Five favourite things since my childhood: TRAVELLING (part three)

5.    Travelling.

       

Of course we were eager to have a better look at Gorbachev’s summer cottage. One guy from our company tried to swim along the coast in its direction at night but failed because the searchlights began to look for the cause of disturbance very energetically. So we decided to try again at the day time. We swam one or two hundred meters towards the ships – we didn’t dare to swim towards the villa of course. Our friend’s wife was a bad swimmer so she was in flippers, but I got tired worse than she as I was in my glasses and didn’t want them to be splashed. 

          The distance was too great, and we didn’t discover anything interesting. Only that the roof we had seen belonged to the smaller house, for service staff supposedly, and the villa itself looked the same: an orange roof and white walls. Maybe there were marble stairs leading to the beach, I’m not sure, and a lot of green colour around. I forgot what kind of plants they were but at such a distance we couldn’t really see it properly.

         We were planning to repeat this camping holiday next summer but it never happened. We had some financial difficulties – so we went to the sandbar instead. It was in 1991 actually and I regretted a lot we weren’t in the Crimea in August as we planned. It would have been so exciting – Gorbachev was trapped in his villa with his wife, and I am afraid the same ships stood on their guard in the sea.

         We didn’t know it was the beginning of the end of our world and the new life was about to start. It was already starting but I don’t think anybody could indicate the exact moment when it actually began. Did it start maybe when they stopped to pay our salaries regularly? But this was nothing compared with what was to come.

       Some time later they stopped paying our money at all. Then food disappeared from the shelves in our shops. When it appeared again in more or less noticeable quantity, it was too expensive for us to buy. My husband went to several scientific conferences abroad and tried to find a job there but failed. We got thin because of the lack of food but we were still haughty. My husband was giving private lessons only of English not physics because he wanted to improve his English. I tried to be a tutor and gave up, had some temporary teaching job and refused to continue though I was offered to stay. The new world was ruthless but we still didn’t understand that and continued to pass our beloved sandbar every summer right up to the time when our marriage followed our late country and collapsed too.

         After some period of half-starving existence and still deeply in shock I went to sell newspapers stubbornly refusing to try teaching physics again as I wasn’t good at it. Maybe watching me selling press for 13 hours a day was the last straw that caused my father’s death when he was only 69.

                

So this was the hardest period of my life and my country as I could remember. Nevertheless when we both began our recovery the first thing I did was cycling with my children around the salt lake Kuyalnik. It was about 70 kilometers trip during a day. I was not in a good form and hadn’t ridden a bicycle for several years. This, I think, deteriorated my problems with veins in my legs but I have never regretted it. I remember my first feeling of joyful surprise when I discovered that the world I loved was still there with its wide green fields, bright blue sky and fresh air with sweet and bitterish odour of steppe grass.

 I joined my children only twice after that and then the doctors told me I couldn’t overload my legs like that any more. I tried different treatments: pills, ointments and swimming in the salt water of the lake and the sea as the vascular surgeon recommended. And I bothered my friends with conversations about my plans how to bring my legs to a condition as they were in my youth - everything for the purpose of joining my children in this annual summer trip around the lake. It was for me as a journey around the world in miniature. I pestered my friends with this for 2 or 3 years before I understood that they were smiling behind my back thinking I was slightly touched in the head. I knew they liked me like that – just a weirdo but I didn’t want to be tiresome. So I stopped talking about that.

        

But I couldn’t resign myself – I woke up early on the day of the journey and helped my daughter with cooking but when my children were leaving I was hiding inside the house at first. Some years later I began to go out with them and as they were standing in the street, young and strong, with their friends and their bicycles I took the first photo of the trip, But every time as they were leaving without me I felt a prickle in my heart. 

           

I hadn’t ridden my bicycle for three or four years for doctors said I was not allowed to. But then, with some encouragement from my daughter, I began to cycle again – using compressive breeches and within short distances at first. Some time later I discovered that when I was in an especially good form, usually in the middle of summer, I could even take a journey of about 20 kilometers once in one or two years. And it was definitely better than nothing.

        

Once or twice a year my friend from university phoned and told me about some excursion she was going to have with her colleagues. I refused to join them only twice: once - when the only attraction of the trip was a winery and the second time – when it was too expensive for me. Mostly I was ready to go anywhere only to break the monotonous course of life – just to feel the fresh wind on my face and see pure blue sky with fluffy white clouds above my head. And was not it enough for happiness to watch the winding stripe of the road unrolling in front of my eyes or a narrow path running among the grass, promising new impressions and new adventures?

