Megrelburg: The Heart of Van Helten [English Version]

Howard flinched, surfacing from his trance. Tyler was about the same height as he was—around one hundred and seventy centimeters—of average build, with neatly styled chestnut hair: his bangs fell to the right side, while on the left there was a perfect part, as if he had spent half an hour in front of the mirror trying to achieve that careless precision. In his eyes burned the same excitement with which he collected school gossip the way others collected stamps.

“Well, picture it,” Tyler went on, not waiting for an answer. “Chris and Jake went yesterday to that old warehouse behind the park—you know the one everyone avoids. Rumor says someone holds underground bicycle races there, but it’s not certain. Anyway, they decided it was their chance to become ‘those guys.’ They climbed in, and there was a security guard—not just any, but supposedly an ex-military man. Chris, of course, immediately started babbling something about ‘we were just looking,’ and Jake tried to act like he’d wandered in by accident and had just been passing by on his way to buy bread. The guard looked at them like he saw right through them and said, ‘If you’re just looking, why do you have flashlights in your hands and gloves like burglars?’ In the end, he made them clean up trash around the warehouse until midnight. And today everyone at school already knows, and Chris is telling everyone it was a ‘voluntary community initiative.’”

Tyler burst out laughing, clearly savoring every detail of the story, and waited for Howard to smile too, to pick up the joke and join in their usual back-and-forth. And Howard did smile—but the smile came out strained, like a badly sewn button. He nodded in the right places, inserted “come on” and “no way,” but his gaze kept slipping back to Emily, who was still standing alone, as if the world around her had paused for a second.

“And in the end, you know what he said?” Tyler leaned forward, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “The guard threw at them on their way out: ‘Next time you come back, at least come up with a decent cover story. “We were just going for bread” isn’t even funny anymore.’”

Howard wanted to laugh, wanted to say something witty like before, but the words stuck somewhere between his throat and his tongue. Instead, he suddenly felt how tightly he was squeezing the handle of his bag, as if it were an anchor keeping him from simply turning around and walking over to Emily.

“Listen,” he exhaled, trying to keep his voice calm and unhurried, without resentment toward himself for once again postponing an important step. “Sorry, I really have to go. I’m... a little out of it right now. But I’ll gladly hear the rest later, honestly.”

Tyler paused for a second, as if not quite understanding why his story had not gotten the expected reaction. Then he nodded, frowning slightly, but immediately relaxed again—he had a talent for not staying offended for long.

“Fine. But don’t think you’re getting out of it. After class you’ll tell me where you were rushing off to.” He winked, waved, and melted into the crowd, carrying with him part of the usual noise that always swirled around him.

As soon as Tyler disappeared from view, Howard turned back to the spot where Emily had been standing. But now she was no longer alone. A small group of friends had gathered around her: someone was telling a story, waving their hands, someone was laughing, and she herself had tilted her head slightly, that same smile playing on her lips—light, sincere, as if she really was enjoying the chatter, the little things, the ordinary school moments.

For a moment Howard froze. He took a couple of steps forward, almost without realizing it, and simply looked at her—at the way the light fell on her hair, at the sparks of laughter in her blue eyes, at how she moved as if unaware of her own beauty, as if it were simply part of her, as natural as breathing. And in that moment he suddenly understood: she was beautiful not because she was perfect, but because she was real. There was nothing invented about her, nothing calculated—only life, loud and bright, refusing to obey any scripts.

He held that image inside for another second, letting it warm him from within, then slowly turned left, gripping the handle of his bag more tightly. With his other hand he mechanically adjusted his coat, as if that gesture could give him back even a little composure. And he walked on—not toward her, not now, but not away from her either. Just farther, to where the day was already waiting for him with all its unexpected turns that defied any calculation.

