Читать книгу Little Ship of Fools. Sixteen Rowers, One Improbable Boat, Seven Tumultuous Weeks on the Atlantic онлайн

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The highlight of my days on Rue Salaam (Peace Street)—a lovely address, I thought, for a place that even our gentle-tongued crewmate Sylvain referred to as “a bit crappy”—came on a morning when I had risen in the pre-dawn so as to be early to the boat, and Steve, as a reward for my diligence, placed a saucepan of heated water in the bathroom that I could mix with cold tap water in a grubby plastic bucket that subbed as the apartment’s shower.

Ten of us lived ass-over-chinstrap in this weird little den—all the men but David, who was installed in the Ibis Hotel, a nice-ish two-star a fifteen-minute walk away, with his dark-eyed fiancée, Lali, who was visiting from Tbilisi. Because she spoke only Georgian, Lali could do little more than smile at the rest of us, and languish, and look longingly at David. They were tender and smoochy with one another and spoke softly, probably about taxi fares or laundry, and yet it always sounded intimate and mysterious. At the boatyard, she would stand motionless and decisive-looking beside Big Blue with her hand on the gunnels for a few seconds, then would pirouette suddenly and take a step or two and put her hand on the rudder and stand there for a minute—then would stand on the ladder that led up to the bridge, while David, a few feet away, sweated and hung upside down, fussing with the wiring, or whatever, in some impossible-to-reach place inside one of the holds.