en: The Lighthouse - English version

The lighthouse had stood there since before he was born. At low jagged rocks protruding from the dark sand on the coast, it sticked up to low clouds driven by salty wind from the sea. Its reflector flashed cold waves with golden light. There, where it shined, the wild element did not seem so coldly bottomless. He always found a kind of solace in that color. He liked to set up his hands to the large reflector watching how the goldness wraps his fingers, palms and wrists... However, lately it seemed that the light was fading. It was losing its power. It was cold, weak and lifeless. The reflector often flickered and went out completely for a while.

Again, he stood in front of the broken window at the top of the tower with the light behind him and he let the blowing wind to ruffle his hair. With closed eyes, breathing-in the scent of the sea and the wet sand on the shore beneath, the dust deposited on the massive beams under round-pointed roof, the old wood, the wet plaster and the pigeons hiding there from the approaching storm. Far in the darkening horizon a bolt of lightning pierced the sky. It shone so strongly that for one brief moment the darkness of closed eyelids turned into a red curtain. He blinked slowly and breathed as he looked at the sky. It was hard to tell where the heavens billowing with water-soaked clouds ended and where surging sea levels, flogging under stronger and stronger whipping wind, had their edges.

The scene precisely reflected his state of mind. The surging and thundering emptiness. He could not find a single idea which would give him the feeling of being alive. He was drowning in that indistinct rupture of two nothingnesses and his breath was shallow. The spotlight behind him, which until now was warming up his back, weakened. Repeatedly it had been happening for a long time but nobody has yet come to repair it. Maybe this whole lighthouse was long forgotten and not needed at all. Therefore it only mildewed and decayed. Just as he did. He, the only one who still remained at that place. He did not know exactly why. He felt like that place understood him. Quietly accepts his presence, absorbing each other's existence, and then projects it with its light into the sea. And the sea grinds and crushes it with the rush of water and waves, so that it is eventually swallowed up by its black depths.

She was sitting, surrounded by dirty sea foam; blackish grains of sand sticking to her white wet skin, breasts trembling under heavy sobs. Eyes staring directly under her - at the border where the edges of waves could reach to. And that border was extending with every new foaming torrent of water. The next wave hit the girl brutally in the face. She swayed a little, fitfully took a deep breath and with slender hands ran in soaked golden hair and in painful spasms seizing her whole naked body she shouted out a long cry of enormous pain, misery and despair facing another wall of icy water.

He stared at that scene and was unable to breathe. He choked. It hurt. The storm in his head was now casting lightnings and with thunders stirred him up back to life. He forced himself to suck freezing air into lungs. Heart beat fast and its swift punches inside the chest forced him to act.

The tide was in. The water was rising. Storm supplied waves with wild power to destroy and kill. The strength of wet masses carried her out of the sand and did not let her sit any farther. She did not resist. She closed her eyes and let the stream to mill her, she breathed out resignedly and let her body to instinctively gasp for an air and suck salty wet blackness into lungs.

The darkness around her spread like an ink soaking to paper. Pain. Silence. Calmness. Pain. Satisfaction. Pain. The end. Pain.

Two hands shattered icy shadows around her like a wax-shell. Tightly clenched around her waist and breasts - so white and shining in the surrounding darkness - and began to pull her up. Up.

When his head was again above the heaving surface, he gasped for air. Diving into the depths exhausted him; her body weighed him down and pulled him back. Her blond hair sticked with his face so that he almost didn’t see. Since he had not bothered to undress, his now wet clothing restrained his motion. He had to get to the shore. He had to make her to breathe.

The first feeling was at the same time great coldness and intense heat lashing to her naked skin from the left. Then a faint smell of old wood flashed through her mind, dust and like-to-known moist warm unknowness. Soon, pounding of large rain drops on the glass and whistling of the wind in broken window frames made its way through the nothingness.

She was becoming aware of herself. Now she lay on her left side and through closed eyelids felt bright glow. Was she dead? She would not feel anything then. And she was so cold! She tried to raise her hand and shield her face to safely open her eyes facing the unknown source of strong light but she felt too weak. Palm limply slid over her chest onto dusty boards. She moaned.

Steps were slowly approaching. The floor softly creaked. According to the sound it was clear that those feet were bare. No hard stomping of a shoes. Soft footprints were with every second closer and closer to the girl's back. She still kept eyes firmly closed. She knew that if she had opened them now to the light, whatever it was, it would have blinded her. Someone stopped next to her.

"Did you come from the sea?"

"What?"

"It seemed like you've... Are you..."

"You silly." She looked out from dirty window at the shore and pulled her hands closer to body. "Thanks," she said.

