The Story of a Life

87

Firinka,

Running Water and a Bit of Danger

Firinka, a small Black Sea fish about the size of a large safety pin, was always fresh because it was the only fish for sale in the shops and all Odessa ate (or, as the more polite Southerners preferred, ‘dined on’) this little insignificant creature. But sometimes even firinka ran out. It was eaten raw, lightly salted, or minced and fried as fishcakes. The fishcakes could be eaten only when the alternative was starvation and, as the Odessans said, were best served ‘with a garnish of tears’.

Nazarov and I (we were neighbours) were nearly broke. We lived on nothing but firinka and soggy maize bread. It looked like a grainy biscuit but tasted of pure aniseed. We had to thoroughly rinse our mouths to get rid of the intense taste of that bread. Once in a while I bought roast chestnuts. They were sold by weary old women in heavy fringed shawls who sat on low benches along the pavement, slowly stirring the nuts cooking in the braziers. The chestnuts crackled, burst and gave off an aroma of burnt bark, although sweeter and more fragrant.

Odessa was dark. The street lamps were lit very late or not at all, and so on many quiet autumn nights the only light was the fire of these braziers. The low-slung glow creeping over the pavements lent the city a certain magical quality. The old women wrapped themselves in shawls, while Odessa wrapped itself in fog. The whole autumn passed in this sea-fog shroud. I must admit, I’ve loved foggy days ever since, especially in the autumn when they are infused with the languid lemon yellow of fallen leaves.

It was extremely difficult to find lodgings in Odessa, but we were lucky. On Cape Langeron, in quiet, peaceful Chernomorskaya Street overlooking the sea, stood Dr Landesman’s private sanatorium for nervous diseases. These anxious, unsettled times had produced a great rise in nervous disorders, but nobody had any money for treatment, especially in an expensive private clinic like Dr Landesman’s, which is why it had been closed.

Nazarov had run into a woman he knew from Moscow, a neurologist, and she arranged for us to live in the empty sanatorium. Landesman, a majestic and exceedingly polite gentleman, offered us two small rooms with white walls in return for our acting as caretakers. It was our job to make sure no one chopped down the little orchard for firewood or dismantled the house and carted it away.

The central heating didn’t work, and the little metal ‘burzhuika’ stove could not warm my room with its exceptionally high ceiling and large windows. Firewood was almost impossible to come by. Now and then I managed to buy some acacia logs, which were sold by the pound. The most I could afford was a few pounds’ worth. It was bitterly cold, especially when the winds blew out of the north. The sanatorium’s walls of glazed white tiles made it feel even colder.

Once again, I got a job as a proofreader for a newspaper (I’ve forgotten its name). It was published by Academician Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky.fn1 I worked every third day and earned very few ‘bells’ – the popular slang for Denikin paper roubles engraved with an image of the Tsar Bell in the Kremlin.

I enjoyed living in the echoing mansion by the sea. I liked the total solitude it provided and even the cold grainy air that smelled of salt. I read a lot, wrote some, and for lack of anything better to do, studied the fog. In the mornings, I went out into the garden and stood on the edge of the cliff over the sea. The invisible surf slowly rolled over the shingle. The foghorn blew dolefully and the bell tolled on the Vorontsov lighthouse. Small grey drops of dew shone on the long-withered grass and the branches of the acacias.

Ever since, fog has been associated in my mind with solitude, with a quiet life of concentration. It reduced the world to a small, visible circle, leaving only a few things available for observation – some trees, a gorse bush, a column of rough stone, an iron gate and an anchor chain lying for no apparent reason in a corner of the garden. It forced me to look at them longer and more carefully than we normally do, and I discovered in them many hitherto unnoticed details. The porous yellow stone was encrusted with tiny seashells and on the gorse a few flowers remained, sitting on straight, stiff branches like so many drenched, wrinkled golden butterflies waiting patiently for the sun. But it seldom showed through the fog and then only as a smudgy white blur that provided neither warmth nor shade. Under the one old plane tree, lemon-yellow splotches on its trunk, lay piles of leaves that looked as though cut from dull green velvet. Columns of ants scurried along the iron gate, carrying the last load of winter supplies to their underground granaries, and beneath the anchor lived a timid little toad.

