? I usually walked to the market, bought fresh fruit, and cooked breakfast. Each time, I threatened Maya with various horrors like our grandmother threatened us. For example, to leave to the beach without her, but I never fulfilled my terrible threats: how could I leave the child alone?
Around eleven o’clock we crawled out into the street and took an hour to get to the beach. We either moved straight there on a trolleybus, or we went to the port, and then transferred to a boat. The road with a transfer was more expensive, but more pleasant – the trip with the sea breeze was worth it. The pleasure boat brought us to the “Medicine Beach” – that was the name of the fenced beach away from the city limits. Entrance to it was paid (10 or 15 kopecks), unlike the city beach, but there were many amenities here: solariums – shady areas under roofs with sun loungers, showers, toilets, buffets with water and kebabs, and a medical rescue service. Probably, all this, to one degree or another, could be found on the city beach, but the stationary service was really convenient. Therefore, the beach of the Union of Composers was located here. Well… the Tbilisi intelligentsia drawn to celebrities, was also situated here.
Main persons among them were the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, her husband, Chairman of the Board of Soviet Composers Rodion Shchedrin, and their friend, Tbilisi-born popular composer Mikael Tariverdiev. I don’t remember that any of our people ever communicated with Rodion. By ours, I meant my aunt Ella and her husband Ed Lirtzman, their physicist friends – skinny, stooped Fred Gelman, a wit and joker, a big guy Agulov, who looked like a handsome King Kong, with a charming daughter Irka from his first marriage, and a bunch of young physicists: Misha, Levanchik and me with my sister.
Not that Shchedrin was turning up his nose, but, being a passionate athlete, he spent the whole day on the horizon on a windsurf board (with a sail). Mika also had his own sailboard, but periodically went down to the ground, smoked, chatted with Tbilisi residents on various topics, and even allowed Misha to surf near the shore on his board. Plisetskaya kept herself very simple. She usually came to the beach with her friend, a personal maid from the boarding house of the Union of Composers, and played tricky fool with her all day. She was simple in communication, without asking, she took an inflatable mattress to lie on from beach pals like me, and didn’t mind to be thrown out onto the hot sand, when the owner was taking back the mattress for a swim.
Once I asked couple of times for my mattress back, but Plisetskaya just was saying,
“Of course, of course, one moment, I’ll fight back now,” but instead she accepted more and more tricks.
Then I got tired and said,
“Maya Mikhailovna, I’ll throw you out on the sand now, the mattress is needed for my sister – your namesake.”
And then she looked at me with a completely different look, young and perky,
“Throw me out on the sand, Nick, please!”
It turns out she knew my name, and without further ado I complied with her request. Then the whole beach was talking about it, and Ed Lirtzman called me crazy. True, Ella, my aunt, did not agree with him. She said,
“And, in my opinion, Nick has simply grown up…”
The beauty of our motley group was that many friends and acquaintances gathered here. There was always someone to funny chat with or to throw out on the sand.
One day, while running along the sand, I stepped on something hard and sharp. It turned out to be a ring with a large sparkling stone in a halo of golden leaves. I walked up to Maya, who was lying with a book in the shadows, and whispered:
“Look what a dowry I found for you!”
She examined the ring with understanding, tried it on and returned it to me,
“Better take it to Irka Agulova. She’s been killing herself for two hours now, she lost her grandmother’s gift.”
Another time Misha suggested going diving at night,
“It’s so cool! Plankton glows with all the colors of the rainbow underwater. You swim naked and feel like you are in an unknown world.”
“I want to swim naked,” said Irka, “You’ll guys only turn away when I take off my swimsuit.”
“I’m not going to dive naked or dressed, even during the day! I believe even more so at night!” I announced, “But I’ll go with you.”
