file photoFrom: Sergei Roy <sergeiroy@yandex.ru>
Subject: Russians Abroad
Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2012

Russians Abroad. The Lure of the Mediterranean
By Sergei Roy [Former editor of Moscow News]

When asked whether there were more living than dead, Ana harsis inquired: "And where shall we include those who sail?"

Diogenes Laertius

1

The official send-off cocktail party lasted long past midnight, then we went back to our boat and had a nightcap, or two, or three. Nightcaps or not, reveille came at five, for such is the austere regimen of the sea.

At dawn the yachts started drifting toward the exit from the Istanbul Atakoy marina, to much hooting, tooting, and whistling of all the remaining vessels. Our chief mate performed a solo on the fog horn, and the good yacht Anna took her place in the somewhat straggly formation at the start line. At the appointed hour the whole flotilla set sail for the southern coast of the Sea of Marmora, and thus the Tenth Eastern Mediterranean Yacht Rally commenced. It would have been sinful not to celebrate the event, so we did.

The skipper then looked at the crew with his kindly blue eyes and said: "The wind is not too strong, and we are sailing straight before it. Hoist the spinnaker." The crew joyously rushed to carry out the order, for the spinnaker is the jolliest of all sails. If the wind is right, it pulls like a locomotive; besides, it reminds all seamen of a woman's well-formed breast, as if God Himself was doing exercises in geometry and accidentally hit on the design. Soon the spinnaker expanded, and so did one's soul. "Rally my foot," I thought, taking a tighter grip on the tiller.

Indeed, what does one associate with the word "rally"? Roaring engines, helmeted drivers, grimy cars, broken windshields, bent bumpers, the sands of the Sahara coming in through the window, that sort of thing. Yacht rallies are different. Their entire esthetics is borrowed straight from paradise: azure skies, the Mediterranean's stark violet waters, crazy seagulls, smiling dolphins, psychedelic sails, shores bristling with palms and cypresses, jolly company on board. It's a bit like "To see Paris -- and die." Only substitute the Med for Paris.

We realized back in Istanbul already that the event was social, commercial, and PR rather than sporting. Start at any time after 1 a.m., daily passage about 75 nautical miles, finish not later than 18:00 at the next rally point, with a mandatory evening cocktail party, dinner party, beer drinking party or some such event to follow. Whatever the name of the occasion, the entire gamut of drinks was served unstintingly, with food to match. Nights were spent at marinas with all the mod cons. Just a couple of times we stayed overnight at harbors where there were no marinas; a not exactly welcome reminder of things as they are back home.

The send-off party set the tone for the whole enterprise. A couple hundred people gathered on the open terrace of a café ­ healthy, friendly folks full of joie de vivre. As they should be, with all the super sailing ahead, rivers of drink up to and including Cutty Sark whisky, mounds of shish-kebab and other Turkish delights, soul-caressing music, fireworks, dancing till you drop, the works. And masses of beautiful girls. I even began to worry where all the other, not so beautiful ones, had got to, but then the concern faded. Wish I had those worries now.

There were awards for winners in the previous rally, then the organizing committee members awarded each other, then the crews of the yachts sailing the following morning were called to the podium. Unfortunately the proceedings were very noisy, much of the talk was in Turkish, I didn't react promptly enough and climbed the podium juggling a shish-kebab wrapped in a lavash in one hand and a tumbler of red wine in the other. Once on the podium, I tried to stand to attention like the rest but only dropped a tomato. Wild cheers.

It grew darker and colder, fires were lit in open barrels all over the terrace, sparks flew, and the atmosphere became cozier and cozier. The band was playing, with undiminished gusto, those eternal Spanish-Italian hits ­ La paloma, Bessa me mucho, Sole mio, and much more in the same vein. Skipper Slava, who took special care to keep about half a dozen cocktails ahead of the crew, performed a passionate tango with the Frenchwoman from the Mafamina, lying alongside the Anna, and the happy lady then fed me some nasty Turkish patisserie of fat and sugar; I alternatively gagged and smiled my thanks.

Out of sheer sense of journalistic duty I cornered the rally commodore Teoman Arsay ("Call me Teo"), a corpulent multilingual Turk, a marvel of organization spiced with gargantuan guffaws. He said that the rallies had begun as a purely private initiative on the principle of "Why not" (incidentally, the name of one of the participating boats). They were later sponsored by a number of Turkish marinas; hardly on altruistic grounds, I suspected, but that was their business.

I then asked if anyone had capsized in the past ten years, had there been any loss of life, that sort of unpleasant journalistic questions. Teo reeled and knocked feverishly on a nearby table ­ a plastic one, I observed maliciously. It was clear that fighting storms and hurricanes was not exactly these yachtsmen's line, as they were mostly otherwise engaged. And indeed, why not?

2

True, the rally might be a bed of roses for the rest of the flotilla, but not for the Anna. (Incidentally, the yacht's name, painted in Cyrillic script on its side, was universally read as Ahha, and that alone created a sort of humorous halo round it.) The Ahha was the smallest (27 feet long), the oldest and the shabbiest boat in the entire fleet. It had been built some twenty years before by enthusiasts from the Parus ("Sail") Yacht Club in Moscow and had seen a great deal of service since. It had a pretty weak engine, just 16 hp, which had been repaired times out of mind; you should see its oil filter ­ fit for filtering the chief mate's tears but little else. Four knots was the fastest that the engine could do, and anything over it made it whine so piteously that our hearts bled.

Things went something like this. Say, the schedule was to sail 75 miles to the next rally point. Even if we take our speed at five knots ­ which we shouldn't ­ it took us at least 15 hours to get to that point. So, taking a couple hours' nap after the mandatory cocktail party, the skipper would rouse the crew at two or three o'clock in the morning, and while the rest of the flotilla went on snoring, we would leave the harbor and start hunting for the wind.

The wind that we caught was usually of a variety called in Russian mordotyk, loosely translated as "nose-basher," but no one bothered to grumble, for such is life. And so it went on all day: up jib, up mainsail, up spinnaker, down genoa, down spinnaker, put the spinnaker away, switch on the engine, everybody move fore, the engine is chortling, damn its entrails.

So that was how it went for us. The rest of the armada, thoroughly rested, would take its morning coffee at leisure, switch on engines ­ two or three, and sometimes ten times more powerful than ours ­ catch up with us as if we were stationary and parade past, carrying their mainsails for purely ornamental purposes, as often as not.

Of course I'm being malicious and unjust. The folks used their engines simply because they hated speeds under four knots, although everyone adored sailing, and some of them even sailed in truly Russian style, carrying their spinnakers far beyond all reasonable limits, until the wind started taking them to shreds. But you should see their spinnakers being put away: they just disappeared into a kind of tube, none of this clutching at the canvas until blood started oozing from under your fingernails, like it happened on the Anna.

I took a good look at all the cutting-edge equipment on the day when my new but already bosom Dutch friends, Antonie and Norma, invited me to sail with them. It was like a leap from the Stone Age into the third millennium. Their Celaeno was of the "words fail me, tears are choking me" variety: two toilets for two, fresh-water shower, a galley like a spaceship control center, sails operated by pushing a button, although Tony, a brawny guy well over six feet, liked doing it manually.

I was particularly fascinated by the autopilot, a neat box containing a computer connected to the steering wheel. You pushed an electronic chart into it, set the coordinates, and it would steer the yacht, show her position on the screen, the planned course, the actual course, the yacht's speed, estimated times of arrival at the point of destination and way points, and who knows what else; the devil's granny's blood pressure, for all I knew. And Tony, he swaggered about the deck, fine-tuned the sails or the engine, sprawled on the cushions drinking Turkish coffee or the cognac I'd brought with me (the Turks make a couple of brands of surprisingly drinkable cognac, the one sold in boxes is slightly better than the other kinf; by the way, don't you ever drink Turkish vodka ­ gasoline is infinitely preferable). Tony could even step down and take a nap in the cabin; the computer would do his job just fine.

Compare this to the way we operated on the Cinderella ­ pardon me, the Anna. You had to steer manually all day long, never letting go of the tiller even if the sun scorched the back of your hand until it was covered with blisters, and your neck was stiff with staring all the time at the compass. It was also a considerable nervous strain, for the wind and the waves kept pushing the boat in every direction but the desired one, and the skipper kept yelling at you for veering off course: "Roy, why are you tacking, you're on motor." That hurt. Yes, the autopilot is worth every cent of the fifteen hundred dollars it costs. If ever I have a boat of my own (what a hope!), I'm sure to get me one. The only danger is to run into another boat that is also on autopilot, but I was ready to contemplate that eventuality philosophically.

Walking to the routine cocktail party one evening, I commented on the fact that there were quite a few old-age pensioners in the rally, to which Tony replied, with a booming laugh, that there were a few young-age pensioners, too. The Dutch couple obviously fell in that category. It's good to know that there are people ­ nice and likable people, too ­ who can live like that, spending half a year in their chalet Les Elans in the French Alps, skiing, and the other half, sailing on the Mediterranean. Of course, such folks need rallies of this sort badly. It must be rather trying, gazing at each other's face day in, day out, while here at the rally they had plenty of entertainment, including a Russian crew nearby driving sleep away with their wild Slavonic airs well into the small hours.

3

The skipper and the crew of the Anna did their best to make up for any lack of electronics with excellent morale and general high spirits, much of them bottled. I hit it off with them from the word go. We were obviously of the same blood, unrepentant gray-bearded romantics clearly dating from the 1960s and just as clearly afflicted with the madness of the sea and the sail.

The point, however, is not just this primordial drive toward the sea as a way of life separated from death by a finger-thick partition. Speaking strictly for oneself, at a certain age one sometimes starts looking for some cogent reason to go on living. Then the boredom and the ecstasy of life at sea can serve as fine substitutes, in the absence of anything more noble and mature. And didn't Jerome K. Jerome say that sailing was a bit like being nearer to God? You don't even have to believe in Him, I might add. He will take care of that end Himself.

To hell with metaphysics, though; people are much more interesting. Skipper Slava with his face as weathered as the rocks, to quote all Russian romantics' favorite song about a pirates' brigantine, seemed to have stepped into the yacht's cabin right out of that song. He had a goodish dollop of Gypsy blood in his veins, so he was our best singer and dancer, but that's not the only thing we loved him for. One day amidst a dead calm he ordered us, in a suddenly dead serious voice, to down jib and reef in the mainsail, and be damn quick about it. No sooner had we carried out the orders than a wind called bora came down roaring from nearby mountains, pushed the boat on its side and hurtled it through the waves in this position for a solid twenty-five minutes, under a reefed-in mainsail, at a speed of about nine knots.

