stocking up on pennies! Yalta! When did they even manage to leave? It looks like this was all her idea, that Malika!” After their meeting at the hotel, Jasyn called Bagila twice. Her voice was cold, humiliatingly polite, Jasyn was offended and stopped calling. On reflection, he decided to pull himself together and try to get her out of his head, but as soon as he thought about it, a wound began to grow in his soul. He realised with horror that he could not forget Bagila, that she would live until the last minute in his callous heart, which did not know tenderness. He was not afraid that he would ruin the girl’s life, this was not the main concern for him. He was afraid of one thing, that someday he would get used to her beauty, before which he bowed, and Bagila would become for him as insipid as his wife. Jasyn remembered a parable about a man who, having become engaged to the daughter of a saint, a rare beauty, was inflamed with passion for a woman with a crooked mouth and dull eyes five years later… He thought about something in his office for a long time, then nevertheless went to the bedroom. Silently opened the door. His wife was sleeping, he entered quiet- ly, but she still moved, looked at him through her eyelids swollen from sleep and turned over on her other side. Jasyn took off his dressing gown, stood by the bed, watching his wife sleep, and lay down in their warm bed. He arrived in Simferopol at noon. He rushed to Yalta on a taxi and easily found the Priboy restaurant and their building next to it. A crystal evening grew thick over Crimea. Malika was not in the room. Everything was familiar to Jasyn here, he had been to Yalta several times. Literally last spring, he rested in the Writers’ House of Creativity, and here he finished the first part of his story. In the spring, Yalta seemed deserted, but now the city looked like an anthill. There were no people dressed like Jasyn, he thought that it was simply indecent to walk around in a suit at this time of the year. There was nowhere to stand on the shore, it was entirely filled with human bodies. The day was long over, and the people seem to have grown together
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