The fog had its own sounds. They appeared shortly before it melted away. It began with a vague rustling. The watery dust of sea spray merged to form drops which collected on the dark tree branches and then fell to the ground with faint plops. Next, a clear, echoing thunk was added to this soft music – the first drop of condensed fog had fallen from the roof and landed on the bottom of the upturned zinc tub below.

I loved the smell of fog as well, which carried with it a scent of coal smoke and steam. It was the smell of railway stations, of docks and ship decks – everything that spoke of travel, of long journeys over land and sea, of voyages through violet-blue light to distant pink islands bathed in the sweet aroma of lemons, of the raw wind and warning lights in the English Channel, of the rhythmic clatter of a train rolling through our slumbering Russian forests, of everything that captivates our frail human hearts.

In Odessa, I was seized by the idea of spending my whole life travelling so that I might live whatever years were granted me in the discovery of new things and people, and to use whatever talent I possessed to write books about my experiences and then give these books – books filled with the whole world in all its variety – to the young woman, as yet unmet, who would fill my life with joy and pain and wonderment at the beauty of the world, the world as it should be but so rarely is. At the time, I was certain that this would be my future. For a writer, to give to the beloved is to give to all humanity. I was convinced of this ill-defined law of generosity and of the need to give of oneself freely and completely. To give and not expect or ask for anything in return, no matter how small, this was all that mattered.

All I have just written is a lyrical digression. Literary critics like to warn writers against them: they upset the natural order of things and serve only to confuse readers, so they say. But it seems to me that there’s no reason why one shouldn’t write an entire book this way – freely and without the slightest constraint – submitting to nothing other than the uninterrupted flow of ideas and imagination. Perhaps this is the only way to achieve complete, total expression.

All the same, I must get back to the firinka, the maize bread and that autumn in Odessa.

The lack of food never bothered me much, particularly after I acquired two tins of concentrated Dutch coffee from the cook on the French steamship Dumont d’Urville, then in port. I traded him a packet of Stamboli tobacco for it. The tobacco had once belonged to my father and for some reason Mama had saved it for years and later given it to me. The Dumont d’Urville was berthed next to an English destroyer at the Quarantine Pier. The sailors from the destroyer played football on the pier all day. The black and yellow steamers of the Lloyd Triestino line called regularly from Trieste and Venice. Groups of Greek sailors walked the streets of Odessa. Their blue uniforms, white gaiters with little round buttons and broad cutlasses looked old-fashioned and theatrical.

Odessa was full of an incredible mix of people that year. The small-time stock exchange gamblers and black marketeers were overrun by an invasion of ruthless and brutal speculators fleeing from what they themselves spitefully called ‘Sovdepia’. The local dealers could only shake their heads and sigh – gone were the good old days when a single crumpled bill of lading for a single wagonload of lemon extract in Arkhangelsk could change hands for a whole month among the patrons of the Fanconi Café, rising and falling in price so that everyone could make a turn ‘on the difference’. Arkhangelsk was farther away than Mars, and lemon extract had long been a myth. But this didn’t bother the black marketeers. Their dealings sounded like a loud game at the lunatic asylum. They haggled until they were hoarse, shook hands over deals, took umbrage, and at times this load of lemon extract or some equally mythical cargo of sponges (Porto Franco Patras, Greece) ended in loud and seemingly endless rows. Sometimes actual deals were made – for a package of saccharine, a batch of old braces or a suspicious-looking packet of sal ammoniac. At the time sal ammoniac wasn’t cheap. It was a popular substitute for yeast.

But the speculators pouring in from the north put these peaceful, philosophical locals to shame with the sheer audacity of their deal making. Brilliant diamonds, from the tsar’s own crown, of course; crisp new sterling and franc notes; luxurious scented furs straight from the shoulders of Petrograd’s most famous beauties – all this and more passed into the hands of razor-stubbled Greek merchants. They did a particularly lucrative business selling the landed estates of the old nobility in provinces all over Mother Russia.

Every evening, one could see many well-known figures mingling with the flower girls on Deribasovskaya Street. Most of them, it was true, were looking rather shabby and agitated by the epidemic of outlandish rumours. In this respect, Odessa was way ahead of all the other southern towns. The rumours were indeed outlandish but frightening too. They blew into the city on the gusty north wind from the Kherson steppes. The Soviet army was charging south, demolishing covering forces, tightening the noose around the Whites, cutting off their escape routes. The Whites’ thin front line was breaking like rotten thread, one minute here, the next there.