The skipper's savvy was later celebrated repeatedly and in a highly appreciative manner. A very worthy gentleman all round. Incidentally, he had a high opinion of yours truly, too. He said, for instance, that one could take a drink with Roy at any time of day or night, toasting the light of the moon or the whistling of the wind, for lack of other toastable subjects.

Slava was so full of his role as the skipper that he even tried to clean up our vocabulary, if you'd care to call it that. Without much success, I need hardly say, although he had pinned up in the cabin an icon of St. Nicholas, protector of all seafarers. The saint looked down gloomily at all sorts of linguistic misbehavior, except that as often as not he was deviating severely from the vertical, and it is hard to look down on anyone from that position. Besides, we were not exactly swearing (except when we were), it was mostly a manner of speaking.

Chief mate Leonid Gerbin, a damn caviler by his office and about the nicest person I know in his unofficial capacity. They simply don't make them like that anymore, that's for certain. A naval officer in the past, he even had a command of his own at one time but was later thrown, by a whim of the Defense Parcae, into air defense at the time of the duel between the then rickety Soviet AD system and the U-2 spy planes. If he did not know something about yachts and yachting, it simply was not worth knowing. Extremely sensitive to beauty, especially, it appears, beauty of volcanic nature: he kept talking about the volcano on Santorin Island and how it had all looked at night at the time when they were crawling all over it. He had carried away a goodish portion of the volcano as souvenirs, I thought as I looked at them.

Like all humans, he wasn't without a blemish: right in the middle of inspired boozing he could suddenly say that he wasn't drinking any more; he'd simply had enough. Cause for all-round concern and thoughtful analysis: maybe he had eaten something that didn't agree with him?

Anatoly Ivanov, able-bodied seaman, an ancient a year older than me, unsurpassed at the art of furling sails, very strict on officer ward-room manners: almost taught me not to drink from the bottle. Ever ready to discuss what is known as the "accursed Russian questions," and that's what we did in our leisure time sitting fore: picked to pieces all prominent Soviet-era thinkers. Hidden under pedantry and grumbling were unsuspected layers upon layers of irony and wit, which often made me recall Dostoevsky's line: "There's too much to the Russian; I'd trim him."

Finally, myself, a miserable sinner and defrocked associate professor, as simple as an ameba in terms of the gentle art of yachting, although in my time I had sailed all over the Aral (when there was an Aral), the Caspian, and a great deal else in my Polish-built Mewa, but the Mewa's sails are just a joke compared to the Anna's: she's a little over 12 foot long, mast, 15 foot. Chief mate Leonid regarded my predilection for center-boards as some kind of perversion and tried to instill in me the idea that real yachts start at about 36 feet: at that length the boat begins cutting through the waves, whereas with center-boards it's all haywire, any old wave can hit it on the bow and stop it, another hit, and there you go on the rocks, what's left of you. All this is certainly true, only I still stick to the view that no regular yacht can compare with a center-board in terms of adrenalin secretion; you get your pants full of sensations, metaphorically speaking. On the Anna, what I lacked in experience I made up for in eagerness taken to the point of idiocy.

4

In all, we sailed across three seas ­ the Sea of Marmora, the Aegean, and, to use a bit of Turkish, Ak Deniz, the White Sea, that is, the eastern part of the Mediterranean. Six hundred odd nautical miles, Istanbul to Antalya and a short trek back to Kemer.

The Aegean was the stormiest, although we came in for a bit of rough weather in other places, too, but nothing like the previous year's gale force winds that had mauled Moscow. The guys had lived through that gale on the Anna on the Black Sea, and they still could not explain how they had pulled through. They talked in hushed voices of the boat dashing along at a terrific speed under a jib that they simply had let escape and couldn't take in, the deck vibrating under their feet from sheer speed and the seas first flattened by the wind, then rising like mountains, so that the boat at times behaved like a diving bomber, sliding off a roller.

As I have said, there was nothing like that on our voyage, but from time to time things did get exciting. Off Cape Karaburun ("Black Maelstrom") we had to trim the boat for several hours, sitting on the windward side wearing nothing but our bathing trunks: the wind was exceptionally warm, must have been some sort of sirocco, only the sea spray was pretty cold and stinging. That night the armada was expected to anchor off Karaada Island, with a friendly supper party aboard the flagship, but because of the high wind the signal went round for all boats to head for the port of Chesme, the very same one where Count Orlov had beaten the hell out of the Turkish fleet and earned himself the title of Chesmensky, more than two hundred years ago. The wind gradually died down to a gentle breeze, we sailed hour after hour, it grew dark, and at last I could enjoy a view that had long tormented me on sleepless nights on shore: a smooth, oily swell and, dancing on it, a golden moon path. It felt particularly sweet as everyone had gone to take a nap after a strenuous day, and I was alone in the cockpit; just me and my dream. The dream had come true, and still I didn't believe it. Curious, isn't it.

We sailed into the harbor at 23:22 local time. Not a soul on the pier, not a palm leaf stirring. The fleet was wrapped in sleep, the friendly supper must have long been over, if it had ever taken place. OK, we celebrated this, the finest day of sailing, all by ourselves, with a bit of elated singing and a few heart-felt toasts to us and guys like us. We dropped off where we sat. Three hours later, reveille. As it happened, we saw practically nothing of Count Orlov's Chesme. Pity.

Apart from storms or just fresh winds, there were, by way of excitement, dolphin sightings. We had just a few of those, and that was mostly in the Sea of Marmora and the Aegean ­ they seem to be attracted to places where the traffic is heaviest. I snapped a picture of one just as he was coming out of the water in that inimitable hunch-backed roll, but the snapshot looked quite silly and conveyed nothing of the grace and excitement of that vision. Let me put it like this: for the first time in my life, big chunks of it wasted on spear-fishing, my hunting instinct was totally in abeyance, obliterated by the sense of being in the presence of overwhelming beauty. I leaned over the bows, like a middle-aged male figurehead, and could distinctly see below the surface a whitish body moving powerfully yet without any visible effort, as if showing the boat which way to go, then diving deeper and disappearing only to do another graceful surface roll a few yards away. The chaps said that dolphins sometimes swam next to the boat within touching distance. No such luck this time; still, their company was immensely pleasant while it lasted.

Sailing on the high seas has few diversions like this. There are drifting jellyfish, of course, but they are colorless in more senses than one. You also get mad at all the garbage that humans discharge in these beautiful waters. Bits of plastic are particularly dangerous to boats, as they can wrap themselves round the shaft and stop the boat, which generally happens when you have to move pretty damn quick to get out of the way of some rumbling monster of a tanker or some other high-speed unpleasantness. Plastic sheeting is an even worse hazard for the fish, they swallow bits of it and die in terrible torment. Presumably.

We were pretty careful about things like that and never threw any such stuff overboard. That was easy, because our garbage mostly consisted of empty bottles, and we took good care to fill them with sea water before dropping them to the bottom, to make a home for some inoffensive crabs. There are plenty of amphorae lying around there anyway, according to reliable report. Some still contain thousand-year-old wine, and it isn't doing anyone any harm, is it.

Still on the subject of exciting moments at sea: when we could, we went in for simple pleasures like bathing out in the open sea. In dead calm we would stop altogether and cavort for a few minutes, the whole crew except someone at the helm. Naturally, we bathed in the raw, for who would want to insult the yacht by festooning it with drying bathing trunks? The water was not too warm but still quite delicious once your body got adjusted to it, especially since that body, scorched by the sun, mostly felt more like a rare steak, if stakes feel anything. When the wind was light, we would drop overboard one by one, trailing at the end of a rope; pushing through the resilient water was so exhilarating that chief mate had to chase some of us back onboard with a swab.

No, there was none of the fatal boredom of the sea which, according to various accounts, makes some seamen feel that stepping light-heartedly off the stern is the easier option. This must be the curse of bigger ships where the supply of vodka is woefully inadequate and the people have nothing to do except look after machines, though nowadays it's mostly machines that look after people. We were constantly busy doing things, trying forlornly to catch up on a bit of sleep when there was nothing more exciting to do. But generally there was.

5

The sea is always beautiful whether it merely looks awesome or is actually drowning you, whether it sings a dirge or a lullaby, only I am not going to describe the beauty of the sea ­ on principle. If you've been at sea and it got to you, there's no need to explain, and if you haven't and it hasn't, it's no bloody use. It would be like verbally explaining all about orgasms to a virgin: she won't understand a thing but will only get the idea that it's all horribly filthy. Leonid Andreyev, a famous Silver Age writer and a fine yachtsman, was adamant on this: he knew the caliber of his talent to a T, treated the sea with holy trepidation, and refused to put that holy feeling into feeble words. A worthy role model, Leonid Andreyev.

The Turkish coast is simpler to describe than the sea itself. It is mostly reminiscent of the Karadag area in the Crimea: sheer cliffs rising out of the sea concealing little inlets straight out of paradise. The shores are much more deserted than the Russian, or formerly Russian, Black Sea coast. Sometimes you sail for half a day or a full day, and there's no sign of life on the shore, not even any goats or sheep on the hills. The place must be arid, and hearty thanks to Allah for that from all lovers of solitude, preferably à deux. In my travels along the eastern, desert coast of the Caspian I'd discovered that some kind of water, or better say moisture, could be found in the most unlikely places. So it made my mouth water to dream of some day sailing past these shores alone ­ well, more or less alone ­ and stopping over in these delicious little coves for some spear-fishing, sunbathing, and generally sloughing off for a day or two.

The coastline is indeed a sailor's dream -- all jagged: if there's any unpleasantness, weather-wise, you can always find a snug little bay or cove to hide in or an island to shelter you from nasty buffets. The hills are at first low, with little or no woods, it's mostly either mere scrub or bare rock, but nearer Antalya they rise to creditable height. In late April and early May there was snow on some ridges, even.

In some places Greece and Turkey sort of interlace: there would be, say, a Greek island straight ahead and, looming beyond it, a Turkish peninsula. On these occasions the Anna would forge ahead right through the Greek territorial waters, while the rest of the flotilla hugged the Turkish coast. The thing is, our lads had already cruised among Greek islands, and they said that our coreligionists the Greeks treated all Russians like long lost brothers. You might get smothered with hugs and kisses, if you were not careful. We-are-of-the-same-faith-you-and-I sort of thing.

