Sadland

"И я встречу тебя не сегодня, не завтра

Но снова, я знаю, что встречу тебя…"

The Retuses. Pyxis

I’d been living in Buenos Aires three months and I hadn’t seen rain yet. It wasn’t just a trip or vocation. I was living there with one clear purpose. I was trying to find my wife. Oh, it was so complicated, I had come back home and couldn’t find her there.

When I was so far from her and tried to survive, I’d got from her several letters, she called Buenos Aires ‘our place of peace’ where we would go after all. She barely believed in that dream and I could see it in her trembling handwriting. ‘Buenos Aires is the place of the precarious dream.’ I took all my money and came here. 

I was living in a small and filthy flat but it wasn’t matter. All days I was wandering around streets and showing every policeman and every barista the vague photograph of my wife. All in vain. As far as I was watching in it, I barely could recognize her even by myself. I hadn’t seen her more than two years.

It was so hard. There was the first month of summer pretty uncommon even for those places. Every piece of the city every shard of the air was so hot and dry. People were so lazy and they barely walked, they barely ate, all what they could do were sleeping, sitting at cafes and drinking cold vine and mate. 

One day in the early morning I woke up and found out hard clouds in the sky. It wasn’t so hot at that moment. I even could see how life was coming back to people. I knew that this day would be different. That day I was searching her even harder than before, but my exiting was getting weaker and weaker ‘cause I spent half a day without any results.

But about 2 o’clock I entered in one quite small and desolated bar at the unknown part of the city. There was a deep evil silence within this place and only crooked barmen behind the bar was coughing from time to time like an old fridge. He looked at me quite strange and smiled with yellow teeth.

‘She knew that you would come.’ He said ‘She told me about you every day, yeah, I had recognized you by the broken soul in the depth of you shell right away even before you entered here’

It was like a hard punch right in my stupid face. I barely could say a word, fearing that he had mistaken, because he was old enough for that and maybe a little bit drunk. But he hadn’t.

‘Where is she?’ all that I could say.

‘In the middle of that fucking hot as all of us, but you can find her here at the nearest park. She is waiting for you all this time on the old bench right behind the blooming fern.’

I tried to give him some money but he refused. I walked away without a word.

The wind was getting harder, I could see the clouds which were trying to escape from the sky. I knew that the long-awaited rain was coming. Park looked like a grin spot in the middle of the dusty cement.

When I had entered, I found out straight away the blooming fern in the far corner of the park and the old greenish bench and a small bulletin board with advertisement behind it. She was the only one missing. I sat and looked around. After all these years of waiting after all these months of searching I didn’t even know what to say to her.

I turned my head left, she was sitting next to me, I barely recognized her. Her face, hair and gestures were different and only eyes, only eyes were the same like the iced lake with deep and perfectly clear bottom.

The wind blew and she smiled to me with such a painful smile. I could see endless suffering and loneliness inside her soul.

‘I had finally found you’ I said but she didn’t answer to me. ‘Sorry for all, I didn’t have to leave you but I did it’

The wind blew again and she looked on me somehow different. Her eyes were weakly sparkling, giving me the sense of emptiness. I was keeping a silence for several minutes, but after that I started speaking. The other things around me didn’t bother me, only this conversation and nothing else.

I told her everything about war, about killing people and feeling of the desolation, about endless pain and solitude among another men. She was hearing me without a word only with evanescent sadly smiling from time to time.

I knew that the rain was starting soon. And when it happened, I started crying. I turned to her again and found out that she was crying too. But her tears were leaving a long dark spots in her face like wounds.

The wind blew last time and she faintly touched my hand and gave me something. The rain was falling harder and I barely could see her beautiful but bleak face which started melting under the water. Several minutes left and all sharp lines were melting around me because of the water. I found out that I was watching in the small bulletin board with remains of the advertisement with young woman with my wife’s eyes.

I was still keeping in my hands the small piece of wet paper which she gave me. I unfolded it and saw the short message of two words ‘love you’ written unmistakable by my wife’s hand with trembling handwriting

I knew that it was impossible. My wife had died two years before.