LITMIR.BIZ

      So turtles, after all? Or tigers? Anyway, “Vanbapoztzy”, inconvenient for Russian-speaking citizens, had been gradually transformed into what my fellow said, “Ambavozy.” Though the dictionary gives a very strange interpretation – where it is eight princes or the prince of the eight turned into turtles?

      However, the riddles did not end there. Two maids were overheard at the hotel: “It’s cold to swim on Shamora.” “You would rather go to BOMBovozy!” Formed from the two roots well known to the Russian ear, the name Bombovozy is easier to pronounce than Ambavoz, and sounds much more impressive than any Turtles. However, for young people, there is another pronunciation variant like “Bombiki” apart from Turtles, in particular for the females.

      Waves are high enough on Ambavozy, as if after a strong storm but the water is warm. Quite near the bay, there are rows of holiday homes. Seryoga’s Dacha (a holiday home) is over there too. While he was arranging some kind of barbeque place in the courtyard together with his girlfriend, I went out to look around. The road went uphill, houses ended at the top and a forest started with a black wall of trees. I went upwards, keeping away from the allotments and closer to the forest, looking at the plum trees and kicking stones under my feet.

      In the middle of holiday homes, a lousy stain of a huge burned-out house was rising which made you feel scary while passing it nearby. It stood on high metal stilts so that one could climb down to the very bottom of the structure. That’s what I did. Crawling on my knees through mugwort jungle among partially rotten stilts, I just hurt my hands with fragments of broken glasses. I kept running into the strangest items now and then: a broken comb with a scrap of someone’s hair, a rusty harmonica, twisted tapes of a light-struck film. Beside mugworts, there was also myriads of fairy-mushrooms. It was a culmination of Gothic horror, a miniature of the Castle of Otranto. When I got out of there, I walked around the burned house. The run wild imagination pictured what could be hidden behind the smudged windows and the elaborately carved shutters of the three-storey bulky thing.

      The sun was going below the horizon, cuckoo tune was making you feel depressed, the sharpness of vision faded in the evening twilight. I came back to the path leading to the top of the hill, and climbing up, I settled on the edge of the forest sitting tailor-fashion and took out a voice recorder from my breast pocket. I saved for the long-awaited dessert the answer to the question, “Why do you want to kill Mira?” especially looking for a suitable environment. I was looking for something exciting to make blood turn to ice, the cuckoos kept singing, and the burned-out estate full of ghosts made you feel scared with its fragments of old combs. All right, let’s go…