Sasha dove, opened her eyes, and saw a school of gray elongated fish.
On the way back she ran—Mom was probably worried. The uphill road seemed unexpectedly long and steep. She stopped at a store, where a harried saleswoman sold bread, eggs, and potatoes, and the queue was long and solemn. After enduring the line for nearly half an hour, Sasha filled up her bag with groceries and ran down the Street That Leads to the Sea into the garden with the “peacock” trees.
A man stood near a rental agency, a green booth with permanently closed shutters. Despite the heat, he wore a dark denim suit. Under the peak of his dark-blue cap his face had a jaundiced, waxy tint. Dark glasses reflected the sun’s rays, but Sasha managed to catch his glance. She cringed.
She looked away from the strange man, entered the hallway that smelled of many generations of cats, and walked up to the second floor, to the door upholstered in black faux leather with a tin number 25 on it.
Every morning Sasha and her mother woke up at four, when their neighbors, the young couple, returned from a nightclub. The neighbors stumbled up and down the corridor, made tea, made the bedsprings creak, and eventually fell quiet; Sasha and her mother dozed off again and woke up next around seven thirty.
Sasha made instant coffee for both of them (the kitchen sink brimmed with dirty plates—the neighbors apologized profusely for the mess, but never did the dishes), and they headed for the beach. On the way to the shore, they bought little cups of yogurt or freshly steamed corn sparkling with salt crystals or jam doughnuts. They rented one plastic lounge chair to share, spread their towels over it, and ran toward the water, stumbling on the sharp gravel and hissing from pain. They plopped into the water, dove in, and lingered in the waves.
On the second day, Sasha got a sunburn, and Mom smeared yogurt on her shoulders to calm the sting. On the fourth day, they went on a harbor cruise, but the waves were choppy, and both of them felt a touch of motion sickness. On the fifth day, there was a real storm, and half-naked lifeguards strolled around the beach, announcing: “Can’t swim—alligators abound,” as Sasha’s mother quoted from an old children’s rhyme. Sasha played with the waves and managed to get slammed by an errant rock; the painful bruise took a long time to heal.
In the evenings, the whole town was drowned in music streaming from the nightclubs. Clusters of guys and girls armed with cigarettes stood near the kiosks or box office windows, or sat around old iron benches and participated in social engagements expected of adolescent mammals. Occasionally, Sasha caught their appraising looks. She did not like those guys with their obnoxious, overly made-up girlfriends, yet she felt uneasy—it was embarrassing for a normal sixteen-year-old to be vacationing with her mother like a little girl. Sasha would have liked to stand just like this, in the center of a noisy group, leaning on a bench and laughing with everybody else, or to linger in a café, sipping gin and Coke from a tin can, or to play volleyball on a square patch of asphalt, split by long cracks like an elephant hide. Instead she would just walk by, pretending she had some urgent, much more fascinating business to attend to, and spend her evenings strolling around with her mother in the park or along the boardwalk, gazing at the creations of the never-ending street artists, haggling over lacquered shells and clay candleholders, doing all these rather nice and not-at-all-boring things—but the peals of laughter coming from the teenage clusters sometimes made her sigh heavily.
The storm subsided. The water had been freed of the mud that clung to it, the sea regained its transparency, and Sasha caught a crab, as tiny as a spider. She let it go right away. Half of their vacation had already dissolved into nothingness; it seemed as if they’d just arrived, and now only eight days remained.
She met the man in the blue cap at a street market. Moving along the rows, Sasha was pricing black cherries, when, rounding the corner, she saw him in the midst of the shoppers. The man stood nearby, his dark glasses turned toward Sasha. She was sure he was watching her, and her alone.
Sasha turned and pushed toward the market exit. After all, she could buy the cherries at her street corner; it was more expensive, but not so much that it was worth sticking around. Swinging her plastic bag, she entered the Street That Leads to the Sea and strode up to her apartment building, trying to stay in the shade thrown by the acacia and linden trees.
She looked back after half a block. The man in the dark denim suit was following her.
For some reason, she’d believed he had stayed at the market. Of course, there was the possibility that he needed to go in the same direction, but she was not that naïve. Staring into the impenetrable lenses, she felt unutterable terror.
The street was packed with beachgoers and vacationers. Ice cream was melting down children’s fronts in the same way as before, open-air kiosks were just as busy selling bubblegum, beer, and vegetables, the afternoon sun was just as scorching, but Sasha’s instant chill felt like a lining of frost in her stomach. Not really aware of why she was so afraid of the dark man, Sasha shot up the street, her sandals drumming a feverish rhythm and passersby hastily moving out of her way.
Gulping air, not daring to look back, she burst into the yard with the “peacock” trees. She leapt into the hallway and rang the doorbell. Mom took a long time to open the door; downstairs, in the entrance hall, a door opened, and Sasha heard footsteps …
Mom finally made it to the door. Sasha dove into the apartment, nearly toppling her mother. She slammed the door closed and turned the key.
“Are you crazy?”
Sasha clung to the peephole. Looking distorted, as if through a funny mirror, their next-door neighbor walked up the stairs, carrying a bag of cherry plums, and went farther up to the third floor.
Sasha started breathing again.
“What happened?” Mom’s voice was tense.
“Nothing, really.” Embarrassment moved in. “Somebody was following me …”
“Who was?”
Sasha began to explain. The story of the dark man, when narrated logically, did not seem frightening, only ridiculous. Nothing she said made any sense, and Mom clearly wasn’t alarmed.
“I assume you did not buy any cherries,” Mom concluded.
Sasha shrugged guiltily. The right thing to do was to pick up her bag and return to the market, but the very idea of opening the door and walking out into the yard made her knees shake.
“I suppose I might as well do it myself.” Mom sighed. She picked up the bag and money and left for the market.
Next morning, on the way to the beach, Sasha saw the dark man again. He stood by the tourist center, pretending to examine the offered tours and prices, but in reality he was watching Sasha from behind his dark mirrored lenses.
“Mom, look …”
Mom followed Sasha’s gaze. Her eyebrow lifted. “I don’t understand. Some guy standing there. And?”
“You don’t see anything weird?”
Mom continued walking, each step bringing her closer to the dark man. Sasha slowed down.
“I’m going to walk to the other side of the street.”
“Go ahead, if that’s what you want. I think you have been getting too much sun lately.”
Sasha crossed the asphalt, wrinkled and covered by tire tracks. Mom passed the dark man, but he didn’t pay her any attention. He watched Sasha, and only her. His gaze followed her.
Once settled on the shore, they rented a beach chair and placed it in the usual spot, but for the first time, Sasha did not feel like swimming. She wanted to return home and lock herself up in the apartment. Although, if she thought about it, the door in the apartment was flimsy, made of plywood, a mere illusion covered with ancient faux leather. It was safer here, on the beach, crowded and noisy, with inflatable mattresses floating in the water; a little boy stood knee-deep in the water, and the floatie around