The three of us went together. After all, they still needed someone to guard them and their swimsuits. The friends have undressed and dived in turns. A couple of minutes later Irka surfaced and I threw her a swimsuit. But Misha was still not there. I was already worried and was thinking about raising the alarm, when suddenly there was a noise, and Misha’s head appeared on the surface, hysterically inhaling the air. Misha gradually came to his senses and said that he had lost his orientation under water and, instead of surfacing, went deeper down. When fear gripped him, he still did not lose his head and began to release the air little-by-little and watch where the bubbles running away. They naturally were running to the surface of the sea. For the last few meters he was already swimming without air, exhausted, with only one thought – not to open his mouth and not to stop…
But usually I did not go swimming, diving or belaying others in the evenings. It was the time when “aristocratic entertaining life” was beginning – walks along the embankment boulvard, dinners in restaurants, cinema and concerts.
Basically, all these events boiled down to conversations with friends and exchange of opinions. In the evening, we often went to the ice cream parlor in the hotel “Intourist”. It was a very popular meeting place on the boulevard, the ice cream was served covered in nuts, and the lines were long. But it so happened that I made friends with a young saleswoman, and she often served me even without waiting in line. Honestly, I didn’t abuse it, because chatting in good company, whether sitting, standing, or walking, was equally pleasant.
One day my sister and I were returning from a late showing at the cinema. Trolleybuses no longer ran or ran extremely rarely, and before going on a journey home I decided to look into the toilet of the city park. A funny feature of this establishment were signs calling visitors to order:
“Please, keep all sounds quiet!” and “Sit right over the toilet funnel!”
But there was no light in the toilet that evening, and the men’s room was locked, suggesting an alternative solution to the issue. The women were apparently pitied. But I didn’t want to urinate under a tree in the park, so I asked my sister to see if there were other women inside the hall. Maya made sure that there was no one there; I put her on guard at the entrance and slipped inside, satisfied. When I came out, I saw an amazing picture. A woman next to Maya was shaking, her teeth chattering out of fear. When she saw me, she squealed and closed her eyes.
I took my sister away from this nervous woman and asked what happened? It turns out that the stranger woman, afraid of the dark and the Caucasian “thugs,” asked my sister,
“Is everything all right there? Why aren’t you entering?”
And my sister, lowering her voice, honestly warned her,
“You better not go there yet!” and the poor woman immediately imagined a bloody crime taking place in pitch darkness.
But not far from our house, in a beer stall, we saw a real crime under full electric lighting. Large rats were sitting in dirty beer mugs with the remains of beer. They licked the mugs dry and fought until they bled for scraps of food.
Another summer, after Maya entered the Polytechnic, my sister and I stayed in the very center of the city, but away from the coast, in a house located right next to a railroad overpass. The trembling of passing trains made the house shake.
“Don’t worry,” said the hostess. “You’ll get used to it in a day.”
And indeed, on the second night we were embracing with deep sleep, not paying attention either to the shaking of the house or to the searchlights of the locomotives, illuminating our room with a blinding light.
The old housewife lived with her grandson Christo. The grandmother was Russian, and the grandson was Greek. He was a very nice and friendly guy, a couple of years older than me, suffering from severe kyphosis that is a hump. The history of their family was interesting, like, probably, the history of most families. Christo’s father was from a merchant family. When the Hellenic society of Abkhazia was closed at the end of the 30s, and wealthy Greeks were arrested, those who had the opportunity, that is, Greek citizenship, emigrated, like Christo’s grandfather. But the son quarreled with his father, did not allow himself to be bought out of the army, and stayed. Then he fought at WWII, returned to Sukhumi, married a Russian girl and continued to build socialism. And… he reached its advanced stage. In 1949, fifty thousand Sukhumi Greeks were exiled to Kazakhstan, where many, including Christo’s parents, died in inhuman conditions. And baby Christo, who was not allowed to be left with his grandmother, was thrown out the window of a freight train by his father, when the train rumbled over their house at night. The child injured his spine, but survived and remained with his grandmother, who raised him.
Christo was known and, it seems to me, loved by everyone in the city, and, thanks to communication with him, I met some of the townspeople. The most pleasant thing was meeting a Greek siblings – brother and sister, distant relatives of Christo. We got acquainted on the city beach. My new acquaintances seemed to have stepped off the pedestals of Praxiteles, they were so good-looking and physically perfect. We talked with great interest and mutual sympathy. They, like me, had an idea – to emigrate from the country. They were passionate about Greece and were preparing to go there to visit relatives, so they were cautious when discussing this seditious topic in the Union. I really liked the girl, but our meeting was like a meeting between two operatives from friendly counterintelligence agencies, and we went our separate ways in life and never met again.
