«Je marchais ma tristess accompagne..», – He mumbled the verses by Verlaine that floated unexpectedly into his mind (“I walked along with my sadness”- fr.)
“The veil of darkness,” – He recited, breathing heavily while climbing up the hill, “Clouded the last of crimson sunset… “
He forgot the rest of it, so he kept mumbling again and again about the last of crimson sunset, staring at the giant black orb set against that very crimson.
An air balloon was available to the visitors of Yarkon Park. He and Nonka took a ride once, kissing and laughing above the trees.
Squint a little, so as not to see the net surrounding the orb – and you can imagine an apocalypse, end of worlds and luminaries, crash of planets, meteors and other disasters. A black meteor, bringing an eternal sunset to planet Earth.
And he is out on his last promenade, reciting Verlaine with sad wisdom.
And Nonka, whom he never met again in this life, is gazing at this horrible black orb from her bedroom window, tears stream down her beautiful face and she bitterly regrets kicking him out of her life in such a cruel manner three years ago. “One chance” – Her thin agitated lips whisper, – “I should have given him at least one chance…”
But no, she killed all the chances with her own hands back then.
He remembered how she stood by an open door, her lips cast into a metal wire, eyes gazing through him, and the air around her was frozen with hatred.
Well, yes, he got caught like a fool, not for the first time, and not for the last as he believed. What difference those meaningless little affairs of his make, he explained to her patiently, if the only woman he really loves is her, his Snow Queen?
When she heard that phrase, about the Snow Queen, her face twisted, she rushed to the bathroom and vomited there for a long time, noisily and ugly.
“Poor thing, a food poisoning on top of that…” – He sympathized when she came back, greenish pale with red eyes and a swollen nose.
That’s when she opened the door and stood next to it, straight as a frozen stick, and drenched him in hatred – just one glare, but he was still shook over it.
And he was wrong, it WAS the last time.
He failed to see her or even get her on the phone ever since.
Once he even made a row behind her door – in the best traditions of drama movies. Shouting, wailing, trying to kick in the door and threatening to kill himself right away.
The police reprimanded him and banned him from approaching her. And seeing him off, an elderly policeman, furtively squeezed his shoulder, sympathetically and silently, and sighed.
He kept writing his screenplays and like a maniac, kept inserting into every storyline a scene where the main male character makes up with a cold bitch. She is crying, realizing how stupid she has been. And he – sometimes he forgives her, and they both cry and hug (the happy end), and sometimes just smiles sadly and derisively, gently removes her hands from his chest and says, it’s over, honey, I’m sorry, but that’s you wanted, isn’t it?.. And walks into the sunset, slightly hunched over. Just like that, slightly hunched over. Knowing that she is crying her eyes out right behind him, but not forgiving. (That’s a pretty good ending as well, right?..)
Eventually, Solomon Stichel, showrunner of the new series, asked him politely and strongly to stop taking advantage of his personal drama. The entire country is sick of your Snow Queen by now, he said gloomily. Or else I will personally write in a double homicide scene, do you understand, he said gloomily.
That’s when he started writing letters to Nonka. He sent them and then printed them and read them over and over again for thousand times. He felt weird – as if he was peering above her shoulder, reading it along with her. And his staggering pain would subside for a while.
He has written one hundred and eighty one letters during those three years – one per week, sometimes twice, and when he was getting completely desperate – three or four times.
He wrote to her: Please, forgive me. He wrote: I will never forgive you. He wrote about love, about pain, about binge drinking and crying without tears. He wrote that never again. And that he will find someone better. And that he can’t do it anymore, he can’t, he wrote and groaned, tucking his face into the keyboard.
He, who was so used to bathing in words, manipulating words and storylines his entire life, couldn’t find that one magical final phrase that would set him free. Or her.
“Love lives for three years” – He remembered Beigbeder. That’s right, three years. It’s going to be three years and eight days tomorrow.
My love should be dead for seven days by now. Die out. Dry off like a rotten leaf. Let me breathe. Let me forget those metal-wire lips.
I’ll wake up tomorrow, he thought, shuffling his feet along the paths of Yarkon Park in the dark, and all is well. And my heart won’t ache, and my stomach won’t hurt. And women’s smiles will again be smiles, and not an abyss full of snakes.
“Thus, I walked among the willow trees, along with my sadness” – He whispered to himself. “Never mind, tomorrow everything will be fine. Tomorrow my love will die forever and everything is going to be fine!”
Translated by Diana Shnaiderman-Pereira