— Corina…? I whispered.
The woman stopped. She didn’t turn her head right away. She stayed like that, her back to me, for a second that lasted like all these years. I saw her clutch her bag tighter, hesitate, as if she were afraid to turn around.
When she finally turned around, she was looking at me without understanding. Then something trembled at the corner of her mouth.
« Robert? » she said softly. « Is that you? »
I nodded. I couldn’t speak anymore.
— I searched for you, and I finally found you. I searched for you for twenty-two years.
She put her bag down on the wet pavement and reached for her chest.
“I’ve seen you around here several times in recent years,” she said, and her voice broke. “But I never thought you’d want to see me again. Not like this. Not… tired, with bags in your hands. Life hasn’t been easy for me, Robert.”
I reached into my breast pocket. I pulled out the ribbon.
Old. Pink. Intact.
Her hands were trembling when she saw him.
« I never forgot, » I told him.
Corina covered her mouth with her palm and started to cry there, in the middle of the sidewalk, with the steam from the laundromat rising behind her.
Half of the sandwich had a story I didn’t know
I took her to a tiny little pastry shop across the street, with plastic tables and geraniums in the window. She ordered a tea and stayed with her palms around the cup, as if she wanted to warm herself.
She told me everything. After her family moved to the countryside near Filiași, her father fell ill, and she left school in tenth grade to take care of him and two younger brothers. She married young, to a man who soon after left for Spain and returned only with empty promises. She raised a daughter alone. She had worked for years in a garment factory, then in this laundry, with ten-hour days and hands cracked from the detergents.
« This isn’t a life to brag about, » she said, looking at her tea. « That’s why I didn’t want you to see me. »
I remained silent for a moment. Then I asked him a question that had been eating away at me for twenty-two years.
— Corina, why did you only give me half your sandwich every day? You were just a child. Weren’t you hungry?
She looked up. Her eyes misted over again, but this time she smiled.
“Yes, I was hungry,” she said. “And things were hard at home too. But my mother would put my sandwich in my schoolbag in the morning and always say, ‘Corina, if you see someone hungrier than you, give them some. Shared bread never runs out.’ And I saw you, sitting alone on the steps, looking away while the others ate. I didn’t want to embarrass you. So I pretended I wasn’t hungry.”
Something broke inside me. For twenty-two years, I had believed it was just a childish gesture. And in reality, it was a whole lesson, given by a woman I had never known, through a twelve-year-old girl.
“This sandwich, Corina…” I said, my voice trembling. “I lived off that sandwich. Not just literally. When I was up at the top, in offices overlooking the whole city, and I felt empty inside, I thought of you. Of someone who had given me something without asking for anything in return. You were the only proof that the world isn’t made up of nothing but self-interest.”
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