An Extra Cup

The town greeted him with a light wind that ruffled his already graying hair, as if welcoming back a boy it had once known.

The town knew him well. It remembered how he had run along the pavement, escaping classmates who wanted to punish him for some wicked little prank; how it, the town, had cleared a path for him, swinging open the gate of a stranger’s house and lowering lilac branches over his head so his pursuers would not see him.

The town remembered him as a child and knew the sound of his young, slightly crooked steps, when he rushed forward as though trying to outrun his own feet. It remembered how the man stepping off the train had once, as a boy, smelled of his father’s fresh cologne, stolen from the shelf before a date. He smelled the same now, only older and less recognizable.

He stepped down from the train and stopped. The station seemed to have remained just as it had been many years ago, when he had last stood here. Only one thing was missing…

“The one who came to see me off,” he finished his thought aloud, his gaze settling on the bench before him.

An image rose before his eyes, one that had never left him all these years: a girl sitting on that bench, nervously biting her lips and clutching in her hands the stems of the violet flowers she had brought him as a farewell gift. She did not realize the pain she was causing the flowers, just as he did not realize the pain he was causing her by leaving.

Back then, he had stood exactly where he stood now, looking at her. She sat without lifting her eyes, and he did not know what he feared more: that she would never look at him, or that she would look at him for the last time.

“Sophia…” he called softly, knowing there was nothing else left for him to say.

She raised her head. For a moment he saw again her forest-dark, fawnlike eyes. Then, suddenly, the memory broke apart and scattered across the station like sand, leaving him alone. He shut his eyes, trying to gather it back, like a dream one longs to return to, but it was too late. The memory slipped away, and with it, somehow, the bench had vanished too.

He looked once more along the platform, but it was nowhere to be seen. That bench had probably been moved long ago, though for some reason he was certain it had been standing before him only a minute earlier. Still, there was no time to think about it.

He got into a taxi and went to the hotel — one of those that had remained from the days of his youth, though he had never been inside it. As a teenager, he had liked to imagine what it was like inside.

To his delight, the hotel’s exterior had changed very little; it had only grown a little more modern under the gentle hands of a restorer. Inside, it smelled of expensive wood and something sweet: someone had brought out a cloche into the lobby, and beneath its glass dome sticky cinnamon buns were slowly cooling.

The hotel porter greeted him and showed him up to his room.

“You’ve been to our town before, haven’t you?” he asked with a smile.

“Yes. I used to live here,” he said, wondering what had given him away.

“Then I’m sure you know where you’re meant to go. Have a good day.”

A moment later, he left too. He paused only to make sure he still had the photograph. In it, he was holding Sophia, and Sophia was laughing in his arms, leaning slightly forward as though she might at any moment slip free and flutter out of the picture. Her smile steadied him. He put the wallet back into his pocket, along with the photograph, like a small charm.

The emptiness of familiar streets led him toward Sophia’s house. With every recognizable lane, he felt more certain that he would find her.

The town had not changed. It still tenderly tended the crooked chestnut tree on the corner between the bakery and the porcelain-doll shop. Sophia had once loved to stop before its window. She especially liked a little doll in a blue dress, one that resembled her.

“She looks sad,” Sophia used to say.

“It’s just a doll,” he would laugh.

“That’s why she is sad.”

And every time they passed the shop, she gave the doll the smallest nod, as if greeting a little girl trapped behind the glass.

He went up to the window and was surprised to see the doll still there, sitting in exactly the same place, her head turned at the same angle. The coincidence made him smile.

“I’ll find you, I’ll find you,” he repeated to himself, walking faster now, almost running, once again trying to outrun his own feet.

Only the lilac bush stopped him, as if it had been waiting for him all these years. For many springs, he had stripped its branches, stealing those fragrant violet flowers to bring as an offering to his little fawn, Sophia. He would place them in her lap like gifts at the feet of a small woodland goddess, and bury his face in her dark, apple-scented hair.

“I have missed you so,” he would say every time he saw her, even if no more than a couple of hours had passed since their last meeting. What could he then have known of true longing for her?

Now he stood again by the lilac bush. After hesitating for a few seconds, he did something he had not done in years: like a boy, he ruthlessly snapped off a few soft violet branches and arranged them into a bouquet.

Sophia’s house was close by. A few steps later, he was standing right in front of the gate.

“Everything is exactly the same.”

