On Sundays, when I didn’t have too much work, I’d take an Opel and we’d go to the beach, to Eupatoria. Often I’d drive myself. The heat was increasing by the day, we were in the heart of springtime, and I had to watch out for the clusters of naked boys who, lying on their stomachs on the burning asphalt of the road, scattered like sparrows before each vehicle, in a lively jumble of thin little tanned bodies. Eupatoria had a fine mosque, the largest one in the Crimea, designed in the sixteenth century by the famous Ottoman architect Sinan, and some curious ruins; but we couldn’t find any Portwein there, or even really any tea; and the lake water was stagnant and muddy. So we would leave the city for the beaches, where we sometimes met groups of soldiers coming up from Sebastopol to rest from the fighting. Most of the time naked, almost always completely white, apart from their faces, necks, and forearms, they played around like children, rushing into the water, then sprawling on the sand still wet, breathing in its warmth like a prayer, to chase away the winter cold. Often the beaches were empty. I liked the old-fashioned look of these Soviet beaches: brightly colored parasols missing their canvas, benches stained with bird droppings, changing booths made of rusty metal with their paint flaking off, revealing your feet and head to the kids lazing by the fences. We had our favorite place, a beach south of the city. The day we discovered it, half a dozen cows, scattered around a brightly colored trawler lying on the sand, were grazing on the new grass of the steppe invading the dunes, indifferent to the blond child on a rickety bicycle weaving between them. Across the narrow bay, a sad little Russian tune drifted from a blue shack perched on a shaky dock, in front of which rocked, tied up with old ropes, three poor fishing boats. The place was bathed in calm forsakenness. We had brought some fresh bread and some red apples from the previous year that we snacked on while we drank some vodka; the water was cold, invigorating. To our right stood two old ramshackle refreshment stalls, padlocked, and a lifeguard’s tower on the verge of collapse. The hours passed without our saying much. Voss read; I slowly finished the vodka and plunged back into the water; one of the cows, for no reason, galloped off down the beach. When we left, passing by a little fishing village to get our car, which was parked farther up, I saw a flock of geese slipping one after another beneath a wooden gate; the last one, with a little green apple wedged in her beak, was running to catch up with her sisters.