Incidentally, our armada was accompanied by a Turkish patrol ship, but it seemed to be there mostly for scenic effect, no sign of conflict whatever. The officers of that patrol boat appeared at all the cocktail and other parties, and very ornamental they were, too, their uniforms ironed to squeaking point. I talked to a couple of officers at one such party, and very nice chaps they turned out to be. Very thoughtful, serious drinkers. Apparently the Navy is the Navy -- in Turkey, Africa, or anywhere.

Turkey, now. You know, my grandfather fought the Turk, my great-grandfather fought the Turk, and as for more remote ancestors, they seemed to be doing little except fighting the Turk. That is why the picture I had somewhere in the recesses of my subconscious was of Janissaries with yataghans behind every palm tree and fountain in Oriental palaces, roughly the same way some Americans come to Moscow to listen to the howling of wolves on Red Square.

Instead, I saw a country to which I wanted to emigrate at once, immediately, and without delay. The first thing you noticed about Turkey was that it was completely different from your idea of Turkey. Oriental? Hell, no. Just here and there. Let me put it like this: If you take, say, Baku and wash it in seven waters for seven years, you'll have a pale cosmopolitan likeness of Istanbul, 1999.

The city ­ what we saw of it ­ was superbly picturesque, with masses of flowers one did not recognize and Botanical Gardens type courtyards everywhere, and almost German in its cleanliness. There is a touch of the French here and there, too: men carrying piles of carpets through the Grand Bazaar on their heads yell something that sounds like the French "Attention!" Bags are called pochettes. Car parks, oto (meaning "auto") parks. And so on. The French, along with the British and Italians, occupied Turkey after the First World War, before Kemal Ataturk had kicked them out, and these must be the leftovers.

Sure, some Turkish women cover themselves in black from head to foot, but old imperialists like myself will recall that there were many more of these in the bazaars of Tashkent, Nukus or Makhachkala a few years ago, and there must be even more now.

The one Oriental feature I could never get over in Turkey was the Turks' love of bargaining. Just one episode to give a glimpse of what the Turkish art of salesmanship looks like in real life: a certain s.o.b. pursued me for about half a mile through the crowd in the Grand Bazaar, and eventually I had to buy eight (8) T-shirts from him, just to be rid of him. I handed the T-shirts round to the skipper and crew of the good yacht Anna, and still have three too many left.

Another Oriental touch was orderly rows of men kneeling right out in the street doing the namaz at certain hours to the mechanically transmitted howling of muezzins. I thought how nice it must be to be able to drop out of the rat race five times a day, to think of things eternal and clean out the accumulated filth from the corners of your mind, only who the deuce could tell what they were really thinking during the ritual? Maybe asking Allah to help them find more idiots to buy dozens of their self-destructible T-shirts.

Still, this type of autosuggestion must be extremely gratifying, though I tried to imagine doing it in my office -- the imagination just boggled. The sea is as good a tool as prayer for cleansing the soul. Whether it's the sea or the muezzins' howls, it certainly works for the Turks: an extremely kindly and civilized lot, ever ready to do you a service, yet with a distinct sense of dignity. In three weeks, we did not encounter a single instance of caddishness or boorishness that is routine back home, not even anything remotely resembling unpleasantness. Nothing but smiles and other friendly facial expressions. Either the Turks totally lack that internalized, heavy malice or pent-up aggressiveness that you feel in a Moscow crowd, or else they hide it very thoroughly indeed. I must have spoken dozens of times to people in Turkish streets, and not once was I directed to any of the remote addresses so popular in my beloved Motherland.

6

We spent a whole day at Aivalyk. It was called a "day of rest," in sheer mockery, I guess, for tourism, if practiced conscientiously, is very hard work indeed. In that town the Turks gave me yet another priceless object lesson in the art of salesmanship. As a result, I was forced to buy a carpet at a price that doesn't bear saying out loud. An extremely edifying story.

That day they took us all over the ruins of ancient Pergamon, now known as Bergamo, and it was all very nice, only very hot, and then the guide said that Turkish archaeology was all ancient Greek, Roman and Byzantine, but its ethnography was purely Turkish. So he took us to an ethnographic museum ­ or so he said. It was, in fact, a commercial trap of steel, only I realized that much too late.

True, on the ground floor some women wrapped in black from head to foot were weaving something while our guide told us all about the Turkish double knot which left all the other types of knots simply nowhere. He then showed us how silkworms were tortured and put to death, and how silk threads were extracted and woven together. All very enlightening.

We were then taken upstairs to an exhibition hall, where we were seated on banquettes along the walls and offered drinks ("Raky for me, please"). What followed was a blend of university lecture and ballet. The guide told us all about types of ornaments, their hoary age, their symbolism (I only remembered that two brackets were a symbol of fertility, sort of like a woman standing akimbo), differences between ornaments in different regions, the way young maidens were expected to impress prospective bridegrooms with their art of weaving or stay unmarried, and all that sort of baloney, while well-trained lads were skillfully unrolling one carpet after another by way of illustration, until the whole floor was covered with several layers of carpets.

Toward the end of the lecture I was careless enough to show interest in a carpet that was thrown right at my feet, and when I came to, the carpet had been certified, paid for, and packed in a huge bag. In the interval, some members of the management had rushed in, I had been dragged to a different room where a special show entirely for my benefit had been laid on, I had done my best to escape but had been severely restrained, monstrous sums had been mentioned, and it had all ended in my parting with the entire contents of my wallet. I was then taken to the bus by the management's full complement, probably to the sound of "The Turkish March," only in my dazed condition I couldn't be sure.

This gave rise to the flotilla legend about "five men in a boat, to say nothing of the carpet." Space aboard the yacht being at a premium, I was lucky that I wasn't kicked off the boat by the skipper, carpet and all; I merely had to stand countless rounds to celebrate the purchase, practically pattern by pattern. The carpet ought to be good for a hundred years at least.

Later I bought, in a similar manner, a pair of glasses at $100 instead of those I'd dropped in the Aegean, and some lousy cream, "Made in the USA," at $11, although I distinctly remember wanting a jar of Nivea for $2.

But all these are minor, forgettable incidents. On the whole, we Russians could only envy the Turks. In the ten years during which my countrymen, led by their super-clown, indulged in one circus after another, the Turks built up a first-class tourist industry; all they had to do now was stand by and rake in the dough. In practical terms, the process seemed to be like this: a Turk gets up early in the morning, gathers a few kilos of oranges, heads for his makeshift stand, squashes an orange or two ­ one dollah, puhlese. And so it goes, all day long. The ruins bring in a hefty amount of lucre, too. Doesn't Russia have ruins? Sure she does. The whole damn country is in ruins.

Evidence of a construction boom was everywhere in Turkey. Plenty of unfinished hotels, motels, camping sites, bungalows, and so on. To save land, they were building high-rises instead of two- or three-story houses. My Dutch friends positively rolled with laughter hearing this talk about saving land; in their Dutch view, there was land enough and to spare. The architecture was not too varied, they simply had no time for architectural refinements, but the buildings looked jolly and comfortable. Most cottages, even tiny ones, had satellite dishes on the roof, as well as sun panels and water tanks. In some towns, the population increased tenfold in summer. One could not help wondering where all the money for construction came from, with the country's runaway inflation. Despite the inflation, everyone was happy except the Kurds, but the Kurds were the business of the government, while the people were busy with their own businesses.

There was one obvious exception, and that was the Ocalan cause célèbre. When we were passing Imraly Island, where they were keeping Ocalan, we were warned about fifty times by radio to keep five to six miles away from the island, only our Israeli colleagues didn't give a damn and took a short cut. They had a real Israeli admiral on board; retired, of course. So the Turks had quite a time squeezing them out of the restricted area.

Most Kurds solved their ethnicity problem quite simply: they said they were Turks, and who the deuce could tell the one from the other? Only the more fanatical ones, and the wilder tribes up in the mountains, were bent on making life miserable for the government. To deal with this contingency, inconspicuous little soldiers with big submachine guns were placed at various strategic points. In Antalya, we wanted to do a bit of spear-fishing off some rocks next to our marina, but the moment we stepped outside the gates, a young Kalashnikov-toting soldier rushed to inform us in sign language that we were not welcome outside the marina perimeter. The chap didn't know a word in any European language. I couldn't even explain to him how funny it was to see a Kalash, which had obviously seen quite a bit of service, in strange hands.

It made one feel sad, observing all this prosperity and orderliness in Turkey. I knew one thing: there would be nothing like that on the Russian Black Sea or Caspian shores during my lifetime. The natural conditions here are richer than in Turkey, but the mentality is all wrong. The impression is that the populace finds it more entertaining to cut each other's throats and engage in slave trade. And not just in Chechnya, either.

Turkish mentality was apparently thoroughly reshaped by Ataturk, helped, among others, by Vladimir Lenin and Mikhail Frunze. The latter had, according to rumor, been sent by the former to Turkey on a mission and put the Turkish army in shipshape order, so that it ruled the roost in the region ever since. As for Ataturk, he was all over the place: sitting, standing, on horseback, on foot, in all public places, embroidered, painted, drawn, in plaster, in bronze, you sometimes got the impression that he was hanging from the chandelier, frowning and enforcing the nation's unity. And that's what a nation apparently needs more than anything else.

7

I must speak here of yet another thing that shook me to my foundations in Turkey: the Turks' attitude toward the environment or, putting it simply, toward the sea. You know what Russian harbors look like: oil sleeks, watermelon rinds, hot and cold sh-t in every shape and form. One of our men of letters wrote once that all Russian southern ports slightly reek of urine. Here is eyewitness testimony: there was no smell like that in any Turkish ports. The water in the harbors was just as bright violet as on the high seas, save for the occasional beer can that some son of a bitch had dropped overboard. In Kemer, I actually saw a swordfish that swam into the marina and kept poking its sword among the yachts for about an hour. What would have happened to it if it turned up, say, at Makhachkala port? Dreaded thought.

Our friends from Frankfurt, Klaus und Gabi, solved the mystery of this purity of sea water for us. By the way, if Gabi was not a top model, she should be. As for Klaus, I once asked him what he did, professionally, and he said, with a big smile, "Urlaub" ("Holiday"). But that is strictly nebenbei, in parenthesis, that is.

