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this absurd and misplaced request, I understood, to forget his fear, the terror he’d allowed me to glimpse, of a massacre or whatever it was that was keeping them hidden, your mama and your papa, in the worst place for it, a site they never should have retreated to, Petya, if they were afraid of robbery or assault. Which was why they’d never let you go out, in all those months. Six months there without ever having gone down to the sea, without ever having touched it, wet your hands in it. And wasn’t I right to yield to my impulse, take you by the hand, lead you to the gate, push back the heavy bolt, and step through, the air hitting us full in the face when we were outside and heading, your hand in mind, down toward the sea?
    To stroll along the beach, take out the Book, let the air ruffle its pages, open it up to any passage at all. To go out, I thought: a tiny incision. Letting the sea air rush in with a whistle, the real birds of southern Spain.
9
    It was an impulse toward the sea, Petya. All those years I’d been moving toward the sea. Irresistibly attracted to the edge of the earth from the deepest heart of your country where my feet had taken me in an earlier part of my life to lock myself in behind kilometers and kilometers of land with no sea. I learned to love rivers, unknown to me until then, and sometimes, looking out a train window, an endless line of blue-green pines in the distance, tightly and evenly packed, would leave me speechless, for it looked like a sea! A deep nostalgia for the years spent near the sea, afternoons when I felt I would never again have all the sea—you know?—all the sea to myself. And I began, without being fully aware of what I was doing, to move, slowly, like a tectonic plate that begins to migrate. Toward Spain, I thought, and once in Spain toward the sea. To bring an end to all the false moves, the blue-green pines, the signs, the water dreams where I would sometimes see myself on the edge of a great lake and walk in amazement toward the undulating water, its movement thick and heavy, a primitive reproduction, a mental construct. Like a man on Solaris, an earthling, who never for a single day stops dreaming of the earth.
    Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would feel an urge to get up and take a train, a plane, walk with my rucksack on my back, wear out the soles of my shoes, eat cold food in roadside bars, sleep outdoors, fall in love with the girl in the post office, wake up one day with birds flying over my head. They, too, heading south. On my way to the sea.
    What wouldn’t I have done in order to take a job in your house, enter it like a young tutor in the nineteenth century who loves the lady of the house (not your mother, the sea) and finds work there so as to have occasion to see her every day? I read the advertisement. I lied in my response, endowing myself with pedagogical experience I do not have. All that so I could live, spend a summer, near the sea, let the sea come in through the window and in a single night displace the leaden sea of my dreams.
    I asked Batyk if the house had any sea, any view of the sea. I’m not going anywhere, I told myself, unless someone brings me certain news of the sea. I interrogated him very thoroughly on that point. The advertisement read: “Young native speaker of Spanish wanted as schoolmaster of a young boy, private tutor, on the Costa del Sol.” A small square advertisement, in Russian, published in
El Sol de Málaga
(this newspaper exists and that is its exact name:
El Sol de Málaga
). I called and didn’t have to wait more than two days: Batyk rang me back to arrange for the interview. When, what day could he come and see me? It turned out to be a scorcher, an afternoon I spent walking barefoot across the tiled floor of the little apartment I was renting. An urban horror, a visual horror: a circle of bald hills, barren lots without green that I gazed out at and cursed