A Story About a Man I Never Fell in Love With

After entering the cafe where I was headed for my job interview, I notice Nikolai standing behind the bar, making a coffee for himself. I greet him with enthusiasm. The moment he hears my voice, he turns around. It seems to have caught him off guard, making the room shrink a little. After his quick but friendly reply to my question on how he’s doing, our conversation ends. I wish I could ask him more, but his attention has already gone back to his coffee.

I introduce myself to the manager of the cafe and take another glance at the bar. There is something contagiously calm about Nikolai, as if he knows exactly what he is doing, and how he has to do it. No surprise, for a man who is born during the time Stevie Wonder was an international star, but who has the energy of his teenage daughter.

The Mysterious Manager

The first time we met we weren’t introduced, we never shook hands. I assumed he was my boss her husband, but he turned out to be in Japan. “The guy who pops by every now and then,” was how I described him to my colleagues, hoping to get some more information. ‘And doesn’t say a lot’, I wanted to add. “That’s Nikolai, Jane’s brother,” one of my colleagues told me. Nikolai, the mysterious manager who winks at you and mentions your name whenever he comes in, was our boss her brother.

Whenever he came rolling into the cafe on his skates, nodding his head at me while I was serving customers, passing me by to disappear into the basement, I didn’t always realize I was pausing for a moment. I had to reboot, focus on what the customers were saying. He was not the kind of manager who came by to check on his employees, making sure everything was OK. He was just there, not even paying attention to me, but filling the entire shop with his energy, without being visible.

One week later I went down the stairs to restock. He was sitting on the floor with a friend, fixing the doorknob. There was a lot of handyman stuff going on which reminded me of a job that needed to be done at my own place. He seemed to be the perfect guy to fix my sink, it would save me some money and give him something to do, I assumed. He said he’d be happy to do it, he even had a sink laying around in his house somewhere.

Some days later he arrived at the front door and got to work. Was I supposed to help him? I decided to get out of the room and whenever he needed something, a towel, a bucket, I would find it for him. There was nothing weird about it, but just the fact that I started wondering about it, made me very self-conscious. Maybe I didn’t want it to be normal.

Rolling in and out

I had no idea how he earned his money, what he would do during the day besides popping by at the shop, and fixing sinks on request. I didn’t know if he had a family or just a dog. Maybe he was a cat person. The only thing I knew was that he lived two streets away from the shop, but that was far from enough information.

A few weeks later, on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, when no customer dared to show up, I asked what he did all day. Probably in those exact words. He told me he had been working in the filming industry for years, as a technician. I only had to ask a few questions for him to open up about his family. He told me about his parents and his grandparents. He told me about his grandfather who was in the resistance during the war in his country of birth. His grandmother saved his grandfather’s life at least three times. He told me life could be harder than the things you see in movies, and I, shocked at his statement, asked if this was true for him too. He shook his head and looked out of the window as if to tell me he didn’t know where to start.

Some customers came in while we were still talking. He put on his skates and stood in the door for a brief moment, waiting for an opening to tell me he was going to leave, before rolling out of sight.

Victorious

A few days later he was already at the shop when I was opening. He was fixing more defects on different machines. I felt the need to thank him again for replacing my sink. This day too, people decided to stay at home, safe from the weather.

While he was doing his handyman stuff, I put up a 60s playlist, which made his face light up. We started to guess an artist’s name we both forgot, and I gathered the courage to ask how old he was. I don’t remember him asking for my age, but somewhere in the next half an hour, I found out he had a daughter my age, and that his wife died when she was way too young. I felt slightly victorious while he went on telling me about his life, and his relationship with his daughter. So this is what you have been hiding, mysterious manager.

He started to pack his stuff. Before leaving, he gave me some instructions on how to unclog the sink. We were standing near the tap and while trying to focus on his explaining, I was estimating at what distance I would be standing too close to him. Whenever he moved one inch, it felt like he got two feet closer to me. I started to pay attention to his hands, the signs of his age on his skin. Along with my thoughts, my body started to respond to his presence. The moment he left, his energy lingered around for just a couple of seconds, before the shop turned back to its previous shape.

A desert island

Whenever he showed up, I became aware of his existence again. I never looked forward to him when I was working, in fact, I never even though of him. Not when I was at home, or when I was in bed with my boyfriend. He was only there when he was physically present, like a desert island I washed up ashore now and then, far away from the mainland where my friends were.

I didn’t tell anyone about him, because there was nothing to tell. Even though my mind and body were very aware of his presence, and my fantasy ran wild, even though I was wondering whether all of this was on his mind too, and rather, how he was imagining it, even though he was no longer just a manager, as soon as he left, I would relax and forget about him.

The season was ending and my last shift had passed. My boss owned another store where they needed some employees. A couple of weeks later I had an interview. Not even for a moment did it cross my mind that I could run into Nikolai, and yet there he was, behind the coffee machine. It was as if he tried to make the room larger with the way he responded, ignoring the roles we once had in each other lives.

While I’m having the interview, I’m not aware of Nikolai leaving the shop. His absence doesn’t really affect me, like it never did. Despite everything that was happening in his presence where he would be consuming all of my thoughts, in his absence, he was really gone.

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Previously published on medium

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