CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
In the dark, the river was taut and warm. It smelled of freshly washed linen, the silent work of a hundred thousand invisible laundresses.
Upon the command, “Girls to the left, boys to the right”, Sidelnikov deduced that the “tsar bathing” required stripping to the skin. The taxi drivers waiting behind the bushes were talking in an undertone. ‘That’s them Bandeets, innit?’ one of them uttered a familiar phrase.
The intimate touch of water brought goosebumps rushing on his skin. Entering the flowing darkness up to his chest, Sidelnikov pushed the bottom with his feet and dived. If it were not for the tightness in his lungs, he could have, without coming to the surface, torn along the river merging with his body and then finally flowed into the open sea, as into a non-sca
