The Labyrinth of Stories

I meet Eddie only one more time, he gives me the money for interpreting, we sit in a bistro in the canal embankment, he says that his renting business in America gives him the opportunity to draw and travel comfortably when and where he wishes, he proudly tells me how he has rescued a slightly acquainted Russian woman from agricultural slavery in Cyprus. As for Alla, the story of our acquaintance is long, two elderly Americans had come to visit her even before Eddie, she had written long letters to them both and rejected both having met them personally citing their old age as a reason. In a year after Eddie another person, a young nice doctor from California starts writing to her, and she seems to reply to him willingly, but when the doctor comes the result is the same. It looks like Alla is in our agency because she theoretically understands that she needs family and children, but in reality she is forever plunged into the world of her own imagination.

I do not very well understand why I recommend just Elena to Reginald: maybe I like her family name, a colleague of my deceased father had a second name like that and my father had often pronounced it telling me and my mother about his work in the times of my childhood. True, that it turns out later that Elena had got her second name from her ex-husband who has nothing to do with my father’s colleague either, but I like Elena’s manner of answering questions not immediately, but, after having thought, having made not a too long and not a too short, but an appropriate pause, because of this pause she seems to me a mature person with her own views of life, she is inquisitive, she asks questions besides the point about the agency and America in general, she works as a chief accountant and studies at the institute, and it seems to me that a serious and responsible Reginald and exactly the same Elena will get along fine. But Elena suddenly leaves on a business trip and after her return her interest completely disappears and there is no more inquisitiveness, she calls me soon and informs me that she has changed her mind, she will not reply and does not any more wish to take part in the process at all.

Oksana, the next girl from Reginald’s list, is a nurse, I meet her in Finlandsky Station near the memorial locomotive late in the evening because at that time an American girl, a student I should meet and take to a rented room with a Russian family comes from Helsinki. Together with Reginald’s letter I also give Oksana a letter from another client, a lucky businessman who is however unlucky in love, and Oksana rejects Reginald and chooses the businessman because she thinks that Reginald is too much a pain in the backside and that he is also too fat. Here she makes a mistake because the businessman simultaneously starts corresponding with another woman of the same age as him who has an adult daughter, that woman writes to him letters not so naive as Oksana’s, but deep and thoughtful ones, she is also very pretty and finally the businessman decides to come to Russia to see just her and does not know what to do with Oksana, but here fate in the person of my tiredness and absent-mindedness interferes while I am editing the translations of letters in Word and I accidentally insert a piece from the businessman’s letter to his chosen one in his letter to Oksana, and though Oksana knows that her beau writes not only to her the difference in the tone of these two messages is so evident that in a fit of temper Oksana sends an unwarrantedly abusing letter to the businessman and not having got any reply she becomes even more frustrated and asks to have her picture removed from the site.

So, looking at the approaching train in which an American girl arrives and talking to her boyfriend, also an American student who has come to meet her -- I have already placed him in another apartment with another family -- I start worrying about Reginald, a young airline dispatcher who appealed to our agency having collected references and chosen us. Reginald is accustomed to consider each little second at work, he creates a precise plan for his search for a future wife, he says if you do not plan your life it will do it for you, he sends letters with current pictures of himself and also with pictures taken six years ago before he had lost a hundred pounds of weight, because he puts honesty above all, and, going along the platform, trying to locate the girl in a car, I think that it is not at all necessary to show the world everything negative you have had in the past, in particular the hundred pounds of extra weight which was rejected by Oksana immediately even without figuring out. On the other hand, maybe Reginald is right and it is better to play it safe, with a strict approach like that he at least cuts off the possibility to meet the wrong person and turn his life in a ruinous direction. But at that moment the American student sees his girlfriend in the car window, we rush inside, the girl enthusiastically presses her cheek against mine and is happy with everything she expects to see in Russia. Later it turns out that the first impression of her was wrong, she cannot get on for more than a month anywhere, she niggles over each ruble, reproaches her landlords that she becomes fat with their meals, and leaving, takes the door keys with her, blackmailing poor pensioners, demanding they pay her kopecks supposedly owed her. Her boyfriend, on the contrary, behaves with dignity, his landlady treats him and his girlfriend as if she is their mother, refuses them nothing, with a gentle smile explaining her indulgence for young people who love each other, but the girl manages to ruin even this relationship and in a year she leaves Russia deeply disappointed with the intention to write a book of slanderous contents.

