On the steps behind the school, my knees pressed against my chest, I was so hungry my stomach hurt. I was twelve years old and for three days there had been no bread at home: my father had left, my mother was cleaning the stairs, and at noon I pretended not to hear the canteen bell.
That’s when a little girl with pigtails and a red ribbon in her hair sat down next to me.
She didn’t ask me anything. She didn’t look at me with pity. She simply broke her sandwich in half — one half cheese and tomato, it smelled like freshly baked bread — and handed me the larger piece.
« Here, » she said. « Anyway, I’m not hungry. »
She was lying. I saw her swallow when she watched me eat. But she handed me that half every break, day after day, for months on end. Her name was Corina.
I could still smell that odor in my nostrils, even now, twenty-two years later — chalk and bread, mixed together in the cold air of the corridors.
One evening, in my apartment in the center of Bucharest, I stopped in the middle of signing a multi-million euro contract and just stood there with my pen in the air. I had everything I had promised myself when I was twelve. And I had no one to share anything with.
I got up, grabbed my car keys, and left. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I didn’t really know either—I only knew that I had to get to Craiova, to the neighborhood where I grew up.
I drove for five hours, in the rain, my heart pounding like when I was twelve years old.
The school had been renovated, with PVC windows and a new gate, but the back steps were still there. I sat down on them like a madman, in a suit, at forty-one years old, and felt my throat tighten.
In a drawer at home, I had kept her red ribbon for twenty-two years. Faded now, almost pink, but intact. She had given it to me on the last day of school, when her family had moved, telling me not to lose it.
« When I’m rich, I’ll marry you, Corina. » That’s what I promised her. She laughed and called me a little idiot.
For years, I had asked around the neighborhood, asked acquaintances, and looked at alumni lists. Nothing. It was as if she had vanished off the face of the earth.
And then, just as I was getting up to leave, the door of a building across the street opened—a kind of laundromat, with steam pouring out of the window. A woman came out, a heavy shopping bag in one hand and a plastic bag in the other. Tired. Her hair was tied back carelessly. She walked hunched over, a few steps away from me.
I looked at her and my breath caught in my throat.
The same eyes.
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