So, as they say, I started to live happily ever after. Busy with daily affairs, I didn’t notice how a few more years passed. I was trying hard to figure out whether I was doing everything right, if I’d truly learnt the lessons taught me by my life. I was reading a lot. I was working a lot. So my barber’s business and well being both kept slowly growing.
About this time Vova married a girl he had known since childhood, and they were expecting my grandchild to come into this world. I was happy, and truly loved my daughter-in-law. We lived in the same house with her family and watched our children growing up together and being friends.
Savoring the beauty of single life, I didn’t miss marriage at all. But after five years of this, in October a life-changing event happened. Of course, at that time I had no idea how transformative it would be for my life.
The weather was strange. The air was filled with wet mist. It was not quite a fog, but not rain yet. There was no wind so this soggy mist seemed to seep into everyone who had the courage to go outside, and get deep under the skin. I had to go out for a meeting with another possible client so I off I went.
“Polina!” I heard a voice behind me.
Turning, I saw Veronika. She wasn’t one of my close friends. But our city was so small. I knew Veronika due to my friend, Zhenia, who had advised me to read Mikhail Veller’s novels. The persevering heroes of his story, saved by the ambulance doctor, Zviagin, helped me to make the correct decision at a critical moment, and not to take away my own life before its due time.
I was still in touch with Zhenia. Though she had quite a prestigious position in our local newspaper, it didn’t prevent her from being a good friend to me, an officially unemployed woman with no great achievements in my life.
So Veronika, perhaps with this in her mind, said, “Hey, I’m going to meet Zhenia.”
“Oh.”
“How are you?”
I wondered if she really wanted to know how I am doing, or if this is just a formality, I thought. “Okay,” I answered, unwilling to commit as to how I really felt.
“You don’t look that good. You seem exhausted or something.”
I think you’ll agree with me that such a compliment can be said only by one woman to another. A man would lie or, at least, say nothing. Oh, Veronika!
She looked stunning. She was wearing a beautiful and very expensive leather coat of a nice deep wine color, with boots matching it, and a perfect hairstyle. My clothes could not compete with hers. A cheap quilted jacket, neat, but pretty shabby, old boots I’d used to work in my garden, and no hairstyle to speak of. Everything was bought at the local market, and not in an expensive boutique. But to my surprise and pleasure I noticed that I didn’t care how elegantly Veronika was dressed. And I had no desire to look like her. Strange. This would not have happened five or six years before.
During this interior dialogue, a picture from my distant youth came to my mind. I recollected being in that central square of that provincial Uman city, walking with Liuda. Yes, that first beauty in the past, the one I wanted to look like. The one whom that strange man predicted would live with the Sword of Damocles hanging over her, because of her own daughter. I had met her recently, that very daughter? What has beenhappening with Veronika?