Meanwhile the date of Reginald’s arrival to St.Petersburg approaches, but there is still no one to whom I could introduce him, he has hidden, waiting, thinking that I am an expert and that I know how to make people happy, they come to me, write to me, call me and I try to help. In reality I have neither special methods nor psychological tests, picking couples I follow my inner voice, sometimes it tells me “yes”, sometimes “no”. When my mood is good it seems to me that everyone may be happy with everyone, when it is bad it seems that none may be happy with anyone, everything usually begins when I sit cross-legged in an arm-chair in front of the computer and imagine a man who has appealed to me with this or that girl and then I guess if I like that picture.

Then I meet Reginald in the airport – he is smiling, likeable, no extra weight at all, he is absolutely different from that one I imagined before his visit when I woke up at nights in horror having a dream about his strict face and hearing his question: “Why does not anything succeed in this celebrated agency of yours?!” In the very last moment I search out almost from the air an absolutely unknown girl Galia who has just appealed to the agency and who seems to correspond all Reginald’s criteria, I immediately present Reginald’s data to her, she says: ”Possible to try” and I am ready to jump on one leg from joy that there is at least something positive I may inform him about. Reginald’s parents are happily married for already thirty years, they dance ball dances in the evenings in a dancing club, there is antique furniture and velvet portieres in their home, their home is full of warmth and love for their only son who looks for the same warmth and love in a rational American world and does not find them as even flight attendants treat the air Captain with greater respect than a modest dispatcher who is not in favour at all. Reginald’s last American girlfriend was happy to fly with him to the Bahamas on weekends when he worked for a passenger airline where a free ticket was provided, but when he moved to a cargo airline where there were no free tickets the girl said “good bye”. And during the next few days I am occupied with Reginald and Galia: they invite me to a meeting with my literary friends, they invite me to watch an interesting movie on TV, they invite me to the kitchen if not to cook dinner then at least to eat it up, but I either call on phone coordinating Reginald’s schedule or wander somewhere interpreting as Galia does not speak English. I still cannot understand what kind of person Galia really is and why she does not asks Reginald any questions when we sail for so long to Peterhoff in a small ship through a foggy Gulf and in response to my offer to ask him at least something she knits her brow, becomes tense, keeps silence, shrugs her shoulders and finally says: “Actually everything is clear”. I wonder what really is clear to her, if I were in her place I would have dogged Reginald with questions about America in general and about his work, life and parents particularly, even, for instance, initial engraved on his finger-ring and what it means, my intuition prompts me that nothing will come of it all, but, I think, maybe I am too obsessed with my intuition, because understanding is not a chaos of emotions, but a precise system of symbols and if it is so it is then necessary to examine clients with the help of special methods.

Nevertheless, Galia calls me and says that it is difficult for her to communicate with Reginald without any knowledge of English, she asks me to inform him about it as gently as possible because just the day before Reginald gave her roses and a computer print of both of them in a frame with monograms, he tenderly leaned to her and covered her palm with his. Having learned that he was rejected Reginald flags, but asks me to arrange one more meeting for him and we rustle on the fallen leaves along the paths in the Summer Gardens and sit in a cafe with one more dark-haired girl who finally decides to stay in Russia forever after lots of inquisitive questions that Reginald asks her. Reginald goes to his apartment and desperately retires into himself, he does not even call, the most horrible thing is that in a couple of days I will fly to Turkey for a week where my husband and I go not already for the first time, more exactly for the second one, I just need relaxation from the computer because I have been working like a machine comforting, supporting, arranging and solving the problems of other people for already two years. I still do not know how wonderful it will be in Turkey that October, we will catch the last sunny days as if we have managed to order them, we will not be burnt by the sun, we will not be overheated, our windows will face a shady garden with a view to the mountains, we will swim to a yellow buoy hardly seen in the edge of the bay, the beach will not be crowded, there will be mostly elderly female representatives of the multi-level marketing congress there and once in the evening we will be amazed when a fellowcountryman with a big suitcase, a bit mad and exhausted after a long journey, hails us in the main street of the town with brightly illuminated windows and asks as if at home in Moscovsky Station where the public toilet is located there.

But so far I am haunted by the thoughts of what to do with Reginald who should have spent one more week in a strange, dank and unfriendly city, with repentance I recall my many times repeated comforting words that when everything is bad in the beginning it will be really good afterwards, that really good luck does not come right away, it should be deserved, and all these incantations already seem to me like an empty shaking of the air.

