The island of San Marco handed out round-the-clock bliss and peace across eleven months of summer. Beauty like that, naturally, did not go unnoticed. Every day herds, flocks and couples of vacationers touched down at the local airport, scattered to the beachfront hotels, and after a while came back to the airport tanned and refreshed and flew away. Flew away, leaving behind a certain quantity of banknotes. And where did those interesting little scraps of paper end up? In the island’s one and only bank, by the look of it – and the disposition inside that bank, my friends, was highly erotic.
Picture it: a deserted square in the middle of a little island town. A guard loafing at the bank entrance with a rusty «Beretta» in his holster. Half a dozen clerks wearing out their trousers in the banking hall. One more guard quietly dozing in the vault. That’s it! Nobody else!
My hands itched past all endurance, my backside whistled and tingled, but I kept reining myself in: «Halt, Sashka!» The Hamlet question – to take or not to take – had been settled from the very beginning.
Not to take!
I’m a simple resort sucker who rolled in here to rest, splash around in open water, pick up a bit of a tan, unwind… And what business is some native bank of mine? None whatsoever. All the more so since the holiday crowd mostly paid not in cash but with plastic cards.
Spitting on the bank and the whole system of cashless settlement, forgetting my criminal past, the very embodiment of respectability, I marched down to the beach every day in my little trunks and singlet. There, first thing, I would give myself over to the ancient Russian pastime – swimming out past the buoys. I’d swim three hundred meters or so from shore, rock on the turquoise glass for fifteen minutes and come back. People marveled at my reckless daring and envied me quietly, in a good-natured way. I was the only Russian on San Marco; the rest were law-abiding Americans who swam a shade better than an axe. Well then – that’s us for you! Under a barrage of admiring female glances – a daredevil! a bogatyr! a colossus of a man! – I would collect a cocktail at the beach bar and settle in thoroughly under some awning or other. There I’d hold court in a lounge chair, studying the horizon, the ocean swell, and the assorted young women arguing with that same swell. At three in the afternoon I’d head back to the hotel, a hundred meters from the beach, no distance at all. There, in the cozy little restaurant on the hotel veranda, I’d stuff my growing belly with all manner of national dishes. Which particular nation those dishes belonged to was a great mystery. To all my persistent questioning, the establishment’s narrow-eyed chef answered evasively: the pot is round, whatever you put in is what comes out. The main thing is that it comes out edible. There was no arguing with him.
After lunch I either dozed a couple of hours in my room or went down to the beach, where I again dozed under the awning for those same couple of hours. When darkness fell – always somehow abruptly – I squeezed into white trousers, pulled on a loose open shirt and set off for the dancing hall. Waiting for me there were romantic adventures in the form of good-looking American women who had reached the age bracket known as «ripe all over again». These ladies, cut loose for two long-awaited weeks of vacation, were carefree, full of life and sexually aggressive. They wanted no moderation in anything, and for the most part favored positions number one, five, twelve and thirty-seven out of the manual «Sex for Dummies» – twice a night, at that. Wow!
Having a good time, in short, and no complaints about fate.
I was living out my crystal dream: from evening to morning, assorted merry undertakings in the name of Shura Murin; from morning to evening – sitting on the ocean shore in weighty meditation on the meaning of life.
I was tremendously good at it, especially the meditating. I arrived at the conclusion that there is no meaning to life whatsoever. Absolutely none. Provided the following conditions are met:
– there are two hundred thousand U.S. dollars sitting in the bank;
– the hotel room and the restaurant meals are paid up half a century in advance;
– you’re handsome, healthy, quite something during the hours of darkness, and…
Well – for happiness, that’s entirely sufficient.