It was a real Pole with spick and span, blinding and beautiful dunes of snow, like healthy teeth high and low, with a white bear growling in vicinity or could it be a surly walrus; without a single trace except for a rare penguin path, with a flocky grey-fiery sky burning in thousands of shades, elevated, with birds few and far between. A drunken snow storm was trying to riot for dear life, but its tipsy relics were powerless: as soon as it managed to take off and start a dancing swirl, it dropped squatted, gave out a short howl, fell silent and started yet another attempt to recover. The place appeared wild; it felt like not a soul could be found within miles to have a talk or take a dram with and only harsh weather prowled everywhere showing its weather-beaten face from behind snow ridges and smudged blobs of the firmament.
“And where is the ocean?” she asked and turned her head to him. A man wearing a three-piece suit, with bows of legs that couldn’t be concealed even by loose trousers, with an impenetrable face that looked like crumpled linen, with swept-back hair shiny with gel and a cigarette nestled in a sturdy hairy hand, indiscernible in the line of numerous golden screws, obviously bored, even to death, withdrew his gaze from her back, warm under the tight fabric of her white sports T-shirt, leveled up his look to her waiting-for-reply profile, slowly slid down her straight and prominent nose, beautiful in concert with the other features, stopped by a rarely blinking black eye of hers, memorized the image of wind raging in her ashen hair torturing her hairdo and the question mark shaping up her sharp lips.
“Ocean?” he repeated in a voice deprived of any emotion. “It’s over there,” he lazily pointed forward with his chin, regaining the focus on her back. Her eyes shifted to the fore and suddenly she couldn’t breathe with hungry adoration and timid fear filling her up to the rims. In front of her, endless, touching the sky in the distance and becoming one with it, as if by a mighty thrust of water whirl above their tiny heads that seemed to swallow them up, laid a pristinely black canvas. Tranquil and silent, motionless and lifeless, smooth and ethereal, here and there pimpled with splinters of ice, eternal and somewhat mystical, almost real but with an ever-present doubt of being possible.
“What if I go there?” she gasped and again distracted him from her back.
“You’ll drown,” he smiled calmly.
“What if I want to walk on it?”
“Then, you won’t,” the man shrugged. “But I wouldn’t recommend doing it…”
“Why?” her lips narrowed.
“Only one could do it,” he explained opening a new cigarette pack. “And could teach others. I am apprehensive of such competition…”
“You” she squinted her foxy eyes. “are afraid of something?”
“Why disturb the powers to be?” he retorted reasonably.
The girl was about to say something, but was interrupted by frequent beeping, which made them both wince. The man produced a small box of a mobile.
“Hello,” he replied sullenly without stopping staring at her back as if it was some kind of a masterpiece. “Yes, heard that,” he started pacing back and forth, his expensive shoes leaving neat waffle-like footprints on the snow canvas unaffected by human attention, perfect except for rare penguin paths. “If you are sure about it, then do it, what can I say,” his eyes were still savoring her.
She made several steps forward. Her small shoes were gradually destroying the impeccability. She quickly bent down, took a large dented piece of that boundless pie, raised it above her head as if rejoicing at something, then pressed it against her clothes and crushed. It crumbled down along her garments; it was strange and provoked certain questions.
“Snow,” she pronounced tenderly noticing the silence that established itself behind her back. “Why is it warm?”
“You want it to be cold?” the answer returned.
“It ought to be cold,” she stated, tore another piece of perfection and got burnt by it. It happened so suddenly that for a while she couldn’t believe that a gutless mush undertook to sting her palms, but when she came to realize it, flame entered her eyes and the piece smashed a step away from the man.
“Sorry,” he said calmly. “That is why it was warm.”
The girl turned her offended back.
“I want a Polar bear,” she spit out.
He said nothing, examining her with his wrinkle-rayed eyes, while the snow storm persisted in raging madly and the morose old ocean merged with the skies. There was no sight of a Polar bear.
“Merlin,” she screamed angrily.
