Luka spent his life as a stonemason on a small Adriatic peninsula. Under his hands, stone changed shape and took on new life with an ease uncommon to the material itself. The speed with which he shaped stone blocks became widely known along the coast, and he was never without work. He lived modestly and simply, accepting tasks others turned down as too small, too intricate, or poorly paid. He valued his work always the same.
"Whatever you give," he would say calmly, receiving with gratitude whatever sum was offered. "A full heart and a full house — that's all a man needs. Money comes and goes," he would add if asked why he lived that way. "I have the two little ones and Marija at home. What more should I ask for? We are small people, and we value everything God sends us."
People respected him and regarded him as a gentle remnant of older times, persisting despite the new age. Technology did not interest him. When he was not carving stone, he worked in the garden. Work always found him at his doorstep; people knew where he lived and came to him when they needed a dependable craftsman.
Every Sunday, Luka rowed out to a small islet lying only a few hundred meters from the shore, facing the open sea. He would spend the stillness of dusk there and wait for night to thicken. He watched the sky until just before dawn, then quietly rowed back home. No one knew why he did this, and the locals, as locals often are, did not give it much thought. Most avoided the barren rock.
Its jagged limestone shore, sharpened by the sea and without any beach for swimming, attracted few seagulls, let alone people. Apart from three trees, there was nothing on it at all. Tourists passing by in boats would wonder how the trees survived, what fed them, and how they managed to grow from bare stone. Luka was not interested in such questions. He accepted it as fact that they were there, and that over time they only grew stronger. As far as he was concerned, they could feed on stone — there was always plenty of it. He respected the simple truth that three different trees lived together on that small patch of rock, sharing it peacefully, enduring both summer heat and winter gales.
When the November weather no longer allowed passage to the islet, Luka spent time in the village church, reading old records. "Did you know that in 1925, more than two thousand people lived here? Now there aren't even a hundred of us," he would mutter on his way home, more to himself than to anyone else, not expecting the children to care. The ache those ancient pages sometimes stirred in him, he soothed by telling himself that everything was "according to the Creator's will."
One evening, he came upon a twelfth-century entry:
On the rock of Saint Nicholas, there stood a small church and a monastery for a brotherhood of up to three brethren in Our Lord Christ. It served as a cell for novices before their departure to Jerusalem. After a year's trial, the pilgrims were blessed by the coastal archimandrite on their journey to venerate the tomb of Christ the Saviour.
Luka traced the words with his finger and stopped at the mention of a tower that once stood on the islet, lighting the sea at night with an oil lamp. There was no mention of the trees, nor any explanation of what became of the church or the brethren.
"If all this was here," he thought, "it must have been tiny — like a prison cell."
It puzzled him that no trace of anything remained on the rock except sun and salt.
That winter passed — longer than usual, it seemed. He helped rebuild the parish house in a nearby village, reinforced hundreds of meters of stone walls, and laid stone floors in three luxury villas built by a Russian oligarch for his daughter and two sons. The owner, Vasily, atypical for someone of his status, sought out Luka personally after hearing stories about his craft. There was something exotic to him in the fact that a man like this still existed, and he took it as a sign.
Vasily considered himself unique as well, convinced that no one in the world traded agricultural seed better than he did. For him, only the best existed, and a rarity like Luka was an opportunity to display refined taste among close friends. At their first meeting, Vasily struggled with the local language, and negotiations over money went poorly. To spare them both the trouble, Luka decided to do the work for free. When the job was finished, Vasily was equally pleased with the work and shocked when Luka handed him the money back.
"God bless you, Vasily, and your family," Luka said quietly as he left.
From the terrace of the imposing villa, through the clear water of the pool, the small rock with three trees could be seen.
A few days later, Vasily hosted a ceremonial dinner with his family on the terrace to celebrate their move-in. Above them, the sky was crowned with brilliant stars when, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a rowing boat approaching the islet. The figure seemed familiar, though the setting sun and distance blurred the scene.
