The river was small. Some places could be forded by merely stepping on a string of slippery stones. In wider places, deep vortices formed, mostly behind lone boulders. And if the boulder was big, the vortex could run very deep.
In places, thick dry snags stuck out of the river, clinging to the rocks and growing into the brown silt. Bleached white, they resembled mammoth tusks rising over the water. Branches floating downstream from the mountain passes would often become their victims.
Despite the cold, ice had yet to form on the river, continuing to flow in a lively black stream between the thick, snowy white banks of the river.
Robert’s mind took him back to his childhood, when he first crossed the river as an eight-year old boy, wading, and then climbing to the top of a flat boulder warmed by the sun, where he felt very proud of his deed.
Robert pulled out a bottle of vodka from his coat and took a few gulps.
His thoughts slipped further back, immersing him in memories.
The first time it happened was on July 15, 1982.
On that day, Robert’s family gathered at a large table to celebrate his twelfth birthday.
It was a hot summer day and the air smelled of roasting bitumen. The scorching sun melted the road, turning the asphalt into a viscous mass that clung to the rubber of bicycle and car tires and to the soles of shoes. This odor was forever associated in Robert’s memory with the sensations of a hot summer.
There is a big, round, chocolate cake adorned with brown and red cream flowers on the kitchen table. On top of the cake, written in uneven letters, was the inscription: Happy Birthday – 12 years. Robert loved chocolate sponge cakes, but most of all he loved cream roll cakes, which were sold at the store near his house.
Little Robert always asked himself: why do people buy round cakes for a birthday? Why can’t they buy several roll cakes, place them on top of each other and present them to the birthday boy? And without inscriptions – the letters seemed silly, were not tasty for some reason and, in his opinion, totally unnecessary.
That day, Robert got a pair of oversized blue fabric sneakers as a gift. His parents bought almost all his clothes several sizes too large so that he could wear them longer, as his family’s income was low. His father worked from morning to night at a factory as a metal worker, while his mother was a nurse at the local hospital. To make ends meet, both parents had to take side jobs. Still, money was scarce and they lived very simply. Ice-cream and watermelon were the best desserts that were served for dinner on Sunday or for celebrations.
Robert invited only his school friend Jovan to his birthday party. His family usually did not have big, noisy parties to celebrate significant dates.
Quickly devouring the rest of the cake and washing it down with apple juice straight from a three-liter jar, the two friends climbed up into the barn that stood in the shadow of a huge old walnut tree. The roof of the barn was made of tin, and those places that were not protected by the shadow of the tree became as hot as a frying pan under the direct sun, making it impossible to sit there. Nevertheless, the roof was a place where nobody could keep the friends from idling away the hours, casually conversing, singing loudly and dreaming.
«Jovan, look, there are horses floating in the sky,» Robert said suddenly and laughed, pointing at some white clouds.
«Coooool!» Jovan said in languid surprise as he watched the clouds pass, but he suddenly perked up and said, «Let’s guess which animals they resemble. The one who finds the most animals, wins!»
There was, indeed, a huge white cloud in the shape of a floating horse. Its head turned slowly, but the thick mane transformed into the long wide tail of an enormous fish.
«Horse-fish or fish-horse?» said Robert. He squinted at the sun and…
That’s where it all happened.
The blinding sun abruptly caused his eyes to darken. Robert felt light-headed and his ears clogged. He blinked and then glanced around with a look of bewilderment. Next to him sat a stranger. He was telling him something, but Robert couldn’t understand a thing, whether from surprise or the constant ringing in his ears, he could not be certain. In fact, he did not even try to understand the language of the strange boy. It seemed as though he was seeing everything for the first time, everything was odd, unfamiliar and incomprehensible. Robert’s face exhibited genuine surprise.
He did not understand where he was, on whose roof he sat, or what he was doing there. Robert stood up and inspected his clothes. He was stunned – the clothes were new, as was the barn and, ultimately, the whole yard.
Robert could not understand what was happening to him. Everything around him was completely unfamiliar. With eyes wide from bewilderment, Robert looked up at the sky.
There, the horse with a fish tail was still floating proudly with his mane spread across the sky. Rays of sun broke like long threads through it and disappeared again. The horse appeared to be smiling.
The first thought that came to Robert was that he was delirious. He knew that sunstroke could cause a loss of consciousness, but he could not comprehend how such hallucinations could at once seem so real and unreal. His heart was threatening to burst from his chest. A primal fear was starting to overwhelm him.