Every time the front was broken, more deserters flooded into Odessa. Drunken noise filled the bars until morning – women shrieked, dishes crashed, shots rang out. The defeated tried to settle accounts and figure out who among them were the traitors responsible for Russia’s destruction. The white skulls on the sleeves of the officers of the ‘Death Battalions’ were yellow with dirt and grease, and no longer scared anyone. The city lived from hand to mouth. According to official estimates, supplies of food and coal should have run out long ago, but, by some miracle, they hadn’t. Only the city centre had electricity, and even there the lights did little more than flicker dimly. No one acknowledged the Whites’ authority, including the Whites themselves.

Three thousand bandits from Moldavanka led by Mishka Yaponchikfn2 looted lazily, clumsily, half-heartedly. They were sated with fabulous hauls from their previous raids and wanted to relax after this exhausting work. They joked more than they stole, they caroused in the restaurants, they cried as they sang the heart-rending song of the death of Vera Kholodnaya: ‘Poor Runich weeps, / Over Vera’s grave.’

Runichfn3 had acted alongside Vera Kholodnaya. According to the lyrics, Vera begs him from her grave:

In bright cornflowers blue,

Do wreathe my cold breast.

With tears of love so true

Show that you loved me best.

One evening I walked back home to Chernomorskaya Street from the editorial office with Yakov Lifshitz, a journalist from Petrograd. Homeless, Lifshitz joined us as the third lodger at Dr Landesman’s. A short, dishevelled, restless man, he was known as ‘Yasha on Wheels’. This was because when he walked, he rolled from heel to toe with a strange rocking motion, something like a blotter absorbing ink on paper. Yasha didn’t appear to be walking but gliding as though on roller skates. His shoes even looked like ink blotters – the soles were bent in a convex arc.

‘Yasha on Wheels’ and I walked along, picking the small side streets and lanes to try to avoid the patrols. In one of them, two young men in matching jockey caps came out of a doorway. They stopped to have a smoke. We were walking right towards them, but they made no sign of moving. It looked as though they were waiting for us.

‘Thugs,’ I whispered to Yasha.

He snorted at this and said: ‘Nonsense! Thugs don’t work deserted streets like these. We need to check.’

‘How?’

‘By talking to them. It’s obvious.’

Yasha had a pet theory – always approach danger head on. He was convinced that this theory had saved him from many a tight spot.

‘What are we going to talk to them about?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘Any old thing. It makes no difference.’

Yasha walked quickly up to the two men and asked them out of the blue: ‘Could you tell me, please, how to get to Chernomorskaya Street?’

The young men began to politely explain it to him. It was complicated, and so it took them a long time to describe the route, especially because Yasha kept interrupting them. Finally, Yasha thanked them, and we went on our way.

‘There now, you see,’ said a triumphant Yasha. ‘My theory never fails.’

I agreed with him, and then, the very next moment, we heard the men call us. We stopped. They came up and one of them said: ‘You do know, of course, that everyone who goes past Alexandrovsky Park, which you’ll have to do to get to Chernomorskaya, is robbed of their coat?’

‘Really, everyone’s coat?’ Yasha said with a laugh.

‘Well, almost everyone,’ the young man corrected himself and smiled. ‘They’ll steal yours. That’s for sure. So, it’s better you take it off now. It can’t make any difference to you whether you lose it here in Kanatny Lane or at the park, right?’

‘Well, I guess you’re right …’ said Yasha, all flustered.

‘How nice of you. Now please be so kind.’

The young man flicked a knife out of his sleeve. I had never in my life seen such a long, beautiful knife. It was as sharp as a razor. He held it close to Yasha’s stomach.

‘If it’s not too much trouble,’ the man with the knife said, ‘please remove everything from the pockets you might need, except money. Wonderful! I thank you. Goodnight! No, please, don’t bother,’ he said, turning to me, ‘one coat is plenty for us. Greed is the mother of all sins. On your way then, and don’t look back. It never pays to look back, does it?’

We walked home, not terribly upset by what had just happened. The whole way Yasha kept waiting for someone to come and take my coat, but no one ever did. He became gloomy after a while and angry with me, as though it were my fault they took his coat and not mine. I got the feeling he actually wondered whether I had been in cahoots with the two thieves.