A couple of lessons passed almost unnoticed—as if Howard had been present in the classroom only in body, while his thoughts wandered somewhere far away. In geometry, the teacher drew angles and triangles on the board, wrote out formulas, but to Howard these were not figures but diagrams: he was mentally constructing the ideal trajectory by which he might approach Emily, calculating the points where their routes crossed in the hallways, picking out moments when she was alone. Every line became a step toward a conversation, every angle a possible obstacle to get around. In geography, it was even further from reality. The teacher talked about climates, capitals, and mountain ranges, while the lovesick boy saw not maps and atlases but his and Emily’s travels. There they were, walking along the narrow cobblestone streets of old Brussels—between houses with pointed roofs, where the wind carried the smell of fresh pastries from a little bakery on the corner; there they stood on the shore of the Mediterranean by the cliffs of Amalfi, and the salty wind mixed her wavy hair with the sun’s sparkles on the water; there they were riding a train through the green hills of Tuscany, with rows of cypresses and vineyards bathed in golden light drifting past the window. Every country turned into the place of their future vacation, every river into a road they might walk along together. He caught himself mechanically writing down the names of cities—Brussels, Naples, Florence—as if composing an itinerary, then immediately erased them, feeling the absurdity of those fantasies.

During the long break, Howard sat down at a table in the school cafeteria—at the very one by the window, from which part of the schoolyard was visible. He was served the usual late-80s school lunch: a plate of mashed potatoes with a golden-breaded cutlet on top, a few slices of pickled cucumber and a piece of dark bread beside it. In the mug was warm cocoa—not too sweet, with a light foam on top. Howard ate almost mechanically, not tasting anything, and from time to time stirred the cocoa with his spoon, as if hoping to find some answer in the dark liquid.

The cafeteria hummed with its usual sounds: the clatter of dishes, fragments of conversations, someone’s laughter, the scraping of chairs. But to Howard that noise seemed distant, fading into a background against which his own thoughts rang louder. He looked out the window, where streams from the morning rain ran along the asphalt, and again went over the phrases from that little paper in his head, trying to find an intonation that would not make them sound laughable or pitiful.

At some point he felt someone’s gaze on him—warm, persistent, but not heavy. Raising his eyes, he saw Susan. She had quietly sat down across from him, resting her hands on the edge of the table, and was looking at him with her big green eyes—attentively, patiently, as if she were ready to sit like that through the whole break until he finally noticed her.

Susan was small, delicate, with soft features and a wayward strand of light hair that always escaped from her braid. There was not a drop of that tense composure that lived in Howard—she seemed lighter, as if she knew how not to cling to worries but to let them drift past. But beneath that outward lightness she was incredibly perceptive: she noticed everything—how her brother squeezed his fingers, how he averted his gaze, how he stirred his cocoa not in circles but with sharp, nervous movements. To her, those little things were like words, only more honest.

“You’re thinking about something again that you’re not telling anyone,” she said quietly, tilting her head slightly, as if listening not to words but to what was hidden behind them. “I can tell. You’re sitting like you’re holding the whole world on your shoulders, and it doesn’t fit you.”

Howard smiled weakly—not because things had gotten easier, but because next to Susan even heaviness felt a little less prickly.

“It’s just one of those days,” he tried to wave it off, but his voice betrayed him: there was no confidence in it, only weariness.

“A day like any other,” Susan replied calmly, not arguing, just calling things by their names. “But you’re different in it. Not like when you’re just angry or tired. You seem afraid to take a step, and then afraid you won’t take it.”

She paused, then carefully pushed a saucer with a small shortbread cookie—his favorite—toward him.

“If you don’t want to talk, you don’t have to. I’ll just sit here. Or we can talk about anything: about classes, about Tyler’s dumb gossip, about how weird the cocoa is today. Or about nothing at all. But if you ever want someone to just listen... I’m here. And I won’t say ‘come on’ or ‘it’s not that bad.’ I’ll just listen.”

There was no pressure in her words, only a quiet, reliable kindness—the kind that asks nothing in return and therefore works more powerfully than any persuasion.

Howard looked at his sister, at her attentive green eyes, at that cookie, as if she were trying to support her words with something tangible, and suddenly felt something inside him loosen just a little, shedding some of the tension.

“Thank you,” he said quietly, and that “thank you” was not for the cookie but for the fact that she hadn’t tried to poke at the most painful place, but had simply reached out her hand into the darkness.

