The Withering Tree
Two
As I approached the traffic light, I noticed a couple huddled together, the girl with her back to the glass window of a shop. The boy had his arms locked tight around her waist. They were whispering into each other’s ears in intricate, silent intimacy.
The couple's public display of affection epitomised the selfish nature of Love. It was nothing more than an exclusive connection, one that prohibited the rest of the world, encompassing only two people. Such a difficult connection to understand. I smile inwardly and my mind raced backwards in time.
She came to me one day in the summer of 1941 in Russia. Or rather, I was the one who singled her out of the group of girls she was with. I was walking home from school when I saw her. She was talking animatedly with her friends, and although a bright smile constantly played on her lips, I had a strange conviction that underneath that cheery façade, something restrained her from sharing herself with the world.
From the corner of my eye, I saw her cast me a quick glance that sent my heart pumping wildly. A corner loomed ahead, and I knew she was going to make the turn, while home for me was in the other direction. The sun was already dwindling. But. At that moment, I knew I shouldn’t let this girl slip away.
I took a deep breath, and stepped into her world for the first time. With a trembling voice I said hi, and felt my face go up in flames as her friends giggled at my naivety and pluck. The girl looked at me for a little while, regarding me with the look of one who had just lost her favourite book but found it a week later.
It was a fairytale romance. We went out several times, steering clear of the city areas. I remember how we traveled long avenues of birch and hazel on our bicycles, where light and sound took on a repressed quality beneath the canopy of green. It was as if the world around us had shrunk to only those roads we’d trodden upon so many times, where we shared secrets (I learned that Eva lost her mother to cancer when she was five, and that accounted for her reluctance to open up to people easily), dreams and fantasies. It was as if it was just us left in the world, it was as if Time simply stopped, and turned ours.
I still remember till this day that particular date when I proposed to her under a great maple with its sturdy branches fanned out like an umbrella, its leaves glistening like tears of fire.
“Sit down, Eva, I’ve got a surprise for you.”
She smiles and sits obediently on the gnarled, exposed root of the tree.
My palms are starting to sweat as I keep my clenched fist behind my back.
“Close your eyes.”
She does.
I place my gift on her apple-white palm.
She opens her eyes and scrutinizes the shimmering object in her palm.
“Gabriel?” She looks up at me.
I kneel down in front of her.
“Eva, will you marry me?”
“Absolutely not! What’s the meaning of this? You can’t hope to win my heart with this bit of crushed foil.”
“You just broke my heart. Here I am, presenting my heart to you and you just trample all over it with your huge feet.”
With feigned anger, Eva lunges at me and we wrestle for a few moments before collapsing into fits of laughter, rolling around in the bed of crackly, yellow leaves. Then the first drops of rain began to fall, forever bounded by gravity.
1942 eased in. The German Third Reich was at the height of its power. The Nazis were already advancing upon Russia. The Red Army began its conscription for the imminent battle at Stalingrad.
Eva and I spent one last night together in the shed tucked away in a corner of my garden. We made love. Soft stripes of moonlight filtered through the wooden boards, chilling our naked bodies. As we snuggled close together, skin to skin, Eva’s shoulders started shuddering, her chest began heaving. Soon, I felt a thin rivulet trace my left cheek.
The next morning, I walked Eva to the port, before I was required to report to the Army Headquarters, our fingers entwined. There, we held each other in a long embrace as pandemonium arose around us, with people laden with hefty suitcases bursting with clothes and prized possessions, perhaps photographs of their beloved that have gone to fight the war, lunging for the boats in a mad rush. I could barely hear the commotion as she whispered to me, the raggedness of her voice interspersing with my heavy breathing, “I’ll be waiting for you because I know you’ll come back to me.”
We sealed the promise with a kiss, then I watched her retreat reluctantly to the boats, her eyes shining with tears, her lips forming a quivering smile.
I wish I could tell you she was able to sail away to America (where we’d agreed to meet again) and after arduous months of waiting, finally reunited with me, or in a darker scenario, was struck down by shrapnel so that our love could continue, unchanged, the way she would continue living in my heart.
Alas.
I returned alive from the war in 1945 and for 6 years, scoured the whole of New York for her. I stopped on 19th June 1951, when I read about her in the newspapers.
She had married another- a wealthy oil magnate for that matter. I still kept the clipping in the top drawer of the chest by my bed. I take it out sometimes, and spend a whole hour sitting on my bed, fingering the yellowed paper, staring at her beautiful face in the photograph (“Igor Tolstoy, 34, with wife Eva Vodianova, 26”).
Stapled to the clipping was another. It was dated 10 April 1955, speaking of the magnate and his wife dying in a car crash, along with their children Veronika and Daniil , aged 2 and 4. (Tolstoy’s younger brother inherited their mansion in Boston and the bulk of their fortune, the remaining portion of it was donated to the Red Cross.)