In general, Yasha was extremely unlucky. Nazarov always tried to convince us that Yasha was a Jonah. As proof, he offered two incidents. Unfortunately, I could not refute their veracity because I had seen them with my own eyes. The first involved a large jug of water, the second a thermometer.

At the time, Odessa was experiencing an acute water shortage. It had to be brought all the way from the river Dniester, over sixty kilometres away. The water pump on the Dniester was barely working. It had been shot up and attacked by numerous gangs. Odessa was hanging by a thread – it might be left without water at any moment. There was still water in the pipes, sometimes, but only in the areas of the city closest to sea level. Long queues of people from all over Odessa trudged to these more fortunate neighbourhoods from dawn until dusk, carrying with them every sort of pail, bucket, pitcher and kettle. Only a lucky few – the owners of carts – arrived with barrels to fetch water. We both envied and hated them, despite the fact that they had to harness themselves to their carts. It was painful to watch as they puffed and panted their way up the hills or chased, horrified, after these same carts when they got away from them and began careering back downhill, spilling a good half of the water.

We took turns fetching water over on Uspenskaya Street, a couple of kilometres away. I knew every cellar with a tap on that street so well I could find them all blindfolded. As we queued we heard all the latest news and gossip and the ‘regulars’ greeted each other as though they were dear old friends. The poet Vera Inber lived near us in shady Observatorny Lane.fn4 She always fetched water with the same vase, made of frosted, multi-coloured glass and decorated with purple irises in relief. Inber, a slight, frail woman, slipped one day and broke her vase. The following day, however, she was back with another one just like it. Out of sheer compassion, I carried the vase of water back home for her. Inber’s fear that I would drop and break this last vase of hers was exhausting and made my legs shake.

Quite naturally, I had to be careful carrying all that water. I always watched my footing and so came to learn everything there was to know about the roads and pavements between Chernomorskaya and Uspenskaya Streets. I became convinced that looking down as I walked was an alluring and at times even useful activity. There were a good many little objects to see, all of which stimulated various thoughts and ideas. Some of these objects were pleasant, some indifferent, and some were bad.

The worst, and most common, were drops, and at times whole pools, of blood and Mauser cartridges. The cartridges had an acrid smell of gunpowder. Empty purses and torn documents were also bad. Those were less common, however. There were fewer pleasant objects, but they were more varied. Typically, they were utterly unexpected – dried flowers from a bouquet, fragments of cut glass, desiccated crab claws, empty packets of Egyptian cigarettes, little girls’ hair ribbons, rusty fishhooks. They all spoke of a world at peace. The tufts of grass growing up here and there between the paving stones also counted among the pleasant things. As did the little flowers, most of them withered, and the round flat stones in the cement gutters washed clean by the rain. Most of the objects belonged to the indifferent category – buttons, copper coins, pins, cigarette butts. No one paid them any attention.

We poured our water into a large glass jug in the hall. One day, Yasha left his room and started screaming wildly. I rushed out into the hall and witnessed something inexplicable: right in front of Yasha and me, our enormous jug slowly began to tip over, pausing for a few seconds like the Tower of Pisa, before falling onto the floor and shattering into a thousand pieces. Our precious water ran gurgling down the stairs. We could have caught the jug, but for some reason we just stood there without moving as though bewitched.

The second incident, with the thermometer, was even stranger. I fell ill with Spanish flu. Thermometers in Odessa were as rare as pineapples. There was only a handful of them in the entire city. People treasured their thermometers no less than shipwrecked sailors treasure their last match.

Nazarov asked to borrow one for a couple of days from our editor, the illustrious Academician Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky. As a celebrated humanitarian and venerable guardian of Russia’s liberal traditions, Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky could not possibly say no. Biting his lips and groaning (the strongest expressions of displeasure he ever made), he gave Nazarov the thermometer with strict instructions to wrap it in cotton wool and keep it safely stored in a drawer. Nazarov, Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky warned, must cherish the thermometer like the apple of his eye.

Nazarov took my temperature, but he forgot about Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky’s instructions. He put the thermometer down on my bedside table and went off into town. I fell asleep. Yasha woke me up. He tried to open the door carefully, but it made a loud squeak. I glanced at the table and could feel the hair on my head rise – the thermometer had started to roll slowly to the edge of the table. I wanted to scream but couldn’t. I saw the look of terror in Yasha’s eyes. He too was watching the thermometer, motionless. It rolled off the table, fell and shattered on the floor. My fever broke, no doubt from the shock. I recovered almost immediately.

