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transparent stratum to the limit set for it. Kolya was throwing a piece of board he had found for Lady, the fox terrier, to retrieve and she would lift both front paws together and bounce across the water before tensely proceeding to swim. The next wave that came would catch her up and sweep her powerfully back to deposit her in perfect safety on the shore. Then she would drop on the shingle before her the stick wrested from the sea and shake herself violently. While the two boys were bathing in the buff, Lida, who took her dip with her mother and Sofia much earlier in the morning, would retire toward some rocks which she called Ayvazovskian in honor of that painter’s seascapes. Kolya swam with a tumbling motion, Tartar-style, while Martin prided himself on his swift and correct crawl, which he had learned from an English house-tutor during hislast summer in the North. However, neither of the boys would swim very far out, and in this connection one of Martin’s sweetest and creepiest daydreams was of a desolate, stormy sea, after a shipwreck, and himself alone in the dark, holding above water a Creole girl with whom he had danced the tango on deck the evening before. After a swim, it was wonderfully pleasant to stretch out naked on the hot stones and, with head tipped back, look at the cypresses, thrust like black daggers deep into the sky. Kolya, a Yalta doctor’s son who had lived all his life in the Crimea, accepted these cypresses, and the ecstatic sky, and the marvelously blue sea with its dazzling metallic scales, as something normal and routine, and it was difficult to draw him into Martin’s favorite games, and transform him into the Creole’s husband, by chance cast up onto the same uninhabited island.
    In the evening they would climb along narrow corridors of cypresses to Adreiz. The large, ridiculous villa, with its many stairways, passages, and galleries (so amusingly constructed that sometimes you simply could not tell on what level you were, or having gone up a few steep steps you suddenly found yourself not on the expected mezzanine floor but on the garden terrace), was already shining through with yellow kerosene light, and the sound of voices and the clink of crockery came from the main veranda. Lida would go over to the adult camp. Kolya would gorge himself and immediately go off to bed. Martin sat in the dark on the bottom steps and, consuming cherries out of his hand, hearkened to the gay, brightly lit voices, to Ivanov’s guffaws, Lida’s cozy patter, and an argument between her father and the painter Danilevski, a garrulous stutterer. In general the guests were numerous: giggly girls in bright kerchiefs, officers from Yalta, and panicky elderly neighbors, who had taken en masse to the hills during an incursion of the Reds the previous winter.It was never clear who had brought whom and who was friends with whom, but the hospitality of Lida’s mother, an inconspicuous woman who wore a gorget and spectacles, knew no bounds. Thus one day appeared Arkady Zaryanski, a lanky, deathly pale man who had some connection or other with the theater—one of those absurd people who tour battle-fronts giving poetry recitals with musical accompaniment, arrange performances on the eve of a town’s devastation, run off to buy epaulets and never manage to run far enough, returning instead, puffing happily, with a miraculously obtained top hat for the last act of A Dream of Love . He was balding and had a fine, dynamic profile, but en face he turned out to be less handsome: bags swelled beneath the mud-colored eyes, and one incisor was missing. As for his personality, he was a gentle, kind, sensitive man, and, when they all would go out for a walk at night, he would sing in a velvety baritone the romance beginning:
Do you recall our sitting on the seashore ,
The sunset’s glow with scarlet striped the sky ,
    or tell an Armenian joke in the darkness, and in the darkness someone would laugh. On meeting him for the