On the second-to-last day of the vacation, I managed to spark a Russian-Israeli conflict. A lot of hotels have this practice. A stupid one, really. People claim the best poolside loungers early in the morning by putting towels on them. Then they go off and do their own thing. As a result, anyone who likes to sleep in is left with the crappy spots far away. And often without umbrellas, too. And it’s pretty miserable lying there in your lousy spot, looking at those wonderful places a meter from the pool being occupied by nothing but empty towels. Meanwhile, the owners of the towels have gone to the beach, off to eat, or back to sleep. So anyway. On vacation we get up early, but in the morning we go to the beach. Then lunch and a nap. Around four, we head to the pool. And we, too, kept suffering from the fact that the good spots looked taken but sat empty, while we were left with the awful ones. Very inconvenient, because our daughter is always swimming and needs to be watched. Which means one of us has to just stand there like an idiot by the edge of the pool in the sun. So one fine morning I decided to make use of the established practice and came down at seven to claim the three fanciest spots, the ones most convenient for us. Spread out the towels. All day we went back and forth between the pool and the beach. After lunch, as usual, we went for a nap. Then we come back—and bam: sprawled across our spots is some gang of assholes from Israel (there are, oddly enough, a lot of them in Bulgaria). With surprised faces but in a peaceful tone, we say something like, guys, these are our spots, sorry. They respond with astonishing arrogance and aggression: no way, they’re ours. And the best part is, THEY’RE LYING THERE ON OUR TOWELS! (Well, hotel towels of course, but obviously ours, because there weren’t any others nearby.) So, one word leads to another. I appeal to reason: look, here’s my book, here are my flip-flops. These are our spots, guys. They go: they’re ours now, you were gone too long. And one of the women is unbelievably quarrelsome—every other word she’s yelling something in Hebrew. Things are heating up. I slowly switch to Russian. No one is actually shouting, of course, but the conversation is emotional. The Israeli guy sitting in my spot would have left long ago—apparently he understood some of the Russian words. But his woman is egging him on, apparently saying something like, come on, don’t be a sucker, don’t give up the spots. The people around us are watching with interest (later it turned out that 20 minutes before we arrived, this same group had also driven off some French people. So everyone was staring, waiting to see what the Russians would do). At that point our fellow countrymen started showing remarkable solidarity and actually began drifting over to the scene. Saying things like: kick those Romanians the hell out, we’ve been watching them for a while, we’re sick of them, and we don’t like them. I didn’t bother clarifying that they weren’t Romanians but Israelis. No need to add the crucifixion of Christ to the charges alongside towel theft. In short, it was a stalemate. Nobody wanted to back down. Either they leave. Or somebody gets punched in the face and everyone ends up at the police station. In the end, the Jews’ weak spot turned out to be feminism. The loudmouth woman kept saying things to me the whole time. And I wouldn’t look at her, addressing only the man. That made her twice as furious. I said to the guy: tell your woman to shut up, I’m talking to you. He agreed and tried. Said something sharp to her. Poor bastard. I still feel guilty about him. She practically ate him alive on the spot. In the end he threw his cap on the ground, turned around, and walked off. The woman sat with us for a while longer, hissing curses, but then, after promising me serious trouble, she left. For some reason with the words, “There is no place here for Russian mafia.” With the remaining Jews, we ended up having a fairly pleasant chat. And quite predictably agreed that, of course, all evil ultimately comes from Muslims. After they left too, a French delegation approached—the ones who had been chased off earlier. They thanked us effusively. So there you have it: Russia once again stepped into the role of the world’s policeman and defended the corrupt and fundamentally wrong practice of reserving loungers with towels.