“Take what you need and then we will figure it out. You have a child with you,” the landlady proposed generously.
Their vacation was working out sumptuously. Never in their lives had they eaten such quantities of stewed canned pork and butter as they did in those two weeks vacationing in the South. As for tomatoes, there was nothing to be said: that summer taught them that the product sold under the name of tomatoes in all other places had no relation whatsoever to the real thing.
But their principal discovery was made three days later, when having had their fill of looking at the sad, barely live sea, they made their way finally to the estuary.
The sandbar—overgrown in places with reeds and wormwood—stretched many miles, washed on one side by the languid sea and on the other by the estuary’s standing water, rather, that of one of its long inlets, which during spring high water was connected with the river’s main stream, but for the larger part of the year was entirely cut off. In a surprising way this small sandbar represented the entire local region: abandoned, almost nameless, cut off from its own history and alien to the present. This was the edge of the Bessarabian steppe, the setting for ancient civilizations trampled by Scythians, Gets, Sarmatians, and various nameless tribes. Once the outlands of the Roman Empire, it was now the wasteland of another, contemporary empire. Unfortunate, forsaken by all the gods, the motherland of white feather grass and fine suffocating dust . . .
Already sunburned, in long sundresses, their crimson backs covered with towels, Tanya and Vika dragged little Misha in his pajama bottoms along the unpopulated shore as they attempted to find a place where they could take cover from the direct rays of the sun. The round sand dunes, which had stopped growing short of full size, offered no shade. At noon, no one went outside except vacationers: the locals lived by the laws of the South, burrowing off for siestas at this time of day, regardless of their work schedules . . .
They found a small hill with three bushes with a trembling hint of shade underneath. They lay down on the hot sand. At this place the sandbar was about three hundred feet wide, the path running close to the estuary; having rested for a bit, they dipped themselves in its fresh water. You couldn’t say the water was warm; it was hot. They found a half-submerged dinghy in the reeds, which kept Misha busy for quite a while. Ducks with their adolescent ducklings scurried along the shore, accustomed to the heat, the warm water, and the abundance of food. The shallows, like a can of sardines, teemed with minnows. Only without tomato sauce. The thickets of reeds were filled with a live rustling: something there scurried by, started a ruckus, and emitted various sounds. Unidentifiable paws of various sizes had left their tracks along the tiny sandy shoal, and Misha bent over them, studying their script.
Tanya folded her arms across her stomach and tapped with her finger.
“You good in there? Satisfied?” She understood that yes, he was good . . .
The ever-prepared Nanny Goat, who in addition to water and food had hauled along a chubby volume, leaned her head into the scanty shade and opened her book. She started to read aloud.
“He thought that the mountains and clouds looked completely identical and that the particular beauty of the snowy mountains, about which he had been told, was as much an invention as Bach’s music and a woman’s love—none of which he believed in—and he stopped waiting for the mountains to appear. But the next day, early in the morning, he was wakened by the fresh air in his cart and looked casually to the right. The morning was perfectly clear. Suddenly he saw—about twenty steps away, as it seemed to him at first glance—the pure white colossi with their gentle outlines and the whimsical, distinct aerial line of their summits against the distant sky. When he comprehended the true distance between him and the mountains and the sky, the full enormity of the mountains, and when he sensed the full infiniteness of this beauty, he became frightened that it was all an apparition, a dream. He shook himself, so as to wake up . . .”
Tanya glanced over her shoulder. “You rereading Tolstoy? What for?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. I feel like it. Almost every year, and certainly in the summer. Like this, on the beach. On a train . . . In the yard, in the kitchen garden . . . Like visiting a relative. Out of a sense of duty. But love too. It’s a bit boring. But necessary.”
“Yes, yes. I know. My mother has read Tolstoy that way all her life. Her father, my grandfather, was a Tolstoyan or something like that. He was shot.”
“Are you kidding? They arrested Tolstoyans too?” Nanny Goat was surprised.
“How else? Absolutely . . .” She closed her eyes. She saw an unexpectedly lustrous picture—pure white colossi with their gentle outlines and the whimsical, distinct aerial line of their summits against the distant sky. “I don’t care for him. No, that’s not so. He writes that he doesn’t believe in the music of Bach or a woman’s love, in the beauty of mountains, and you’re prepared to agree with him. Then he ups and suddenly writes three sentences about the beauty of the mountains that hit you right between the eyes . . . And it all gets turned upside down.”
She rolled off her back onto her stomach and leaned on her elbow in the sand.
“Thank you for hauling me out to this hole. This place, of course, is awesome . . . Nobody around . . .”
In fact, there were lots of vacationers, who could be observed in the morning at the local market: people from Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Kishinev. Many vacationers arrived particularly toward the weekend. But they all gathered amicably on two beaches—the resort hotel’s and the so-called public beach . . . The Moldovans with their hanging mustaches, Ukrainian mine workers who succeeded in covering their coal-dust-darkened faces with crimson suntans, their full-bodied wives, and screaming children laid out their domestic supplies along a littered strip of shore where they drank warm vodka, played circle volleyball, splashed about in the shallows, then left, leaving behind stinking mountains of trash to be washed away by the cleansing storms of autumn. No matter what they called themselves, they were the true descendants of the extinct barbarous world.
Neither the sandbar nor the wild seashore down the staircase interested anyone. Walking past the feculent public beach, Tanya and her companions would come out on the sandbar, and a quarter mile later the remains of the barbarians’ campgrounds disappeared. If they followed the turn of the sandbar and walked another two to two and a half miles, they found themselves at such a remove, in such an uninhabited world, as was impossible to imagine . . .
On the second Saturday of their stay on the estuary, the pain of their sunburns having already subsided, they made their way to the very middle of the sandbar, where the remains of some indeterminate stone structure were still preserved. Likely the winter waves reached these ruins, but the vacationers did not, which meant that there were no broken bottles and no tin cans among the roots of the pathetic bushes that had sprouted under the cover of the heaped-up stones . . . They walked over toward the ruins and caught sight of a tent made out of a white sheet strung in seclusion among the rocks: there were several young men inside the tent.
“It’s the musicians from the club.” Tossing a quick glance in their direction, Tanya recognized them immediately.
“What club?” Nanny Goat wondered.
“The sailors’ club, where our Mama Zina . . .”
“I hadn’t paid any attention to them. Tanya, you have an incredible visual memory. How did you remember them?” Nanny Goat continued to be amazed.
The pianist, the eldest of them, thick-nosed and hairy-legged, waved cordially.