One day the Anna and the two Germans' catamaran with the cannibalistic name Lapu-lapu lay alongside at some pier, and chief mate and me decided to wash the deck with some detergent. I suddenly saw Klaus signaling to me like mad; so I went over, and he asked: "Do you have a thousand bucks to throw away?" It appeared that he had witnessed a scene in which just such a stickler for cleanliness shampooed his hair on board his yacht at that price ­ a thousand greenbacks. That was the fine for defiling the harbor, and there was no wriggling out of it. If you had no money to pay the fine, your yacht would be confiscated. A bio-toilet is a must, or else you must have a holding tank on board, to be emptied beyond the twelve-mile zone. These strictures applied not only in harbors but also anywhere near the shores. I thought of the way we simple-hearted folks... OK, let's not dwell on the sad things, as Skipper Slava used to say.

We are now coming to the subject of ruins. I had often doubted if it was worth the trouble to scamper, like eighty-year-old American ladies did, from ruin to ruin only to have your picture taken against some background or other. I eventually came to the conclusion that it was, though not because of the pictures.

Imagine this scene: you are looking at something that used to be a functioning temple of Dionysus and the guide is showing you how, millennia ago, a not very sober priest would stumble out of that temple, pick grapes, squash them with his heels, taste the must, and then start leaping and whirling madly, for the wine promised to be fine. Both the Greeks and the Turks inherited a dance that went back to this pantomime, only they called it by different names. An evergreen subject, this.

Or, say, there was an icon of St. Nicholas, protector of all seafarers, hanging in the cabin of the Anna, and in Demre (ancient Myra) you could go visit the church where the saint had once served and also his tomb or rather sarcophagus, and you could do the remembrance ritual for him in the strict Orthodox fashion, pouring some vodka on the ground but not forgetting yourself, either. His bones, incidentally, had been stolen and taken to Italy about a thousand years ago. The Turks called him by a curiously homey name, Baba Noel, that is, translated into Russian, something like Father Frost.

You could also take a look at the floor mosaic in the church and appreciate the architecture. There was a notice to say that some Russian prince had restored the church in the 19th century. I guess they could have found out which particular prince it was; we'd have lit a candle in his honor.

Or consider this: one thought one had read quite enough stuff about Phales, Anaximander et al., about differences between the Ionian school of philosophy and the properly Attic ones. But one heard of these things with what appeared to be a different pair of ears as one stood in front of the ruins of Miletus where once upon a time all that had begun, at the exact spot where the sea had once lapped the beach and Greek and other ships moored. Before you knew where you were, the speculative concerns of, say, Heraclitus became a chunk of your life, and you felt in your own gut that, indeed, panta rhei, all things flow, and the lines by Vladimir Solovyov began to throb in your brain:

Time gathers speed with every passing year,
At times, it seems, with every passing day.
As I sense freedom from afar, and hear
The sea, I murmur quietly: Panta rhei.

Funny that freedom and the sea should also go together in the mind of a philosophical landlubber like Solovyov.

The ruins are, of course, a bit hard on one's state of mind, reminding one as they do of things eternal and of the transitory and perishable nature of all things living. At a certain age these reminders are a bit de trop. The sad facts are pretty clear without them.

It turned out, by the way, that I was not the only one who was sensitive to these vibes. One night I and Nahum, an Israeli from Haifa, a really nice guy who also liked a drink or two, we were returning from a cocktail really prolongé under shaggy southern stars, and I talked about these idle thoughts of mine. It turned out that his own ran rather parallel with mine, only he was taking it all somewhat easier, with a certain detachment, perhaps, while I couldn't yet make up my mind what I really wanted, some sturgeon with horseradish, to quote Chekhov, or to go round the world alone in a center-board. All right, let's not talk of sad things, as Skipper Slava would say again, and I would add: "I see no reason not to take a drink."

8

There is a lot to be said for and about ruins. There are plenty of guide books that could be rehashed, with judicious interpolations drawn from one's own experience, but I'm afraid that that would be more boring than The Frigate Pallas, and who reads Goncharov these days?

I'd rather talk therefore of meetings and acquaintanceships, some of which were quite curious, especially those under the heading of "This is a small world." It sure is. A global village, in fact.

Imagine a cocktail party at a Mediterranean café, noise and toasting under the palm-trees, me holding forth on the political and non-political situation in Russia and what a great newspaper my Moscow News is. It turns out that one of the listeners is a Dutch publisher and a good acquaintance of Derk Sauer, publisher of The Moscow Times and a good deal else in Moscow, and me, I was for a couple of years editor of Moscow Magazine which Derk had founded, and I once published an interview with him. At that distance from Moscow me and the Dutch publisher, we were as good as blood relations. An excellent reason to raise yet another toast.

Later that night I ran into a Swiss German who worked on behalf of the United Nations on the ecological disaster in the Aral Sea area, and I must have mentioned above that in the past I had sailed all over the Aral; it had been a beautiful sea in my time, later done in by the local builders of communism. The Swiss gentleman also touched on this subject, only naturally he implied that the root cause of that manmade disaster was Moscow. So I had to inform him that at the time the fate of the Aral had been decided, "Moscow" had been none other than Comrade Islam Karimov, who had then been a big noise at Gosplan, the State Planning Committee, and who was now president of Uzbekistan and, curiously, an implacable critic of Moscow's role in the affair, let Allah grant him health and an unperturbed conscience. I guess he still sleeps soundly, untroubled by visions of dying kids. You see, in Karakalpakia things had got to such a pass that babies were dying of their mother's milk, for it was poisonous: now that the sea had mostly dried up, thanks to the various irrigation projects siphoning off water from the rivers that had fed the sea, the poisonous chemicals that had for decades accumulated on its bottom were lifted in the air by desert winds and deposited, fanwise, all over the area, so that all food produced there was poisonous. But I've written enough of these sad things elsewhere.

There were also quite cheerful happenings, though at times not unaccompanied with tears, either. Sailing on the Okura, with Doreen and Archie, a nice Scottish couple, was a fellow called Helge from former Eastern Germany. It turned out that Helge and me, we happened to have lived, a long, long time ago, in roughly the same places. So we nostalgically remembered those times and places and were naturally moved. After that we somehow got onto the subject of German literature, you know, Goethe, Heine, that sort of thing, and I recited, with great expression, Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam Im Norden auf kahler Höh' u.s.w., and expanded on the subject of how melodiously Cornet Lermontov (incidentally, of Scottish origin) had translated that poem into Russian, only in his version the love came out a bit Lesbian, for both pine and palm are feminine in Russian, whereas in Heine it's all right and proper, the pine-tree is masculine as it should be, and the palm-tree feminine. So it was a bit of a muddle in Lermontov, but very nice anyway. After that I got carried away on a mighty wave of literary inspiration and proceeded to recite, with fierce abandon, verses from the Prologue to Die Harzreise: "Auf die Berge will ich steigen, Wo die frommen Hütten stehen" etc., which invariably move me to tears. I then went away to get yet another couple of beers, and somebody in the line asked, "Roy, what have you done to the German, he's sitting there alone on a bench ­ crying, isn't he?" So he must have been moved to tears, too. As a remedy, I struck up, at the top of my voice, the famous march of Hamburg prostitutes: "Geh' weiter, geh' weiter, du bist nur ein Gefreiter, wir gehen nicht spazieren mit Unteroffizieren" and so on, verse after verse, and things were all right again.

No really, there was more merriment than anguish. There were even competitions as to who would out-bellow whom, singing songs ­ clean but not too clean ones, if you see what I mean. I particularly remember a concert like that on a pier after a nocturnal sacrilegious barbecue amid the ruins of some ancient church. Germans have no equal in the obscene Alpine Lieder department, they simply quashed us, yelling that smut at the top of their lungs, but then the Israelis came to our aid, we let loose with a jazzed up version of "Seven Forty" and pranced and yelled like the devils. To clinch the matter, we burst into "Kalinka," and everybody joined in, I even did the squatting dance and hurt my knee, but what's one bad knee more or fewer between us officers and gentlemen.

We also met some Russians, and these meetings were really touching. On a terrace above the sea under the stars, one of many such terraces, I listened one night to some band playing, and after a while I decided ­ No, no Turks could play like that. So I came up to the musicians and asked, "You guys wouldn't be from Russia by any chance?" To which they replied, "No, we are from Ukraine." Chief mate Leonid, who was alternatively a Russian or a Ukrainian nationalist, when he was not both, asked, dumbfounded, in Ukrainian, "Where from?!" The chaps, though they were from Ukraine, were Russians and did not speak much Ukrainian, but it was a pleasant meeting anyway. The same story repeated itself in another port, only the jazzmen there happened to be from Moscow, and one from Baku. Soviet friendship of the peoples in action. Those were all very warm meetings, balm for the soul, real balm.

Sometimes the sea washed ashore absolutely exotic and adventurous specimens that would look larger than life in a picaresque novel even. In Antalya, a certain young lady called Natasha joined our crew for a while. She had just returned from Singapore, had been part of the crew taking some millionaire's yacht there. In Antalya, she was repairing, under a Brit called David, another millionaire's yacht, as well as building children's catamarans and dreaming of sailing across the Mediterranean in one of these crazy little things. As we talked at a festive table on the Anna, it turned out that she had graduated from the Christian Humanities University in St. Petersburg, so that I was privileged to see with my own eyes a real-life yachtswoman with whom I could talk of Vladimir Solovyov, Pavel Florensky the theologian who perished in Stalin's camps, and other religious philosophers. I was so touched that I kissed the top of her head. Life is really stranger than fiction. In fact, real life leaves fiction simply nowhere.

I see that what I've written here looks like a cross between a promotional booklet and a report on a trip to paradise. The paradise did not always have all mod cons, of course, and some snakes popped up here and there, as in any decent paradise, but I've passed them over in silence, on principle. What of it if there are some untypical pieces of sh-t floating on the surface; one ought to take the in-depth view.

At times this proved to be more difficult than usual. When we were some six miles off Antalya, a kind of mountain with a superstructure began growing out of the sea. Not trusting my eyesight, I asked the chaps what that could be. "Can't you see? It's a US aircraft carrier."

It was like a cold draught from the grave. The escape to heaven was over, we were coming back into the real world, nowhere else to come back to, and the real world was up to its ears in muck, with Phantoms buzzing around like dung-flies. I said, "Let's effing ram her," but the guys replied, "Wouldn't you feel sorry for the Anna?"

Sure I would feel sorry for the Anna. And not just the Anna, that's the whole damn point. God's world is so beautiful, life is so ridiculously short, and what does Man the Superfool go and do? Man the Superfool designs and builds this ugliness ­ whose name is Death...