He took the cookie, bit off a piece, and this time the taste suddenly became real—sweet, crumbly, simple. And for one short second all that endless calculation of possibilities, all those routes and scenarios, all the attempts to think through everything and miss nothing—all of it receded, leaving room for something small but real: his sister, the cookie, a quiet conversation that didn’t have to lead anywhere.

Susan really had managed to pull Howard out of the whirlpool of his thoughts for a minute—so deftly, as if she had simply turned off the noise. He suddenly noticed how the cafeteria smelled: not only of food, but also of old wood, chalk from the classrooms, a little dusty and homely. He heard someone at the next table giggle, a spoon clink, a chair scrape. And for that one minute he felt lighter—as if the heaviness he had been carrying since morning had become a little lighter, not gone, but at least no longer pressing on his shoulders.

He looked at Susan and thought that in her attentive green eyes there was no judgment, no desire to “fix” him, not even the kind of curiosity that wounds. Only a quiet “I’m here.” And that made him calm. He treasured that sincerity of hers immensely—it was the very support that doesn’t boast of its reliability, but simply stands beside you, even when everything is falling apart.

Howard wanted to tell her everything: about Emily, about the paper in his pocket, about how he rehearsed every phrase ten times and still feared he would say the wrong thing. But he held back. He understood that she couldn’t give him the answer to the questions gnawing at him from inside. He didn’t want to shift that confusion onto her, didn’t want his anxiety to become her anxiety too. Let at least one person have a simple day.

But he did want to talk to her. Just to hear her voice, to feel that the world wasn’t made only of endless calculations.

“I see Tyler managed to fill you in on the Chris and Jake story,” he said with a smile, trying to make the smile not forced but real.

Susan snorted, rolling her eyes, and there was so much sisterly irony in that gesture that Howard couldn’t help smiling wider.

“He told me about it during the break between first and second period. And he made it sound like the news of the century. I even tried to pretend I was listening, but at some point I realized that if I heard the words ‘underground races’ one more time, I’d fall asleep right at my desk.”

“I couldn’t even properly pretend to be interested,” Howard admitted, lowering his voice a little. “I kept trying to look past him, over to where... Ahem.” He glanced aside, as if trying to instantly veer away from what he’d been about to say. “Where Harry was standing.”

Susan noticed that maneuver: her brother clearly didn’t want to say where exactly he had been looking, and it definitely wasn’t about Harry O’Neil. She simply nodded, as if understanding without words: “Yes, sometimes other people’s fun sounds like white noise when something of your own is humming inside.”

They went on discussing that absurd story for a little while—not seriously, just to keep talking, to avoid leaving a silence that could again give way to anxious thoughts. Susan comically imitated Tyler’s intonation when he whispered about “come up with a decent cover story,” and Howard laughed—sincerely, without effort, for the first time that day.

And in that moment he noticed how she suddenly froze, then changed her tone slightly—it became quieter, softer, as if she was trying to sound normal but couldn’t. Susan averted her gaze, and just then, past their table, a boy walked by. Howard saw him only from behind, but that was enough to sense the confidence in his stride: he walked as if he knew exactly where he was going and why, as if the whole world was not a labyrinth to him but a straight road. Shoulders squared, step sure, not a trace of haste.

In that same second, Susan’s fingers began nervously twisting around each other; her nails caught faintly, as if searching for something to hold on to. She seemed to be trying to hide that tremor, to pretend everything was fine, but to Howard, who was used to noticing details, it was like a scream, only very quiet.

A couple of seconds later, she looked back at her brother, as if returning from another world, and hastily broke the awkward pause:

“So... where were we? On how Tyler talks too much? Or on how Chris and Jake are the unluckiest people on earth?”

Howard smirked slightly, but didn’t press with questions. He didn’t want her to feel caught. Instead, he played along gently:

“I think we were on how Tyler is the best storyteller in the world—if you don’t listen to the content, only to the intonation.”

Susan exhaled—Howard noticed it by the way her shoulders relaxed a little—and smiled graciously, as if he had just quietly offered her a hand and kept her from falling.

