When I was born, my grandfather was in his 50’s, so by the time I had to go to college he was already too old to be introduced to any of my new friends. Well, almost any. There was also a girl named Sara. She loved my grandfather because her own died long time ago. „Old people hide so many stories”, she used to say, when my reckless mind and nature didn’t find patience to listen to his word or advice. „Oh, really? Then you be the one to bare this crazy old man!”. Unlike my grandpa, I was young. Too young to be wise, too young to be patient. Sara was both wise and patient, even though she was young. But Sara was also a girl.

I was in love with that girl.

On my grandpa’s birthday, she came to our place with a brand new fishing rod. A glimpse to her present was enough to make me realize how expensive that thing might have been. Sara was far from being rich, yet she was damn stubborn in her wish to spread life and joy around her. There was that superior knowledge in her heart that made her place the momentary happiness of grandpa above the following days deprived of proper food, coffee and cigarettes. „It’s a perfect day to go fishing”, she said in a mild sparkling voice, smiling from the doorsteps. I know that most of the men wish to become the father of a boy, but I bet in such moments my grandpa wished to have been the grandfather of a girl like her. Yes, I was jealous on her, just as I was angry with myself for everything I couldn’t do the way she was doing. Grandpa was 70 at that time. She made him look 40 by a simple hold of his hand. An hour later, after checking the food basket and our seatbelts, I heard her chirping again: „So, everybody on board?”. „Ay, ay, captain!”, laughed grandpa, proudly sitting by her right side on the front seat, while I had to bare the humiliation of sitting in the back along with the worms and the sandwiches.

She was driving the old car of his father. Her father was working in a gas station, so the car smelled like gas. I was almost sure that even the worms will smell like gas, then the fish which will eat the worms, then we, who were bound to eat the fish. Her brown hair falling on her shoulders – it has to smell like gas too! I bent over using a silly question as an excuse for my movement (actually it was quite difficult to make myself understood with all that noise around). A family portrait – my face, then my grandpa’s, giving off a fresh scent of Cologne, then Sara. Years after that trip, looking back in the past and trying to recreate the impressions I had, I used to think that it was the gas smell and my grandpa’s Cologne following me through the paths of time. Years after, I remembered the other smell, the only one hunting my senses so deeply that I simply had to forget it: a smell of mountains and rain, of dew and of jasmine, a smell of Sara as she was at that time, so young and so beautiful, so crazily in love with my grandfather just as I was, even without admitting, so crazily in love with everything about her.

My family had a farm where grandpa used to live before growing too old to manage things alone or better said before grandma died. We thought he won’t survive living without grandma. They had been together for more than 50 years and grandpa cheated on her many times. All those women were uglier than grandma, that’s for sure. By choosing them ugly, it was his way to protect grandma from losing him. There’s no danger to fall in love with an ugly girl, unless she has brain, but when it comes about sex men seldom think about brain. The first girl I slept with – she was quite a figure! Pretty, smart and a high-school prostitute. She chose me that night because she was drunk and because I was desperate. It lasted less than 10 minutes and only because of her, otherwise it would have been less than 2. I found out later that she married a lawyer who made her mother of a bunch of four kids. When I was panting on her sweaty body, she was far from the classical image of a mother. I felt so embarrassed for my lack of knowledge, my hands were so clumsy, my mouth so dry, my mind so dizzy in her brandy breath. In less than 10 minutes, she taught me all I needed to know about where things can go in and when’s the time for them to go out. But the true lesson I learnt that day was in fact about jasmine. Unless she smells like jasmine, I could never fall in love with a prostitute.

Right before pulling over the lake, I noticed grandpa’s eyes looking at me in the mirror. It was that type of inquiring look that makes you feel really uncomfortable when you go to a party and drop right in the middle of a hungry crowd devouring the new comers with their cheap chat about dress, tie, partners and shoes. “I hope you realize she came here for you”, he said later, catching my wrist in his wrinkled hand, in a moment when she was not paying attention to neither of us. “I hope you realize that’s not something for me to care of or for you to be worried about”, I cut it short, obviously disturbed by his interference in what I used to call my private life, indefinite sequence of words looking more like a joke than like serious matter, considering that my college years have been an endless row of failures in everything that could be called private. My grandfather probably knew it all the time, I had the profile of a fake ever since I was born. I faked almost anything I could think of: family relationships, the girls I had sex with, my so-called friends, my studies, my dreams. I think he felt sorry for me, for his idiot and emotionally handicapped grandson. He may have cheated on grandma a thousand times, but he never faked his feelings for her, nor did he fake his opinions about life and his living according to them. On the other hand, I was faking even his birthday, by pretending not to be in mood for fishing, in mood for his old witty jokes and for Sara, pretending to such an extent that I believed it myself, despite their efforts to get me out of that state of mind. When they gave up, I saw an old man and a young girl, both full of life, enjoying a perfect afternoon in laughter, and I ended by envying them for every single moment of happiness.

