When I turned 18 I left Budapest and went to Vienna. Maybe there were more exciting places to go to, but I wanted to go to Vienna. Because it was the first trip I was going to make all by myself I absolutely wanted to go by plane. But to fly from Budapest to Vienna was absurd. So I decided to go with a special flight discount and fly to Vienna via London. I would have to spend the night in a London hotel, which meant an extra chunk out of my tight budget, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that plane, cruising through the sky, with me in its belly.
On the day of the departure I arrived three hours early at the airport. I was so nervous I constantly paced up and down the hall, looking at planes and sometimes bumping into people going in the other direction. All the time I had one eye glued to the large terminal clock, which hung above the entrance door. It was a big black box with twelve white stripes and one longer and one shorter white arm. I sometimes imagined I could hear its mechanical heart twisting and turning behind its black and white surface and the thought struck me as an incredibly sad one, although I couldn’t say why.
Approximately 45 minutes before take-off a woman entered the waiting room in which I had been sitting for the past 15 minutes (nervously tapping my foot on the floor). I raised my head to look at her and immediately knew I would have trouble bringing it down again. She was tall and thin and had long, naturally blond hair, which lay like two bouncy curtains on both sides of her face. She wasn’t so young anymore, I would say 37 or 38, but that only seemed to fit the aura of serenity that hung about her perfectly. As if she wanted to prove that age wasn’t a punishment, but something worth while waiting for. In spite of the hot temperatures she wore a black skirt, which reached all the way down to her calves, black shoes with rubber soles, a black shirt with short sleeves and a transparant purple scarf. When she sat down in the chair across from me she turned her head to the man sitting next to her, slightly raised her chin and compressed her lips into a faint smile. The man nodded his head in turn and quickly ran his eyes down her body.
Because she was sitting at the other end of the room and because that room was getting pretty crowded as time went by I was reduced to seeing only bits and pieces of her, like a foot, an ankle, an arm or a finger with a wedding band. Suddenly I saw her left eye, staring at me from behind the hip of an older woman and I stared back at it. The eye looked away, turned to the magazine in another woman’s lap, scattered towards the ceiling and eventually ended up with me again. Our eyes locked in what must have been the longest three or four seconds of my life. Finally she looked away, disappeared completely behind the hip of the woman in front of me and allowed me to start blushing all the way up to my eartips.
A little after that the glass doors opened up and the group of talking, sweating people started to move towards the exit. As I was standing up I tried my best not to look around to see where she was, but couldn’t help scanning the crowd in front of me. I didn’t see her, so I figured she had to be behind me. For all I knew she was staring at me right then and there, just as I had done only moments earlier. I started blushing again and pushed against the person in front of me, all the time apologizing but also hoping to get me out of this room and onto that bus as fast as possible.
In the bus, which had no seats, everybody just went straight to the back. Because I didn’t feel like rubbing up to a pair of sticky legs or arms I decided to stay in front, just behind the driver’s eat. I was leaning up against the window and watching the reflected faces of the people passing by behind me when I saw her. She looked at me, stepped out of line and casually took the place beside me. She could have walked on, to the back of the bus, far away from the boy who had been staring at her in that small, sweaty waiting room, but she didn’t. She had walked up to me and deliberately positioned herself next to me. I could feel her eyes burning holes in my back. Sweat started to pierce through my skin and I was almost certain that small sweat stains were starting to build around my armpits. Her sent was fresh, like a lemon. She obviously wore perfume, I didn’t and I couldn’t stop worrying if she was able to smell me. Only after the doors had closed and the bus had roared off onto the runway I turned around and looked her in the face. Her chin went up and her lips came together in a faint smile, almost like the one she showed the person in the seat next to her a couple of minutes ago. Almost. This time there was something different about her smile, but I wasn’t sure what it was or how to call it.
When the doors opened up again and the plane was waiting outside she slowly started to walk away from me without having said a single word. Of course dozens of conversations had flashed through my mind during the two or three minutes we stood side by side in that damp airport bus, but not one of them seemed worth while starting. When people started lining up to climb the small staircase to the plane she left the line, walked further away from me, and cut in again right before the staircase. When she was standing at the top of the stairs she tilted her head slightly backward, maybe to see the airport building or the plane flying just over it, and suddenly the wind caught her hair, pulling it way back and exposing her cheeks. To my surprise they were almost completely covered with pimples, just like the ones you suffer from in puberty. Quickly she tried to bring her hair back alongside her face, but the wind wouldn’t let her. Just seconds later she disappeared into the small, egg-shaped hole of the plane, still covering the sides of her face with her long, slightly bony hand.
It was uncommon for a woman her age to still suffer from acne, but she did and never again did I see such a beautiful person as I did that day, standing at the bottom of a staircase that would take me to London Heathrow, where I was headed with no idea what it was I wanted out of life, although I felt it had to be something good and something beautiful, because that was all that really mattered.
Wouter Dehairs