A letter came from Madagascar. By the way, it’s time for me to confess that Madagascar is an imagined place of residence of the 4th floor apartment owner, who did indeed marry Prince Abamelk, but the name of the prince’s home country is rather dull and I invented Madagascar (you can consider him a Prince of Bahrain, if you wish). Olga Barsukova informed us that Prince Abamelk keeps admiring Toma Stenko’s paintings, but he was imprisoned, as upon their arrival, a coup d’état took place in Madagascar (Bahrain). Now she delivers food parcels to her loved one. Seventeen meals: dry Spanish omelette with Martini, lobster eggs with ketchup, tomato and seaweed jelly, sweet parmesan... Some chef told Barsukova that those meals were a part of Salvador Dali’s habitual breakfast. “Abamelk holds no hard feelings for your absurd running after him with a knife.” In this way the letter from Princess Olga Barsukova ends. I recalled all this sitting in utter darkness and looking at the stars outside the window of my Mildom Hotel room. I went downstairs to the reception desk and said I needed light, so the desk clerk lit a candle for me and I carried her... no, I carried it to my room. I reread my writing and was horrified: what rubbish I’ve written! What is to be done? Should I run into the dark Kazakh night and vanish? How lucky is Abamelk sitting behind bars, given Salvador Dali breakfasts! Maybe I should start all over again? Starting with what? With that first encounter with Stenko, when at 3 a. m. I climbed out of the empty pool of Zhemchuzhina Hotel,
where the Kinotaur Film Festival had just ended, and I trudged along with Roma Kozak (the wonderful theatre director — alas, passed away). Tomorrow morning we were supposed to board a plane bound for Moscow. I walked holding the Grand Prix for Moon Father, as I, Irakli Kvirikadze, wrote its script. It was June, 2002. A year ago, Osama bin Laden had the Twin Towers blown up in New York. But that night Sochi was fragrant with magnolias. It was only three steps to the pool’s gate when Roma whispered to me, “Irakli, just look to your left, at this wonder” — and I looked and saw the wonder, a 22-year-old girl, about such wonder Marina Tsvetayeva once said: “Before me is a girl — a living fire!” I saw this girl — the living fire, selling flowers by the wall of Limpopo café. Roma Kozak shouldn’t have shown her to me, I should have taken those remaining three steps, passed through the gate and left the next morning for Moscow! God, what am I talking about! Roma Kozak, during your limited residence on this earth you have staged many great productions, played in some of them as an actor, but your best cue was spoken in a thick drunken voice, “Look to your left, at this wonder!” Seventeen years since then, I am still looking. The girl-fire’s father Valery Storozhenko was a hydrologist, who dug artificial lakes and let fish live in them. Sazans, carps, both mirror and non-mirror ones, and sturgeons worshipped him. The girl-fire left the provincial Adler for Moscow and enrolled on the design course at the Textile Institute. While a first-year Brief chronicle:
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