This summer, Maya returned home earlier than usual, she had to go to college, and my Sasha came to me for a few days (maybe just for a weekend). This was the only time in my life, besides the pioneer camp and the All-Union Math Olympiad, when we vacationed together. Well, I already talked about this before in another chapter. But the reason why these flashes occur to me is that our deepest relationships with people are built on time spent together. And my closest friends – Sasha, Eli, Denis, Anton, Igor from Odessa – are those with whom I have ever lived somewhere in the same room or at least nearby.
The Russian proverb says,
“To know a person you need have eaten a pood (16 kg) of salt together with him.”
It is clear that “eating a pood (16 kg) of salt” is not a random measure of friendship. If the daily norm of table salt is 5 g, then two people will absorb a pood (16 kg) of salt in 16,000:10 = 1,600 days or in 4 years and 4 and a half months. That is, eating together for five years is a big deal!
Of course, friendship is a multifactorial phenomenon, so it cannot be described by only the time. As you can see, living together or nearby is some kind of independent factor, and living at a distance, on the contrary, is another factor that weakens the bonds of friendship. I’m also keeping quiet about the interaction between oneself and third parties and a lot of other things. No, I can’t build a friendship function, but I always enjoy the friendship itself.
My comrade Vova from Sukhumi was the most pleasant person among my acquainted there. I already talked about him and his family in the chapter “A Scientific Experiment” (Chapter 38). These are exactly the years when I came both on scientific business and in the summer for vacation. But in the summer, Vova worked and rarely appeared on the beach, where Misha and I were always happy to see him. Looking ahead, I will say that he survived terrible days in Sukhumi, where rioting Abkhaz nationalists – bandits, dragged Vova’s father out of the government’s building or from their house, located there, at the Lenin Square, and shot him near the monument. Lenin’s monument, of course, saw even worse deeds, but Vova was depressed and devastated. His brother managed to arrive in an armored vehicle and take Vova out of the burning city. Subsequently, Vova emigrated to Israel and settled there with his family, surrounded by his friends and classmates.
In Sukhumi I had another friendly “shelter”. In a two-room apartment, in a new house, lived a girl we knew, Nina, a relative of our friends, a teacher at the Sukhumi Russian School. She was an orphan and rented out a room to a young woman, Giuli, who was always fighting with suitors, on the fronts of morality and health, and sometimes suffered losses. I met Nina when she came to our city to visit relatives. She was a pretty girl, but very modest and shy, although she had a beautiful figure – a source of attractiveness for many men. Alas, modesty prevailed, despite Giuli’s influence (or vice versa, thanks to it), and Nina never got married. She became the director of the same school, but still lived with Giuli and her daughter from one of her boyfriends. True, as a result of the revolutionary events in Abkhazia, Nina was fooled and her apartment was taken away, but the kind-hearted Giuli accepted her into her small house, which she managed to build as reparations from personal battles and as compensation for losses in health.
And once, at the seaside, I decided to start an art business. The fact is that from time to time I composed bard songs. In total, I wrote about seventy songs, which I barely remember now and no longer perform, but I keep them recorded on punch cards from the old digital computers.
So, I came up with the idea of selling one song to a gypsy ensemble performing in Sukhumi. I gathered my courage and went behind the scenes of the Philharmonic’s summer garden to look for their leader.
“I want to offer you a song to sing,” I said to a curly-haired gypsy with a brown face and a gold earring in his left ear.
“Who wrote it?” he asked.
“I did!” the author of the song proudly declared.
“Do you have the sheet music? Can you perform the song?” my interlocutor continued.
“I can,” I said and I sang the song.
“Great song!” said the curly one, “Our song! Are you a gypsy?”
“No, I’m not a gypsy, but I really love gypsy melodies.”
