He went down into the basement which was littered with the debris of his former farm model. He said aloud, “What a mess,” and started cleaning. After half an hour all the rubbish had been collected in bags. He took them out to the dustbins.
He stood by the dustbins for a while, his unseeing eyes fixed on nothing. Then he went out onto a foot path and ran.
He was running, circling the neighborhood again and again.
Then he stopped dead. He remembered everything.
Kurt met Elena in a resort town where he was vacationing after a successful tour. He had more than enough cash and no responsibilities, so he was binging big time.
When he was already getting fed up with booze and whores, he saw her. She was singing on the podium of a café chantant. The café was an unpretentious affair, and she sang accordingly. She had neither a powerful voice, nor a particular style, but altogether it came out beautiful.
She was beautiful herself, too. No, she was more than just beautiful. The sight of her knocked the wind out of him – something that had happened to him only once, a long time ago, when he, a rooky marine, was punched in the gut by a beast of a sergeant.
He started pursuing her, wooing her. She would laugh at him, call him “gorilla”, but would not drive him away – she must have somehow fancied him.
He was throwing his money about, showering her with gifts.
Then she suddenly agreed to marry him.
“Don’t you think you’ve bought me,” she said.
Things would have been easier if he had bought her. She was indifferent to money but she could not do without company. She needed to be the center of everyone’s attention and be admired.
She was dragging him to some motley parties where he felt an idiot. Then she was hanging out at some parties without him.
They did not have children – she did not want any.
He suspected her of cheating on him, though he knew for a fact that he satisfied her in bed.
They quarreled – about anything and about nothing. She was mocking him and provoking him, and seemed even to derive pleasure from his slapping her when she went too far.
One day, as he arrived home from a tour, he caught her with a lover – right in their conjugal bed. Not in the least embarrassed, Elena shouted, her naked breasts shining at him:
“Happy now, gorilla? You’ve got what you asked for!
Her lover was some youngster, like a pizza delivery boy. Kurt broke his neck in a single sweep of his iron arm.
Elena – his beautiful, naked Elena – shouted furiously:
“Come on, kill me, too! That’s all you’re capable of!”
Momentarily, he lost control of himself and hit her. That was not a symbolic slap of the kind that she had occasionally contracted before, but a serious hook. He hit her the way he would hit a mercenary that failed him.
He paid a pile of money for her treatment and another pile for the lawyers to keep him out of prison.
When discharged from hospital, Elena did not return to him. He made no attempts to find her – he understood that it was useless. He was not a wise or sensitive man, but it was finally borne in on him that they were not destined to be together.
He could not live with Elena, and he could not live without her.
He drank a lot, seized every available contract, then drank again.
Once, as he was rummaging through the Internet in search of mercenary vacancies, he stumbled on something that was his salvation, or at least, that was what he thought.
It was not quite legal, and it was going to cost him – he would have to throw away almost all of his remaining savings – but he did not think twice about it.
“Doctor, is she going to remember anything?”
“We used the mentogram that was made while she was in hospital, so, in theory, her memory will contain everything up to that moment” explained the doctor. “But the short-term memory is always actualized to a lesser degree than the more distant past.”
“I want her to forget everything that has been going on between us recently.”
“Most likely, that will be the case,” assured the doctor.