We racked our brains for a long time about how we were going to find another thermometer. The next two days Nazarov called in sick to avoid running into Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky. In the end, we had to resort to crime. We found the key to Dr Landesman’s office and found a thermometer in his desk drawer. To put it in the evasive language of thieves, we ‘took’ it (thieves never like to use the word ‘steal’) and returned it to Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky.

After these two incidents, Nazarov tried to convince me that Yasha was dangerous and urged me never to go out with him again. I just laughed at him, for which I was soon to be cruelly punished. In order to explain precisely what happened, I must first say a few words about Sturdzovsky Lane. It led to Chernomorskaya Street and was impossible to avoid.

This little street, named after the famous Alexander Sturdza, a contemporary of Pushkin, always evoked in us a sense of hidden danger, perhaps because the sides were lined with nothing but tall garden walls made of heavy stone, behind which large gardens stretched all the way to a high cliff overlooking the sea. The long, blank walls up and down Sturdzovsky Lane offered no protection, no cover. In those days, before walking down any street, we had all developed the habit of scoping out the quickest places to hide or take shelter from gunfire or drunken patrols. There wasn’t a single hiding place on Sturdzovsky Lane, unless one counted a sole two-storey house with its deeply recessed doorway. The house stood abandoned. Weeds grew out of the broken windows.

I paid Nazarov no heed, and late one autumn night walked back home again with Yasha from the office. Walking the streets at night required strict observance of a number of unwritten laws. First of all, no smoking, no talking, no coughing. Second, walk quietly, minimising the sound of one’s feet. Third, stick close to the walls or in the shadows of trees. Fourth, every forty or fifty steps, stop, look and listen, being sure to search the darkness for any movement. And fifth, at every intersection, scan the cross street to see that it was clear and then make a quick dash to the other side.

We made it safely to Sturdzovsky Lane, and then stopped at the corner, listening and peering into the inky darkness for a long time to make sure the coast was clear. On the one hand, the darkness helped us to hide. On other hand, it also helped the enemy to hide. There was the danger of walking straight into a trap.

Everything was quiet, so quiet we could even hear the faint rumble of the surf. We crept stealthily down the lane. Before we set out, I had told Yasha that we should make our way down the side of the street with the doorway, stop before we reached it, and then quickly and quietly dart past it. I had worked it out mathematically. If anyone was hiding in the doorway, they might well not see us coming. If we went down the other side of the lane, however, they could see us from a good way off. According to my calculation, if we walked on the other side, we would be in sight of the enemy five times longer. Thus, the danger to us would be five times greater.

But Yasha had countered my theory with his own, namely that it’s always better to face danger head-on. Even though we had been whispering, I didn’t argue with him for the simple reason I didn’t want to risk being discovered, and so we set off down the side of the street opposite the doorway.

Yasha counted the seconds to himself. We knew it took seven minutes to walk from Sturdzovsky Lane to Dr Landesman’s. We always felt safe once we were back at the sanatorium, behind its high wall and iron gates, especially if we made sure not to light the oil lamps. As we were passing the doorway, Yasha stumbled. Whenever we talked about this incident later, Yasha always insisted that the more you concentrate on doing something perfectly, the more likely you are to make some foolish mistake. As for me, I was convinced it was all due to his absurd way of walking. But I never told him this to spare his feelings. Anyway, Yasha stumbled, and he was so shocked that instead of cursing silently to himself, he blurted out ‘Sorry!’ in a loud, embarrassed voice.

‘Don’t move!’ shouted a husky voice from the doorway. The sharp beam of an electric torch hit us squarely in the face. ‘Hands out of your pockets! Now! You bastards!’

Several armed men came up to us. It was a Cossack patrol.

‘Papers!’ said the man with the husky voice.

I handed him my identity card. The Cossack shone his torch on it and then on me. ‘Damned foreigner! Greek, most likely,’ he said. ‘Mackerel with a slice of lemon, that’s what you are. This is obviously fake. Here, take it.’

He handed back my identity card and then shone the light on Yasha. ‘Don’t even bother showing me your papers,’ he said. ‘Anyone can see you’re a general in the Jerusalem army. Go on, get out of here!’

