I was lying in one of the deck chairs by the pool at the resort and was just thinking if I really needed this short vacation at the Mediterranean Sea. It was just the season when tourism had shrunk. The pool and the deckchairs around were almost empty and only a few couples here and there.
And then I saw her, a petite woman in the next deckchair, mid-thirties according to my estimation, under her straw hat she had brown smooth hair with few grey strands. The kind of woman who doesn’t like hair dyeing and make-up, but her natural beauty could not be overlooked. She was immersed in a book.
I fought ten minutes with myself whether I should approach the woman, decided at the end but to do that.
“What is the book about?”
No reaction. I thought that was a stupid question to start a conversation, or not. I raised my voice and repeated my question.
She flinched, raised her head and looked at me for seconds without answering, then realized that she was meant after all.
“Oh, do you mean this? It’s about a morgue and a forensic anthropologist who was close to becoming a hit-and-run victim himself.”
“Pretty creepy for here and now, huh?”
“Cuddly novels don’t entertain me.”
I couldn’t suppress a grin. We talked and didn’t notice how time passed until we got hungry, it was long after noon and we hurried to the restaurant to get something to eat in the last minutes. We kept talking along. I told her that I was divorced, and after the breakup with my ex-wife I was so absorbed in work and filming one after another that I didn’t think of a new relationship (Didn’t I mention I’m a filmmaker?). I told her about my previous productions which she occasionally commented on with “Ah” and “Oh”. She wasn’t so talkative, but she told me that she was never married and that she works in an advertising agency as a developer.
We were together the whole day. In the evening after we ate something in the restaurant we had a drink together outside with nice piano music. then we said goodnight without becoming particularly romantic and went alone to our rooms.
In the night she didn’t go out of my head anymore. For a long time the thoughts of a woman occupied me so much that I noticed that this time it is not about something temporary.
I got up relatively early for a vacationer in the morning, went for a walk around the resort and on the beach before I went to the restaurant where breakfast was reserved. My eyes wandered over individuals in the hall, but I couldn’t see her anywhere. I thought to myself maybe she allowed herself a little longer sleep. With this thought I could calm down and have my breakfast in the exaggerated length…
I looked everywhere for her until noon, then I remembered that she once mentioned her room number when we talked about where our rooms were.
I strolled to her room, I was about to knock, but I saw a chambermaid just coming out, I could see through the open door that the room was tidied up. I asked the maid about the woman who lived in the room the other day, she said the room was being prepared for the next guest.
My heart began to beat faster. I hurried to the reception, told her name to the receptionist, he said she had left early this morning…
My attempts to find her again were all unsuccessful. We hadn’t exchanged phone numbers because I didn’t think she’d be gone by morning. Apparently she was also one of the few people from the old school who can’t be found in any of the social networks…
Today – two years after I saw her for the first and last time – was the premiere of my new film. It is about a morgue and a forensic anthropologist who was close to becoming a victim of a hit-and-run himself.
And I still think of her …
“And such little things have the power to change lives. Irrevocably.”
From the thriller novel “The Scent of Death” by Simon Beckett
By Niki Nazemi