Keywords: Russia, Europe - Russia, Environment - Russian News - Russia - Johnson's Russia List

file photoFrom: Sergei Roy <sergeiroy@yandex.ru>
Subject: Russians Abroad
Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2012

Russians Abroad. The Lure of the Mediterranean
By Sergei Roy [Former editor of Moscow News]

When asked whether there were more living than dead, Ana harsis inquired: "And where shall we include those who sail?"

Diogenes Laertius

1

The official send-off cocktail party lasted long past midnight, then we went back to our boat and had a nightcap, or two, or three. Nightcaps or not, reveille came at five, for such is the austere regimen of the sea.

At dawn the yachts started drifting toward the exit from the Istanbul Atakoy marina, to much hooting, tooting, and whistling of all the remaining vessels. Our chief mate performed a solo on the fog horn, and the good yacht Anna took her place in the somewhat straggly formation at the start line. At the appointed hour the whole flotilla set sail for the southern coast of the Sea of Marmora, and thus the Tenth Eastern Mediterranean Yacht Rally commenced. It would have been sinful not to celebrate the event, so we did.

The skipper then looked at the crew with his kindly blue eyes and said: "The wind is not too strong, and we are sailing straight before it. Hoist the spinnaker." The crew joyously rushed to carry out the order, for the spinnaker is the jolliest of all sails. If the wind is right, it pulls like a locomotive; besides, it reminds all seamen of a woman's well-formed breast, as if God Himself was doing exercises in geometry and accidentally hit on the design. Soon the spinnaker expanded, and so did one's soul. "Rally my foot," I thought, taking a tighter grip on the tiller.

Indeed, what does one associate with the word "rally"? Roaring engines, helmeted drivers, grimy cars, broken windshields, bent bumpers, the sands of the Sahara coming in through the window, that sort of thing. Yacht rallies are different. Their entire esthetics is borrowed straight from paradise: azure skies, the Mediterranean's stark violet waters, crazy seagulls, smiling dolphins, psychedelic sails, shores bristling with palms and cypresses, jolly company on board. It's a bit like "To see Paris -- and die." Only substitute the Med for Paris.

We realized back in Istanbul already that the event was social, commercial, and PR rather than sporting. Start at any time after 1 a.m., daily passage about 75 nautical miles, finish not later than 18:00 at the next rally point, with a mandatory evening cocktail party, dinner party, beer drinking party or some such event to follow. Whatever the name of the occasion, the entire gamut of drinks was served unstintingly, with food to match. Nights were spent at marinas with all the mod cons. Just a couple of times we stayed overnight at harbors where there were no marinas; a not exactly welcome reminder of things as they are back home.

The send-off party set the tone for the whole enterprise. A couple hundred people gathered on the open terrace of a café ­ healthy, friendly folks full of joie de vivre. As they should be, with all the super sailing ahead, rivers of drink up to and including Cutty Sark whisky, mounds of shish-kebab and other Turkish delights, soul-caressing music, fireworks, dancing till you drop, the works. And masses of beautiful girls. I even began to worry where all the other, not so beautiful ones, had got to, but then the concern faded. Wish I had those worries now.

There were awards for winners in the previous rally, then the organizing committee members awarded each other, then the crews of the yachts sailing the following morning were called to the podium. Unfortunately the proceedings were very noisy, much of the talk was in Turkish, I didn't react promptly enough and climbed the podium juggling a shish-kebab wrapped in a lavash in one hand and a tumbler of red wine in the other. Once on the podium, I tried to stand to attention like the rest but only dropped a tomato. Wild cheers.

It grew darker and colder, fires were lit in open barrels all over the terrace, sparks flew, and the atmosphere became cozier and cozier. The band was playing, with undiminished gusto, those eternal Spanish-Italian hits ­ La paloma, Bessa me mucho, Sole mio, and much more in the same vein. Skipper Slava, who took special care to keep about half a dozen cocktails ahead of the crew, performed a passionate tango with the Frenchwoman from the Mafamina, lying alongside the Anna, and the happy lady then fed me some nasty Turkish patisserie of fat and sugar; I alternatively gagged and smiled my thanks.

Out of sheer sense of journalistic duty I cornered the rally commodore Teoman Arsay ("Call me Teo"), a corpulent multilingual Turk, a marvel of organization spiced with gargantuan guffaws. He said that the rallies had begun as a purely private initiative on the principle of "Why not" (incidentally, the name of one of the participating boats). They were later sponsored by a number of Turkish marinas; hardly on altruistic grounds, I suspected, but that was their business.

I then asked if anyone had capsized in the past ten years, had there been any loss of life, that sort of unpleasant journalistic questions. Teo reeled and knocked feverishly on a nearby table ­ a plastic one, I observed maliciously. It was clear that fighting storms and hurricanes was not exactly these yachtsmen's line, as they were mostly otherwise engaged. And indeed, why not?

2

True, the rally might be a bed of roses for the rest of the flotilla, but not for the Anna. (Incidentally, the yacht's name, painted in Cyrillic script on its side, was universally read as Ahha, and that alone created a sort of humorous halo round it.) The Ahha was the smallest (27 feet long), the oldest and the shabbiest boat in the entire fleet. It had been built some twenty years before by enthusiasts from the Parus ("Sail") Yacht Club in Moscow and had seen a great deal of service since. It had a pretty weak engine, just 16 hp, which had been repaired times out of mind; you should see its oil filter ­ fit for filtering the chief mate's tears but little else. Four knots was the fastest that the engine could do, and anything over it made it whine so piteously that our hearts bled.

Things went something like this. Say, the schedule was to sail 75 miles to the next rally point. Even if we take our speed at five knots ­ which we shouldn't ­ it took us at least 15 hours to get to that point. So, taking a couple hours' nap after the mandatory cocktail party, the skipper would rouse the crew at two or three o'clock in the morning, and while the rest of the flotilla went on snoring, we would leave the harbor and start hunting for the wind.

The wind that we caught was usually of a variety called in Russian mordotyk, loosely translated as "nose-basher," but no one bothered to grumble, for such is life. And so it went on all day: up jib, up mainsail, up spinnaker, down genoa, down spinnaker, put the spinnaker away, switch on the engine, everybody move fore, the engine is chortling, damn its entrails.

So that was how it went for us. The rest of the armada, thoroughly rested, would take its morning coffee at leisure, switch on engines ­ two or three, and sometimes ten times more powerful than ours ­ catch up with us as if we were stationary and parade past, carrying their mainsails for purely ornamental purposes, as often as not.

Of course I'm being malicious and unjust. The folks used their engines simply because they hated speeds under four knots, although everyone adored sailing, and some of them even sailed in truly Russian style, carrying their spinnakers far beyond all reasonable limits, until the wind started taking them to shreds. But you should see their spinnakers being put away: they just disappeared into a kind of tube, none of this clutching at the canvas until blood started oozing from under your fingernails, like it happened on the Anna.

I took a good look at all the cutting-edge equipment on the day when my new but already bosom Dutch friends, Antonie and Norma, invited me to sail with them. It was like a leap from the Stone Age into the third millennium. Their Celaeno was of the "words fail me, tears are choking me" variety: two toilets for two, fresh-water shower, a galley like a spaceship control center, sails operated by pushing a button, although Tony, a brawny guy well over six feet, liked doing it manually.

I was particularly fascinated by the autopilot, a neat box containing a computer connected to the steering wheel. You pushed an electronic chart into it, set the coordinates, and it would steer the yacht, show her position on the screen, the planned course, the actual course, the yacht's speed, estimated times of arrival at the point of destination and way points, and who knows what else; the devil's granny's blood pressure, for all I knew. And Tony, he swaggered about the deck, fine-tuned the sails or the engine, sprawled on the cushions drinking Turkish coffee or the cognac I'd brought with me (the Turks make a couple of brands of surprisingly drinkable cognac, the one sold in boxes is slightly better than the other kinf; by the way, don't you ever drink Turkish vodka ­ gasoline is infinitely preferable). Tony could even step down and take a nap in the cabin; the computer would do his job just fine.

Compare this to the way we operated on the Cinderella ­ pardon me, the Anna. You had to steer manually all day long, never letting go of the tiller even if the sun scorched the back of your hand until it was covered with blisters, and your neck was stiff with staring all the time at the compass. It was also a considerable nervous strain, for the wind and the waves kept pushing the boat in every direction but the desired one, and the skipper kept yelling at you for veering off course: "Roy, why are you tacking, you're on motor." That hurt. Yes, the autopilot is worth every cent of the fifteen hundred dollars it costs. If ever I have a boat of my own (what a hope!), I'm sure to get me one. The only danger is to run into another boat that is also on autopilot, but I was ready to contemplate that eventuality philosophically.

Walking to the routine cocktail party one evening, I commented on the fact that there were quite a few old-age pensioners in the rally, to which Tony replied, with a booming laugh, that there were a few young-age pensioners, too. The Dutch couple obviously fell in that category. It's good to know that there are people ­ nice and likable people, too ­ who can live like that, spending half a year in their chalet Les Elans in the French Alps, skiing, and the other half, sailing on the Mediterranean. Of course, such folks need rallies of this sort badly. It must be rather trying, gazing at each other's face day in, day out, while here at the rally they had plenty of entertainment, including a Russian crew nearby driving sleep away with their wild Slavonic airs well into the small hours.

3

The skipper and the crew of the Anna did their best to make up for any lack of electronics with excellent morale and general high spirits, much of them bottled. I hit it off with them from the word go. We were obviously of the same blood, unrepentant gray-bearded romantics clearly dating from the 1960s and just as clearly afflicted with the madness of the sea and the sail.

The point, however, is not just this primordial drive toward the sea as a way of life separated from death by a finger-thick partition. Speaking strictly for oneself, at a certain age one sometimes starts looking for some cogent reason to go on living. Then the boredom and the ecstasy of life at sea can serve as fine substitutes, in the absence of anything more noble and mature. And didn't Jerome K. Jerome say that sailing was a bit like being nearer to God? You don't even have to believe in Him, I might add. He will take care of that end Himself.

To hell with metaphysics, though; people are much more interesting. Skipper Slava with his face as weathered as the rocks, to quote all Russian romantics' favorite song about a pirates' brigantine, seemed to have stepped into the yacht's cabin right out of that song. He had a goodish dollop of Gypsy blood in his veins, so he was our best singer and dancer, but that's not the only thing we loved him for. One day amidst a dead calm he ordered us, in a suddenly dead serious voice, to down jib and reef in the mainsail, and be damn quick about it. No sooner had we carried out the orders than a wind called bora came down roaring from nearby mountains, pushed the boat on its side and hurtled it through the waves in this position for a solid twenty-five minutes, under a reefed-in mainsail, at a speed of about nine knots.

