Semyon was always telling Lyuba that she needed to lose weight. At the grocery store, he would take bacon out of their cart, and in clothing stores he would pointedly draw attention to the size that actually fit her.
“Two years ago, you could still fit into a medium,” he would remind her.
Hearing things like that hurt Lyuba. She didn’t consider herself fat and didn’t see her weight as much of a problem.
“And what’s going to happen when I have a baby?” she would ask. “Some women gain thirty kilograms during pregnancy.”
Semyon used to talk about having children all the time, but lately he quickly shut down any conversation on the subject. Lyuba wanted to ask him, Have you changed your mind about marrying me and having children with me? But she was afraid to ask such a question.
For her birthday, he gave Lyuba a one-year gym membership.
She cried all night because she had been certain Semyon was going to give her a DSLR camera. They had even talked about it. Lyuba had dreamed for a long time of trying photography and had even taken a course. A friend sometimes let her borrow her camera, but naturally her friend needed it herself, and on a teacher’s salary Lyuba couldn’t afford much.
“Once you lose weight, we’ll buy you a camera,” Semyon promised.
Out of spite, Lyuba began eating everything she wanted. After work, she would stop at the shopping mall, head to the food court, buy French fries and pizza, and wash it all down with sugary soda. Then she would call her mother and cry.
“Am I really fat?” she asked.
Of course, in her mother’s eyes, she could never be fat.
“You’re the most beautiful girl in the world, sweetheart! Don’t listen to your Semyon! Come visit me instead. I’ll bake you potato pies.”
Lyuba kept postponing the trip to see her mother. Semyon didn’t like the countryside and preferred spending weekends and holidays in the city. Lyuba would apologize and promise that she would definitely come for the next holiday, but then something else would come up, and she wouldn’t go.
During the May holidays, for example, one of Semyon’s friends invited them to his wedding.
Lyuba spent an entire month going to the gym and trying to stick to a diet, but she didn’t manage to lose much weight. Her posture improved, and overall she became more toned, but she was still far from fitting into the medium size Semyon dreamed about.
“I’d like to buy a new dress for the wedding,” she hinted timidly.
“When you lose weight, then we’ll buy one,” Semyon snapped.
“So we’ll get married when I lose weight too?”
Their eyes met.
And Lyuba realized that she had just said aloud what Semyon himself had been afraid to tell her.
Her face flushed, and her lips trembled with hurt.
He had proposed to her a year earlier, saying at the time that they wouldn’t rush into the wedding. They would save enough money both for the ceremony and for a honeymoon.
But somehow they never managed to save anything. Semyon always found something else to spend money on.
“I want you to be the most beautiful woman at the wedding,” he said. “Including ours.”
“All right,” Lyuba said. “Let’s get married in September. We can skip the honeymoon and fly somewhere for New Year’s instead.”
“So you promise you’ll lose weight by September?” Semyon clarified.
“I promise,” Lyuba breathed.
At his friend’s wedding, she ate nothing.
Watching slim girls happily devour mayonnaise-covered salads, Lyuba almost cried. Why was she so unlucky?
But the bride looked so beautiful and happy, and Lyuba had dreamed about her own wedding for so long that she decided it was worth trying.
Now Lyuba went to the gym almost every day.
She bought nothing but diet food she was already sick of: buckwheat, chicken breast, cucumbers.
Semyon complained that he hadn’t gone on a diet and would either go to a café for dinner or order pizza for himself.
Lyuba would lock herself in the bathroom and cry because the smell of pizza made her mouth water, and she wanted nothing more than to forget the stupid diet and eat several slices.
Sometimes she broke down.
A colleague would bring a cake for a birthday, and Lyuba would give in when everyone insisted that there was nothing wrong with her weight and that she didn’t need to lose anything.
After the gym, she would stop at a supermarket, buy a bag of chips, and eat it on the way home, crying over her own lack of willpower.
Then she would call her mother and complain that nothing was working.
Her mother always said the same thing.
“Come stay with me, sweetheart. If you don’t want pies, I’ll make you vegetable soup. Just come.”
In June, Semyon proudly presented Lyuba with a huge cream-colored box.
“What is it?” Lyuba asked.
“A present.”
She opened it.
Inside was a wedding dress.
A medium, of course.
It didn’t fit Lyuba.
Losing enough weight to fit into it was realistic, but that wasn’t the point. Lyuba had dreamed of choosing her own wedding dress, of going from salon to salon and trying on fluffy, marshmallow-like gowns or elegant silk dresses.
And now this…
She couldn’t hold back her tears.
“You’re never happy with anything,” Semyon said, offended. “I was trying to do something nice.”
Lyuba apologized and told him the dress was wonderful. She promised she would lose enough weight to fit into it.
But to do that, she said, she wanted to spend her vacation at her mother’s house.
“But we wanted to go to Karelia,” Semyon reminded her. “And go to that festival.”
“I won’t be able to starve myself while traveling,” Lyuba explained. “There are fewer temptations in the village.”