"What would anyone be doing there?" he wondered.
Night had already fallen. The man was no longer visible among the trees, while the moonlight illuminated the old wooden boat. Vasily pulled his chair closer to the edge of the terrace, leaned back comfortably, and tried to make sense of what he had seen.
"Cassiopeia — look," said his younger son beside him. The boy was passionate about astronomy and was preparing to set up a professional telescope he had brought from Moscow.
"Hurry, please," Vasily said. "Before he's gone. I want to see who's on the island."
The boy skillfully removed the telescope from its aluminium case, unfolded the tripod, and within minutes invited his father to look.
"A sky like this doesn't exist where we live," he said excitedly as Vasily adjusted the focus. "There's no light pollution here."
"There isn't," Vasily replied, "and I don't know if there are many people like this anymore. Look."
The boy leaned in. "The stonemason?"
"That's right. Luka."
In that moment, Vasily knew he would one day visit the islet. He was troubled by what might be hidden on that barren rock.
A year passed until the next summer. On the seventh of January, Luka turned fifty. He did not like birthdays or celebrations, but he indulged Marija and the children and blew out the candles. They gave him new oars — the old ones, made by his grandfather, had grown porous and unreliable and could snap at any moment.
The winter was unusually mild, and Luka used the weather to spend more time on the islet. He began going whenever a free workday allowed, bringing only his mason's hammer and chisel. Day by day, in less than ten months, he shaped enough stone to build an approach from the sea and lay a path leading to the three trees. For generations, olives, carob pods, and pinecones had collected between them, mixing with leaves and needles into a soft ground. Sheltered from the wind by high rock and thick trunks, the place resembled an enlarged bird's nest. He liked to walk there barefoot. He felt that anything he did on the island must stay outside the space of the three trees.
On Sundays, he brought no tools, keeping faithfully to his routine. "Sunday is for the sky," he would say to himself.
The sun was just setting when Vasily arrived by scooter and tied up next to the wooden boat. He surveyed the rock and spotted Luka from behind, seated on a stone shaped like an armchair, to the right of the great pine. Vasily stepped into Luka's boat to disembark more easily, pulled the rope, and hopped onto the neat stone path. Luka heard footsteps. Startled at first, he quickly recognised Vasily and stood to greet him. Vasily smiled and opened his arms in an honest embrace. Unaccustomed to such closeness, Luka stopped at a handshake.
Beneath the pine, toward the open sea at the very edge of the rocky shore, Vasily noticed the circular foundation of a stone structure. It was no larger than an average bedroom. The wall stood only two feet high, made entirely of stone, perfectly carved and fitted into a harmonious mosaic. There was no concrete binding it, no sign of modern tools. The structure was so precisely balanced that each stone supported itself — and several others. Vasily stared at the emerging building in wonder.
"What is that, Luka?" he asked, now speaking more fluently.
"It's a dome, Vasily. There used to be a monastery on this island."
"What kind of monastery?" Vasily asked. "There's barely room for a bell tower, let alone a monastery." From the vantage point of an empire, the rock seemed laughable.
"The elders say that the three monks who lived here became these three trees. My great-grandmother used to tell it by the hearth: as each of them departed to stand before God, a tree grew where he had rested."
Vasily turned away to laugh, looking at Luka in disbelief.
"And that's why you keep coming here?"
"No," Luka said calmly. "I come here for the sky."
"For the sky?"
"Come, Vasily." Luka placed a hand on his shoulder and gently guided him into the sheltered space between the trees. "Lie down on that rustle, and look up." He gestured first to the ground, then to the heavens.
Vasily obeyed, lowering himself carefully so as not to be pricked by needles, then settling comfortably between the massive trunks. Their crowns framed a perfect equilateral triangle of sky above him. He saw a constellation shimmering faintly in the dusk — the same one his son had shown him days before. It pulsed rhythmically with trembling light.