“I’m not sure if it’s just like that. Ask your parents carefully. Gypsy melodies live in the blood! In a word, we buy the song! Write down the words, I’ll write down the notes myself.”
I quickly wrote down a few verses.
“Come to the concert tomorrow evening, we’ll perform your song and, based on the reaction of the audience, we’ll pay you: 500 rubles for an ovation and 200 rubles for regular applause. For weak claps or if, God forbid, they’ll boo it, we won’t pay you anything!”
“That’s fair!” I said, and the next evening I came to the Philharmonic garden for a concert.
The poster read, “Virtuoso illusionist Emil Beliy.”
My heart sank from a bad feeling. I ran to the administrator.
“Where are the gypsies?” I asked.
“You’re late, young man. They gave their last concert yesterday.”
“Where are they now?”
“They left for Sochi last night. I think they are performing there today.”
“Is their leader curly-haired, tanned, with an earring in his ear? He bought a song from me, and promised to pay me today after the concert.”
“Ha-ha-ha,” the administrator laughed, “This is very gypsy, but I think there is not a single real gypsy in the ensemble. What you saw was makeup and masquerade, and their leader, was Boris Ivanov, an elderly, gray-haired WWII veteran. You weren’t talking to him, that’s for sure.”
“Thank you… ha-ha… it’s just… it’s… ha-ha-ha!” I was broke with a laughter.
I was laughing, hiccupped, and laughed again, remembering my stupid appearance yesterday. “Gypsy is in the blood – ha-ha-ha, what a scam!”
“Young man!” the administrator called out to me, “As a compensation, here is a pass-check for the illusionist Emil Beliy show.”
And I stayed for the show. The program and tricks were really great.
I also have some memories of trips to the sea, not to Sukhumi, but to other places. One of them is the wish card game described in the chapter “Cards” (See Chapter 42).
Another is a trip to the New Athos stalactite caves.
It happened like this. I was relaxing in a Resort Hotel and met someone of my age – a pale-skinned young man, wearing expensive McCarthy sunglasses, bored on the beach. We started talking. It turned out that his name is Vova, and he is vacationing with his father, a high-ranking government official from Moscow.
“We are going to visit the New Athos caves, the director is dad’s friend. Do you want to come with us?”
Of course I wanted to. Tickets had to be ordered long before the visit (before the vacation began, and don’t forget that we do not yet had Internet then) or bought at exorbitant prices from speculators, so his dad’s connections were very useful. But I wasn’t going to suck up.
“Tell me when the trip is, and if I don’t have anything planned with anyone that day, I’ll be happy to keep you a company.”
Vova was delighted with my agreement; it seemed that he was lonely on vacation. And in the evening, after the dinner, a respectable man (now I would say a gentleman) in an expensive suit and with a cane addressed me:
“I am Vova’s father, former secretary of the Trade Union of the USSR, a pensioner of union importance.”
I immediately remembered, “I am the son of Colonel Rybakov…”
He continued,
“Vova told me that you are the only interesting person in the rest home. I would really like you to be friends with Vova here.”
“I’m either friends or not, and not “I’m friends here, but not there,” I shrugged.
“Sorry, you don’t live in Moscow, I meant be friends where you see each other. By the way, I invite you to visit the New Athos caves with us on Tuesday. Can you?”
“Yes, I can join you on Tuesday, and I’ll go with pleasure.”
“We are leaving after breakfast. At ten o’clock the caves director’s car will be waiting for us at the entrance of the Rest House…”
And we drove off there. The drive along the seashore was beautiful. The caves were mysterious and enchanting – a magical underground world. After the excursion, the director of the caves invited us to his office for lunch. They brought kebabs and wine, and after eating, Vova and I were sent to the next room for honored guests; the adults had to discuss subsidies from the Trade Union. In this room we found a guest book and began leafing through it. And it turned out that the guests of honor were writing nonsense worthy of the column “You can’t make this up on purpose”.
