On foreign sands

Early this morning, on the coarse gravel at the bank of the lake the sun was gently touching the emerging silhouettes of sleepy chaise-lounges, left behind bucket toys on, of a pair of lost flip flops and some of those glossy foil packages that summon the crows and make them litter the paper around the blue dust bins as if they were many tiny precious splinters. The air drifted away some fresh morning coolness, which slowly dispersed the dizzy vapour over the calm lake water resonating only the sound of the bungee jumping rusty post.

No one has opened yet any of the waterside cafes, still the sound of the early programme on the radio came floating from somewhere. The 7 kilometers of this oblong busked in the mild morning sun and awaited the first children’s voice to announce the beginning of the weekend. I stopped for a coffee and a pack of cigarettes at one of those up early anglers, whose trattoria looked very much alike the pound net bars at our seaside. His wooden small chairs were like borrowed from the late 80’s, when I was a child. My eyes thirstily looked around this wilderness inhabited only by the coal-coloured birds at those hours of the day when day where having a feast with the yesterday’s leftovers. I was thinking how fine it may be to live here at the waterside, to go fishing once in a while, make coffee or make love, have some small chat with the people passing by.

Maybe the winters here are composing the manuals in romance, entitled with frozen lace of finest calligraphy. My skin was soaking the warmth of the first sun rays up at the end of a May and my eyes half-closed reproduced a satisfied fat cat blissfully stretching at the heavy gates of a monastery.

Here on summer Saturdays the voices of thousands of children are spreading a careless clamour that mingles with the notes of the melodies floating from the cafes and the glassy sound of flasks and jars in sweat, filled to the brim with mint and ice. One of the mothers would just raise a loud voice at her child urging it to get out of the water as it is already high time. The high time to get of the water has its own personal indicator that measures the exact nuisance of the blue to purple on a child’s mouth. Here and there the whistle of the bay watcher and his stern voice would pump intensely his muscles to direct the message he has getting straight to the particular recipient he might eventually has seen at the edge of a fault. This approach has a better effect even than the Royal mail and all known Austrian mobile operators got together for a quality service as we know of it.

The day at Ada is one of the longest worldwide. At its banks, washed by the waters lingers a quiet timelessness. Even the birds have withdrawn and laid up somewhere else in the town in order to not disturb the ordinary human noise, patiently awaiting the hour of the morning mist, which will set the table for their next day feast.

I stood like that long hours at the waterside pound net bar of the old fisherman, when my sight caught a glimpse of something that distracted my thoughts. The pleasant lines of golden baked coffee bean coloured figure of a tall man in his 50’s slowly getting out of the water unconscious of the interest he caused was not looking to attract attention in any way. Drops of water were rolling down his burned curves wrapped in a thin filter of sun oil, which made the moist on his skin shiny and greasy and called distant images of olive trees hills, virgin olive oil, scent of Oriental incense and sand mixed with sea salt on one’s body. His sight was not looking for other people’s eyes on him.

He dropped down on his beach towel in a slow move and the spread of summer vigorously breathing, of a man and a musk encompassed the space between us. My hips were trembling as if I was the game in a chase. My breast was filling up with juices to feed the baby he made to me in a night of love. Suddenly, Ada bathed in gold and cracked passionately like the coffee beans when they bake. A carousel whirled in my head with the wind sweeping the fallen leaves of a distant autumn. I fell to parts and pulled together in a new shape, inevitably comprising a part of this man.

A water ring embraced our bodies like any of the time a drop or a leaf would fall on the surface for one last time. Our pondered hands painted pictures of desire in the water moving in an elegant and slow dance, searching each other’s hand, calling out for love. We painted the fragments of the summer, we were foreseeing the winter, the autumn rains and the leaf fall. We stayed in the entire time before us – in the corridors of the Syndicate’s palace, where he appeared one frosty February day pressing the yellow paper of the chocolate bar the palm of his hand to make sure that it is still there until I get it for the time without him.

O, yes! Most of the feminine inconveniences are well treated with chocolate…in his bureau, where we have been relaxing at the end of our intellectual disputes while our words and sighs were hitting the stand with the three katana swords with his name on it…in the secret suite, where only warmed up rumpled bed sheets would keep the story of us being there…in the impossibility of the 250 km, which stood later between us, in his sad pace on the leave when I stayed for another couple of hours at the waterside of Ada. There was a crying jealousy in the way he had to depart, in his certainty that the arrogant seagulls on two legs will disturb and bother me when he’s gone.

Somewhere in all this, at the very beginning was this charmer Ada with her idle warm morning hours, the children loudly laughing and the glowing at the very white heat broken stones, on which we ran barefoot in a haste across the pound net bars. Somewhere in all this, at the very beginning of the very this was the full-life body of a vine, which twisted on the summer heat with every wish of ours and filled with juices of nothing but the life itself. This was the meaning of all states and preconditions, of the knot-work my world resembled, sealed by way of precaution with some of his blunted kisses on my sun burned shoulders.

He walked slowly out of the water, the drops were flowing down his body like a thick olive oil from the Crete island hills. In several steps he dispersed into my breath and preferred to stay there.