The boy could not help but think that this was some mysterious, fantastic, but strikingly realistic dream. He kept looking around with an open mouth and wide eyes. He wanted to flee that roof to the ground, and without thinking he took a step. The hot roof burned his bare heel like when he was on the beach in Pattaya several days earlier, where his father had taken him and his mother to see the Gulf of Thailand. The sea had been teeming with jellyfish and Robert accidentally stepped on one.
«Jellyfish. It’s just jellyfish, nothing to worry about,» the doctor had said calmly at the local hospital where the boy was taken with the burning foot. To the child, the word jellyfish meant a sudden stinging pain. The throbbing foot was covered with bright red marks.
It lasted for just a moment. Feeling a sharp pain, Robert squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath.
«Jellyfish! It doesn’t look like a horse-fish at all!» Jovan sat next to him laughing loudly. «Look, Robbie, see – there’s the head and there’s some tentacles. Like the one in our biology textbook.»
The snapshots of a distant, hot country disappeared abruptly without a trace, like the surprise Robert’s face bore just a few minutes prior.
Robert smiled at Jovan and looked at the sky.
And yet, it was a horse that was floating in the sky, not a jellyfish, he thought.
Jovan and Robert, two inseparable friends, continued to enjoy looking at the clouds.
Meanwhile, the horse with a long fish tail continued to float across the sky, smiling.
Chapter 2
Geneva, Switzerland (Trevor)
17 December 2011. 09:03
Bright sunlight seeping through a crack in the curtains lit a narrow strip of a wide bed. The rest was covered in darkness. A cell phone on a glass nightstand was persistently ringing. Running water could be heard from the shower. Men’s socks, trousers and women’s underwear were scattered on the floor.
The phone went silent, but soon started ringing again. Trevor, in a bathrobe and with a towel draped over his head, approached the bed and picked it up.
«Good morning, Victor… Sure, in an hour… Thanks.»
The line went dead. Amanda’s assistant reminded Trevor about the time of the session.
Trevor dropped the phone and threw open the curtains. Light broke into the room. The windows of the Beau-Rivage Hotel on Lake Geneva revealed a fountain and the snowy mountain peaks of the Swiss Alps. On the bed, snoring softly, a young girl with long dark hair was sleeping. A gray, silk sheet enveloped her naked body like second skin. Breaking his gaze, Trevor recollected the previous evening at the nightclub he frequented whenever he was in Geneva.
Last night the club featured some band that was probably quite popular, judging by the two hundred young people who crowded the stage, singing loudly along with the vocalist to the deafening accompaniment of drums.
The thick blue and yellow beams of projectors caught the faces and hands of the fans in the crowd. Laser chasers were blinding Trevor, so he turned away from the stage and headed to the nearly deserted bar. The young bartender with short, bleached hair and a colorful tattoo took his order and poured a glass of whiskey. A girl sat alone at the other end of the bar, watching Trevor. When their eyes met she smiled and looked down. But then she looked at Trevor again with a tenacious, penetrating, somewhat inquisitive, even defiant look. Trevor slammed down his drink and confidently approached the girl.
In the morning, he could not remember her name, where she was from or what they had talked about at that club. The several glasses of whiskey he had consumed scorched his memories of that night, melting away all that was unnecessary and leaving only fragmented, disconnected shots of their embraces and kisses. Trevor could not remember how they left the nightclub, how they got to the hotel, to his room, but his memory shamelessly continued to show him moments of their lovemaking. Trevor remembered her as passionate, bathed in sweat in his arms, illuminated by a narrow ray of pale moonlight, and he smiled.
«Chloe!» The name of the stranger struck him like a bolt out of the blue. «I think that’s what she called herself? Right, it was Chloe.»
Trevor dressed and opened his wallet. A plastic window revealed an ID with PRESS written in big letters on it. He pulled out four hundred Swiss francs, placed them on the bedside table next to the girl and quickly left the room. Soon, he was outside the hotel on the street.
Christmas was fast approaching and the weather in Geneva was warm and autumnal. At night the temperature would fall to near freezing, which was unseasonably warm, but for Trevor, who had recently flown in from the Sahara, the weather was quite pleasant. The temperature in the desert at night also rarely rose above 3—4
o
Beau-Rivage Hotel to Rue du Cendrier is about a twenty-minute walk along the city’s promenade.
Trevor felt very agitated before the second session. Until this point, he did not fully understand what had happened to him the day before. Over the past twenty hours, he kept thinking about the office of the psychologist Amanda, listening over and over to his own voice broadcast by the speakers of a small portable recorder, telling an incredible story of a part of his life that nobody knew about, hidden somewhere deep in his subconscious.
