A bottle with a secret. Alla Krasnova

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      A bottle with a secret

      Alla Krasnova

      Illustrator Иллюстрации Zap

      © Alla Krasnova, 2025

      © Иллюстрации Zap, illustrations, 2025

      ISBN 978-5-0067-1379-6

      Created with Ridero smart publishing system

      Sergei. The first chapter

      That summer was unsettling, bleak, but very beautiful. I stayed at my grandmother’s dacha, and occasionally, in order to have at least some communication, we went out into nature with our neighbors. Our dachas were located not far from each other, but we saw each other infrequently. A middle-aged neighbor named Clara invited my grandmother to a picnic, and I came with her. There were five of us in total, because she brought her other two nieces, Tara and Rita. Rita and I didn’t have much contact, she wasn’t interested in us, but we almost became friends with Tara. Almost, because what kind of friendship can there be under the strict supervision of adults?

      We drank lemonade that summer. Klara and the girls made it themselves, it looked like slightly fermented kvass, but it was easy to drink, toned.

      I still remember that wild August: a sea of flowers spread out like a blanket, we sit and look at sandwiches, try to talk. My grandmother and Klara do it easily, they discuss onions and potatoes, who has what tomatoes, apricots and cherries, flowers this year, and we didn’t have much to talk about. Teenagers are a gentle, timid people. So, in order not to sit completely idle, I took the already drunk, empty bottle of lemonade and said to Tara: «Let’s go make"secrets». Now I’ll make a «secret», we’ll bury the bottle, and then we’ll see in ten years who wrote what! It will come true or not.“ Always despondent, sad, and tortured by her aunt’s moralizing, Tara seemed to come to life: „Yes, come on!“ she exclaimed. She didn’t understand what „secrets“ were, but I explained that we should write wish notes and then see what happens in ten years. I also added that her thoughts were material enough to get her fully involved in my game. I pulled out my travel notebook, tore out a couple of pages, and gave one to her, keeping the other for myself. „Just don’t peek! I said. «Write!»

      She nodded. I don’t know what she wrote there, but she thought for a long time – sometimes she turned to look at me, but it was as if she was looking right through me, then she lowered her eyes again, thought, and wrote again. Finally, she finished, rolled up the paper, came over to me, and carefully put it in the bottle.

      – But only exactly, so that in ten years and not a year earlier! – No, «she said firmly. «Well, let me see,» she said, smiling. «Geez, in ten years I’ll be old, almost twenty-five.

      – yes! I exclaimed. – I’m almost the same age.»

      We both remembered the three-month age difference, in fact I was older, but we looked as if she was several lifetimes ahead of me, she already had such a thoughtful, piercing look. I was pleased that she enjoyed this adventure. For the first time in a long time, I saw her smile from the bottom of her heart. We buried our bottle of notes under a lonely tree and, as it turned out, passed the time very well, because they were already looking for us. I could hear my grandmother’s voice calling for Tara and me. They seemed to have lost us, talking about something of their own, for a while forgot about our existence, while we were planning the future in our dreams.

      In general, memory is a strange thing. It seems that nothing special happened, and there were events in my life that were much brighter, more powerful and significant than this, but this picture stood and stood before my inner eye: a tree, a bottle with notes, and we bury it deep and for a long time.

      ***

      Twenty years have passed. My grandmother died that year, my mother and stepfather sold their dacha and breathed a sigh of peace. They never liked her, then split up the money and went their separate ways. I got married twice, then divorced, then lived with a woman named Linda. A good woman, but she was a gamer, not from this world, she preferred virtual communication to everything. It was somehow difficult to catch her in reality. So the question of whether there was a woman was always up in the air. I think we broke up long before we broke up, physically separated from her. I don’t know if she was suffering, but I was suffering all the time. True, not because of her, but just like that, apparently, this need to suffer has been sitting in me for a long time and forever. The shortness of time, which is difficult to describe, greatly upset me. And then there’s my worthlessness, my mental distress, and my eternal, never-ending fear of the future. Fortunately, everything was fine with my career, but this external well-being made my fear of the future even greater, as if it fed it.

      Of course, I forgot about that bottle of notes, and I didn’t think about it until the summer of twenty years later, when I was depressed. You could say that she had me covered from scratch, because I didn’t have any obvious reasons for her. But there was a devilish play on words in this very formulation – in an empty place – because I mercilessly felt the emptiness of life, as if this life did not exist at all, and everything that was – was as if not with me.

      ***

      I was quite good-looking, as they say, in the prime of life. I had no problem meeting the woman – they called me themselves. But something imperceptible crept up and enslaved my peace of mind, as if I began to bury myself more and more. I was more and more drawn to look into the dark forest of my past, and I couldn’t help thinking that I had lived wrongly. And because of this, I woke up in a cold sweat. My friends and I often went out to ride motorcycles, and they called me, but I didn’t want to talk at all. On another camping trip, I thought of Tara, but only because the guys and I were sitting under a tree, and the wife of one of our comrades was with us. She suddenly said: «And we buried „secrets“ in the sand, and then opened them, that was a joy!» And then I remembered the bottle with the secret.

      She said it so easily, so directly, that I couldn’t help but remember that last summer at my grandmother’s dacha. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Funny, I wanted to understand more about what Tara had written, even though I couldn’t remember what I’d written or if I’d ever written it. At night, when I closed my eyes and sleep gradually took hold of my sanity, I would dream of this bottle being thrown into the loose, black soil under the tree. Although I clearly understood that I would probably never find this tree. And all this is nonsense. But I didn’t have the energy to work anymore. I gathered my last strength and took a vacation – I left earlier than I was going to. Two months earlier, it just became unbearable.

      Probably, someone else in my place would certainly попhave taken theback road of fate in search of a skilled psychiatrist, but I got into social networks and started looking for Tara. How do you find her?» What is it like now? I couldn’t even remember her last name. The only thing I remembered was that she was 35, because she was three months younger than me. The lack of information was compensated only by the determination to find it, for some reason it became so important. The image of that blooming, anxious summer kept coming back to me, as if an invisible conductor of fate had waved his wand so that everything around me would pick up an anxious note and freeze on it.

      ***

      I looked through dozens of accounts with roughly the same date of birth, but it was almost impossible to find it that way. There are many women who were born on the first of March 35 years ago with the name Tara. And how would I know her if I hadn’t seen her in twenty years? I wasn’t sure if that was her full name at all, because it was quite possible that her name was Tamara or Tamila, and Tara was just a shortened name. I sighed. My grandmother was the mother of my stepfather, whom my mother had separated from almost 20 years ago. It seemed to me that I needed to find my stepfather, if he was still alive, and then find out from him who his mother was friends with at the dacha. But that didn’t hold water either, because I hadn’t seen him since my divorce from my mother. It was a stalemate, but she wouldn’t let me go.

      I started looking for a list of mental disorders where the entire focus of attention converges in the past, and at its not most significant point. Well, there are people