The skipper's savvy was later celebrated repeatedly and in a highly appreciative manner. A very worthy gentleman all round. Incidentally, he had a high opinion of yours truly, too. He said, for instance, that one could take a drink with Roy at any time of day or night, toasting the light of the moon or the whistling of the wind, for lack of other toastable subjects.

Slava was so full of his role as the skipper that he even tried to clean up our vocabulary, if you'd care to call it that. Without much success, I need hardly say, although he had pinned up in the cabin an icon of St. Nicholas, protector of all seafarers. The saint looked down gloomily at all sorts of linguistic misbehavior, except that as often as not he was deviating severely from the vertical, and it is hard to look down on anyone from that position. Besides, we were not exactly swearing (except when we were), it was mostly a manner of speaking.

Chief mate Leonid Gerbin, a damn caviler by his office and about the nicest person I know in his unofficial capacity. They simply don't make them like that anymore, that's for certain. A naval officer in the past, he even had a command of his own at one time but was later thrown, by a whim of the Defense Parcae, into air defense at the time of the duel between the then rickety Soviet AD system and the U-2 spy planes. If he did not know something about yachts and yachting, it simply was not worth knowing. Extremely sensitive to beauty, especially, it appears, beauty of volcanic nature: he kept talking about the volcano on Santorin Island and how it had all looked at night at the time when they were crawling all over it. He had carried away a goodish portion of the volcano as souvenirs, I thought as I looked at them.

Like all humans, he wasn't without a blemish: right in the middle of inspired boozing he could suddenly say that he wasn't drinking any more; he'd simply had enough. Cause for all-round concern and thoughtful analysis: maybe he had eaten something that didn't agree with him?

Anatoly Ivanov, able-bodied seaman, an ancient a year older than me, unsurpassed at the art of furling sails, very strict on officer ward-room manners: almost taught me not to drink from the bottle. Ever ready to discuss what is known as the "accursed Russian questions," and that's what we did in our leisure time sitting fore: picked to pieces all prominent Soviet-era thinkers. Hidden under pedantry and grumbling were unsuspected layers upon layers of irony and wit, which often made me recall Dostoevsky's line: "There's too much to the Russian; I'd trim him."

Finally, myself, a miserable sinner and defrocked associate professor, as simple as an ameba in terms of the gentle art of yachting, although in my time I had sailed all over the Aral (when there was an Aral), the Caspian, and a great deal else in my Polish-built Mewa, but the Mewa's sails are just a joke compared to the Anna's: she's a little over 12 foot long, mast, 15 foot. Chief mate Leonid regarded my predilection for center-boards as some kind of perversion and tried to instill in me the idea that real yachts start at about 36 feet: at that length the boat begins cutting through the waves, whereas with center-boards it's all haywire, any old wave can hit it on the bow and stop it, another hit, and there you go on the rocks, what's left of you. All this is certainly true, only I still stick to the view that no regular yacht can compare with a center-board in terms of adrenalin secretion; you get your pants full of sensations, metaphorically speaking. On the Anna, what I lacked in experience I made up for in eagerness taken to the point of idiocy.

4

In all, we sailed across three seas ­ the Sea of Marmora, the Aegean, and, to use a bit of Turkish, Ak Deniz, the White Sea, that is, the eastern part of the Mediterranean. Six hundred odd nautical miles, Istanbul to Antalya and a short trek back to Kemer.

The Aegean was the stormiest, although we came in for a bit of rough weather in other places, too, but nothing like the previous year's gale force winds that had mauled Moscow. The guys had lived through that gale on the Anna on the Black Sea, and they still could not explain how they had pulled through. They talked in hushed voices of the boat dashing along at a terrific speed under a jib that they simply had let escape and couldn't take in, the deck vibrating under their feet from sheer speed and the seas first flattened by the wind, then rising like mountains, so that the boat at times behaved like a diving bomber, sliding off a roller.

As I have said, there was nothing like that on our voyage, but from time to time things did get exciting. Off Cape Karaburun ("Black Maelstrom") we had to trim the boat for several hours, sitting on the windward side wearing nothing but our bathing trunks: the wind was exceptionally warm, must have been some sort of sirocco, only the sea spray was pretty cold and stinging. That night the armada was expected to anchor off Karaada Island, with a friendly supper party aboard the flagship, but because of the high wind the signal went round for all boats to head for the port of Chesme, the very same one where Count Orlov had beaten the hell out of the Turkish fleet and earned himself the title of Chesmensky, more than two hundred years ago. The wind gradually died down to a gentle breeze, we sailed hour after hour, it grew dark, and at last I could enjoy a view that had long tormented me on sleepless nights on shore: a smooth, oily swell and, dancing on it, a golden moon path. It felt particularly sweet as everyone had gone to take a nap after a strenuous day, and I was alone in the cockpit; just me and my dream. The dream had come true, and still I didn't believe it. Curious, isn't it.

We sailed into the harbor at 23:22 local time. Not a soul on the pier, not a palm leaf stirring. The fleet was wrapped in sleep, the friendly supper must have long been over, if it had ever taken place. OK, we celebrated this, the finest day of sailing, all by ourselves, with a bit of elated singing and a few heart-felt toasts to us and guys like us. We dropped off where we sat. Three hours later, reveille. As it happened, we saw practically nothing of Count Orlov's Chesme. Pity.

Apart from storms or just fresh winds, there were, by way of excitement, dolphin sightings. We had just a few of those, and that was mostly in the Sea of Marmora and the Aegean ­ they seem to be attracted to places where the traffic is heaviest. I snapped a picture of one just as he was coming out of the water in that inimitable hunch-backed roll, but the snapshot looked quite silly and conveyed nothing of the grace and excitement of that vision. Let me put it like this: for the first time in my life, big chunks of it wasted on spear-fishing, my hunting instinct was totally in abeyance, obliterated by the sense of being in the presence of overwhelming beauty. I leaned over the bows, like a middle-aged male figurehead, and could distinctly see below the surface a whitish body moving powerfully yet without any visible effort, as if showing the boat which way to go, then diving deeper and disappearing only to do another graceful surface roll a few yards away. The chaps said that dolphins sometimes swam next to the boat within touching distance. No such luck this time; still, their company was immensely pleasant while it lasted.

Sailing on the high seas has few diversions like this. There are drifting jellyfish, of course, but they are colorless in more senses than one. You also get mad at all the garbage that humans discharge in these beautiful waters. Bits of plastic are particularly dangerous to boats, as they can wrap themselves round the shaft and stop the boat, which generally happens when you have to move pretty damn quick to get out of the way of some rumbling monster of a tanker or some other high-speed unpleasantness. Plastic sheeting is an even worse hazard for the fish, they swallow bits of it and die in terrible torment. Presumably.

We were pretty careful about things like that and never threw any such stuff overboard. That was easy, because our garbage mostly consisted of empty bottles, and we took good care to fill them with sea water before dropping them to the bottom, to make a home for some inoffensive crabs. There are plenty of amphorae lying around there anyway, according to reliable report. Some still contain thousand-year-old wine, and it isn't doing anyone any harm, is it.

Still on the subject of exciting moments at sea: when we could, we went in for simple pleasures like bathing out in the open sea. In dead calm we would stop altogether and cavort for a few minutes, the whole crew except someone at the helm. Naturally, we bathed in the raw, for who would want to insult the yacht by festooning it with drying bathing trunks? The water was not too warm but still quite delicious once your body got adjusted to it, especially since that body, scorched by the sun, mostly felt more like a rare steak, if stakes feel anything. When the wind was light, we would drop overboard one by one, trailing at the end of a rope; pushing through the resilient water was so exhilarating that chief mate had to chase some of us back onboard with a swab.

No, there was none of the fatal boredom of the sea which, according to various accounts, makes some seamen feel that stepping light-heartedly off the stern is the easier option. This must be the curse of bigger ships where the supply of vodka is woefully inadequate and the people have nothing to do except look after machines, though nowadays it's mostly machines that look after people. We were constantly busy doing things, trying forlornly to catch up on a bit of sleep when there was nothing more exciting to do. But generally there was.

5

The sea is always beautiful whether it merely looks awesome or is actually drowning you, whether it sings a dirge or a lullaby, only I am not going to describe the beauty of the sea ­ on principle. If you've been at sea and it got to you, there's no need to explain, and if you haven't and it hasn't, it's no bloody use. It would be like verbally explaining all about orgasms to a virgin: she won't understand a thing but will only get the idea that it's all horribly filthy. Leonid Andreyev, a famous Silver Age writer and a fine yachtsman, was adamant on this: he knew the caliber of his talent to a T, treated the sea with holy trepidation, and refused to put that holy feeling into feeble words. A worthy role model, Leonid Andreyev.

The Turkish coast is simpler to describe than the sea itself. It is mostly reminiscent of the Karadag area in the Crimea: sheer cliffs rising out of the sea concealing little inlets straight out of paradise. The shores are much more deserted than the Russian, or formerly Russian, Black Sea coast. Sometimes you sail for half a day or a full day, and there's no sign of life on the shore, not even any goats or sheep on the hills. The place must be arid, and hearty thanks to Allah for that from all lovers of solitude, preferably à deux. In my travels along the eastern, desert coast of the Caspian I'd discovered that some kind of water, or better say moisture, could be found in the most unlikely places. So it made my mouth water to dream of some day sailing past these shores alone ­ well, more or less alone ­ and stopping over in these delicious little coves for some spear-fishing, sunbathing, and generally sloughing off for a day or two.

The coastline is indeed a sailor's dream -- all jagged: if there's any unpleasantness, weather-wise, you can always find a snug little bay or cove to hide in or an island to shelter you from nasty buffets. The hills are at first low, with little or no woods, it's mostly either mere scrub or bare rock, but nearer Antalya they rise to creditable height. In late April and early May there was snow on some ridges, even.

In some places Greece and Turkey sort of interlace: there would be, say, a Greek island straight ahead and, looming beyond it, a Turkish peninsula. On these occasions the Anna would forge ahead right through the Greek territorial waters, while the rest of the flotilla hugged the Turkish coast. The thing is, our lads had already cruised among Greek islands, and they said that our coreligionists the Greeks treated all Russians like long lost brothers. You might get smothered with hugs and kisses, if you were not careful. We-are-of-the-same-faith-you-and-I sort of thing.