"I could not have let you do it."

She turned her head towards him with a short sad smile. She said: "I meant the sweater." She tugged the fabric. "You must be cold."

"That's okay. I'm fine." He crossed his arms on his chest and clenched his teeth, so that she could not hear them chattering.

She stood up. Sweater on her petite body looked like a huge baggy crumpled piece of sail. Sleeves, which had been long enough even before, stretched much more after the dip in the sea and now they reached just little above her knees. The bottom hem ended in the middle of her calves. She walked barefoot to his naked figure in the shadows by small steps. She grabbed his hand and pulled him firmly toward her. Her fingers were still icy cold, but her palm warmed on his skin like hot coal.

"Come here." Without stopping looking into his eyes, she led him farther into the light of heating reflector. He was naked, too. The wet shoes and pants were still draped over the hot metal casing of the beacon's lamp and dried. Sudden temperature change, despite all his efforts, made his whole body trembling. She pulled the sweater up to her chin, and in that very moment he suddenly felt like if the beacon's light started shining with new energy just to expose her nakedness as much as possible. Without completely stripping her baggy top, she trapped the boy in itchy wool with her. They were now so close that their bodies touched. He felt his chest pressed against her small breasts and her nipples hardened by cold. Her heartbeat and her breathing were changing their rhythms rapidly. He felt like dazed. He stared into her eyes and in strong glow tried to discern their dim color. A tornado of thoughts whirled in his head and none of them he could grasp. It was the same as if he was not thinking at all. All he sensed was her figure pressed against him, her eyes burning through his own and her lips slightly parted to facilitate accelerated breathing. He stood petrified.

"Oh, c’mon," she smiled. "You surely have seen naked woman before!"

Under the wool she took his hands and placed them against small of her back. She hugged him and leaned her head with still wet hair on his shoulder. She shook as if she settled on a pillow. Whirlpool of thoughts in his head disappeared and the only feeling fulfilling his entire being was, despite the slowly receding cold and the dirt all around, comfort and ease. He breathed out. He turned his face with a slow deep breathing in and buried it in her golden hair. It smelled of sea and sand. The heat of the reflector intensified again.

"Thank you," he said and hugged her a little tighter. Her hair tickled and warmed on his face and he felt pleasantly tired.

"For what?" Her voice was sleepy as well and the question sounded more like purr.

"Well..." In tight embrace he stroke her with one hand on her back. She flinched a little but tension eased right after and she laid her whole weight into his arms. "For everything... for you."

"I wasn't supposed to 'be'. Not by now," she said. "But you prevented to… that."

He eased his grip a little, so that they could look at each other. In his sad eyes she felt unspoken answer.

"You..." She stroked his cheek because she saw something familiar in his face. Those almost invisible wrinkles around glass-like eyes and tightly clenched pale lips. She used to see that look in every mirror's reflection. "Why would you?"

"It's strange." He looked away from her wet reproachful eyes and looked around the circular room. "I have been coming here every day for several years and this lighthouse has never lived so much as it does today. And yet everything is still so deafly empty. "

"We are here," she said.

"... And we do not belong here, although we are supposed to be here."

They looked silently at each other. Mouths so close that they could feel warm breaths of each other on their lips. The reflector still radiated stronger and stronger bright gold-full light on their pressing bodies. Nothing had changed about the lighthouse to that moment. It was still dilapidated, disintegrated, smelled of damp plaster and moldering wood and dust. Empty like a medieval castle ruins. But not for those two. Floorboards around were like calling them to lie down under the friendly protection of old walls, the wind howling in broken windows changed in Melusine’s plaintive vocals and raindrops were accompanying her on glass tables with their drumming.

"I'm scared," she said, suddenly coiled swiftly again in his arms and hid her face so that he couldn’t see her tears.

"Do not worry," he whispered in her ear and stroked her hair. He did not know how to name it, but the fear was strangling them both. "You're safe here."

"I'm not afraid of the place. What I feel now - that scares me," she explained, trying to suppress tears. "I do not understand it."

She dug her nails into his skin as if she was afraid that he would slip out. "Everything seems so..."

"As it happened a long time ago?" He expressed his impression. "Like if all this had been once set in motion and all our lifetime we have just been reaching to this moment?"

She held her breath.

"Yes," she whispered wiping her tears with their sweater. "Before I came, I used to have a dream."

"What dream?" He asked with his eyes closed and beside her soft voice he perceived only the warmth flowing over his body.

