They didn’t jump off the wet springboard with its tricky bounce, let alone the sunbathing roof, but walked down the wooden steps, holding on to the banisters, and jumped into the water one by one: even back then it was already covered with a film of oil shimmering with all the colours of the rainbow. And Fariz went with them, not the last, but not one of the first either — the doubt in his ability to negotiate the ten-metre wide strip of water to the steps of the nearest “number” arose simultaneously with the foreboding that the bottom of this opaque, greenish water was somewhere very, very far down, and he wouldn’t be able to push off from it if he needed to, as he had done at the beach in the camp.
He couldn’t bring himself not to jump, although at the last moment, when he still had t
