Oles Honchar (II) — Shore of Love

A light breeze came wafting in from the sea. Girlish laughter reigned there. No transistor radios caterwhauled mindlessly. And you waited for that ineffable gift of nature, for the moment when from the darkness of the horizon, from somewhere in the dark, mysterious depths, the moon would rise and cast its moving and bright path of light on the sea.

The fortress was twenty or even more centuries old. Millenia had gone by since the time when Romans' armed galleys had first appeared by these shores. Augustus and his legions had turned into dust. The fortress' ruins had become the quarry of archeologists and a place for dancing. Inexorable time had changed everything to suit its fancy and perhaps the only thing that remained unchanged was that poetically shining path over the sea, that fairy-tale carpet for people in love and for poets. When the moon rises and admires herself in the mother-of-pearl mirror of the nighttime waters - a ghostly flickering - there comes a magic moment born of the darkness when the most rabid and ceaseless shouters fall silent, when the girls cling together. They look silently and thoughtfully at the hazy light, for this is truly the special moment coming into its own, an indescribable moment when it appears that nature herself is at the summit of her eternal mystery of creation. Light reigns. How vast the sea becomes on such clear moonlit nights, how breathtaking its reaches are!...

The lantern of the night would be born in silence and would rise from the horizon. And once again the hubbub would start up, someone would spread out a handful of mussels on the wall, bottles of beer would clink in a carrier-bag and the divers would now even more eagerly boast to the girls about their daytime feats.

"Some people like to sink things but our job is to get them up!. .. "

"I've lost count how many days you've been getting it up and it's still Sitting on the bottom."

''Well, girls, that's because it's not a bag of potatoes!"

"All right, girls, taking out an appendix is not an easy matter but do you think it's any easier to go swimming under water? When on top of your own head with its two ears someone screws on yet another metal one and then you have to go into the deep-do you think that's as easy as going for a walk? There on the bottom you see a monster covered with ooze and shells, as hairy as a mammoth, and you have to guess from what angle to tackle it. First you have to drive a tunnel under the ship with a water-jet, next position pontoons beneath it, and only then can you get on with pumping those pontoons full of air! Only before doing that you yourself have to make your way through that tunnel under the ship. And crawling beneath her when you know that not less than 2,000 tons of steel is balanced over your head-do you think that's simple?"