It had all started several days earlier, after an unexpected encounter and what he thought was an innocent proposal.
***
«Yes, Trevor, these are some fine rocks,» said an elderly jeweler, who was unable to roll his «r’ as he spoke, as he examined a round diamond the size of a hazelnut. «Take this one – pure perfection.»
A short gray-haired Jew with horn-rimmed glasses perched on his head had been inspecting the diamond for five minutes through a thick magnifying glass, holding it with fine tweezers in his white cotton gloves.
He carefully returned the stone and picked up another from the handful of nearly identical in size and shape diamonds scattered on a black lacquered table.
«Wonderful!» He was clearly admiring them. «The cut is amazing! The girdle on all of them is as sharp as a knife. The colors and purity are like dew from the sky…
Trevor was introduced to Lev Goldenberg, a jeweler and emigrant from the Soviet Union, by Rochefort, chief editor at Les Mondes, who often ordered jewelry from him.
Lev Goldenberg created remarkable copies of the best collections offered by the leading jewelry brands of Europe.
«Show me a photo of a masterpiece and I will make you one that is hundred times better at half the cost,» he loved to say every time potential clients approached him. Indeed, he was the finest craftsman.
«I have a client who can purchase all of these in one lot,» said the old jeweler as he eyed yet another rock. «If you negotiate well, he will pay five million right away, maybe more.»
«Lev, I wasn’t thinking of selling just yet. I just need a safe place to keep them for a while.»
«Teo, you don’t understand,» the jeweler said softly, prying his gaze from the diamond to give Trevor a piercing look. «Five million euros, not dollars. That’s a lot of money, my friend.»
«Lev, I need a safe place for a couple of days, until Christmas. I’m staying at a hotel and it would be extremely reckless of me to keep them in a safe there.»
– Tov5, my friend, all right,» said the jeweler somewhat dejectedly. He gathered the stones in a green velvet bag. «You know you won’t find a safer place. But if you do decide to sell, just let me know and I will arrange everything within two-three hours.»
Shortly after the conversation with the jeweler, Trevor was sitting on the open terrace of a small restaurant in the heart of Geneva, sipping coffee and reading the latest newspapers.
Military service was in the past, the only reminder being a pale tattoo of a skull on his left shoulder, a device of the Reconnaissance Battalion of the Marine Brigade of the French Foreign Legion headquartered in Algeria. The department of the French Press Institute at Paris II Panthéon-Assas University was also in the past. Now, he was a special war correspondent for Les Mondes.
Trevor remembered only bits and pieces of his childhood, as the family moved around a lot. His father was from Carpathian Ruthenia6 (territory of modern Zakarpattia region in Ukraine), a Ukrainian Ruthenian (Rusyn)7.
However, at the beginning of the Second World War, when Zakarpattia, then a part of Czechoslovakia, was occupied by the Hungarian army, his family fled first to Prague and after the war to France, where Trevor was born in the early 1970s. His father would converse with him only in the Rusyn language so that he would remember his heritage. Trevor’s mother, a teacher of French and French literature, tried to instill in him a love for everything French.
His father, an expert in hotel construction, had traveled regularly for work to different countries, and he would often take his family with him. That was why Trevor’s childhood memories were reduced to faded color and black and white photographs against the backgrounds of public markets in India, islands and temples of Thailand, sands of the Middle East, and the endless construction sites of Hong Kong, Dubai and Bangkok. As a child, Trevor got so used to moving around and the constant changes that even when he entered adulthood, he could not imagine himself as an office employee, working at the same desk day after day. That was the reason behind his fascination with journalism.
But then the accident happened.
When the boy was twelve, his parents died in a car accident. Trevor spent nearly a month in a hospital until his mother’s older sister, Anne Frachon, became his legal guardian and took him to Paris.
Aunt Anne was unmarried and gave all his love to Trevor. She was the one who insisted that Trevor enlist and later study journalism at university.
Over the past fifteen years, Trevor had traveled to nearly all the world’s conflict zones.
He received the Prix Albert Londres war correspondent award.
His career as a journalist began in 1999 during the Yugoslav Wars. He was sent there as a young, promising reporter by the newspaper in place of an experienced correspondent, who had unexpectedly fallen ill. As a former soldier who served five years in the French Foreign Legion and had intimate knowledge of military matters, Trevor was more than ready for that kind of work.