I was lying on my back, straps of my swimsuit bra pulled under my armpits to allow for a more uniform tan. It was day four of our vacation and I'd gone to the beach alone. Shoulder-to-shoulder crowd, but I'd managed to find a spot. A sunburned woman with her little kids was to my right and a girl, about my age, to my left. I registered the girl because I thought myself lucky having her for a beach neighbor: she was neither a creepy man nor a screaming child. She wore a two-piece, polka-dot swimsuit, big white dots against a navy background. Her long black braid was wet from a recent swim and was lying next to her body like an extra limb. Her actual limbs were tan, skinny and sharp—a bony girl, likely a poor runner, probably liked to read.

When I propped myself on my elbows to survey the scene, I saw it right away. At first I thought the sun was playing tricks on me for I'd had my eyes shut for a long time. So I stood up, as if to stretch, taking a closer look. The girl with the black braid was lying on her back, eyes closed, her bony knees sticking out like two pink apples. This is what I saw: white dots of her swimsuit panties turning red. It was menstrual blood.

I walked over to the girl at once.

"Hey, you're bleeding," I said.

"Oh shit," she said. She sat up and reached for her skirt.

"This happened to me once," I lied.

And just like that we started talking. The context of blood—backdrop for easy intimacy. Melana was alone at the beach because her brother Ruslan didn't like to lie still, preferred to abandon her, taking long walks instead. Ruslan was my age: sixteen. Melana was a year younger. She told me that they were from Grozny, the Chechen capital, and that, like me, they'd come to Sudak for a vacation with their mother, renting a room on Gagarin street. Could I please wait until Ruslan came back from his walk? she asked. I was to tell him that Melana went home to get her book. She said she was reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude for the third time. Latin American magical-realism, she said. Do you mean science fiction? I asked. Oh no, she said, it is quite different, it is like Buglakov's The Master and Margarita: flying witches, ghosts, an allegory for real suffering. Both her parents were writers, she said, and her grandfather was a poet people knew about. Her dad taught history at the University of Grozny. Melana had meant to take that book with her to the beach, so it would hardly be a lie. And even if it were a lie, she explained, a lie protecting the dignity of a person is a morally permissible lie, like giving the wrong information to a Nazi soldier.

She had been gone for no more than five minutes when I spotted Ruslan, a tall young man with a black mustache, black curly hair, and a plaid shirt, unbuttoned, showing off his hairy chest. He was walking over to my area, eyes scanning the crowd for Melana. When he saw her towel, he came over and gave it a questioning stare. I got up, walked over to him and told him the lie about Melana's book, and then he asked me my name. His mustache was an unfortunate style decision, I thought then. Or Grozny teenage fashion? Provincial idea of manliness? Grozny was not cosmopolitan like the 'Venice-of-the-North' Leningrad. A backwater place, likely all tall apartment buildings and Lenin statues. But I'd never been there or even seen photographs. Not a tourist destination. Not a place one wants to associate with destiny. Or style. Can't imagine falling in love with that boy, I thought, although he was not quite a lokh, a slang term denoting a brew of naïveté, simple-mindedness, provincialism—the polar opposite of "cool." On a closer inspection, I thought he was decidedly not a lokh: an intelligent boy, his gaze confident, his manner self-possessed. It seemed as though his jaws were clenched underneath those tan cheeks of his. They weren't, but his face gave off that impression. When he smiled—and he did, when I told him that I'd thought Marquez was a science-fiction writer—he did it with his entire face, his eyes laughing with a child-like, mischievous light. I don't know why I thought this: Ruslan's full-face smile seemed to be the most telling sign of his intelligence, or maturity, or both.

Sometimes friendship is like a rare bird that descends from the skies unannounced, making you still, turning you into a quiet observer who stands at a distance, holding your breath, bewitched by the sight of the bright feathers of a little being with a heart. It was the same with Melana and Ruslan. There was a connection between us like a new beating heart. We met in the evening on the pier that same day. Ruslan brought a guitar, and we sat on the bench, looking at the Black Sea, singing songs by Viktor Tzoi, God of USSR teens, a young man who had died the previous summer in an auto-accident. Ruslan showed me chords for Tzoi's song "A Star Called The Sun," and I found myself singing it well, hitting deep notes. "War is young people's task," I sang, "medicine against wrinkles."


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