It was so good that everything around seemed almost fake.
The Arabian Sea rustled, green, right before my eyes. Although, no ... Rather, it is turquoise, slightly browned with sunset nacre. And the foam of the waves, slowly creeping up to the sand densely licked by them, seemed like camel saliva, whipped with the tongue tired of the many-day passage through the waterless animal.
This is all before my eyes.
And in the back India was breathing me fragrantly with its soils of animatedly picturesque jungle, incense sticks, unusual food and jewelry shops of Nepalese, as if filled with marvelous aromas emanating from the unearthly beauty of stones skillfully set in silver and lying in front of them.
And all this - in some kind of bliss, languor, in the search for sophistication and simplicity at the same time.
And through all this, she went to my table and sat, not waiting for an invitation, on the opposite chair, somehow surprisingly not blocking, but fitting in an extraordinary way into the interior of the ocean. It immediately became clear that the Arabian Sea only pretends to be a sea with one coast here. In fact, it is the warmest ocean on earth.
She smiled, and therefore was not inappropriate. Before I spoke, I managed to make out her. And when I saw it, at once all the beauties of the world around faded, for it was so ...
So ...
Not old already. Not at all young. Most likely, she was at the age when a woman becomes more beautiful than any young woman, for her eyes twinkle and live in such an amazing ... silence and spirituality that only a living and suffering person carries in himself, which makes him not only beautiful, but surprisingly deep . It seems to me that if the Lord allowed Adam to create Eve immediately at this age, then He would take it from the First Man on earth, because he himself would want to marry her, no matter how blasphemous it sounds.
When she realized that I had come to my senses after a “collision” with her, because I probably knew about the magical impression that I made on others, then she spoke:
- Hello ... Well, how do you like my restaurant? How is the kitchen? ..
And, unashamedly, she looked into my plate.
“If you come here next time, then it’s better to order not seafood, but goat soaked in lassi ...”
Then, flashing for a moment with the pearls of her bright teeth, she continued:
- For some reason, my compatriots always order seafood, which in itself for us Russians is already exotic. And here you are trying to seem to be ordinary and not surprising, only - very, very different, because here everything is different.
I myself did not immediately understand this. I used to feel it. Therefore, probably, I ran here to take refuge ...
Then she glanced at the Richmond pack in front of me, pulled out of her purse, a box that I did not know, and lit it ...
I didn’t ask her anything because I immediately felt that this was not necessary. Surely there was something similar with you at least once, when you, having met a person for the first time, suddenly realize that he wants to tell. Here it is important not to frighten off this revelation even with too noisy a sigh.
She “kissed” her cigarette several times, barely touching it, and spoke again:
- This is my restaurant. For almost twenty years. And I was looking for a cook for a long time. This one ...
She nodded at my plate, not doubting that I like the food.
- Found it. In Bihar. It is far from here, at the other end of the country. He kept a small tavern there and was dying of tuberculosis. I cured him and brought him here to the sea. So now we live nearby. He is near. With me and my sons. I have two of them. Adults already. The elder married a local girl. Soon they will give me grandchildren. And the little one was born here ...
She looked at me, understood a question that I was not even going to ask, and continued:
- No, he is also Russian. Once, now it even seems to me that in a past life, I lived in such a small city in Russia, where every day I woke up from the fact that in the local church they started calling to the morning. She fed her husband and son breakfast and went to work on the streets with asphalt broken here and there, past the old, dilapidated buildings, where before the revolution merchants kept their goods, and now there lived women like me, who probably also fed in the mornings their husbands, and the children were taken to kindergartens on the way to work.
When I realized that I was pregnant with the youngest, there was no one to say about it, because my husband was a passionate hunter and fisherman and at that time shot ducks somewhere far from our city on a small lake, on which they brought and lifted only that ended in the summer of their chicks.
When he returned, I said that I was expecting a child. He only answered:
- Now we don’t need a second ... We won’t pull ...
And left again. Only now at the resort. In Mineralnye Vody. His stomach was sick, and he had to be treated ...
And I ... The very next morning I took my older one to a friend, because the husband’s mother told me that she couldn’t take her grandson, because she had hypertension. And in general - my husband and I need to get used to solving our problems on our own. She told me this because her husband was already at the entrance to the resort. My parents have already died. And therefore - to a friend ...
And in the afternoon I went “to surrender” to the hospital ...
She looked at me again. She smiled, again showing her luxurious teeth a little, and turned away to the ocean ...
It was almost dark, and therefore his waves, like broken pieces of asphalt, crawled one on top of another with a loud rustle. The end of her story, my mistress seemed to be telling the ocean already, sitting to me in a half-turn:
- ... And suddenly it began to vomit me. Then I already knew that it was toxicosis, as any pregnant woman should. She put a handkerchief over her mouth and ran. To a friend to pick up his son. She, as soon as she saw me on the doorstep, understood everything. One said:
- Well, that's right. Run ...
And pushed towards my son.
And that's all. And we left. Threesomes: me and my children. They were traveling, I didn’t know then. I knew one thing for sure: from the city, from the city where people live in former warehouses and walk on broken asphalt ...