and when I tell the truth.” His voice was soft and gentle. It sounded like the voice of another person speaking in the distance.
A few minutes ago I was ready to sacrifice all I had just to stay by his side forever, but now, I felt like a caged animal and wanted to get out of the cab as soon as possible. I wanted to shut myself in my room and be alone.
I said, “This is my fault. I cannot forgive myself.” I was aware I was talking nonsense, as if somebody else were dictating my words.
“If there’s someone who cannot be forgiven, it’s me,” he replied quickly. “But I really don’t care. Come with me, and I’ll go wherever in the world you want to go. I’ll give up everything.”
At that moment, I realized I was dealing with a kid.
No, he wasn’t lying.
If you could have looked into his eyes, if you had been in my shoes, you would have understood.
For a moment, I thought the cab would not stop but go all the way to the airport, and that we would get on a plane, fly away, and begin a new life together somewhere else.
Could it have been possible?
If we had succeeded in forgetting about everyone else, our pasts, the consequences facing us, all our responsibilities, and opening the door of the dream had gone on that unexpected journey, would everything have changed?
And it was there: The door in the fairy tale—the door that would open when you pronounced the magic words was right beside me. It was the door of a cab speeding through the streets of London.
I knew what the magical words were. They were there, on the tip of my tongue. If I said them and opened that door, I would probably achieve what many people have desired in vain for hundreds of years.
I wished for everything to turn into a movie all at once and that we could begin a life of our own wherever we wanted.
We could go to a faraway island, meet new people, and spend our days and nights as we wished, not according to other people’s desires. As far away as possible. For as long as it lasted.
What did it matter if it were as short as a film? Couldn’t we have fit everything in? Couldn’t we have built a life, every moment of which we would cherish till the end of our days? In place of all those boring meetings, those hours passed in vain, those days when we wanted to say things but couldn’t and met people we pretended to like, and those nights full of self-pity when you put your head on the pillow and wondered if your whole life was destined to be spent in such a colorless way.
I wished that we had no secrets between us and that we could tell each other everything, even the things that could make us angry, things we would be scared to hear, and the things one might be afraid to confess even to himself. We would be naked and stripped of our identities, constructed over the years brick by brick, that we would no longer be two separate human beings. We could then pass without fear and trepidation through the gates that opened before us, one after the other, and enter those secret corridors without thinking about what awaited us.
I felt odd. I felt that we could find something that only belonged to us and would bring us together. Something even we weren’t aware of, something granted to just the two of us. Two separate parts of something that would reveal the joy of life only if united.
Otherwise, could I feel so close to a man I only knew occasionally? I felt closer to him than I had ever felt to any other person.
As he waited for me to give him an answer, these thoughts dominated my mind. Not in well-arranged or well-thought-out sentences, though. I was mixed up, but I believed something would emerge from me and change the direction of both the cab and our lives, and that I wouldn’t be able to stop it.
I would not worry about anything and just tell him, “Hold my hand and let’s go.” Then we would go far, far away.
This was what I truly wanted to do.
Yet I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
All I did was to say with an icy voice, “Please, let us close this subject. I consider it one of your jokes. Let it remain a joke, a big joke.”
Maybe, if I had managed to be brave enough for once in my life, everything would have changed despite all odds. Not only for the two of us, but for everyone.
So it began like that.
With separation.
With us separating even before we united.
I looked at him through the window. He paused for a moment and then changed his mind, hurrying toward his hotel.
His hat on his head, with the wrinkled back of his thin summer jacket . . . stooping, his shoulders fallen . . . disappearing in the heavy mist descending slowly.
That blurred image is still in my memory like a photograph.
It was to be repeated so many times.
As he left . . . always when he left.
Time passed.
Whenever I went out, my feet guided me there, to the same museum. I don’t recall how many times I entered that hall where the cherubs waited for me. The women in uniform who sat on small stools and read their books must have thought I had a mysterious bond with that painting.
I wonder how many times I stood there, in front of it, asking myself whether it had all been a dream.
Undoubtedly, it had been a dream.
The daydream of a young woman.
She wasn’t aware of what she had done.
Even if she were, what would have changed?
Impossible things . . .
In those days, I read books about impossible things. Diaries written hundreds of years ago. Feverish lines from love letters. The way lives were wasted by waiting in desperation and lost in the anguish of an impossible love.
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