Free Loves of Yulian by Julian Padowicz Page A

phenomenon had not, after all taken place.
    Now I turned my mind to recalling exactly how I had gone about learning to swim. I could remember standing on a dock, two or three years earlier, with Kiki and looking down at people doing the breaststroke in the water. Then, at some point, we had acquired the orange, inflatable floatation cushions with the straps to tie around our waists. In water that came up to my chest, we had let the cushions support us as we did our best to imitate the swimming motions that we had seen, and found ourselves actually moving forward a little. It was, of course, the incident with Mother and Mr. Gordet on the ship that had taught me that I did not need a floatation device to stay afloat.
    “Y. . . ou h. . . ave to go l. . . ike th. . . is,” I said now, demonstrating the arm motion, sitting there on the hotel blanket.
    Irenka seemed to imitate my example without any difficulty. “Th. . . at’s r. . . ight,” I said. “And w. . . ith your l. . . egs y. . . ou. . . ” I paused to lie down on my stomach, “go l. . . ike th. . . is.”
    “I see,” Irenka said.
    “No,” I said, “Y. . . ou tr. . y it n. . . ow.”
    Irenka copied my arm movements.
    Then I told her to lie down and do the leg kick. “Th. . at’s all there is to sw. . . imming,” I said. “J. . . ust do th. . . at in the w. . . ater and you’l sw. . . im.”
    “I want to try it now,” Irenka said, getting up. “You’ll make sure I don’t sink, won’t you?”
    I nodded my head. Irenka started running down towards the water, and I followed.
    But the moment we were knee-deep in water, I realized that it would be unlikely that either of us would be able to do any swimming, as waves, much bigger than the ones I had seen in Yurata, came crashing, one after the other, onto the sand. Quite a ways further out, I could see people’s heads bobbing on the bumpy water, but those near the shore only dove into the oncoming waves and let them redeposit them close to shore.
    “I don’t think we can do any swimming here,” Irenka said, and I agreed. Then I watched her plunge headfirst into an oncoming wave.
    Diving headfirst was not an action I had yet attempted, but I knew that I had little choice, but to follow her example. In fact it was I who should have set the example. I straightened my arms in front of me, closed my eyes and lunged into the next wave as it bore down on me. Instantly, I felt myself whirled around by the force of the water, turned upside down with salt water going up my nose. Then, as I thrashed to reach the surface, my head hit something very unyielding, which I realized must have been the bottom. I had been going in the wrong direction. Now panic grabbed me as I felt the lack of oxygen in my lungs. I tried to turn so as to put my feet against the sandy bottom and thrust myself toward the surface, but the force of the wave had not finished with me, and I felt myself lifted again and suddenly crashing against the beach, face and shoulder first.
    “That was wonderful!” I heard Irenka shout and realized she was sitting on the wet sand right next to where I had landed. “Let’s do it again!” She stood up and reached for my hand.
    My shoulder hurt, my face hurt, and my head ached from my impact against the sand. But I let my companion pull me to my feet. Hand-in-hand we charged the next incoming wall of water.

CHAPTER IV
    Our hotel occupied half the space between two larger buildings. This would have provided an alley between the side of the hotel and the building to its left, except that the hotel lobby took up one story of that empty space. So that what you saw from the street was an entrance to a small, single-story, flat-roofed structure sandwiched between a large building on one side and the five stories of the hotel on the other. Except that inside the lobby had a big opening into the dining room and the elevator that were the bottom of the hotel.
    Our bedroom window, on the fourth floor, looked out