Incidentally, our armada was accompanied by a Turkish patrol ship, but it seemed to be there mostly for scenic effect, no sign of conflict whatever. The officers of that patrol boat appeared at all the cocktail and other parties, and very ornamental they were, too, their uniforms ironed to squeaking point. I talked to a couple of officers at one such party, and very nice chaps they turned out to be. Very thoughtful, serious drinkers. Apparently the Navy is the Navy -- in Turkey, Africa, or anywhere.

Turkey, now. You know, my grandfather fought the Turk, my great-grandfather fought the Turk, and as for more remote ancestors, they seemed to be doing little except fighting the Turk. That is why the picture I had somewhere in the recesses of my subconscious was of Janissaries with yataghans behind every palm tree and fountain in Oriental palaces, roughly the same way some Americans come to Moscow to listen to the howling of wolves on Red Square.

Instead, I saw a country to which I wanted to emigrate at once, immediately, and without delay. The first thing you noticed about Turkey was that it was completely different from your idea of Turkey. Oriental? Hell, no. Just here and there. Let me put it like this: If you take, say, Baku and wash it in seven waters for seven years, you'll have a pale cosmopolitan likeness of Istanbul, 1999.

The city ­ what we saw of it ­ was superbly picturesque, with masses of flowers one did not recognize and Botanical Gardens type courtyards everywhere, and almost German in its cleanliness. There is a touch of the French here and there, too: men carrying piles of carpets through the Grand Bazaar on their heads yell something that sounds like the French "Attention!" Bags are called pochettes. Car parks, oto (meaning "auto") parks. And so on. The French, along with the British and Italians, occupied Turkey after the First World War, before Kemal Ataturk had kicked them out, and these must be the leftovers.

Sure, some Turkish women cover themselves in black from head to foot, but old imperialists like myself will recall that there were many more of these in the bazaars of Tashkent, Nukus or Makhachkala a few years ago, and there must be even more now.

The one Oriental feature I could never get over in Turkey was the Turks' love of bargaining. Just one episode to give a glimpse of what the Turkish art of salesmanship looks like in real life: a certain s.o.b. pursued me for about half a mile through the crowd in the Grand Bazaar, and eventually I had to buy eight (8) T-shirts from him, just to be rid of him. I handed the T-shirts round to the skipper and crew of the good yacht Anna, and still have three too many left.

Another Oriental touch was orderly rows of men kneeling right out in the street doing the namaz at certain hours to the mechanically transmitted howling of muezzins. I thought how nice it must be to be able to drop out of the rat race five times a day, to think of things eternal and clean out the accumulated filth from the corners of your mind, only who the deuce could tell what they were really thinking during the ritual? Maybe asking Allah to help them find more idiots to buy dozens of their self-destructible T-shirts.

Still, this type of autosuggestion must be extremely gratifying, though I tried to imagine doing it in my office -- the imagination just boggled. The sea is as good a tool as prayer for cleansing the soul. Whether it's the sea or the muezzins' howls, it certainly works for the Turks: an extremely kindly and civilized lot, ever ready to do you a service, yet with a distinct sense of dignity. In three weeks, we did not encounter a single instance of caddishness or boorishness that is routine back home, not even anything remotely resembling unpleasantness. Nothing but smiles and other friendly facial expressions. Either the Turks totally lack that internalized, heavy malice or pent-up aggressiveness that you feel in a Moscow crowd, or else they hide it very thoroughly indeed. I must have spoken dozens of times to people in Turkish streets, and not once was I directed to any of the remote addresses so popular in my beloved Motherland.

6

We spent a whole day at Aivalyk. It was called a "day of rest," in sheer mockery, I guess, for tourism, if practiced conscientiously, is very hard work indeed. In that town the Turks gave me yet another priceless object lesson in the art of salesmanship. As a result, I was forced to buy a carpet at a price that doesn't bear saying out loud. An extremely edifying story.

That day they took us all over the ruins of ancient Pergamon, now known as Bergamo, and it was all very nice, only very hot, and then the guide said that Turkish archaeology was all ancient Greek, Roman and Byzantine, but its ethnography was purely Turkish. So he took us to an ethnographic museum ­ or so he said. It was, in fact, a commercial trap of steel, only I realized that much too late.

True, on the ground floor some women wrapped in black from head to foot were weaving something while our guide told us all about the Turkish double knot which left all the other types of knots simply nowhere. He then showed us how silkworms were tortured and put to death, and how silk threads were extracted and woven together. All very enlightening.

We were then taken upstairs to an exhibition hall, where we were seated on banquettes along the walls and offered drinks ("Raky for me, please"). What followed was a blend of university lecture and ballet. The guide told us all about types of ornaments, their hoary age, their symbolism (I only remembered that two brackets were a symbol of fertility, sort of like a woman standing akimbo), differences between ornaments in different regions, the way young maidens were expected to impress prospective bridegrooms with their art of weaving or stay unmarried, and all that sort of baloney, while well-trained lads were skillfully unrolling one carpet after another by way of illustration, until the whole floor was covered with several layers of carpets.

Toward the end of the lecture I was careless enough to show interest in a carpet that was thrown right at my feet, and when I came to, the carpet had been certified, paid for, and packed in a huge bag. In the interval, some members of the management had rushed in, I had been dragged to a different room where a special show entirely for my benefit had been laid on, I had done my best to escape but had been severely restrained, monstrous sums had been mentioned, and it had all ended in my parting with the entire contents of my wallet. I was then taken to the bus by the management's full complement, probably to the sound of "The Turkish March," only in my dazed condition I couldn't be sure.

This gave rise to the flotilla legend about "five men in a boat, to say nothing of the carpet." Space aboard the yacht being at a premium, I was lucky that I wasn't kicked off the boat by the skipper, carpet and all; I merely had to stand countless rounds to celebrate the purchase, practically pattern by pattern. The carpet ought to be good for a hundred years at least.

Later I bought, in a similar manner, a pair of glasses at $100 instead of those I'd dropped in the Aegean, and some lousy cream, "Made in the USA," at $11, although I distinctly remember wanting a jar of Nivea for $2.

But all these are minor, forgettable incidents. On the whole, we Russians could only envy the Turks. In the ten years during which my countrymen, led by their super-clown, indulged in one circus after another, the Turks built up a first-class tourist industry; all they had to do now was stand by and rake in the dough. In practical terms, the process seemed to be like this: a Turk gets up early in the morning, gathers a few kilos of oranges, heads for his makeshift stand, squashes an orange or two ­ one dollah, puhlese. And so it goes, all day long. The ruins bring in a hefty amount of lucre, too. Doesn't Russia have ruins? Sure she does. The whole damn country is in ruins.

Evidence of a construction boom was everywhere in Turkey. Plenty of unfinished hotels, motels, camping sites, bungalows, and so on. To save land, they were building high-rises instead of two- or three-story houses. My Dutch friends positively rolled with laughter hearing this talk about saving land; in their Dutch view, there was land enough and to spare. The architecture was not too varied, they simply had no time for architectural refinements, but the buildings looked jolly and comfortable. Most cottages, even tiny ones, had satellite dishes on the roof, as well as sun panels and water tanks. In some towns, the population increased tenfold in summer. One could not help wondering where all the money for construction came from, with the country's runaway inflation. Despite the inflation, everyone was happy except the Kurds, but the Kurds were the business of the government, while the people were busy with their own businesses.

There was one obvious exception, and that was the Ocalan cause célèbre. When we were passing Imraly Island, where they were keeping Ocalan, we were warned about fifty times by radio to keep five to six miles away from the island, only our Israeli colleagues didn't give a damn and took a short cut. They had a real Israeli admiral on board; retired, of course. So the Turks had quite a time squeezing them out of the restricted area.

Most Kurds solved their ethnicity problem quite simply: they said they were Turks, and who the deuce could tell the one from the other? Only the more fanatical ones, and the wilder tribes up in the mountains, were bent on making life miserable for the government. To deal with this contingency, inconspicuous little soldiers with big submachine guns were placed at various strategic points. In Antalya, we wanted to do a bit of spear-fishing off some rocks next to our marina, but the moment we stepped outside the gates, a young Kalashnikov-toting soldier rushed to inform us in sign language that we were not welcome outside the marina perimeter. The chap didn't know a word in any European language. I couldn't even explain to him how funny it was to see a Kalash, which had obviously seen quite a bit of service, in strange hands.

It made one feel sad, observing all this prosperity and orderliness in Turkey. I knew one thing: there would be nothing like that on the Russian Black Sea or Caspian shores during my lifetime. The natural conditions here are richer than in Turkey, but the mentality is all wrong. The impression is that the populace finds it more entertaining to cut each other's throats and engage in slave trade. And not just in Chechnya, either.

Turkish mentality was apparently thoroughly reshaped by Ataturk, helped, among others, by Vladimir Lenin and Mikhail Frunze. The latter had, according to rumor, been sent by the former to Turkey on a mission and put the Turkish army in shipshape order, so that it ruled the roost in the region ever since. As for Ataturk, he was all over the place: sitting, standing, on horseback, on foot, in all public places, embroidered, painted, drawn, in plaster, in bronze, you sometimes got the impression that he was hanging from the chandelier, frowning and enforcing the nation's unity. And that's what a nation apparently needs more than anything else.

7

I must speak here of yet another thing that shook me to my foundations in Turkey: the Turks' attitude toward the environment or, putting it simply, toward the sea. You know what Russian harbors look like: oil sleeks, watermelon rinds, hot and cold sh-t in every shape and form. One of our men of letters wrote once that all Russian southern ports slightly reek of urine. Here is eyewitness testimony: there was no smell like that in any Turkish ports. The water in the harbors was just as bright violet as on the high seas, save for the occasional beer can that some son of a bitch had dropped overboard. In Kemer, I actually saw a swordfish that swam into the marina and kept poking its sword among the yachts for about an hour. What would have happened to it if it turned up, say, at Makhachkala port? Dreaded thought.

Our friends from Frankfurt, Klaus und Gabi, solved the mystery of this purity of sea water for us. By the way, if Gabi was not a top model, she should be. As for Klaus, I once asked him what he did, professionally, and he said, with a big smile, "Urlaub" ("Holiday"). But that is strictly nebenbei, in parenthesis, that is.