I never loved another since Eva, because now, fifty years later, I still loved her like I did when we first met in the hustle and bustle of Moiseyevskaya Square.
The couple's public display of affection epitomised the selfish nature of Love. It was nothing more than an exclusive connection, one that prohibited the rest of the world, encompassing only two people. Such a difficult connection to understand. I smile inwardly and my mind raced backwards in time.
She came to me one day in the summer of 1941 in Russia. Or rather, I was the one who singled her out of the group of girls she was with. I was walking home from school when I saw her. She was talking animatedly with her friends, and although a bright smile constantly played on her lips, I had a strange conviction that underneath that cheery façade, something restrained her from sharing herself with the world.
From the corner of my eye, I saw her cast me a quick glance that sent my heart pumping wildly. A corner loomed ahead, and I knew she was going to make the turn, while home for me was in the other direction. The sun was already dwindling. But. At that moment, I knew I shouldn’t let this girl slip away.
I took a deep breath, and stepped into her world for the first time. With a trembling voice I said hi, and felt my face go up in flames as her friends giggled at my naivety and pluck. The girl looked at me for a little while, regarding me with the look of one who had just lost her favourite book but found it a week later.
It was a fairytale romance. We went out several times, steering clear of the city areas. I remember how we traveled long avenues of birch and hazel on our bicycles, where light and sound took on a repressed quality beneath the canopy of green. It was as if the world around us had shrunk to only those roads we’d trodden upon so many times, where we shared secrets (I learned that Eva lost her mother to cancer when she was five, and that accounted for her reluctance to open up to people easily), dreams and fantasies. It was as if it was just us left in the world, it was as if Time simply stopped, and turned ours.
I still remember till this day that particular date when I proposed to her under a great maple with its sturdy branches fanned out like an umbrella, its leaves glistening like tears of fire.
“Sit down, Eva, I’ve got a surprise for you.”
She smiles and sits obediently on the gnarled, exposed root of the tree.
My palms are starting to sweat as I keep my clenched fist behind my back.
“Close your eyes.”
She does.
I place my gift on her apple-white palm.
She opens her eyes and scrutinizes the shimmering object in her palm.
“Gabriel?” She looks up at me.
I kneel down in front of her.
“Eva, will you marry me?”
“Absolutely not! What’s the meaning of this? You can’t hope to win my heart with this bit of crushed foil.”
“You just broke my heart. Here I am, presenting my heart to you and you just trample all over it with your huge feet.”
With feigned anger, Eva lunges at me and we wrestle for a few moments before collapsing into fits of laughter, rolling around in the bed of crackly, yellow leaves. Then the first drops of rain began to fall, forever bounded by gravity.
1942 eased in. The German Third Reich was at the height of its power. The Nazis were already advancing upon Russia. The Red Army began its conscription for the imminent battle at Stalingrad.
Eva and I spent one last night together in the shed tucked away in a corner of my garden. We made love. Soft stripes of moonlight filtered through the wooden boards, chilling our naked bodies. As we snuggled close together, skin to skin, Eva’s shoulders started shuddering, her chest began heaving. Soon, I felt a thin rivulet trace my left cheek.
The next morning, I walked Eva to the port, before I was required to report to the Army Headquarters, our fingers entwined. There, we held each other in a long embrace as pandemonium arose around us, with people laden with hefty suitcases bursting with clothes and prized possessions, perhaps photographs of their beloved that have gone to fight the war, lunging for the boats in a mad rush. I could barely hear the commotion as she whispered to me, the raggedness of her voice interspersing with my heavy breathing, “I’ll be waiting for you because I know you’ll come back to me.”
We sealed the promise with a kiss, then I watched her retreat reluctantly to the boats, her eyes shining with tears, her lips forming a quivering smile.
I wish I could tell you she was able to sail away to America (where we’d agreed to meet again) and after arduous months of waiting, finally reunited with me, or in a darker scenario, was struck down by shrapnel so that our love could continue, unchanged, the way she would continue living in my heart.
Alas.
I returned alive from the war in 1945 and for 6 years, scoured the whole of New York for her. I stopped on 19th June 1951, when I read about her in the newspapers.
She had married another- a wealthy oil magnate for that matter. I still kept the clipping in the top drawer of the chest by my bed. I take it out sometimes, and spend a whole hour sitting on my bed, fingering the yellowed paper, staring at her beautiful face in the photograph (“Igor Tolstoy, 34, with wife Eva Vodianova, 26”).
Stapled to the clipping was another. It was dated 10 April 1955, speaking of the magnate and his wife dying in a car crash, along with their children Veronika and Daniil , aged 2 and 4. (Tolstoy’s younger brother inherited their mansion in Boston and the bulk of their fortune, the remaining portion of it was donated to the Red Cross.)
I never loved another since Eva, because now, fifty years later, I still loved her like I did when we first met in the hustle and bustle of Moiseyevskaya Square.