"A dream which have haunted me for a long time. I saw myself lying here on the floor. This sweater was dried here on this reflector. The smell of wet warmed wool eventually woke me up. And there was a man. Well, actually there he was not," she said and she feared that it would sound absurdly to him and that he would not understand, "but he was there. I knew he would be there, you know?"

He felt that once again she began shivering. He stroked her with fingers over the fine hairs on back of her neck and kissed them. He did not know why he had done it. His mind was distant to reality and old forgotten dreams completely overwhelmed his soul.

Gentle pressing lips calmed her down. He felt how she happily smiled and her body eased and softened again in his embrace.

He grunted, as he understood what she had meant.

"I did not know him, but as there he was, I saw his soul, and he saw mine, so we merged together. It was beautiful." He still felt her smile. "And it smelled like this sweater," she said and sniffed it.

"When I watched you lying there, naked and even in that despair and pain so lovely, it was clear to me that all this here had been built just for that one moment. I have always looked for you in the lighthouse, but I never saw you, so it has been unreal and empty here. "

"Just as I did not see the man," she said thoughtfully. "I may have been created so that he could be absent in me, then rise to existence."

"Not until today... I guess that is why I have been coming here all the time," he continued in his thoughts. "Waited for formation of reality. For you here. "

"This empty lighthouse ..."

"It is like my life," they both said at the same time.

Electrical hum intensified.

"I do not know what it is either. This feeling, this certainty..." wrinkles appeared on his forehead as he struggled to find a suitable name. "... of determination? But..." he whispered after a moment of silence toward her little earlobe. She could feel his breath shortening and accelerating, when trying to understand the unfamiliar emotions. "I feel that it is okay."

"Yes." She smiled again, shook her head on his shoulder, smelled his fragrance and kissed him on the neck. "Now everything is as it should be."

"I am thirsty," she sighed.

"Wait." He wanted to let her, break away from the common clothe and go for his backpack lying under broken window on opposite side. It seemed as if that movement scared the hell out of her. Tearful eyes opened wide, her nails dug into his back and hugged him even tighter, as would be binding him to her. First he hissed with pain but then he soothingly stroked her cheek and wiped a tear rolling down towards fear-gripped trembling lips. He lightly touched them when moving. Under touch of his fingers the grip eased and wet bright lips kissed his salty moistened hand.

"Don't leave me!" Her voice broke in despair and fear.

"It would be just for a moment," he tried to soothe her. "I am going only over there, just under the window."

"Don't leave me!" She burst into another sobbing cry.

"Shh," he soothed, stroking her hair. "I'm not going anywhere, okay?"

"Are you staying here?" She managed to put between two gasps. "You stay with me?"

"I stay," he said simply but pressed her body to his so tightly that she could feel on her chest his heart beat next to her own. "I stay with you."

She took his face in her hands and with lips sprinkled with tears kissed him deeply. All her pain was in that simple gesture, all the grief and all the desire for the ungraspable which now seemed so own and real.

"Love me," she whispered with parted lips and downcast eyes. Her body was imprisoned along with his in coarse wool, exposed to even increasing glare blazing with new vigor.

For a second he said nothing, ran with fingers in her hair on the top of head and gently pulled them so she turned her gaze onto him. As she moved, her lips slightly sagged open and he kissed them warmly in response.

That night the lighthouse reflector shone with sharp strong light until the old device flickered for the last time and then faded forever. It extincted in pompous show of its supreme majesty and beauty.

Cold waves in regular intervals crashed and shattered into green-grey foam clinging on shore of black sand covered in seaweed. The sun lazily and heavily, like if it could any second pluck off and fall back down into the depths of the ocean, climbed the pale sky blurred by tattered veil of clouds. The whole world looked tired and like if it was reborn from night repeatedly raped by storm.

Sunrays went through sharp remnants of glass in the window frames and touched old dusty floor. Then they continued, as the day was waking up, slowly shifted up until they revealed his naked body covered with woolen sweater from the gloom of cold room.

He slowly opened eyes.

His soul was not willing to give him any other feeling but cruel sting curving every muscle and causing tears. With painful screaming, he aimlessly moved his hand over the rough floor to place where last night she fell tired asleep side-by-side with him. Instead of soft breasts in his hand he found only dust mixed with pigeons' little feathers.

Those who would have walked that morning on the seashore's sand, they could have fallowed a footprints trailed from the lighthouse’s stone steps along the line of waves. The steps gradually faded until they finally disappeared. It was impossible to say whether the waves washed them away or if they resignedly walked into the sea themselves.

The old lighthouse might still be standing there. Or maybe it fell into the water where the parts of its ruins devoutly dwells at the bottom right next to the broken body of its loyal friend from long time ago.