"If you lie long enough," Luka said, "you'll hear music."
This time, Vasily laughed aloud. He knew Luka was peculiar, but he had not expected this.
Vasily returned alone the following summer. His wife and children found the quiet rock insufficiently engaging and chose to stay in Mallorca. He despised their indulgence, knowing at the same time that he was its source and chief architect. When the children were small, he had taken them fishing, taught them knots and the names of stars. Somewhere along the way, he became addicted to success. Nothing compared to the thrill of growth and expansion. Money increasingly replaced his presence at home.
They did not resent him — or so it seemed — but gradually they stopped asking him anything at all.
Once, returning from a trip, he found Olga dining alone on the terrace of their Moscow apartment, a vast bouquet of roses beside her, delivered the day before by courier. Only then did he realise he had missed her birthday.
"They're beautiful," she said calmly, without reproach.
He knew inwardly that he himself was the architect of such lives, and the most responsible for the family relationships that now burned him so painfully.
"The word sin originally meant missing the mark," he had heard on a television program. "Then I am a sinner in the original sense," he thought.
He ate dinner in silence on the terrace, reading business reports. On the horizon, the circular tower on the small islet stood out sharply. He could not be sure, but just above its peak, a light seemed to flash from time to time — like a lighthouse. He decided to go to the rock the next day.
In the morning, there was no one on the islet. It was more orderly than ever. At the mooring point, the outline of a future small pier could be discerned, and the path now branched—one way toward the trees, the other toward the tower. The tower had neither doors nor windows, only seven broad, regular steps leading from the stone ground and the path directly into the wall itself.
"Perhaps he planned to put the entrance here," Vasily thought.
It was as tall as an average two-story house, its walls tapering from base to crown. There was no scaffolding, no tools, nothing to testify to Luka's presence or labour except the tower itself. Vasily was in no hurry. He tried lying down and looking at the sky, but in the pale morning blue, there was little to stir him.
"Music, my foot," he muttered irritably.
Restlessness soon lifted him to his feet. He decided to sit in Luka's stone armchair and try meditating on the horizon. The heat was already rising; seagulls and the occasional boat disrupted the calming rhythm of the waves. Meditation proved useless. He wondered if Luka might appear during his stay. He was curious why the tower had no doors or windows.
He circled it several times, even entertained the idea of an underwater entrance—that seemed most plausible to him. He jumped into the water intending to dive, but there was no passage through the vertical rocky seabed. Somewhat disappointed that he had not encountered the enigmatic stonemason, Vasily returned home.
As was his custom, Luka was on the island again on Sunday evening. He took his place on his favourite stone and thought. The tower had outgrown the wooden ladder he had used during construction, which he alone could carry by rowing it over. He knew the tower was unfinished, but he had no idea how to finish it. Every approach he considered required either more people or materials other than stone—things foreign to him. None of the options pleased him.
He wished to raise a lighthouse on the spot where he believed the miniature monastery had once stood. One like the one the elders spoke of, casting clear light over the sea around the island and guiding local fishermen and sailors home. He moved gently onto the soft ground at the foot of the trees and lay back, imagining the scene. The fading day revealed the constellation.
"Everything around us is music," he said quietly to himself. "This stone, this tree, these stars."
Vasily was endlessly intrigued by how one might enter the tower, why Luka had built it precisely there, and what it might contain. The stonemason was not a man of many words, and Vasily was certain he had not told him the story of the monastery, the monks, and the trees without reason.
He climbed into his massive SUV and drove to a nearby city, to a nautical supply shop.
"A lightweight anchor and thirty meters of rope, please," he asked the saleswoman politely.
He drove straight to the marina where his scooter was moored and set off toward the islet with the rope and anchor in hand. He loosely tied the scooter to a smaller rock and jumped quickly ashore. His intention was to climb the wall somehow and lower himself into the tower. In his youth, he had been an exceptional mountaineer; these seven or eight meters of height were a trivial challenge.
