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On holiday, Marina gave me a silver fork with a tiny handle engraved with open-work letters, «I’ll save Ajax from Poseidon’s trident». Looks like when I’m on the Russian island and find myself on my name-bearing bay, I’ll have to stick a fork into Poseidon’s eye before he sticks a trident in my ferry. Although I did not anger the sea deities. Moreover, I changed my place of residence. Now I live practically possessed by them, where behind my window there is still nothing but the sea, and all roads and high-rise residential buildings are inconvenient at the level of lateral view and do not attract attention.
In time immemorial my damn father, studying the belongings of his late grandfather, found an entertaining book – Dictionary of Chinese toponyms in the territory of the Soviet Far East published in 1975 compiled by F. V. Soloviev. The introduction says that geographical names are a sick topic in the Far East, since they give food to endless disputes about the owners of these lands – Russia or China.
My damn father kept the dictionary as a true relic, not even allowing me to scan the pages. Arriving in Vladivostok, I solved a long-standing problem within a day: A barman Seryoga sent me the whole book by e-mail, and a couple of hours later, I left the copy center on Aleutskaya street, holding more than a hundred hot freshly printed sheets in a folder.
Now I will return to the penultimate paragraph and give an example. A barman’s friend suggested that we go to the «Turtles» on the weekend. «Where?» «On the Ambavozes,» said Sergei. Opening the precious dictionary, I found the following explanation:
Ambabosa (Turtle) is a lake on the northwest coast of the Ussuri Bay in Primorsky Krai. The name has Chinese origin, formed by the components: baths – the prince; ba – eight; on – the lake; tzu is a suffix. Vannaboztzy means Turtle Lake. Hydronym first appeared on the map in 187 spelled like Uvambaboza. By the end of the XIX century the first part of the name (Wamba) was reinterpreted into Amba meaning Tiger in Tungus-Manchu. Ambapoztzy means Tiger Lake.14
So turtles, after all? Or tigers? Anyway, «Vanbapoztzy», inconvenient for Russian-speaking citizens, had been gradually transformed into what my fellow said, «Ambavozy.» Though the dictionary gives a very strange interpretation – where it is eight princes or the prince of the eight turned into turtles?
However, the riddles did not end there. Two maids were overheard at the hotel: «It’s cold to swim on Shamora.» «You would rather go to BOMBovozy!» Formed from the two roots well known to the Russian ear, the name Bombovozy is easier to pronounce than Ambavoz, and sounds much more impressive than any Turtles. However, for young people, there is another pronunciation variant like «Bombiki» apart from Turtles, in particular for the females.
Waves are high enough on Ambavozy, as if after a strong storm but the water is warm. Quite near the bay, there are rows of holiday homes. Seryoga’s Dacha (a holiday home) is over there too. While he was arranging some kind of barbeque place in the courtyard together with his girlfriend, I went out to look around. The road went uphill, houses ended at the top and a forest started with a black wall of trees. I went upwards, keeping away from the allotments and closer to the forest, looking at the plum trees and kicking stones under my feet.
In the middle of holiday homes, a lousy stain of a huge burned-out house was rising which made you feel scary while passing it nearby. It stood on high metal stilts so that one could climb down to the very bottom of the structure. That’s what I did. Crawling on my knees through mugwort jungle among partially rotten stilts, I just hurt my hands with fragments of broken glasses. I kept running into the strangest items now and then: a broken comb with a scrap of someone’s hair, a rusty harmonica, twisted tapes of a light-struck film. Beside mugworts, there was also myriads of fairy-mushrooms. It was a culmination of Gothic horror, a miniature of the Castle of Otranto. When I got out of there, I walked around the burned house. The run wild imagination pictured what could be hidden behind the smudged windows and the elaborately carved shutters of the three-storey bulky thing.
The sun was going below the horizon, cuckoo tune was making you feel depressed, the sharpness of vision faded in the evening twilight. I came back to the path leading to the top of the hill, and climbing up, I settled on the edge of the forest sitting tailor-fashion and took out a voice recorder from my breast pocket. I saved for the long-awaited dessert the answer to the question, «Why do you want to kill Mira?» especially looking for a suitable environment. I was looking for something exciting to make blood turn to ice, the cuckoos kept singing, and the burned-out estate full of ghosts made you feel scared with its fragments of old combs. All right, let’s go…
Sometimes she might be called Mirabel or probably Miroslava, or even Mirra, with two rolling «r’s». But it’s easier for me to call her with four letters, which were pinned down in the past before our era, before Christ, on the parent’s car. It was called Mira Daihatsu, it was blue, with three doors and very small. This car was crashed in an accident. Being extremely short, Mira kept smacking me across the head with her short little hands when I was learning to drive. Patting me on the shoulder, challenged me, «Keep steering, my young pianist.» or, «Keep driving, my young pianist.»
She killed everyone who dared to offend me. Yes, yes, she just came and made at point blank. But I won’t tell you about this. Mira hates that I don’t eat, but I always have an answer, «How can you think of food recalling the siege of Leningrad?» Even Mira can’t argue with that.
She still does not confess what she is really after and believes that it’s too early for me to see corpses and blood. But I can still see it. When I put her contact lenses in special containers, through the transparency of the solution, I see the reflected faces of those whom Mira was likened to… When I wash off her flower dress from splashes of someone else’s blood… I am aware of everything. I know that she dyes her hair in red so that the blood of being killed by her is not so noticeable until Mira gets to the bathroom and find peace in the cold silence of the tile.
Once Mira gave me a Hohner harmonica when I was hopped up on blues. She bought this gift in Paris being together with Jean-Baptiste at that time. Mira was so angry that even slapped my face when I dropped the harmonica in a barrel of water at our dacha, it was on Amba…
I stopped the recording. I got up and walked away from the forest edge, trying to move as quickly as possible. Down the hill, skipping along.
Chapter 5
E – Eponymous settlement of de Vries
Being a Heligolander, James Cornelius De Vries was an Earl and a merchant (according to another version his name was John, not James), who arrived to Vladivostok in 1865 intending to open trade and become a farmer having settled in the harbor. James Cornelius chose a peninsula that goes into Amur Bay. The peninsula got its name De Vries (people call it «difris»).
There are lots of legends about this place, which is considered an abnormal area. There are two legends about the tragic death of the Earl’s young daughter. The first says that she drowned because of unrequited love, and the despairing father planted «Love Alley» in his dominions to commemorate the memory of his late daughter. The second legend narrates about the difficult conditions to overcome small distances. Back then, you had to cross the sea by boat to get from De Vries to Sadgorod. Once the boat capsized, and all of its passengers drowned, including the Earl. Nowadays, there is Cape of Drowned located on the peninsula in the vicinity
of the cemetery, which indicates that the legend number two might be quite a real story.
(Grouped
The Odyssey by Homer (translated by S.H.Butcher & A.Lang).
Dictionary of Chinese toponyms in the territory of the Soviet Far East by F.Solovyov.