The next second, Vanessa—Susan’s classmate—slid into the seat at their table. She burst into their quiet corner as if she had brought a piece of sunshine with her: bright, energetic, with that smile that seemed to promise the day couldn’t be all bad. She wore a plaid skirt, a turtleneck sweater, and a bright scarf that seemed to live a life of its own—it kept slipping, and she kept adjusting it, laughing at her own clumsiness.

“Hey there, my dears!” Vanessa exclaimed, flopping onto the bench as if they were not in the school cafeteria but at a picnic in the park. “You look so serious, like you’re discussing the fate of the universe instead of school lunch. What’s going on? Or better yet, tell me what’s been going on without me? I feel like I missed something important!”

Her voice was bright and infectious; there wasn’t an ounce of falseness in it—only a sincere desire to be part of everything happening. She immediately reached for Howard’s mug, pretended she was about to take a sip, then snatched her hand back with a giggle:

“Just kidding! Your cocoa is sacred. But if you have another cookie, I’m ready to sell my soul for it. Or at least tell you the latest gossip—your choice.”

She snapped her fingers as if trying to catch a thought, then blurted out:

“By the way, did you hear? There’s a rehearsal for the Christmas concert in the assembly hall on Friday, and Mr. Harris wants the seniors to help with the decorations. I already signed up. If you come with me, it won’t be so scary hauling those boxes. Or at least you can cheer me on.”

Vanessa talked fast, but not annoyingly—more as if she was afraid that if she stopped, all that charge of energy would simply scatter. And, most surprisingly, she really did change the atmosphere: with her arrival, the silence became fragile and the tension heavy. Now it was just a pause between lines, not an abyss one could fall into.

Susan laughed, shaking her head, but there was relief in her laughter—as if she too was glad they no longer had to hold the conversation just the two of them, that she could hide a little behind that cheerful chatter.

“Vanessa, you’re like a hurricane,” she said, smiling. “In a good way.”

“A hurricane with cookies and good intentions,” Vanessa winked, then turned to Howard as if only now truly noticing him. “And why are you so quiet? Don’t worry, I don’t bite. It’s just that when I’m quiet, I feel like the world stops, and I don’t like that.”

Howard caught himself smiling—and this time it wasn’t an attempt to seem normal. It came on its own, as if in response to that lively, loud sincerity.

The bell rang sharply, as if cutting the conversation off mid-sentence. Vanessa flinched, immediately jumped up, grabbed Susan by the arm, and pulled her along, chattering as she went:

“Okay, okay, let’s run, or else Mrs. Clark will again say I’m ‘disrupting discipline with my lateness,’ when really it’s her disrupting my peace of mind with her looks! Are you coming? Or are you going to pretend you’re an angel who’s never late?”

Susan, already rising, only managed to brush her hand across Howard’s shoulder—a light, almost weightless touch that held all her “I wish I could stay just one more minute.” She smiled at him quickly, guiltily, as if apologizing for the world’s hurry, and then vanished into the stream of students, carried away by Vanessa’s energetic whirlwind.

Everything around started moving: chairs scraped against the floor, someone dropped a notebook, someone called a friend across the hall, someone laughed without hearing their own voice in the noise. The hallways were already beginning to fill with the rumble of footsteps, and the cafeteria, which a minute before had seemed like an island of quiet, turned into a crossroads of hurrying lives—each person rushing to their own class, their own little drama, their own way of not drowning in the day.

Howard unhurriedly folded his napkin, wiped his mouth, stacked his dishes on the tray, and went to the washing station. On the way, he paused for a second, breathing in that particular cafeteria smell—warm bread, boiled potatoes, and a hint of sharp soap—as if he wanted to hold on to that moment of calm before plunging back into the school whirlpool.

By the sink stood Clara—a plump woman with kind, slightly tired eyes and hands roughened by hot water and brushes. She always smiled as if that smile was her personal way of keeping herself from drowning in routine. Beside her bustled her young helper Lina, who had only been working for two months and still fussed about as if afraid of doing something wrong.

