Depth

One day Li learned that everyday life can be deeper than it seems.

Not long ago he began to take an interest in freediving. Not the kind with scuba gear and Cousteau’s commandments, but the kind known to pearl divers. When you can rely only on yourself and your body, and the water environment, unfamiliar to the organism and cold, surrounds you on all sides and resists the outsider. Until, finally, you manage to relax, immerse yourself in it, merge with it, calming your thoughts and opening yourself to the silence and serenity of the underwater world.

Surprisingly, while Li was on shore and only occasionally took short swims, diving seemed simple and primitive. Hold your breath, push off from the surface, dive, swim — what’s so difficult or unusual about that?! But that is only until you decide to descend deeper or stay underwater longer.

Li had read that until quite recently the most experienced swimmers and the best medical authorities were convinced that a person was not adapted to dive deeper than thirty meters — first, pressure would begin to hurt the ears, and second, oxygen absorption and delivery by the blood to the organs should cease. But then the first divers overcame this threshold, and it seemed an impossible miracle. It turned out that the human body can show wonders of adaptation — simple maneuvers of the nasopharynx muscles equalize pressure on the eardrums. Blood drains from the limbs, preserving precious oxygen for vital organs. The lungs compress and decrease in volume, supporting oxygen absorption. And yet no foreign impurities, no gas bubbles appear in the blood that threaten to cause boiling and decompression sickness. The harmony of the body and its surrounding environment is preserved.

The most interesting thing for Li was that truly deep and long dives required not concentration of strength and strained effort, but the exact opposite — maximum relaxation of both mind and body. It turned out that the main consumer of oxygen in our bodies is the brain. And relaxing the mind sharply increases our ability to stay underwater for one minute, two, three. And the best divers spent even ten minutes underwater without any harm or consequences, which still seems like pure fantasy.

Li lazily recalled all of this as he lay on the shore of a lake under warm sunbeams. It was late summer, the weather was beginning to change, but this day was pleasantly warm and cloudless. Sunlit paths ran along the water’s surface, shimmering on the ripples like flowing gold. Silence reigned.

Over the previous hour Li had managed to dive well, spending one and a half to two minutes underwater at a time. Today he was alone, so he kept caution and common sense, knowing the limits of his abilities. It would be a bad idea to stay too long without air and catch cramps or lose consciousness — without a safety partner that would be dangerous, and it was certainly not worth tempting fate.

Li’s thoughts returned to the dives. The lake was shallow, with a clean sandy bottom. The transparent water was lit by the sun, and at depth it was still bright, which made it feel spacious. Li did not expect anything special from this rest. An even, empty bottom, the quiet mirror of the lake — serenity, wonderfully relaxing and restoring.

Curiously and unexpectedly, he noticed in the distance strange outlines of straight lines on the bottom. Swimming closer, Li found a boat sunk upside down, now almost completely covered with sand and barely visible. From beneath the sand protruded the sloping bottom; in one side a hole could be seen in the gray boards covered with a thin coating of algae. Interestingly, around the hole the boards were darkened and charred, as if burned.

Li’s lazy stream of thought was interrupted by a loud rustle and the flapping of fabric. Turning his head, Li saw that about thirty meters away a young man had come out to the shore. He was spreading a large blanket on the sand, clearly intending to rest. Li smiled approvingly. He was afraid he would run into a noisy company today, but the new neighbor gave the impression of a quiet, calm person not interested in rowdy fun. The man caught Li’s gaze, turned and slightly nodded in greeting, signaling friendliness and a desire to keep distance.

Well, the day was going great. Li leaned back again, closed his eyes. He returned in thought to the lake, the diving, the boat. Feeling a light drowsiness, he let his thoughts wander absentmindedly. A recent short vacation came to mind. Walks around the city. A trip to the cinema. A new science fiction movie had just come out, with enormous and mesmerizingly beautiful sandy deserts, dramatic fates of entire peoples, space flights. The movie was beautiful, with vivid artistic images, memorable. Against its backdrop ordinary everyday life looked flat, calm, measured. Even boring. There, on the screen, epic events made the heroes suffer and rejoice, vividly experiencing one event after another. Here, on the lake shore, nothing was happening, and life went on as usual, without tragedies and dramas.

Minutes passed slowly. The sun warmed. The stream of thoughts flowed lazily.

Then Li caught himself on a vague feeling that something had changed around him. He opened his eyes in surprise. He looked around slowly. Nothing special — the same bright sun flooded the lake’s surface. The leaves of the trees behind still rustled softly. In the distance the man sat relaxed on his blanket. But the vague confusion did not recede. A couple of minutes passed before Li realized what exactly had unsettled him. His new neighbor, who had clearly come to relax on the lake shore in this heat, was fully dressed. He had no towel, no bag with swimming things, no book, nothing. And he was not going to undress or sunbathe. He just sat on his blanket, his gaze fixed on the lake.

