Boomerang of Happiness - 2

Alex was grieving for over two years. During this period, he was transferred several times from one place of work to another, from one strategic object to the next one, and took up shorter assignments as business trips. The frequent movement around the entire Soviet Union kept him going and distracted from thinking about Irina.

Novembers were particularly hard on Alex: ridden with guilt over Irina’s disappearance, he could not fight his depression. To overcome it and kill his own pain, Alex plunged himself into work, creating and inventing new communications solutions. Paradoxically, depression-marked Novembers were the most productive months for him, when he made such great leaps in his work that his bosses advanced him to the next level.

In November 1989, at the age of 29, Alex wrote a groundbreaking article for a scientific engineering journal that established him as a brilliant mind capable of leading the communication revolution the humanity was about to experience. At that time, before the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian engineers were going nose to nose with the Americans in developing communication technologies, especially in the area of satellite and wireless signal transmission, and Alex was sure that at least professionally he had a bright and challenging future in store for him.

He was stationed at a closed town near Novosibirsk, the largest city and a major scientific center in Siberia, when Alex met his future wife in January 1990. To be exact, he did not really meet her. Later in life, he would always go blank when someone asked how they’d met, because the moment never registered in his mind. His wife came up with some romantic love-at-first-sight story she’d tell anyone who’d listen and he let it slide because it was easier that way. People love romantic stories and it’s better than to admit he did not remember such a pivotal moment of his life.

The truth is that he did not care about meeting women at the time. Having lost Irina, he seemed to have had lost his zest for life as well. He stopped going to parties, ceased being the center of social life for this friends. His old college friends were already married, many with kids, and had their own challenges and problems to deal with. Making new friends in new places was not a priority for Alex anymore and he kept to himself most of the time.

It was Anna who noticed him first and immediately resolved that he would be her husband. Because she was at the ripe age for marriage and she was sure that if she didn’t get married within a year she would miss her window of opportunity. At the time, most women in the Soviet Union married between the age of eighteen to twenty. Anna was almost twenty-six, had several unsuccessful relationships and nasty break-ups under her belt and her parents were worried she’d remain a ‘spinster,’ a horrible status in the Soviet Union that carried with it a lot of stigma and judgments.

Alex was already a legend, people talked about him all the time, admiring his mind, his collected appearance and the air of cool detachment he had about him. Although some enviers were saying he was just a snob with a superiority complex, most people treated him with awe and respect and tried not to disturb his solitude. Rumors of a horrible tragedy that had made Alex the “lone wolf” always circulated everywhere he went but no one really knew the details of the tragedy.

Anna was working as an accountant at the station. She was an attractive brunet of about 5’7”, with a slender but curvy body: her narrow waste made her breasts and hips appear larger than they were. Some said she looked like a skillfully carved Oriental statuette. Others usually described her as cute, but not beautiful. Cuteness came from the combination of her large brown eyes contrasting with a small button-like nose and plump sharply defined lips on a small mouth. Her eyes and lips were so well-contoured she never used mascara or lipstick, and she often heard people saying that her face looked like a skillfully drawn doll.

If you asked people who knew her well whether she was smart, they would hesitate to respond. She was not stupid at all, and was a solid professional in her field, but she was so chatty that people called her “silly chatter box” behind her back. She knew no boundaries when it came to how much personal information she could dump on a stranger. She talked non-stop with anyone who would listen and people who found this trait of hers annoying tried to avoid her at any cost. Her friends and people who knew her well simply told her to stop and take a deep breath or even shut up when she got carried away in her chatting.

So on that cold Siberian day in January, Anna noticed Alex in line at the cafeteria during lunch. She asked one of her colleagues if he was Alex the engineer who everyone talked about so much. Having received the affirmative answer, she darted into the line, bumped into Alex and said, “I’m sorry, didn’t mean to run into you! I’m so clumsy today!”

“It’s all right,” Alex responded absentmindedly.

“I’m usually not so clumsy, but today, for some reason, I’m particularly clumsy,” she started her rapid fire of a talk. “Bumped into three people and two walls already this morning. Although, no, let me take that back, now that I’ve thought about it: I’m always very clumsy. Always. You should see all the bruises I have on my poor body from all the things I run and walk into. Good thing you are not hard enough to give me a bruise.”

He looked at her, surprised and puzzled at the same time, but didn’t say anything.

“Oh, sorry again,” she continued. “I of course didn’t mean to say that you are too hard or too soft…”

“It really is all right,” he interrupted her with a polite smile.

“Oh, OK then, sorry,” she said quickly, with no shade of embarrassment. “Is it all right if I join you at your table for lunch?”

“Sure,” he said politely, not sure at all if it was all right indeed. He liked his solitude during lunches. It allowed him to think about whichever project he was working on at the time. He agreed only because he didn’t want to appear rude to a stranger.

“Great, then!” she said. “I’m Anna, by the way. My mother named me Anna in honor of her mother, who was named after Anna the Saint. She loved her so much! I mean, my mom loved my grandma, not Anna the Saint. Although, of course, everyone loves Anna the Saint. My grandmother was such a wonderful woman! She is long gone now, died when I was five, but I remember her very well, a very strong Russian woman who endured so much…”

“Nice to meet you,” he stretched his arm to shake hers and stop the flow of her talk. “I’m Alex.”

He let her go in front of him in line, and she immediately complimented him on being such a gentleman. When they got their food and reached the cashier to pay, it turned out Anna was five kopeks short. She started to rummage through her purse, looking for the coins, rapidly saying, “Give me a sec, I’m sure I have it somewhere here, it must have gotten stuck in a corner. I always have a lot of coins in my purse, I just have to find them…”

The line behind him started to get impatient about the holdup, so Alex took a five-kopek coin out of his pocket and handed it to the cashier, simply saying, “Let’s move the line, please.” Anna decided to wait for him to pay for his lunch, standing next to him, incredibly and sincerely grateful. She started to loudly express her thanks to Alex, calling everyone in line to witness his kind deed and promising to pay him back.

He was clearly embarrassed because now the entire line was looking at him as if he was a hero of some sort. He quickly paid for his own lunch and said, “It really is nothing. You shouldn’t worry about it.”

She led him to an empty table she had spotted while he was paying and sat down across from him. During the entire lunch Anna was talking non-stop about her work and colleagues, her family, the weather, latest news and recent events. Alex observed her for about five minutes and even tried to follow her tirade, amazed at how she managed to eat and talk at the same time. But once he figured out that she chewed and swallowed her food as quickly as she talked, Alex lost interest and started to think about his work project. However, his incredibly high social IQ and sensitivity prompted Alex to instinctively nod, saying “aha,” “you don’t say!” and “really?” at all the right places to signal that he followed her rumblings. In the end, Anna was pleased with their first lunch and Alex was happy when it was over and eagerly walked back to his office with a new solution to a problem he had been thinking about for a whole week.

To Part 3

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