“Well, here you are, Howard,” Clara said, nodding almost imperceptibly, and in her voice there was neither reproach nor hurry—only the usual warm recognition of his presence. “As always, you bring everything yourself. Not like some: they leave their trays as if we’re not people but the janitors of their personal messes.” She turned toward Lina and went on. “I remember when he first came. Eleven years ago... such a little boy, big brown eyes, blinking as if the whole world scared him, yet trying to stand straight as if he wasn’t afraid. He’d bring his tray in his little hands, thank me so warmly as if I’d saved his life. I thought then: see, there are children who understand that politeness isn’t about ‘you’re supposed to,’ but about ‘I see you.’”

Lina smiled, tilting her head slightly, and answered quietly:

“It’s nice to see that. In all this hustle... it’s like a little ray of light.”

Howard stood with his gaze lowered a little, and a modest smile played on his lips—not from pride, but rather from the awkward warmth spreading somewhere beneath his ribs. It was pleasant to hear, but he didn’t want to be made into a hero. To him, it was simply the right thing: not to leave a mess behind, not to walk past those who make your life a little easier every day.

He stepped closer and, setting his tray on the counter, said quietly but firmly:

“Thank you. For doing all this every day. For the lunches, for the cleanliness, for the fact that even when everyone is rushing and making noise, it still feels... human here. I appreciate it. Really.”

Clara froze for a second—as if those words had fallen right into her palms and she didn’t know where to put them so they wouldn’t drop. Then she nodded slowly, and something flickered in her eyes—the kind of thing that appears when someone finally notices not only your work, but you yourself.

“Thank you, Howard,” she said quietly, squeezing the cloth in her hand a little, as if that familiar thing had suddenly become an anchor for her. “Sometimes just hearing that... it’s like a cup of hot tea on a cold day. It warms you.”

Lina also smiled, blushed slightly, and murmured:

“Yes... thank you. That’s nice.”

Howard nodded once more, as if wanting to set those words in place, to make them real, then turned toward the cafeteria exit. At the doorway he paused for a second, as if wanting to add something else, but couldn’t find the right words—and just smiled faintly once more toward the sink, where Clara was already getting back to work, but now there was a little more lightness in her movements, and in her voice, as she said something quietly to Lina, there was a quiet gratitude.

“Everyone has their own river,” he thought as he walked down the hall toward the art room. “And each one has its own current, its own rapids, its own quiet backwaters where one can hide for a little while. And no one knows how much strength it takes just to stay afloat.”

He walked on, and those thoughts did not weigh him down but rather supported him, like a railing on a steep staircase. He knew that every person wakes up in the morning carrying some burden—someone is afraid of a test, someone of a conversation, someone simply afraid that the day will again be gray and empty. And almost everyone thinks their own problems are the heaviest, while other people’s are trifles, because those are invisible. But he, like Susan, tried to notice that invisible heaviness. Tried not to pass by, not to pretend he didn’t see.

His mother’s words, spoken one evening when he had complained that people around were “not what they should be,” always came back to him:

“It doesn’t matter whether you know a person personally or it’s just some stranger. Be polite and kind. You can never know what a person went through this morning or last evening, what thoughts are tormenting their mind, what makes them barely hold back from dropping their hands and crying. Sometimes one kind word is a lifeline you throw without even knowing that someone is drowning.”

And he tried to throw those lifelines. Not for praise, not to seem good, but because he believed: if you see that someone is struggling, the least you can do is not add to their burden.

The door to the art room was ajar, and no familiar noise came from inside—no arguments about paints, no laughter, no rustling of paper. Howard paused, as if listening to that strange silence, then stepped inside. There was no one in the room except the elderly teacher—Mr. Finch. He was short, with gray hair heavily silvered at the temples and a large bald spot that made his forehead seem especially high, almost wise. The deep wrinkles on his face formed a complex pattern: they softened when he smiled and sharpened when his gaze turned stern. Mr. Finch’s brown eyes could be both warm and piercing—as if he were simultaneously understanding you and testing whether you deserved that understanding.