The thick, honeylike familiarity spread through him, sweet and warm, and came out as a smile. Without waiting, he pushed the gate open. It gave way — everything was going perfectly — and he walked past the disorderly flowers Sophia had planted there one summer, back when she knew nothing about gardening, and reached the front door.

He was certain she would open the door, and he would tell her how much he had missed her, how he had tried to find her, and how he had dreamed of their meeting again.

Oh no, he would tell her nothing. He would embrace her, kiss her, drop to his knees, wrap his arms around her legs, refuse to leave, and stay with her forever.

The door opened by itself, and his thoughts scattered, leaving him alone on the threshold with a foolish look on his face and a bouquet of small violet lives trembling in his hand.

“What are you doing here?”

Before him stood a woman in whom nothing recalled Sophia. She was much shorter and old enough to be his mother.

“Forgive me, I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’m looking for someone. Sophia…” he faltered; but her name gave him courage, and he added firmly: “Her name is Sophia. She lived here many years ago, and I’m trying to find her.”

The woman narrowed her eyes, looking him over from head to toe. In his expensive coat, he did not look like a vagrant, and so she decided to speak.

“I don’t know any Sophia. I’ve lived in this house for more than fifty years, and before that my husband’s parents lived here. There’s never been a Sophia in our family. Though it is a pretty name.”

That was impossible. His embarrassment quickly hardened into irritation: the old woman was lying to his face.

“The name is pretty indeed, you are right, but I know she lived here.”

The woman shrugged her stooped shoulders indifferently, closed the door behind her, and started down the path toward the gate with heavy steps.

“Wait! I have a photograph. Please, just look at it — maybe you’ll remember.”

He quickly pulled the faded photograph from his wallet and held it out to her. She glanced at it, snorted, and went on.

Confused, he looked down at the photo in his hands — and froze.

In the photograph there was himself, the house behind him, and, beside his shoulder, a small bright absence where Sophia’s laughing face should have been.

“Wait…” he murmured again, automatically, unable to take his eyes off the photograph. It seemed that if only he looked more closely, she would appear again, smiling at him from the old paper.

She was not there.

Thunder rolled somewhere on the horizon, and rain began to fall. He hurriedly slipped the photograph into the inside pocket of his jacket, trying to protect from the water what, it seemed, no longer had any value.

She was not there.

The old woman had vanished somewhere, and he hurried out of the yard, as if the street had pulled him back into its arms. He slipped and fell hard onto the road. His palms were sticky with blood, mud, and rainwater; dazed, he wiped them against his trousers. Now he truly did look like a vagrant — or at least felt like one.

With no thought left to hold on to, he started back toward the hotel as if in a fog, walking unevenly, his mouth half-open as he caught the rain on his tongue, not knowing what else to do.

Soon he realized he was lost. The road that had led him to Sophia’s house now seemed tangled, but at last he dragged himself back toward the square. The town center was crowded, yet everyone was rushing to escape the rain, hiding beneath the black full moons of their umbrellas.

He decided to wait out the weather in the bakery — the one beside the porcelain-doll shop. But when he reached it, he saw that the bakery was gone. Where only that morning people had queued for the town’s best sweet rolls, dusty office desks now stood in lonely rows. On the door, sun-bleached and tired-looking, hung a sign: “For Sale.”

Then he walked a little farther, wanting to see the doll in the blue dress once more. But the doll shop was gone.

Behind the glass, where porcelain girls had once sat with their motionless smiles, black records hung instead. They turned slowly on a display stand, and in their dark gloss nothing was reflected — not the street, not the rain, not even himself.

This cannot be. I must have taken the wrong street, a voice inside him muttered.

He backed away, trying to see both buildings at once, hoping something would prove he had simply turned into the wrong lane. But instead, his back struck the crooked chestnut tree.

I was not wrong. I could not be wrong. This is the very place where, only this morning, the bakery and the shop stood. Why is everything different now? And the house — that house was hers. I remember, I remember it was her house. And the lilac…

At the thought of the lilac, he noticed that he was still holding the flowers, wet and bruised from his fall on the asphalt. He looked at them with pain, as though they were the only thing left to him, and their whiteness blinded him.

Then he broke into a run. He ran toward where his hotel seemed to be, hoping it was still there. Lightning flashed in the sky, thunder rolled again, and he felt as if both were closing in behind him.

Drenched, he burst into the hotel lobby. It was still a hotel, though the lighting was different now, and the morning rolls were no longer on the table. But it was still the same hotel, and he breathed out in relief.