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1. THE SNOW  
2. THE NEW-YEAR CELEBRATION
3. THE ICE-CREAM
4. DRESSES    
5. TRAVELLING (part one)
6. TRAVELLING (part two) 

Five favourite things since my childhood: TRAVELLING (part two)

5. TRAVELLING

Especially scared I felt when we were walking along that sandbar for the first time. Our children were only 6 and 8 at that time. We had a limited amount of water and didn’t know how much time it would take to pass this lonely place. And what a relief it was as the first remote lights of people’s dwellings appeared at last shining in the dark. For us those encouragingly twinkling lights meant – water as we almost ran out of it. We really felt like the true pioneers of the past. 
 

The sea was working hard in winter - so the coast looked different every summer. Most of all we loved high clay cliffs with rooms as we called them. They were the big round hollows made by the winter storms huge waves. In the middle of every room there was a heap of different things thrown out by the sea. I liked to investigate this litter with my children. It looked so clean and smooth washed out by the salt water. Once we found a multicoloured beach ball. Children took it to every walking tour since then. It was like our trophy taken from the sea - my daughter even invented a strange name for it – it was called Dzoom.

For several years those walking tours more or less satisfied my passion for change of air and new impressions but then I began to talk about new places to explore. As for my husband and children they liked to discuss this matter but weren’t in a hurry to change their habits. Although once, just a year before we started our walking tours, we were camping with our fellow student and his family in the Crimea. I loved the place we were staying at so much that even my husband’s bad mood and his coolness, which he showed me from time to time with some incomprehensible frequency, didn’t spoil my pleasure. 
 

I remember how after a long journey in a hot stuffy bus and a tiring walk with heavy bags through the pine-tree forest we reached the beach at last and ran into completely transparent emerald warm water. It was a sensation of flight and unreality. Our friend’s wife felt anxious about our first impression because it was them who invited us to their usual place. When she asked if we liked being there I couldn’t find proper words and just said: “Yes, very much”. It would be too sentimental to answer that maybe in paradise people felt like that.

A high wall of mountains protected the coast from the northern winds. Nights were so warm that there was no need to set up our tents. We just spread them out on the ground, put our sleeping bags over and before falling asleep were watching the stars twinkling through the slightly swaying pine tree branches. And not a single mosquito disturbed us. It was so odd not to have these blood thirsty creatures to spoil our summer rest a little. 
 

When we were walking through the forest, or rather a huge park, to the nearest town to buy some food, squirrels were jumping among the branches above our heads. Climate was so mild there that we found some small cactuses growing just near the road. When I was cooking on the camp-fire alone some curious lizard usually came watching me, sometimes one or two squirrels joined it. 
 

Children loved swimming among the rocks which stuck out of incredibly attractive turquoise water like small islands. Our friends told us that the best way to teach kids swimming was to give them flippers. Our daughter borrowed a pair of those from their children and indeed she learnt the skill of swimming very quickly. Her younger brother felt envious and upset but in the end he managed to do that too.

From time to time the policemen or frontier guards came and asked us to leave. We promised but stayed where we were – we felt well protected having six small children in our company. The representatives of authorities tried to persuade us that it was quite easy to get a place in one of the holiday homes on the coast. But we knew it was not true – they were for party elite, not for ordinary people. And as for me - our way was much cheaper and much less boring. 
 

We were very curious about the first and last president of the USSR Michael Gorbachev’s summer cottage. It was rather a villa of course but we called it “summer cottage” in Russian. It was situated not too far from our place – we could see an orange roof and white walls among the trees. Two or three military ships stood on their guard just opposite it one or two kilometers from the coast. Sometimes we heard the sailors' cheerful voices as they jumped into the water from the board.

To be continued…

1. THE SNOW  
2. THE NEW-YEAR CELEBRATION
3. THE ICE-CREAM
4. DRESSES    
5. TRAVELLING (part one)

Five favourite things since my childhood: TRAVELLING (part one)

5. TRAVELLING.

What do you imagine when you hear the word “travelling”? I see an earth road or a narrow path winding among the grass. I understand that nowadays it’s impossible to travel without using cars, trains and asphalt roads. But for me the most interesting part of a journey starts when I reach some remote places almost unspoiled by civilization. This is the world which mankind is losing now and we’ll lose it forever if we don’t stop our reckless expansion. 
 

I began to love the world of wild nature in my early childhood. The wide open space of steppe with bitter-sweet scent of thick grass in the air – it was the place where my parents started to build our house. And, in spite of all my love for woods and mountains, steppe is the place where I always feel most comfortable as if I belong to it. But can it explain my real obsession with travelling? Walking tours in summertime and cycling to the fields in spring – these were my favourite activities. And they still are, actually – only I can’t afford to walk with a heavy backpack as I used to. 
 

