The Trap of Timing and the Failed Rebound

Five full years had passed, five years of daily grinding beneath the wheels of trains, and of changing wooden stakes in strange lands that grant the stranger nothing but dust. Five years in which sorrow had grown in Leon's eyes until it became a dense layer that blocked his view of joy. But, thanks to a partial settlement of the management's suffocating debts, the wheel of fate took a sudden turn; and on a cold autumn evening the circus manager announced that the next stop was "the Old City."

Upon hearing the name, Leon's heart contracted with a sudden bruise of burning hope. He felt a tremor in his pale hand that made the juggling balls fall from between his fingers. Her face had suffered distortion of features in his mind, yes, and her features had become gelatinous and nameless, but returning to the scene of the first emotional crime was enough to restore life to the dead tissue in his memory. He told himself that seeing her again on that opposite pavement would rebuild the eroded features and drive out the ghosts that had settled in his imagination. The circus arrived in early autumn, and the huge circular circus tent was erected on the same desolate patch of dirt at the edge of the city. On the first day of performances, Leon put on the patched coat and the hard white plastic mask and stood at the huge iron gate. His body trembled behind the rigid plastic, not from the autumn cold, but from the sheer excess of waiting. His black eyes moved with terrifying hysteria among the crowds, examining the opposite pavement with the precision of a surgeon searching for a lost pulse.

Monday evening came, and the queues flowed like human serpents, but the opposite pavement remained empty of her unhurried figure and the books she clutched to her chest. Leon did not know; Clara had not forgotten the ritual, nor had she abandoned the appointment, but during those three days in particular she was subject to a temporary compulsory change in her life's schedule. Her work management had imposed on her an additional evening shift that began a full hour later than her old time. Clara would come, and pass by, carrying the colorful umbrella, and stare in despair at the gate... but only forty minutes after Leon's outdoor shift had ended, and he had closed the iron gate and gone into the darkness of the circus tent to prepare for the inner dawn performances!

On Tuesday evening Leon stood in the light rain, stung by the autumn cold in the same spot where he had gifted a dry sky to a woman whose name he did not know. He waited until the crowds had dispersed, and the street remained bare and cold and dark. And on Wednesday evening, the silent tragedy repeated itself; he stood until his limbs stiffened and his joints were coated with damp. He looked at the empty pavement and felt a sharp physical letdown, as if a rusty dagger had lodged in his chest.

Here, Leon fell into the trap of "premature despair." He did not consider that people's appointments change, nor did it occur to him that life might impose a different course on a person for a few days. His wounded pride and his innate human brokenness led him to the cruelest and most bleak conclusion: "She has forgotten me. The ink of the letter has dried in her heart, and the colorful umbrella has frayed in her hand, and perhaps she has gone off with another man who has a real, stable and natural face, a man who does not hide behind dead plastic, and who has a homeland to receive her in."

This hasty despair was like a coup de grâce to Leon's hope. He felt a severe spiritual nausea as he looked at the pavement that now seemed to him like a vast cemetery of memories. That night, with a violent decision akin to psychological suicide, he decided to close this book forever. Inside the caravan he took off the hard white plastic mask and did not look at it, but threw it into a dark corner, packing his few belongings. And on Thursday morning, before the sun rose, he handed in his resignation to the circus manager and abandoned the life of wandering altogether. He fled the city with a plundered soul and a shattered heart, boarding the first train heading south, toward any distant and unknown city that would swallow him and make him forget his sorrow, leaving behind a pavement that Clara would come to a few hours later, only to find the gate closed, without ever knowing that the one she loved had been standing there the day before, trembling with cold and disappointment, and had despaired mere minutes before they could have met in the span of time.