“You could help us by making a fire”. She said it in low voice because she knew she’s not able to hide the reproach against me, and she didn’t want my grandpa to hear it. They caught a few small carps and I should have known the number, since each of them was followed by a cry of victory and surprise. “Since you started this joke, you should also be the one to put an end to it”, I whispered through my teeth, avoiding her eyes (she had tears in her eyes) and scanning one of the several magazines I found in her trunk. “Why do you like to behave like a jerk?”. Good point and a very good question. Wasn’t it obvious? “Because I am a jerk”, my mind answered. “Because what you’re doing is simply pathetic”, my mouth said instead. I felt like reminding her that she didn’t came with a fishing rod on my birthday and she didn’t invite me to spend an afternoon, just the two of us, down by the lake. I felt like pointing my finger to grandpa, to his feeble legs, to his bold forehead, to his crippled arm injured ages ago, when he was working in the furniture factory. I felt like shouting – “Look at him! What do you expect from that mummy?” – though I was conscious of the fact that my grandfather was rather an attractive old man, as far as an old man can be attractive. Only the thought of his fingers crawling lasciviously on her round tiny breast could be enough to make me puke, but that was nothing but the result of my own evil imagination. It is true that a couple of times I caught her holding her arms from the back, while she was struggling to get the fish to the shore. It is also true that she was wearing a short dress with huge yellow flowers, a dress which made her look like a school girl, all in one innocent, sexy and cute, that kind of view that could make even a dead man go crazy. It is true that I wanted to make love with her with fury and passion, right there on the green wet grass under the willows, I could almost feel the relief of penetrating her body, of making her scream my name, scratch my shoulders, drop her sweat on my burning skin…

“You could help us by making a fire”. I decided to fake that us. My subconscious mind was faster than the conscious one and, before I could even realize, the fake had been done. There were two mind processes going on in the same time: the anguished supposition that something was going on between Sara and this old man who was my grandfather, something unnatural, as it seemed to me, due to the 50 years gap between them, and the much weaker doubt of the previous thought, an unsuccessful attempt to cope with the true nature of mine, the way I was, the way I still am, even after all those years of insecurity, loneliness and frustrated behavioral distress. Yes, that’s the word, frustration. I was frustrated because of Sara and the way she could so easily make a man happy – any man, not only my grandpa. I saw in her heart the simplicity of all things. Life is beautiful, when our tired pitiful minds stop filtering beauty through the complicated and by all means useless network made of envy, corruption, depression, pain, worry, fear…I was not man enough to fight that fear.

I don’t remember who made the fire but I remember the wet slippery touch of the fish. It was still alive, moving its mouth helplessly in search for water just as I was moving my existence through life in search for freedom and happiness. I ripped its stomach, put it down on the grass and watched silently till it died. I watched the fish dying.
“This is a story about a man and a fish. The man stands between life and death. The man thinks, the horse thinks, the sheep thinks, the cow thinks, the dog thinks. The fish doesn’t think. The fish is mute. Expressionless. The fish doesn’t think because the fish knows. Everything. The fish knows.”

This is a story about a man in love and about a girl who was beautiful. All in all, it is the story of my poor dying fish. Its glassy motionless eye was not staring at the murderer, but at Sara’s ankle and her ankle was also beautiful. Simple things are beautiful. Sara was one of those simple things.

Last night I was cleaning the attic and I found the fishing rod among other junks long time forgotten. That’s when I remembered. That’s when I drew the eye of the fish on the wall and Sara inside the eye of the fish. It’s ok, we are selling the house anyway. I’m not afraid of that eye anymore. The new owners will probably paint that all and no one will ever know about my fish, no one will ever know about Sara.

When grandpa died, she came to the funerals carrying a huge bouquet of lilies. They looked amazingly fresh and pure among the rest of the flowers, most of them white carnations, as if that’s the currency to be paid in the other world – senseless carnations. “You knew he liked lilies.” She nodded her head with a smile. “I told you old people hide wonderful stories”. “Did you love him?”. My breath almost stopped while waiting for the answer.

“A lot”.

She was not teasing. It was nothing but a simple answer to a simple question. Anything else but that word would have been a lie. She didn’t know how to lie. I guess she didn’t know that I was in love with her either. She still had that smell of mountains and rain, of dew and of jasmine. She hugged me and, when her hair touched my face, I felt I could marry her only to keep her with me, to keep that smell and be the owner of Sara.

Driving back home on the same seat where a few hours ago there were small armies of worms and of sandwiches, the fish was mute. Expressionless. The fish was empty of guts and of thoughts because the fish knew.

I knew.

I never went fishing again with my grandfather. I never married that girl. And if you ask me, I’d say yes, it’s all true, I never loved anyone more than I loved her, more than I remember to have loved, back in my 20’s, my beautiful Sara.