We walked on a few paces.

‘Stop!’ the same Cossack shouted suddenly in a shrill voice. ‘Don’t move!’

We stopped.

‘What are you dawdling for? Didn’t I tell you to get a move on?’

We started walking again, slowly, trying to hide our fear. Every nerve in my body was stretched tight. I could feel the barrels of their guns trained on our backs even though I hadn’t heard the clicking of the bolts. I realised now they were playing a deadly game of cat and mouse with us. They were going to kill us, and any moment might be our last.

‘Stop! You motherf——rs!’ the Cossack screamed again.

The other men snickered.

We stopped again, this time alongside the wall. I couldn’t see it in the dark, but I knew it was made of rough stone and so there must be places to grab hold of.

‘Over the wall,’ I whispered to Yasha. ‘In one go. Otherwise we’re dead.’

I was thin and light. It was easy for me to climb over the wall. But Yasha, with his big, heavy roller-skate shoes, nearly fell off. I grabbed his hand and pulled. We threw our legs over the top of the wall and jumped. Shots rang out behind us, and chunks of rock exploded along the top of the wall. We raced through the dark garden. The tree trunks had been treated with white lime, which helped us to find our way. The Cossacks had climbed the wall by now and were on our tails. A bullet whistled past my ear. We made it to the wall on the far side of the garden. There was a gap in it. The Cossacks were now running through the garden, but they wasted time aiming and firing their rifles and so we managed to squeeze through the gap. Another three paces and we were on the edge of a steep cliff over the sea.

We scrambled down the cliff and took off running along the shore. The Cossacks kept firing from up above but had lost us by now in the darkness. We picked our way for some time down the shoreline, over large rocks and past dark caves. The surf drowsily rolled up on the shingle. It was hard to believe that a man could kill another man just like himself for no good reason on such a warm autumn night filled with the scent of thyme and the gentle sounds of the whispering sea. I was still naïve enough to believe that beauty could appease evil and that murder was impossible before the Sistine Madonna or atop the Acropolis.

I was dying for a smoke. The shooting had stopped, so we climbed into the first cave and lit our cigarettes. Never in my life have I enjoyed a cigarette more. We sat in the cave for about three hours before coming out and walking stealthily along the rocky shore towards the sanatorium. All was quiet. Clinging to the rocks and bushes, we climbed up the cliff to the high fortress-like wall of the sanatorium. We located a culvert, slithered through it, stuffed it full of rocks behind us, even though this was completely unnecessary, and went inside.

Nazarov was not asleep. He was stunned by our tale. We went into the windowless bathroom, lit the oil lamp and got our first look at ourselves. Our clothes were all torn, our hands cut and bleeding, but on the whole, we were lucky to be alive. We gulped down lots of tea and got drunk. Not from the tea, of course, but from an amazing, incomparable feeling of lightness that came from being safe. If perfect happiness exists, we experienced it that night.

I wanted to hold onto this feeling as long as possible. I changed my clothes, grabbed a blanket and went out to the loggia – a deep bay with a projecting balcony on the first floor. It was dark there and protected from the wind. No one could see me from the street below. I lay down on a wicker chaise longue, wrapped the blanket around me and stayed there until dawn, listening to the sounds of the night.

The sea murmured without end. The sound of the large breakers rose and fell. So did the wind in the bare branches. It rose and fell, becoming as quiet as me, listening throughout the night. But the wind never left, it remained with me. I could tell by the smell of the wet shingle and the subtle trembling of the last leaf on the plane tree. I had noticed that stubborn grey leaf the day before, but now, at night, it seemed a tiny living creature, my one friend, keeping vigil beside me.

Now and then gunshots echoed in the dark from somewhere off in the city. After each shot, dogs barked for a long time. Once a faint light flickered far out at sea and then vanished. Everything around me slept. I too dozed off occasionally, but my sleep was fitful. It was the kind of half-sleep when one can clearly see large white flowers floating on a dark sea or hear the sound of a violin, soft as a child’s hand. In that half-sleep I felt completely different from my usual self – extremely calm, trusting, accepting of the world. From the darkness of the sea, I was certain I could hear a woman whispering:

So, what does my name mean to you?

It’s certain to die like a mournful roar,

Like waves splashing on a distant shore,

A forest noise before the night is through.fn5