The worst in my work is when someone suffers if I do not fulfill my obligations for uncontrolled reasons or when I give the wrong advice or when men or women whom I recommend behave differently than I promise though usually I try to correct my mistakes and other people recommended by me correspond to what I promised. The case with Reginald is special, it is a complete failure, I cannot calm myself thinking of him and of my inevitable departure, his gifts look at me reproachfully – the book of idioms from a book-case, a scanned print-out of photo of myself and my husband – it still hangs in our workshop, and two cans of real Brazilian coffee whose aroma fills our home. The matter is not even in the gifts themselves, but in that joy with which Reginald watches how I free the dictionary of idioms from lots of bright paper coverings in which he had purposely wrapped it, looking forward to my impatience and my reading the inscription: “Love, Reginald”, and in his sincere curiosity wondering which kind of coffee we liked more. In his life Reginald studied, worked, made a career, lost extra weight, but he did not know where to spend all that love he had inherited from his parents circling in each others arms around the dance hall, he has brought this love intact to Russia to give it to the first girl he meets thinking that people here have not yet lost faith in the priority of moral values over the material ones, that’s why any Russian girl is worth this love.

Then I make a last attempt to change Reginald’s destiny: I invite him home on the very day of our departure to look through the catalogues again and he comes, he sits, depressed, on the couch turning over profiles, looking at pictures and I wander around absent-mindedly throwing t-shirts, shorts and swim-suits into the suit-case, being distracted now and then , coming up to Reginald, telling him about different girls, giving him addresses of other agencies and other interpreters. As a result I forget to take a diving mask and a snorkel which we will regret on the beach, and parting near the metro, Reginald goes to his apartment and we go to Turkey, neither Reginald nor myself know that the most important event in his life has already happened that same moment he had pulled an already-tattered profile of a girl named Margarita who is not even to his taste, rather stout than slim, a pink-cheeked blonde, not at all the brunette with high cheekbones that he prefers. Moreover it turns out during their meeting that all that extra weight that Reginald had lost being so proud of himself, seemed to migrate to Margarita – she is as heavier than in her old picture as the present Reginald is slimmer than previously. Either a joke or a finger of fate, but when we still fly over Europe and Reginald makes an appointment for a meeting with Margarita she lies in bed with flu and a temperature of 40 degrees Celsius and despite all the lamenting of her family she still agrees to come to a date the next day, a mysterious force rises her from bed and draws her, quite sick, to the bus and metro, later her flu will earn complications and she will go to the hospital. After the meeting Reginald is completely confused: all his plans and criteria are ruined – Margarita is inadmissibly fat, she does not speak English at all and it is impossible to understand anything in their conversation. But Margarita’s huge blue eyes look at Reginald with a joyous surprise, her pink lips are like Cupid’s bow, she has long, rich blonde hair which falls across his face when she kisses him in parting. Margarita’s lips burn his cheek, he does not know yet that they are so hot because of her high temperature, but Margarita’s grandmother already cries at home sagaciously foreseeing the changes to come.

By our return from Turkey Reginald is already in America, Margarita is in the hospital, her father, a former gallant sailor and now a bridgebuilding specialist working in Moscow and seeing to his family on weekends comes to me with Margarita’s letter and searchingly looks in my eyes trying to understand who has involved their only daughter in a whirlwind of strange events and if it is possible to trust this person. It seems he solves this question positively and very soon he shares his doubts and asks questions. I know, people easily confide in me, on the one hand it is good for my job, on the other hand it often seems to me that they take me for someone who knows everything, but it is not really so.

Then a period of learning about each other through correspondence and conference phone calls begins, sometimes I interpret these calls for three hours late at night, till Margarita’s and my utter exhaustion when Reginald examines Margarita on a special questionnaire he has preliminarily composed, and the questions in it are from the preferred make-up and the length of her hair till the things extending very far away, for instance, what will happen if Margarita comes to America, does not find the intelligent work there she is used to in Russia and becomes bored. Like the clever Elza from the Brothers Grimm fairytale Reginald tries to predict all the options of the future developments not wishing to throw himself on the mercy of Russian hit or miss. Margarita tries her best to reply to Reginald, but sometimes her patience becomes exhausted and we both giggle at his American tediousness while he proudly keeps quiet not understanding our comment. When Margarita, in turn, asks questions incomprehensible for him he pauses for such a long while that it seems to me that the telephone connection has been interrupted and I cry in the receiver: “Hey, Reginald, are you there?” and Reginald’s quiet voice calmly replies to me: “Yes”.

At last, Reginald comes again, this time decisively, he and Margarita hug each other in the airport and settle together in the same apartment. Parting with them, already quite absorbed by each other, I understand that Reginald’s story has come to a happy end: like a thread from a ball it pulled itself out of my labyrinth and found an independent existence. I guess what really made it come true: either Reginald’s responsibility and kindness or Margarita’s selflessness or my conscientious approach, but most likely neither of the three because as in inspiration in creative work good luck in life does not depend on our seriousness and diligence either, it is in the competence of another department and we may only plead for its favourable attitude.