OLGA GRUSHIN
383
She shrugged. He noticed there was a faint unpleasant smell in the
cave, acrid and metallic, with a touch of decaying sweetness underneath,
a bit like rotten seaweed.
"What's your name?" he asked curtly.
"Ino," she replied, tracing her bare foot in the sand and looking at
him calmly.
"Ino what?"
"Just Ino."
He allowed himself a sarcastic little smile.
"If
that's the way your prefer it, fine. But I'm not making a police
report, you know. At least, not yet.... So, Ino, where do you live?"
"Here," she said patiently. "This cave leads to another one where I
sleep."
"A cave where you sleep, right.... And where did you come from?"
A light crease appeared between her eyebrows.
"Come from?" she repeated. "Nowhere. I have always lived here.
Ask anyone in the village, they all know me."
I'm sure they all do, he thought with a silent chuckle. She spoke with
not so much an accent as an unusual manner of enunciation, an uncer–
tain lilt to each syllable.
"So why don't you live in the village like other folks?"
"I like it here," she replied quietly. "The sea ... I like to be close to
the sea."
At the mention of the sea, she smiled for the first time and her eyes
became dreamy and alive, not gray after all, but a green, a deep, chang–
ing green.
It
seemed he had been wrong about her age too, she could not
have been much more than thirty. She might even be considered attrac–
tive, in a quiet, understated way, and in any case, why was he being so
unpleasant to her, why was he interrogating her so rudely, what had she
done?
"I apologize for asking so many questions," he said awkwardly. "It's
just that, you see, I am responsible for the peace of this island.... I mean,
I feel as if it's been entrusted to me, and ... and I just wanted to make sure
... Of course, you are free to be out here, doing whatever you do.... "
He sensed that he was getting hopelessly entangled in his words. His
temples were beginning to break into a sweat, and he had to fight the
urge to touch his moustache. She looked at him, smiling.
"Don't you know what I do?" she said gently. "I was sure the vil–
lagers told you. But I should have guessed, they must be too embar–
rassed to talk about me.... "