He tied the anchor to the rope and tossed it over the wall into the tower. The sound of metal striking stone echoed like a bell from the depths of a well. He gently pulled it back until it caught on the edge of a block inside.
"Perfect."
He climbed skillfully up the rope. Despite his stocky build, Vasily's athletic past was still visible in his back and shoulders. He grasped the top of the stone wall, swung one leg over, and sat. It was easier than he had expected. He unhooked the anchor from the inside, pulled it up to himself, then hooked it onto the upper edge of the wall from the outside. Wrapping the rope around and between his feet, holding on with his hands, he lowered himself slowly to the floor of the tower.
From below, aside from the neat stone wall and the circular cut of sky above, nothing could be seen. Disappointed, Vasily made a few rounds, lifted a larger stone to see if anything lay beneath, and, thoroughly dissatisfied, cursed Luka aloud.
"A waste of time," he thought.
Losses had always irritated him beyond forgiveness. He tugged the rope to check its hold, braced his feet against the dome wall, and began climbing back up with powerful pulls. The stones, even without reinforcement or mortar, held perfectly firm.
Near the top, Vasily placed his foot on a small protrusion of one stone block that fit perfectly like a step, and gripped the top of the stone wall firmly with his left hand. He paused briefly, held his breath, and launched his body in a final effort toward the opening of the dome.
The force of the movement shifted the stone he was holding. It slid from its seat. Without support or balance, his body swayed violently, and despite a swift attempt to grab the rope with both hands, he plunged downward.
The dull thud against the stone floor of the tower knocked him unconscious.
Night had fully fallen when Vasily opened his eyes. Through the circular opening of the dome, he could see a slice of sky filled with brilliant stars. He tried to move his arms and legs, but his body did not respond. Panic rose at his inability to control his movements; he opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came.
His mind, it seemed, was all that remained under his control.
He thought of how foolish a way this was to end a life in which he had achieved everything.
"Sin means missing the mark, Vasily," crossed his mind.
He laughed aloud—honestly, for a long time—until his eyes filled with tears, while his face remained frozen and inexpressive. He stared at the small circular patch of sky where the constellation pulsed rhythmically. The image's clarity slowly dimmed with the ever-quieter beating of his heart. In his mind, an endless bliss flooded his body as an unfamiliar melody filled the space all around.
"Music, Luka… this is the music…"
That was his final thought.
The coastal patrol found the untethered scooter floating several nautical miles from the island. They notified the police, who searched Vasily's house.
"An unfortunate accident," they informed the family. "Most likely a combination of alcohol and narcotics. Drownings are common in this area at this time of year. The state will deploy divers to search the coast for the body, but you know—the sea is vast."
The boat drifted gently forward, carried by the waves from his last strokes. Luka stopped rowing at once and rose to his feet.
"Lord…" he managed to whisper.
"May God have mercy on his soul," he continued in a trembling voice, crossing himself.
He knelt on the bottom of the boat and stared unblinking at the blazing light pouring out above the tower. He was no more than twenty meters from the island. The island, the tower, and the surrounding sea all shimmered with a golden radiance.
It was Sunday—three days after Vasily's fatal fall.
"Try this fig," laughed the sun-browned young man, handing the girl a soft, ripe fruit. They had swum from the shore in search of adventure. Alone on the rocky islet, wet and salty from the sea, the world belonged to them.
"It grows out of the tower's stone—no water, no soil. My old man fenced this tower off, God rest his soul, about fifteen years ago. He stopped coming after he witnessed a miracle here," the young man continued casually. "He said God finished the tower instead of him. Every year, on the twelfth of August, people come by boat to watch the star shine—like a lighthouse lamp above the tower."
"Surreal…" she said, her accent foreign. "Shall we try to see what's inside?"