When I was in my thirties, my husband, our two children and I spent 7 or 10 days every summer camping near the sea. I loved everything about those holidays. There was something fascinating in the smell of burning wood and the sight of orange flames licking the black cauldron with bubbling porridge in it. And what a pleasure it was swimming in the sea water which was clean and transparent and lying on the white sand, silky and smooth –it was so different from our city beaches. And in the evening we loved sitting near the camp-fire singing or watching the shooting stars in the sky. And swimming at night when we could observe this wonderful phenomenon – bioluminescence. The tiny sea creatures flashed out in the dark water when we disturbed them with our movements, and twisting glowing lines or solitary stars were running from our arms and legs.

Usually, standing near the edge of the sea in the dark and not knowing what miracle was hiding in its depth, you would think that rare flashes of bluish light were just reflection of moonlight. But once the sea luminescence was so strong that even the opposite cliffs were dimly lit. Long, gently-sloping waves were running along the sea surface and every wave was topped with vaguely glowing bluish foam. Our tent was made of white thin parachute fabric. So the foam and the full moon were clearly seen through its walls. I remember our tent full of light and our friend Anya, the owner of the tent, joking: “Switch the moon and the sea off - I can’t fall asleep”.

Of course we could stay near the village where we usually bought milk and potatoes and took straw in the golden field to warm our tent floor. But it would be slightly boring to have the same peaceful impressions every year. So, during the first half of our holiday, we had a real struggle walking with heavy backpacks along the narrow strip of land between the sea shore and three salt lakes. This land was entirely covered with sand. At some distance from the sea, where even the powerful waves of winter storms could hardly ever reach, there were dunes overgrown with grass. Its sharp blades were webbed by spiders of different sizes and colours, but mostly they were sand-coloured of course. I was afraid of spiders and when we had to go to the dunes I always reminded my family to arm themselves with sticks to tear the cobweb sticky threads.

Every morning we woke up before dawn and began to pack our things, shivering under the chilly wind with our eyes squinting at the dark uninviting sea. Even now I can clearly see our little squad walking in single file along the very edge of the water and the lazy waves licking the sand and our bare feet. It was the place where the sand seemed almost solid – we only slightly sank into it. From time to time however we couldn’t find this compact path and our progress forward turned into really hard work. It took much more time to cross these soft patches or places covered with heaps of sharp mussels. And another obstacle was day time heat, when we were hiding in the shadow of our tent, though I never gave up cooking our lunch, sitting near the fire in the midst of the hot blazing sand.

Sometimes, when my husband woke us up at the crack of dawn, playing his flute as the sea looked dark-blue and chilly or struggling with soft sand as the backpack straps, especially painfully, hurt my shoulders, I thought it would be much more comfortable just to stay near the village. Nevertheless, every summer we repeated the same route.

To be continued...

1. THE SNOW
2. THE NEW-YEAR CELEBRATION
3. THE ICE-CREAM
4. DRESSES  

Ассоль.

Ассоль.

Капитан Грэй сидел в старой таверне маленького портового городка, куда они обычно сворачивали, чтобы пополнить запасы провизии и воды. В этот час здесь было немноголюдно, и он мог посидеть наедине со своими мыслями. Грэй сидел, потягивая вино и задумчиво рассматривая трещинки на поверхности стола. Шум на другом конце зала привлек его внимание. Мария, хозяйка кабачка, обслуживала компанию подвыпивших матросов, перебрасываясь с ними незамысловатыми шутками. Она ловко расставила перед ними тяжелые кружки и пошла к стойке, зажав поднос под мышкой и слегка покачивая бедрами. Крепкие загорелые парни провожали умильными взглядами ее ладную фигуру с волной каштановых волос, рассыпанных по плечам. Ее все здесь любили и не позволяли себе ничего лишнего. Впрочем, она умела постоять за себя. "Какая женщина", – подумал Грэй, наблюдая, как она протирает стойку мягкой фланелью, - "заботливая, нежная, все понимающая и все прощающая". Она всегда знала, когда его лучше оставить одного. Вот и сейчас даже не посмотрит в его сторону. И нашелся же такой подонок, который бросил ее одну с малолетним сынишкой.

- Дядя Грэй! - услышал он звонкий голос за своей спиной и вот уже Томми крепко вцепился в его рукав, радостно смеясь и преданно заглядывая ему в глаза. - Ты обещал научить меня ставить паруса.

- Подрасти сначала, - Грэй потрепал мальчика по густым непослушным волосам. - Лучше приходи ко мне вечером – я позанимаюсь с тобой географией и математикой.

