came shortly afterwards.
He replied in a serious and simple manner, without any vulgarity. So that’s how their communication began.
Nina told him about her work and the fact that she had a civil husband. In his response, he told her that he was the youngest child in the family and that after finishing school, which he already had finished; he planned to help his father with his business.
In paradise of love
They began to chat every day. They have talked about everything: about their countries, customs and traditions, about sports, about presidents, about religions, Islam and Christianity, about the expedition to Mars… and of course, about the relations between men and women.
Nina felt and understood that it was the topic of his greatest interest. Well, that was logical, since at his age, when puberty hits the most, boys tend to think about sex all the time.
He asked her questions in a delicate way, he wanted to get information from an experienced adult woman. He was still innocent. Girls wouldn’t hang out with boys before marriage in his country.
Nina provided him with answers and insensibly fell for him. She was looking forward to their dialogs. She was glad when he appeared in the chat and greeted her with a short “Hey!”.
“Let’s talk?” he asked, and Nina felt like her heart had skipped a beat and happiness was growing inside it.
“Yes!” she used to answer and the conversation would begin. Though their chats were very simple, they meant a lot to Nina.
It was interesting to her to study an international internet language of the youth, which the boy used, as well as all these English acronyms and abbreviations.
For her, a mature woman who grew up in the pre-Internet era, all of this would never have been possible to learn if he wouldn’t appear in her life.
She received this knowledge from him and was proud of that. Despite of her mature age she managed to keep up with modern trends. That made her feel younger.
The boy also received the information which he wanted.
What was more important, of course, wasn’t that information, but what was growing between them, the bond connecting their hearts across thousands of kilometres.
What was that bond? Was it love? When was that word said aloud in their conversations for the first time? And how did it happen?
One day, while chatting with the boy long past the midnight, Nina suddenly remembered that the next day she had to wake up early to a busy day, so she needed to go to sleep urgently!
Her civil husband would already be sleeping peacefully behind a cupboard in their rented one-room flat. He didn’t pay attention to Nina’s stays by the laptop.
He didn’t even know about raging passions that took place there. She tried not to disturb him and lit the room with the dim light of the table lamp. When they had audio-calls in the messenger, she would go to the kitchen and firmly close the door.
Nina tried to say goodbye to Ismael, explaining why she needed to go to sleep. After a long argument, he had finally agreed with her “Good night”.
She wrote: “Bye, kiss you on the cheek”.
“But I kiss you on the lips,” he answered with a kiss emoji. Nina sat motionless and sent him a question mark.
“I love you,” said Ismael.
Nina couldn’t type anything. She felt confused, happy, delighted and terrified at the same time. She felt him by her side so realistically, as if he was touching her with his fingers. Her throat immediately dried up.
“Do you love me?” he asked.
Nina began to type something with her shaking hands. Her fingers became sweaty and wouldn’t respond. She was typing and deleting her message, again and again… He was waiting patiently. Later on, he sent her a question mark, demanding immediate answer.
“Give it to me straight. Do you love me?”
For whatever reason, Nina sent him a line from a song by the Russian singer Maxim: “My gentle boy, forgive my trembling…", translated into English by Google.
“Do you love me????” he asked impatiently.
“Yes,” wrote Nina, as if whispering that word.
“Tell me that you love me!”
“I love you,” she wrote. It seemed to her that those letters were on fire. They were burning her, flaming on the laptop screen.
“I love you very much!” Ismael wrote in response, “and I will love you until the last day of my life!”
In reality, after this kind of confession, people would hug and kiss. However, there were only words written on the screen…
Nina felt dizzy, everything was floating before her eyes and it was impossible to breathe. She was shaking. It was even more intense and brighter than the real confession of her first true love.
She didn’t sleep that night. She had been chatting with the boy the whole night through. Then he called her and she took the laptop to the kitchen and spoke to him, until her alarm clock went off, marking the time to get up.
During their conversation, Nina heard noises in his house and outside his window in Egypt, such as a baby crying, birds singing, dogs barking.
It was so weird, as if there weren’t thousands of miles separating them. It was spring, mid-May. It seemed to her as if they were sitting side by side, embracing each other and greeting the dawn…
After that the intoxication of love began. They spoke every night and sent each other romantic pictures and music: Arabic, Russian and Western love songs. They taught each other their native languages, he taught her Arab and she Russian to him.
They learned to pronounce the words of love in each other’s native languages.
He wrote her every day, over and over again, that he loved and missed her, that they love each other and should be together. He promised to come to Moscow to meet her…
He then began to ask her about her husband. When they were finishing their chats at nights, he would say to her how jealous he was when she went to bed with him. Nina told him that when she was sleeping with her husband, she imagined her beloved boy in his place…
One day, Nina complained that her husband was drunk and tortured her with his demands.
“I will come and kill him!” he wrote quickly, and Nina felt frantic energy of jealousy and anger that came through the laptop screen and thought: “This Arab boy, like a little beast, will show his teeth!” Yet at the same time, she liked his fervour.
Nina often wondered why that boy loved her, an adult woman who is old enough to be his mother? She read a lot of psychological articles on the subject, which stated that that kind of attraction to adult women existed mostly in two cases: either the boy had a difficult relationship
