A note book

The winter this year was cold and gloomy. An enormous amount of snow covered the city one day, and clouds wrapped the sky on the next, and only in the early spring some light and warmth came back.

A dark-haired guy in a black coat slowly walks along a street lit by lanterns. Step. Pulls a large scarf to the middle of the pale face. His head was lowered, and his fingers, which had been playing the piano keys in the conservatory all day, already froze. Every day he passes by this park. Step. The ice and snow just started to melt. Orange light and a blue sky reflect on it as if it's sprinkled with sparkles. Out of the corner of his eye, he notices something sticking out from under a snow cap, and stops for a second. But a chill wind strikes under his scarf and he hurries ignoring whatever he noticed.

Silence by Beethoven plays in his head. It's the new composition that he memorizes for the first concert this season. Fingers knock on the air. He spends around eight hours playing and rehearsing every day, and holds rehearsals open to the public every Saturday. He used to wait for the weekend all the time, but that person stopped appearing. And he lost this strange foretaste.

Several days had passed since then. He has been ignoring the peaking thing and subconsciously complained about the poor work of the snow blowers until curiosity won.

That morning the sun was finally shining in the vivid blue sky after a long time, and streams of the melting winter had run along the sidewalk, while he was on his way to work. His brown eyes inadvertently fell to that place not far from the bench, and he again saw something peeking out with a sharp black corner. Looking closer, this turned out to be a book or something similar, so he stopped. Being a quiet homeschooled child, books were his eternal friends, so he was puzzled to see one of them thrown away so easily in the park.

The young man looked around, as if the careless owner may be nearby, but there is not a soul nearby in the early morning. Long hands reach the book before he thinks and pull it out with a little effort. The bottom of the black leather cover was covered in ice and the paper became soggy, obviously after being buried in snow for a long time. The person tightens his lips, opens it, and suddenly raises his eyebrows. Manuscript? A diary? Paper wavy from moisture is streaked with neat handwriting as if the author of the words tried very hard, but now some of them cannot be read. They went stained and words at the corners of the pages became blurry and unreadable.

“Wait, why are you touching other people's things?” he thinks all of a sudden.

“But if someone lost it? It seems that someone put a lot of work into it — almost all the pages are filled with prose.”

The young man sighs doubtfully and, brushing off the snow from the little book, wants to leave it on the bench. But for some reason, he hesitates. Then, the phone rings, and without thinking twice, he throws the find into the briefcase and turns around, heading straight for the conservatory.

The keys jump quickly up and down under the pressure of the pianist’s dexterous fingers. He briefly looks at the black notebook, thrown to dry in front of the large window of the concert hall. That evening, he, with the curiosity not even closely typical of him, finally opens the find. “Indeed, some kind of story.” Sitting on the sofa next to the lamp and only source of light, a person flips through the crisp pages. He looks for the name or address of the owner and skims along the lines of prose when he suddenly stops and sits down straight.

“She comes to this place every Saturday,” written with the black ink.

The man opens his mouth, not realizing why he is so puzzled again.

“The person behind the piano seems so distant to her, but the music flowing through the hall like honey makes him very close. But she knows — it's all just music.”

He, who was sitting at the piano an hour ago, blinks in surprise and starts to re-read the sentences again. He goes a few pages back and then a few pages forward; checks the very first and last pages, but there is nothing, nor a number or a name.

“She is so bad at catching details yet one day she notices something, something hilariously rebellious and strange to her. Another gloomy evening was saved by this talented musician she loved to come and listen to; the audience was pouring him with applause, and when he smiled so brightly, he raised his hand. A hand with beautiful long fingers, when she suddenly noticed a small heart tattoo right on the back of his ring finger. And the next time, when she clumsily left an ink spot on her fingers while writing, she involuntarily thought of him."

He raises his hand with long musical fingers and perplexedly looks at a tattoo with a small heart on the back of his ring finger.

* * *

Since that evening, the young man only had one thought.

“Who wrote this?” he muttered in confusion.

Obviously, at first, he was a little scared. He had to double-check if it’s not a coincidence and he is really the person described in the manuscript. But he even reads a description of the park near the conservatory, where cherry trees shower sidewalks with rose petals every spring and flow into the nearby river. He again looks for some identifier of the author or owner of the manuscript. The only clue is the dates by which some chapters are signed. Someone began to write these notes in the summer. Light graceful prose, written by someone with a skillful pen, in which the young man somehow ended up, has mentally knocked him down. And suddenly broke off.

“She knows she will never come and say a word. The only thing she knows is how to observe, and nothing more. There will be another air, another geographic parallel, and this will be forgotten as the first interest in a person in a long time. ” The last sentence is crossed out being written a day before Christmas.