The man continued to be silent enjoying his cigarette in cold blood. A pretty angry face U-turned to meet his sides, menacing eyebrows arched in a battle-like pattern and ravenous lips pressed tightly. However, Merlin’s eyes were not attached to her any longer; he was looking at something else and she involuntarily followed the string of his gaze – it led to somewhere behind her shoulder. Disturbing the tranquility of waters, working free from the black embrace, heavily growling in dissatisfaction while landing its white paws decorated with huge claws on the sugary coast, an immense light brawn dragged itself out as if forced to do it. Water dripping from it, the bear cutely coiffured by the hand of the ocean and in wrath, took to aim at the people and slowly headed for them with a whirr of a sharp-toothed jaw and absence of any awe towards the snow grandeur. The girl moved back.
“It doesn’t seem to be kind,” she muttered in fear amazed by the sight of the Northern duke.
“It’s a beast,” the man smiled. “It doesn’t have to be kind.”
“Take it away,” she cried nervously, seeing the monster approaching at an alarmingly high speed.
“Sure?” Merlin inquired.
“Sure,” she confirmed quietly, feeling her knees going numb. At the very moment, the beast burst like a bubble: the white foam settled and the massive trail remained to serve the only evidence that a second ago the local host was readying to have a supper.
“Give me a cigarette,” she demanded, a bit nervous. A brown end grew out of the corner of her mouth, while the white one sparked and began to smoulder.
“I don’t want this one,” she declared whimsically. “Give me a Parliament.”
Not a single muscle moved on the face of her companion, who was standing motionless, but a new white-brown column grew into her thin small lips and sparked. The girl pulled at it. She was fascinated by a peculiar pause of surroundings; a gloomy plot threw some coal into the burner of her heart, the quietness and scenery were amusing: it seemed as if a Niagara of eyes were screwing this painting in some museum, while the characters were limited by the confines of their lives in a tiny parallel world.
She smiled at the thought. She liked that Merlin did not tire her with his constant presence. He was standing somewhere behind her and treated her to a cigarette. He let her show temper, scream, satisfy a whim, but himself stayed unmoved like an elephant. Only a faint smile touched his rumpled face once in a while, but it was of a rather fugitive type, not clearly seen at the first glance. He must be smoking too.
She got tired of the ocean, which was cold-blooded and unafraid alike. She threw a glance to the left and gradually turned her body in that direction. Somewhere at the outskirts of her field of vision Merlin was wrapped up in smoke, while at the centre of it, on the perfectly smooth snow mount, a high goal for the groggy snow storm, two dots appeared suddenly. One was big, the other was hardly perceptible. She guessed that they were moving towards them by the way they inflated. She squinted unwittingly in an attempt to see more.
“Dasha,” Merlin called her name and she shifted her eye to the periphery of her vision. He too was looking at the moving objects, but unlike her, he wasn’t squinting or surprised, but a shadow of regret brushed his eyes. “It’s high time that we got out of here…”
“In a minute,” Dasha said.
The dots grew bigger and soon acquired color and detail, then took another zoom-out and she could discern the man’s face covered with an icy crust. The man wore winter gear: a fat sheepskin, fur hat in an envelope of a scarf, the second scarf served as throat protection, heavy fur boots were deflowering the virgin snow cover, while his breath was heavy and fragmentary. Next to him, with a visible effort to keep in pace with the man, a little girl of about ten, dressed in a similar weighty gear, with a snow-frost powder on her face, was trying to push her stubborn white pigtails back under the hat that sat on her head as solid as a helmet.
“Dasha…” Merlin called.
“Them again…” she said.
“Dasha…” he repeated.
Dasha didn’t answer. She tried to recall the name of the man with a frost-bitten face, she was sure she had met him before and was frustrated by the failure to remember, her heart was quivering and her eyes jumped from the man to the girl and backwards. She frowned nervously with a cigarette dozing off between her fingers. It seemed to her that the figures wanted to convey something with their hands, next she noticed their widely open mouths and stiff faces, but she couldn’t hear anything, though they definitely were articulating something.
The scene was cut, as heavy hands touched her shoulders and a heavy whisper crept into her little pink ear.
“We are leaving,” and the ice was substituted by a busy foreign city, walled by long and high buildings encrusted with billboards in abundance, filled with unstoppable noise knitted from a great variety of sounds that continued thought day and night. Their bodies were resting in straw arm-chairs; a tiny restaurant was hustling with people, who spoke some foreign language. They were tanned and their patterned clothes were alike to those that Merlin and Dasha were wearing.