A (not wholly) fictional story
It was the summer of 1974, and as a young student, I was attending a course in St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad. I lived near the Mayakovskaya metro station, on Nevsky Prospekt, near the train station to Moscow, and was dating an American girl whose presence would later cross my entire life. Up until then, when we said goodbye, we exchanged kisses on the cheeks, avoiding touching our lips by twisting our heads to the point of risking a stiff neck. But things were different that evening in front of the Dom Knigi (house of books). Instead of turning our heads to touch disappointed cheeks, we sank into a cosmic kiss that broke the barriers of shyness and flooded hitherto arid lands. At that moment, I forgot about Dostoevsky, the crimes and the punishments, but above all, the irritating Nasten’ka and the frustrated anonymous narrator in whom I eventually no longer recognized myself.
At that time, I was a competitive athlete, well-trained and in excellent shape. Since childhood, I knew no better way to release my happiness than by running. So, on that white night in Leningrad — I remember the exact date and time — I ran the kilometer and a half from the Dom Knigi to my college amidst the crowds and traffic of Nevsky Prospekt in under 3’30”. The KGB, who was spying on me, noted the time. They might have had good reasons to send me to a psychiatric hospital instead of a university because of that wild run of happiness.
Indeed, Vladimir Putin, then just twenty and already a KGB officer, allegedly noticed me and reported it to his superiors. Demonstrating excellent political acumen even at a young age, he suggested that instead of arresting me, they should enlist me in the university team to participate in some races. I entirely fabricated the story of Putin and the KGB. Still, the kiss, the subsequent world record (guarded in the secret service files), and some races with the university team all support a sincerely invented truth.
After that episode, the white nights of St. Petersburg quickly turned into just clear nights, then dark, and by the end of August, they were as dark as any other night. Eventually, the time came for us to return to our homes and parallel lives, as we knew from the beginning it would. But it didn’t turn out that way because parallel lines sometimes ect in real life, even more than once. She flew to Phoenix, I to Giessen. Without email and Skype, and with the exorbitant costs of phone calls and travel, it wasn’t realistically possible to maintain our relationship alive at that time. We would have needed to be born twenty years later! And so, in fact, it happened…
(second two)
Many white nights passed by, followed by dark winters, until a quarter of a century later… The white of maturity began to make its way among my brown hair, just as it did among her blonde locks. Faint wrinkles appeared around our eyes, hinting at an old age that still felt distant. We started to notice these signs of a stretch of life spent amidst experiences, joys, and sorrows.
Both of us had experienced successes and failures, if one can ever truly distinguish between these two impostors. However, it so happened that another race brought us back together when we had already given up all hope of seeing or loving each other. We spent our time nurturing different hopes. We never lost track of each other during that quarter of a century. Still, we never met. She lived in Europe or Moscow whenever I was in the United States. When I crossed the Atlantic heading east to Europe, she fled westward, returning to Texas.
Some fleeting, occasional encounters, along with our partners of the moment, were merely brief remembrances of that lasting passion from the past. It was not until a quarter of a century later that I ran a full marathon on a Sunday morning. Feeling tired in the evening, I searched for lost people on Google. When I typed her name, I learned she was in Moscow while I was in Giessen in front of my computer: we are close, I thought! I immediately wrote to her. She replied instantly, and by the second message, I told her I would visit her: “Just give me the time to get the visa.” The phone rang, and she said she would arrive the next day because she already had one.
I rushed to the outlet store and bought an entirely new wardrobe, including new shoes and socks, underwear, jeans, a sweater, a shirt, a jacket, a hat, and gloves, so I wouldn’t wear anything old. A new life was about to start; everything I was wearing had to be new. It was supposed to be Voskresenije, Resurrection. Only the belt of my jeans was used. We had bought it together in Leningrad a quarter-century earlier, and it symbolized our bond, continuity, a connection with the past. I didn’t know it held a spell.
The ritual of renewing clothes symbolized a new beginning or perhaps the closing of a parenthesis opened by that white night in 1974. We met again at the airport, and since then, we have never been apart. That’s what I wanted to believe at the time, and she did too.
(part three)
But if parallel lines often intersect in real life, intersecting lines are doomed to diverge both in geometry and in reality. There was a curse on the belt that had been hexing me, her, and us, a curse I hadn’t been aware of until now. I should have bought a new belt too; instead, I kept and wore the old one as a remnant of the past, something I wanted to carry into the new life. Thus, the ghost who cast the curse split us again. I learned that either you forget everything about the past if you want a fresh start, or you accept carrying all that you were and are into your new life — not as a burden, but as the wealth you’ve gathered over the years that makes you who you are today.
So, as I wait to meet her for the third time after twenty more years, I won’t buy any new clothes. By the way, it’s also cheaper.