The sun floods a glossy instrument and a person, already in his third hour of playing complex scales and turning pages of the notes. But the fingers hit the wrong keys again and again and miss, and what he learned is forgotten as he blinks. Never has this ever happened before.

“If these stories are published, I will be brave and tell this person the truth.” Last record.

From the first octave to the last, he is trying to remember who could write it and then lose it or throw it away. He does not know why he needs this. He wants to think that this is just an act of kindness because perhaps the clumsy owner was looking for the fruit of his labors and it was he who happened to find it. But he also understands that for the first time in a long time he became passionate about something besides music. A little confusion in a stable row of events. 

His everyday life was like winter, meaninglessly the same and cold, like a boring dream. Now he wants to know if his guesses are true. Long warm brown hair tucked behind one cute ear, red lipstick, and fragile hands, sincerely clapping when he glanced into the audience after finishing his play. That person did not come to listen to him playing since the end of December, oddly matching with the day of the last recording in the notebook.

Sonata for piano number seventeen. He found out more, again turned over the pages shabby for three months of custody in the snow.

“She looks out of the window and feels the bittersweet taste of spring. The park blooms just around the corner as if winter did not go away, but instead of snow it is wrapped in flowers.”

Just like in this park, by which he passes every day. Somewhere here. It could be a fiction, but after work, he goes and leaves some leaflets on trees and street lights near the park. He put his number and started to wait if an unknown writer will respond.

“You are an idiot who picked up an unneeded notebook and decided that he was connected with you,” he mumbles.

The young man wearily runs his hand through his soft disheveled hair and reaches for the cooled coffee. Orange lanterns illuminate a darkened room from the window of which you can see the park. The bare trees are now overgrown with pale pink flowers. A couple more days and the whirlwinds of fallen petals will begin to fly through the streets. But a week has passed, and no one answered the leaflets. The concert is coming soon. That person has not come since Christmas and most likely will never come.

“Indeed, an idiot.”

He was always only interested in music and now just wastes his time.

Suddenly the phone rings.

That winter day was cold, perhaps the coldest in a few years. A dark-haired young woman in a light coat and a large scarf runs along a dark street, leaving shuffling traces on the white asphalt. She froze to the bone but did not feel the cold. Things she tried to hold in thin hands reddened by frost are desperate to fall: a small bag that has slipped from a shoulder, a pile of paper and a scribbled black notebook, more like a book. She hurries to the last concert of the year, hoping that this will brighten up such a sad day she had. Glasses, fogged-up from running and ragged breathing, rolled down the bridge of her nose, and after another ten meters she fell, and all things fell from her hands onto the wet ground.

Too late. The last performance of the city conservatory began an hour and a half ago. A few hours ago, her fifth and last publishing house rejected her prose. Leaflets with ready-made text scatter like huge snowflakes in the beginning snowfall and fall, sticking and getting wet in a puddle. She gave herself the last chance and a piece of hope as an author and gave up the last opportunity to see a man, because of whom she began to listen to classical music every Saturday evening. 

Silence. On that day, she decided to put an end to both. Sheets of paper that were so precious to her before being left to scatter on the sidewalk. She rose as a need to cry rose to her throat, lifted the manuscript from the ground, and her lips trembled.

“There is no chance. Good.”

And suddenly she threw six months of her life somewhere into the darkness of the park. Snowflakes began to stick on long eyelashes, but she did not notice them behind the watery veil. An orange lantern remained in that place together with abandoned hopes and snowflakes gaining strength before the snowfall. That night a record rainfall fell. She returned to that place in the morning full of regret and piled snow where the notebook could fall, but was never successful. It disappeared under the thick white snowy blanket. And the suitcases were already packed. Maybe it was never meant to be. There is no destiny.

“Yes... Sure… We can meet and I will return your notebook.” 

* * *

The city shrouded in cold was completely conquered by spring, and now the crowns of cherry trees are white because of the flowers, not the snow. From the slightest breath of cool wind, they tremble and drop rain from pale petals on the road and bypassers. They whirl on dry pavement and rush under the boots of a young man, shuffling from foot to foot from fluster. He continually turns the notebook in his hands and looks around in search of someone. He stands at the bench in the park exactly where he found the notebook and already thinks that no one will come and all of that is strange and stupid. Maybe the wrong person comes and not the one he thought it would be. Perhaps if that person had not stopped coming every Saturday, he would have passed by a notebook looking out from under the snow and never even touched it and stand here.

“Excuse me,” someone lightly touches his shoulder and he turns around.

Red lipstick, thin fragile arms, and long brown hair tucked behind one ear.