Without looking around — he was afraid to look — he hurried up the stairs toward his room.

“Sir, wait!”

He quickened his pace. All he wanted was to get to his room, fall into bed, and wake in the morning in a hospital with his head split open, so that a kind nurse would tell him he had tripped while getting off the train and flown headfirst into a bench. Then he would ask her for his jacket, reach into the inside pocket, and find the photograph there, with Sophia’s face still in it.

He only had to reach his room.

“Wait!” The woman’s voice behind him grew more insistent, and someone touched his shoulder, gently but firmly.

He turned around and saw a young woman in a hotel uniform. With slight concern, bordering on irritation at his attempt to escape, she asked:

“Did you have a reservation?”

“I checked in this morning. The man on the earlier shift gave me the key.”

He reached into one pocket, searching for the key, then into another, and another. The key was hopelessly lost.

He could not prove that he was staying at the hotel. His name was not in their records.

Out of pity, they let him wash up and spend the night in the lobby. He could not sleep, and spent the whole night staring at the white lilac flowers he still could not let go of.

By morning the rain had not stopped; it had only grown quieter and finer. He set out again for the street where Sophia had once lived. He circled it again and again, finding nothing familiar except the treacherously whitened lilac, yet he remained certain: she had lived here.

So he knocked on the door again, and kept knocking until someone opened it. He saw the old woman, and felt relieved that at least she was still there.

“I don’t believe you. Sophia — my Sophia — lived in this house. The first time I saw her, she was standing on this very doorstep. I stood here myself a hundred times. I saw her plant those flowers,” he waved toward the front garden without looking, not noticing that the flowers no longer grew there. “I used to meet her before school and walk her home afterward. It was real. All of it was real. She was real. And the love… the love was real too.”

And then he told the old woman everything: how he had first seen Sophia through the violet trembling of the lilac beside her house, while hiding from his classmates. The branches tickled his face and he was afraid to sneeze, as if his life depended on it.

“Who are you?” Sophia asked.

“Nobody,” he said. “I’m not here.”

He told her how ringing her laughter had been. It was as if she were laughing not only at him, but at the whole world, which in that moment had become simple and light.

He told her how he used to bring Sophia lilacs, though every time he swore he would never tear at the poor bush again, and how he always did, because love in youth is cruel to flowers. How they sat on the bench by the station and made up names for the trains. How Sophia said that one day she would leave for a place where the sea glowed at night, and how he told her he would find her even there. How, in the end, he was the one who left.

“Enough standing in the doorway,” the old woman said at last. His trembling hands and the wet flowers had stirred pity in her, and her tired face relaxed a little.

Only then did he realize he was drenched from the rain. The woman stepped aside to let him in.

The house was warm and smelled of dried apples, and the smell reminded him of the hair of the girl he loved. For a moment, hope appeared — and disappeared just as quickly. He no longer believed he would find her.

“Sit down,” the old woman said. “Since you’ve come carrying such a story.”

He sat at the kitchen table. Pears were printed on the oilcloth. Some had faded; others still held on as yellow patches, like little suns after the end of the world.

The old woman put the kettle on the stove and took two cups down from the shelf.

“Still, it’s all very strange,” she said.

He lifted his head.

“What is?”

“The way you talk about her,” the woman said. “That isn’t how people talk about a person. That’s how they talk about something they’ve kept in memory for too long. One need only come a little closer, and the face begins to blur.”

He wanted to object, but the words caught in his throat. He was silent, and with him the town outside the window grew still, as if listening to the water in the kettle.

“You’re not really looking for her. Not exactly. Sometimes a person knocks on a door he remembers, expecting his own youth to answer. Youth is a sweet thing, especially from a distance. I’d knock too, but what would be the point?”

The kettle began to murmur softly.

“But why?” the old woman asked quietly, looking into the flame. “Why come back here?”

He did not answer.

The kettle boiled. The woman took it off the stove, rinsed two cups with boiling water, dropped a pinch of tea leaves into each, and slowly filled them. Steam rose above the table. Then she turned back to him.

“How much sugar?”

There was no one at the table. On the chair there remained only a wet shadow, drying quickly in the morning light. The old woman frowned, looked at the two cups, then at the door, as if trying to remember why she had opened it. Outside the window, the town rustled with rain, washing someone’s footprints from the path.

Then she sighed, pushed the extra cup toward the edge of the table, and muttered:

“There now. An extra cup again.”