“You’re entering the underground kingdom, and there’s something hard stand up! These are stal-lactites! Like the horns of underground bulls! (V. Alina, a milkmaid, a hero of Social Labor)
“What cubic capacity! What power! And how many more giants are still hidden in our native land! (K. Shilko, a steelmaker, a Deputy of the Supreme Council)
Most of all we liked the recording made by the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee of Kazakhstan Kunaev. More precisely, the entry was made by his referent,
“The beauty of nature cannot leave Soviet people indifferent. It inspire them to the new labor feats!” and the Secretary of the Central Committee signed the resolution,
“I approve! Kunaev.”
I must say that during our vacation we put together quite a large and cheerful company and celebrated our parting with a cool feast, for which I grilled kebabs and chicken, fried to tobacco color, at a local kebab shop.
I simply asked the chef for permission to fry our own food for ourselves, and at that time promised to help him in everything.
“Are you also a cook?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said, “Who else will fry food on the stove?”
The answer completely convinced him, he gave me a white jacket and a cap, and I got to work. First of all, I scraped off any soot from the stove so that the food did not smell burnt and put my skewers with marinated (basturmed) meat. The delicious smell attracted many visitors, everyone began to order kebabs and chicken, and I had to spin like a clockwork to fry both for myself and for the clients. And the boss looked, looked and invited me to a permanent job!
Here are memories of another summer. Denis, Zalessky, and I went to the Sochi coast, to the village of Lazarevskoye. There, the guys said, the prices are cheaper, the dairy products are better and the girls are more accommodating. I decided to check this data and arrived there after Tallinn. Everything turned out to be true, but life in the village looked boring. I missed the lights of the big city, walks along the boulevard, restaurants, music. We ate at a nearby sanatorium, paying for seats at the table (it was illegal without a voucher), and lived in an apartment. Denis and I are in a room on the ground floor, and Zalessky is in a small attic extension on the roof, but alone.
And so, this story happened to me. I made friends with some girl cook, I called her Bella, like Pechorin (Lermontov’s character) called his wildwoman. Not only did she feed me any quantity of any dish, but she also came to visit me during her lunch break while Denis was taking his afternoon exercise. But I wanted a little romance: you can’t have the kitchen – cutlets – bed and so on every single day. It became clear to me how men become drunkards and women cheat on them. But I didn’t intend to lecture society, I just wanted to brighten up my Bella’s life. I loved rowing and steering the boat. And I said:
“Do you have days off? Let’s take a boat ride on the sea.”
The girl was shocked as if she just caught tetanus,
“Do you invite me?”
“Yes, sure! When will we sail?”
“Tomorrow is my day off.”
“Great! Let’s go tomorrow!”
She gave me a kiss, almost knocked out my front teeth, and like in the movies, she ran away without looking back, well, exactly – the Pechorin’s “baby of nature”.
The next day I rented a boat at the boat station and drove it to the beach. My girlfriend jumped into it like a doe, and we set sail. We sailed for a long time. At first they chatted, and then the girl covered her face with a panama hat and fell asleep. I enjoyed driving the boat and felt safe in the absence of strong waves. It seemed to me that I was strong, I could row for a long time, my girlfriend was next to me, and the sea was beautiful! And although it’s a long time to get to the shore, we’re not in a hurry – it’s not that far. I looked to make sure of this, but the shore disappeared from view. I stood up to my full height – nothing, slowly turned around my axis – still nothing. What could I do? The boat didn’t seem to be spinning, and I began to row in the opposite direction, as it seemed to me, towards the shore. But the strip of land did not appear, no matter how I craned my neck.
Obviously, I was not sailing perpendicular to the shore, but deviated by an angle of 90 degrees or more, therefore, turning back, I was swimming not towards the shore, but parallel to it, or even worse – into the open sea. All that was left was to turn 90 degrees and continue rowing, but I didn’t know which way to turn and with a 50% probability I would have gone out to sea rather than to the shore. I decided not to panic. It is unlikely that I crossed the route of large ships moving along the coast, so when a ship passes by, I need to start rowing perpendicular to its trajectory and land on the shore. And as luck would have it, two ships passed by – one on the right and the other on the left! Here’s cholera (or a plaque on both your houses)! Passengers stared at me waving at them with both hands. Some people waved back… Now I was seriously worried. I had to get out of the trap and save Bella, who had foolishly trusted me with her young life.