Li felt anxious and curious. He decided to watch the man carefully, a little slyly. Nothing happened. Li kept looking from under half-closed lids at the seated figure. Several minutes passed, and still nothing changed. The man froze in his place like a monument. Something in this picture evoked sadness and chill in Li. Indeed, peering at the neighbor’s face, Li saw that the corners of his mouth were lowered and his brows drawn together in a sorrowful, almost painful numbness.

Li felt uneasy. In everything happening there was a kind of heaviness and mystery. It was hard to relax and return to idle lounging in the sand. He wanted to call out to the man and ask if he was okay. But the distance that had been kept and the man’s immobility stopped Li from such attempts.

After lying like that for another ten minutes, Li realized he did not want to continue lying there. Curiosity demanded an outlet, but he did not feel entitled to interrupt his neighbor’s solitude.

Getting up, Li slowly and carefully gathered his things, got dressed, nodded goodbye to the man, and walked toward the bus stop. It was about a kilometer and a half, and on the way Li continued to think about what had touched him so much. After all, if you think about it, nothing was happening. Just a person resting, just like Li himself. But then why did it feel so full of sadness and some kind of pain?.. For some reason scenes from the movie with the desert came to mind, and its hero, lonely and lost.

What a silly analogy, Li thought. It’s in movies and books that the fate of peoples is decided, heroes suffer and tormented. You don’t meet that in life at every turn. My imagination ran away, he thought, and out of nothing I already invented a whole drama.

The stop loomed ahead. He wanted to drink, as always after swims, and the bottle he had brought was already empty. Near the stop, very conveniently for Li, there was a small canopy, under which a saleswoman sat with bottles of water laid out before her, a few pies, crackers with cookies, and other simple food. On weekdays it was empty here; her main catch clearly fell on weekends, when crowds of city dwellers escaping their work cages flowed to the lake. But the woman, apparently, felt quite comfortable even alone, leaning back in her folding chair and reading a book. She was clearly local.

Li approached, politely greeted her, asked for a couple of bottles of water and a meat pie. After paying, he settled on the bench next to the stall and gladly started on the pie. The next bus was still a while away, so he could wait calmly.

The saleswoman seemed glad for company — putting down her book, she kept glancing at Li, waiting for him to finish and for a conversation to begin.

“The weather is wonderful today, it’s a pleasure to be in nature!” Li began, smiling to himself at her undisguised attention.

“Tell me about it, I was afraid the rains would start soon — and then this,” the woman responded readily. “And are you from the lake?”

“Yes, I swam and sunbathed great today! And you? Business not very good today?”

“What business here, it’s a weekday,” the saleswoman confirmed Li’s guess. “But on Friday the city folk will come pouring in!”

“And you live here yourself?”

“Yes, from the neighboring village. I’ve settled in well here, a solid addition to my pension, and I help the kids and grandkids,” she laughed contentedly.

They were silent for a bit. Then the woman unexpectedly changed her expression, frowned, and, as if responding to the thoughts that bothered Li, asked:

“Did you see Petro there? Is he still sitting?” Her face took on an expectant expression, as if the answer were especially important to her.

“Uh, you probably mean the man in the blue shirt by the lake?” Li asked, slightly surprised by the question.

“Yes, him! So he’s sitting there again?..”

“Yeah, about twenty minutes ago he was still there,” Li replied, and continued with curiosity, “Why do you ask?”

“Oh.” The woman frowned, her face expressed distress. “I feel sorry for the man; he should live and live peacefully, he’s in his prime, and now he’s ruining himself and sits there all the time, for hours.”

She turned in her chair and stared into the distance, somewhere toward the road. Li hesitated a little, then asked anyway:

“And what happened to him?”

The saleswoman’s face grew even dimmer.

“He’s from our village. He lived his life, everything was good — for him and his wife, I mean.” She sighed. “And then this misfortune happened.”

She fell silent, as if it were hard to continue. Then she met Li’s gaze and went on.

“It was a quiet day, started calmly. Clouds as usual, weather as usual. We don’t usually believe those forecasters. Yellow level, orange — make it gray-brown-raspberry,” she said with annoyance in her voice. “He was at work, and she decided to swim across the lake, look at water lilies, relax, I guess — she loved the water. She swam to the other shore — and our lake is big, you saw — and then suddenly the wind hit, the clouds gathered.”

She fell silent again; it was clear she was upset.

“In short, she swam back, but the storm struck first. And would you believe it, lightning hit right into her boat!” the storyteller lamented. “She drowned then, didn’t make it out. He found her only the next day. And now for a year he’s been like in a dream. He goes to work, but at home everything is abandoned. He just keeps going to the shore and sitting there.”

A rumble sounded in the distance, and soon the lights of a bus appeared from around the bend. It was time to go. At once disturbed and frustrated, Li said a crumpled farewell. His heart was heavy.

Sitting on the bus, he thought. His thoughts revolved around the man, the boat he had seen on the lake bottom, and the tragedy that rose clearly out of that seemingly unremarkable lake surface.

Looking at the faces of the few passengers, Li wondered what secrets and depth might hide behind each of them, eclipsing any scripted inventions…