One day the Anna and the two Germans' catamaran with the cannibalistic name Lapu-lapu lay alongside at some pier, and chief mate and me decided to wash the deck with some detergent. I suddenly saw Klaus signaling to me like mad; so I went over, and he asked: "Do you have a thousand bucks to throw away?" It appeared that he had witnessed a scene in which just such a stickler for cleanliness shampooed his hair on board his yacht at that price ­ a thousand greenbacks. That was the fine for defiling the harbor, and there was no wriggling out of it. If you had no money to pay the fine, your yacht would be confiscated. A bio-toilet is a must, or else you must have a holding tank on board, to be emptied beyond the twelve-mile zone. These strictures applied not only in harbors but also anywhere near the shores. I thought of the way we simple-hearted folks... OK, let's not dwell on the sad things, as Skipper Slava used to say.

We are now coming to the subject of ruins. I had often doubted if it was worth the trouble to scamper, like eighty-year-old American ladies did, from ruin to ruin only to have your picture taken against some background or other. I eventually came to the conclusion that it was, though not because of the pictures.

Imagine this scene: you are looking at something that used to be a functioning temple of Dionysus and the guide is showing you how, millennia ago, a not very sober priest would stumble out of that temple, pick grapes, squash them with his heels, taste the must, and then start leaping and whirling madly, for the wine promised to be fine. Both the Greeks and the Turks inherited a dance that went back to this pantomime, only they called it by different names. An evergreen subject, this.

Or, say, there was an icon of St. Nicholas, protector of all seafarers, hanging in the cabin of the Anna, and in Demre (ancient Myra) you could go visit the church where the saint had once served and also his tomb or rather sarcophagus, and you could do the remembrance ritual for him in the strict Orthodox fashion, pouring some vodka on the ground but not forgetting yourself, either. His bones, incidentally, had been stolen and taken to Italy about a thousand years ago. The Turks called him by a curiously homey name, Baba Noel, that is, translated into Russian, something like Father Frost.

You could also take a look at the floor mosaic in the church and appreciate the architecture. There was a notice to say that some Russian prince had restored the church in the 19th century. I guess they could have found out which particular prince it was; we'd have lit a candle in his honor.

Or consider this: one thought one had read quite enough stuff about Phales, Anaximander et al., about differences between the Ionian school of philosophy and the properly Attic ones. But one heard of these things with what appeared to be a different pair of ears as one stood in front of the ruins of Miletus where once upon a time all that had begun, at the exact spot where the sea had once lapped the beach and Greek and other ships moored. Before you knew where you were, the speculative concerns of, say, Heraclitus became a chunk of your life, and you felt in your own gut that, indeed, panta rhei, all things flow, and the lines by Vladimir Solovyov began to throb in your brain:

Time gathers speed with every passing year,
At times, it seems, with every passing day.
As I sense freedom from afar, and hear
The sea, I murmur quietly: Panta rhei.

Funny that freedom and the sea should also go together in the mind of a philosophical landlubber like Solovyov.

The ruins are, of course, a bit hard on one's state of mind, reminding one as they do of things eternal and of the transitory and perishable nature of all things living. At a certain age these reminders are a bit de trop. The sad facts are pretty clear without them.

It turned out, by the way, that I was not the only one who was sensitive to these vibes. One night I and Nahum, an Israeli from Haifa, a really nice guy who also liked a drink or two, we were returning from a cocktail really prolongé under shaggy southern stars, and I talked about these idle thoughts of mine. It turned out that his own ran rather parallel with mine, only he was taking it all somewhat easier, with a certain detachment, perhaps, while I couldn't yet make up my mind what I really wanted, some sturgeon with horseradish, to quote Chekhov, or to go round the world alone in a center-board. All right, let's not talk of sad things, as Skipper Slava would say again, and I would add: "I see no reason not to take a drink."

8

There is a lot to be said for and about ruins. There are plenty of guide books that could be rehashed, with judicious interpolations drawn from one's own experience, but I'm afraid that that would be more boring than The Frigate Pallas, and who reads Goncharov these days?

I'd rather talk therefore of meetings and acquaintanceships, some of which were quite curious, especially those under the heading of "This is a small world." It sure is. A global village, in fact.

Imagine a cocktail party at a Mediterranean café, noise and toasting under the palm-trees, me holding forth on the political and non-political situation in Russia and what a great newspaper my Moscow News is. It turns out that one of the listeners is a Dutch publisher and a good acquaintance of Derk Sauer, publisher of The Moscow Times and a good deal else in Moscow, and me, I was for a couple of years editor of Moscow Magazine which Derk had founded, and I once published an interview with him. At that distance from Moscow me and the Dutch publisher, we were as good as blood relations. An excellent reason to raise yet another toast.

Later that night I ran into a Swiss German who worked on behalf of the United Nations on the ecological disaster in the Aral Sea area, and I must have mentioned above that in the past I had sailed all over the Aral; it had been a beautiful sea in my time, later done in by the local builders of communism. The Swiss gentleman also touched on this subject, only naturally he implied that the root cause of that manmade disaster was Moscow. So I had to inform him that at the time the fate of the Aral had been decided, "Moscow" had been none other than Comrade Islam Karimov, who had then been a big noise at Gosplan, the State Planning Committee, and who was now president of Uzbekistan and, curiously, an implacable critic of Moscow's role in the affair, let Allah grant him health and an unperturbed conscience. I guess he still sleeps soundly, untroubled by visions of dying kids. You see, in Karakalpakia things had got to such a pass that babies were dying of their mother's milk, for it was poisonous: now that the sea had mostly dried up, thanks to the various irrigation projects siphoning off water from the rivers that had fed the sea, the poisonous chemicals that had for decades accumulated on its bottom were lifted in the air by desert winds and deposited, fanwise, all over the area, so that all food produced there was poisonous. But I've written enough of these sad things elsewhere.

There were also quite cheerful happenings, though at times not unaccompanied with tears, either. Sailing on the Okura, with Doreen and Archie, a nice Scottish couple, was a fellow called Helge from former Eastern Germany. It turned out that Helge and me, we happened to have lived, a long, long time ago, in roughly the same places. So we nostalgically remembered those times and places and were naturally moved. After that we somehow got onto the subject of German literature, you know, Goethe, Heine, that sort of thing, and I recited, with great expression, Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam Im Norden auf kahler Höh' u.s.w., and expanded on the subject of how melodiously Cornet Lermontov (incidentally, of Scottish origin) had translated that poem into Russian, only in his version the love came out a bit Lesbian, for both pine and palm are feminine in Russian, whereas in Heine it's all right and proper, the pine-tree is masculine as it should be, and the palm-tree feminine. So it was a bit of a muddle in Lermontov, but very nice anyway. After that I got carried away on a mighty wave of literary inspiration and proceeded to recite, with fierce abandon, verses from the Prologue to Die Harzreise: "Auf die Berge will ich steigen, Wo die frommen Hütten stehen" etc., which invariably move me to tears. I then went away to get yet another couple of beers, and somebody in the line asked, "Roy, what have you done to the German, he's sitting there alone on a bench ­ crying, isn't he?" So he must have been moved to tears, too. As a remedy, I struck up, at the top of my voice, the famous march of Hamburg prostitutes: "Geh' weiter, geh' weiter, du bist nur ein Gefreiter, wir gehen nicht spazieren mit Unteroffizieren" and so on, verse after verse, and things were all right again.

No really, there was more merriment than anguish. There were even competitions as to who would out-bellow whom, singing songs ­ clean but not too clean ones, if you see what I mean. I particularly remember a concert like that on a pier after a nocturnal sacrilegious barbecue amid the ruins of some ancient church. Germans have no equal in the obscene Alpine Lieder department, they simply quashed us, yelling that smut at the top of their lungs, but then the Israelis came to our aid, we let loose with a jazzed up version of "Seven Forty" and pranced and yelled like the devils. To clinch the matter, we burst into "Kalinka," and everybody joined in, I even did the squatting dance and hurt my knee, but what's one bad knee more or fewer between us officers and gentlemen.

We also met some Russians, and these meetings were really touching. On a terrace above the sea under the stars, one of many such terraces, I listened one night to some band playing, and after a while I decided ­ No, no Turks could play like that. So I came up to the musicians and asked, "You guys wouldn't be from Russia by any chance?" To which they replied, "No, we are from Ukraine." Chief mate Leonid, who was alternatively a Russian or a Ukrainian nationalist, when he was not both, asked, dumbfounded, in Ukrainian, "Where from?!" The chaps, though they were from Ukraine, were Russians and did not speak much Ukrainian, but it was a pleasant meeting anyway. The same story repeated itself in another port, only the jazzmen there happened to be from Moscow, and one from Baku. Soviet friendship of the peoples in action. Those were all very warm meetings, balm for the soul, real balm.

Sometimes the sea washed ashore absolutely exotic and adventurous specimens that would look larger than life in a picaresque novel even. In Antalya, a certain young lady called Natasha joined our crew for a while. She had just returned from Singapore, had been part of the crew taking some millionaire's yacht there. In Antalya, she was repairing, under a Brit called David, another millionaire's yacht, as well as building children's catamarans and dreaming of sailing across the Mediterranean in one of these crazy little things. As we talked at a festive table on the Anna, it turned out that she had graduated from the Christian Humanities University in St. Petersburg, so that I was privileged to see with my own eyes a real-life yachtswoman with whom I could talk of Vladimir Solovyov, Pavel Florensky the theologian who perished in Stalin's camps, and other religious philosophers. I was so touched that I kissed the top of her head. Life is really stranger than fiction. In fact, real life leaves fiction simply nowhere.

I see that what I've written here looks like a cross between a promotional booklet and a report on a trip to paradise. The paradise did not always have all mod cons, of course, and some snakes popped up here and there, as in any decent paradise, but I've passed them over in silence, on principle. What of it if there are some untypical pieces of sh-t floating on the surface; one ought to take the in-depth view.

At times this proved to be more difficult than usual. When we were some six miles off Antalya, a kind of mountain with a superstructure began growing out of the sea. Not trusting my eyesight, I asked the chaps what that could be. "Can't you see? It's a US aircraft carrier."

It was like a cold draught from the grave. The escape to heaven was over, we were coming back into the real world, nowhere else to come back to, and the real world was up to its ears in muck, with Phantoms buzzing around like dung-flies. I said, "Let's effing ram her," but the guys replied, "Wouldn't you feel sorry for the Anna?"

Sure I would feel sorry for the Anna. And not just the Anna, that's the whole damn point. God's world is so beautiful, life is so ridiculously short, and what does Man the Superfool go and do? Man the Superfool designs and builds this ugliness ­ whose name is Death...