- Приду, - мальчик благодарно улыбнулся и снова потянул его за рукав. - А теперь расскажи, как вы попали в шторм под этим как его... Или нет, - перебил он сам себя, - лучше расскажи, как ты построил корабль с алыми парусами и приплыл за своей любимой девушкой. Ну, этой как ее? Ассоль!

Томми заглянул ему в лицо своими блестящими черными глазами и снова засмеялся. Просто так - от полноты жизни. У них с Ассоль тоже мог бы быть такой мальчик. Но лишения, пережитые в детские годы, не прошли для нее даром - она потеряла ребенка. Действительно ли она так хотела малыша или ее угнетало, что и в этом она не такая как все, но эта потеря окончательно отдалила их друг от друга. Ассоль откровенно скучала над учебниками и все чаще убегала от учителей, которых он ей нанял, к морю и бродила там в одиночестве среди скал. Сбрасывала изящные кожаные туфельки, сшитые лучшим мастером города, и шла по берегу, усеянному грудами ракушек, не чувствуя, как они впиваются в ее ступни. Просыпающаяся в ней женщина так и осталась в полудреме и она, по-прежнему, была все той же маленькой девочкой, которая когда-то бежала вдоль ручья за деревянным корабликом с алыми парусами.

Ему часто снится сон, будто он просыпается ночью, а ее нет рядом. Он поспешно одевается, путаясь в одежде, и бросается на поиски. Однажды это произошло наяву. Тогда он долго бродил в предрассветных сумерках. Где-то рядом мягко шумело море, скрытое ажурной листвой деревьев. Он спустился по извилистой тропке к самому берегу и наконец увидел ее. Ассоль сидела, обхватив руками колени, на одном из огромных валунов, в беспорядке разбросанных по берегу. Волны разбивались о подножие камня, обдавая мелкими брызгами ее босые ноги. Грэй подошел совсем близко, но она даже не повернула головы, будто не слышала шороха мелких камешков, вылетающих у него из-под ног.

- Почему ты так поступаешь со мной? - спросил он с горечью. - Я перед тобой ни в чем не виноват.

- Нет, виноват, - она взглянула на него своими огромными черными глазами. - Ты отнял у меня мечту. Мечты ведь тем и хороши, что они не сбываются. - И она снова отвернулась к морю, смутно серевшему в предрассветной мгле, глядя туда, где примерно через час должно было взойти солнце.

На следующий день, прощаясь с ним в порту, Ассоль виновато плакала у него на плече. - Возвращайся - я буду ждать, - просила она, задыхаясь от слез. - Забудь все, что я тебе наговорила вчера.

- Она была красивая? - Томми все еще стоял рядом и серьезно смотрел на него.

- Почему была? - удивился Грэй, - Ассоль и сейчас живет в большом старинном доме у моря. Каждое утро она выходит на берег и ждет своего прекрасного принца на корабле с алыми парусами.

- А как же ты, Грэй? - возмутился Томми. - Ты же лучше любого принца.

- Конечно, малыш, - улыбнулся Грэй и, поднявшись

из-за стола, направился к выходу.

Свежий соленый ветер ударил ему в лицо. Наконец закончился штиль, задержавший их здесь на целую неделю. Завтра они выйдут в море и

через три дня на рассвете пройдут мимо его родных берегов. Как всегда он выйдет на палубу в потрепанном бушлате и будет провожать глазами знакомые очертания, подернутые фиолетовой дымкой, будто надеясь разглядеть стройную девичью фигурку на берегу.

***

Этот рассказ я написала в 2000-м году, когда я работала продавцом газет — «на хозяина», как это тогда называлось. Это было время, когда наша страна уже начинала потихоньку выкарабкиваться из той экономической пропасти, в которой она очутилась, мне до сих пор не понятно почему, несмотря на все объяснения специалистов. Для меня это время ассоциируется с тяжелой изматывающей работой, полуголодным существованием и последней болезнью моего отца. Чтобы как-то отвлечься от безысходной ситуации, в которой я оказалась, я, сидя за прилавком, заваленным желтой прессой, часто выбирала какие-нибудь криминальные ужастики в крикливо-раскрашенных журнальчиках. Полет фантазии журналистов был настолько вопиющим, что это было даже не смешно. Особенно запомнился сюжет про двух маньяков, которые, заманив в свое логово приглянувшегося им человека, угощали его пельменями, приготовленными из предыдущей жертвы. Удивительно, что сюжет моего рассказа приснился мне в то время, когда окружающая меня действительность казалась мне ненамного лучше тех криминальных кошмариков. А рассказ на удивление получился грустным и светлым. Как все-таки непостижима работа человеческого мозга!