Hello, My Brother Bzou!

Friendship between a person and a dolphin… Between a dolphin and a person… Not now, when oceanariums are open even in distant megacities far from the sea, and children can meet and play with a tamed dolphin not only at a seaside resort. This story from the past century is about the friendship of a simple Abkhaz young man with a wild sea creature. And all the more wonderful is this friendship because it’s surrounded by a harsh and sometimes primitive everyday life of an Abkhaz village, where the residents—farmers and fishermen—consider the dolphin a “stupid gray fish” and a thief, and the person who befriended it—at best, a bit of an oddball. The village of Ldzaa has lived by its steady rhythm for many centuries: Abkhazians honor the ancestors’ vows, work the land, go to sea for fish, grieve and rejoice. Dolphin pods have inhabited the sea since ancient times too—playing and hunting, sometimes astonishing people, sometimes frightening them. The meeting place of two future friends is the shore: a spring morning, a promise of a miracle. But this miracle won’t last long. Only one summer—to get to know each other, learn trust, become friends, become brothers… And in autumn—conscription into the army. The radiance of this friendship lights up the entire narration—it reveals characters, warms the stern hearts of the villagers. Step by step, day by day, word by word, the summer of a growing hero passes. The reader will not be offered a happy ending and universal well-being in this story. Quite the opposite: they will face an eternal, meaningless and destructive force, and its name is war. And yet, this is a bright book about goodness and peace.

What can be set against darkness? You can’t say it better than the Abkhaz peasant in the story: “Our business is peace! Live and rejoice! Have children and raise them. Receive guests and wash their feet! That’s what we were taught, that’s what we’ll do!”

Evgeny Rudashevsky spent several years working with marine mammals and knows dolphins’ life firsthand. For the story “Hello, my brother Bzou!” Rudashevsky became a laureate of the “Kniguru” literary contest in 2013.

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