And then I heard a rumble. A small coast guard airplane circled overhead, wiggle its wings. They always patrolled the shores, along which a searchlight beam also walked at night. “Why, they are making sure that no one escapes to Turkey,” we joked usually. But now I realized what they were doing – they were protecting naive amateurs like me from themselves. And I happily waved my hand at the pilot. Apparently we understood each other – the plane made a U-turn and flew in a certain direction. I started rowing there too. But after five to ten minutes he returned and repeated the maneuver – he waved his wings, turned around and flew away, and I slightly corrected my course. And he did this three times until the long-awaited shore appeared on my horizon, and then he flew away for good.
Later Bella woke up, looked at the approaching shore, then at the clock and was surprised,
“You have a great patience! I was sleeping, and you were hanging out in one place! Have you fallen in love with me?”
“I don’t think so,” I said honestly, “But at sea – for sure!”
Soon the day of departure from the sanatorium arrived. But Zalessky was leaving a day later and persuaded his girlfriend to stay behind to go to the dance with him for the last time. She agreed on the condition that her girlfriend would stay and they would both go to spend the night with him. Zalessky was a passionate dancer and agreed to sacrifice his comforts. Right after the ball, both girls in their “prom” chiffon dresses stayed overnight in a tiny attic on the roof. And the next morning we observed the following scene: girls in heels and dresses, as if at a village festival, were climbing down the fire stairs from the roof to the ground, and the mistress of the house was standing below and scolding Zalessky and his girlfriends as hard as she only could.
“I thought you were a cultured guy, but look what whores you brought to you! Well, do decent girls dress like that?”
Zalessky tried to justify himself,
“Praskovya Avdotyevna, how is it possible?! These are very decent girls, they are after the ball.”
“After fuck-ball!” the hostess did not let up, “The dresses are transparent, there are no panties and their pussies are shaved! Wow, whores!”
Denis and I were rolling around in hysterics with laughter, hearing this discussion, while Zalessky, red with shame, rushed about the roof, unable to either help the girls quickly get away from the eyes of the harmful old woman, or stop her eloquence.
But sooner or later the whole company came down from the roof, got into a taxi and drove off to the station. And after the car came the following,
“See – a taxi! Slut pretend to be the lady on a shore, but the lady comes to be a whore!”
Denis and I boarded a boat and went to Sochi, from where we returned home by night train. I remember that as a farewell we went to have lunch at a restaurant at the station. Apparently, it was opened before the war or earlier. There was molding on the ceiling, massive chairs in white covers, heavy cutlery, at least cupronickel. Along with the appetizers and salad, they brought us a sparkling silver vessel with a lid. They placed all this on a white tablecloth, uncorked the wine and wished us bon appetite. Denis opened the lid of the vessel with curiosity. A pink liquid swayed in the bowl.
“Gravy, or what?” he tasted it with a spoon, “Drink! Refreshing!”
Denis poured pink liquid into his glass and drank it all at once. I preferred wine and mineral water Borjomi, and I had some thoughts about the “drink,” but I was afraid to express them out loud.
After some time, the waiter brought the main dish and, pointing to the device with a lid, asked,
“Can I pick it up? Have you washed your hands?”
Denis almost vomited. And I could barely restrain myself from bursting into laughter.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “At the end it’s just a disinfection.”
But I’m afraid this had a bad effect on Denis. All night on the train his stomach hurt, and he ran to the toilet, although most likely it was from the food, and not from the soap solution.
These are some isolated flashes, but, imagine, this is not all, so later I will return again to my favorite marine theme, in which the sea, love, friendship, humor and adventure are present as the quintessence of life. Although someone may object: “Where are they not?” Without arguing, I’d rather tell another story, not a pure memory, but a memory in artistic treatment, a story that covers a significant period of time in the lives of the heroes… under the name
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
https://wordpress.com/post/nickneimstories.com/802
(in between Chapter 33 and Chapter 34)
Nick Neim's Stories 