“All right,” Semyon agreed. “Then I’ll invite Kolya to come with me.”
Lyuba’s mother was delighted to see her and took her daughter’s goal seriously and sympathetically, although not without some disapproval.
“What extra weight? You’re my little doll! But all right, if that’s what you want.”
There truly were fewer temptations in the village.
No fast food, no supermarkets, no food delivery.
Her mother didn’t make the pies and pancakes Lyuba loved. Instead, she carefully prepared vegetables and chicken.
“Rabbit meat is considered very diet-friendly,” her mother said. “I’ll talk to Ivanovich. We can buy meat from him.”
Fyodor Ivanovich was their neighbor, and Lyuba remembered him well.
She went to get the meat herself because her mother had twisted her ankle and shouldn’t be carrying anything heavy.
“I slaughtered three rabbits for you,” Fyodor Ivanovich announced cheerfully. “Goodness, what a beautiful woman you’ve grown into! A proper bride! Do you have a fiancé?”
“I do,” Lyuba admitted with some pleasure. “My wedding is in September.”
“I’m not surprised, a mademoiselle like you!”
“Oh, what’s that?”
Lyuba noticed a DSLR camera lying on Fyodor Ivanovich’s table.
“That? It belongs to my nephew Bogdan. Do you remember him?”
Lyuba remembered Bogdan only vaguely. He had visited Fyodor Ivanovich a couple of times during the summer, but Lyuba had been too young then.
“Not really,” she said. “Is he a photographer?”
To Lyuba, being a photographer was the ultimate dream profession.
“A photojournalist!” Fyodor Ivanovich replied proudly. “Ah, it’s a shame you already have a fiancé, otherwise we could have tried to match you two! Our Bogdan is single. Although who would want to live with a man like him? He’s always away on assignment. He just got back after spending four months in Africa.”
Of course, Lyuba couldn’t miss an opportunity like that: meeting someone who traveled the world and earned money by taking photographs.
She deliberately didn’t put on makeup and dressed simply so that no one would think she had any intentions toward Bogdan.
But when she saw him, she felt embarrassed about even having had such thoughts.
Even if she had wanted to charm him, she would have had absolutely no chance.
On top of everything else, Bogdan turned out to be an extremely tall, charismatic blond man. Standing next to him, Lyuba felt plain and awkward.
“Wow, you’ve grown up!” Bogdan said in surprise. “I remember you as a little girl.”
“Well, I actually work at a school now,” Lyuba admitted.
“Really? What do you teach?”
“Primary school.”
“You like children?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s great. Uncle told me you were interested in the camera. Do you take pictures?”
Lyuba told him about photography school and about her attempts to take pictures with a little point-and-shoot camera.
“Oh, I’ve also got a Zenit! Have you ever tried shooting on film?”
“No. We didn’t even have one when I was a child.”
“No one knows how until they try.”
He handed her the camera.
“I’ve been meaning to test it anyway. Want to come with me?”
They went down to the river, where the light was soft, and Bogdan showed her how to use the Zenit.
“With film, you get only one chance. Click! And you won’t know how it turned out until later.”
Lyuba laughed. Her hands trembled, and he adjusted the position of her fingers on the shutter.
For some reason, his touch made her uneasy.
“Like this,” he said from behind her, and Lyuba could feel his breath against her neck. “Catch the moment.”
The next day, he persuaded her to wake up early, before sunrise, and walk to the river with him.
Mosquitoes nearly ate them alive along the way, but Lyuba thought they had taken several very good photographs.
At least the shots from Bogdan’s DSLR looked wonderful. He had brought that camera with him too.
Lyuba had expected him to spend all his time bragging about his travels and achievements.
But Bogdan hardly talked about himself at all.
Instead, he asked about Lyuba: about her job, about the children she taught, about what she liked in her profession and what she didn’t.
It felt good.
Lyuba hadn’t felt that kind of genuine attention toward her in a long time.
Bogdan photographed her too. At first, Lyuba felt embarrassed, but soon she relaxed.
Later, they went into Fyodor Ivanovich’s dark bathhouse, which had been converted into a makeshift photo lab.
A red lamp cast mysterious shadows, and the air smelled of developing chemicals.
They bent over the trays together, watching their photographs slowly appear on the paper: a sunset over a field, a sad-eyed cow, funny village children.
And then suddenly—her portrait.
The one Bogdan had secretly taken while she squinted against the sunlight.
She was no cover model, of course, but she looked pretty good.
And she didn’t even look fat.
“Beautiful,” Lyuba said shyly.
“Beautiful,” he repeated, looking not at the photograph but at Lyuba.
And in that warm half-darkness, surrounded by the smell of chemicals and wet photographic paper, something subtle changed between them.
Summer in the village flowed slowly and sweetly, like thick honey.
Lyuba and Bogdan spent a great deal of time together.
They greeted sunrises with a camera in hand, laughed over failed shots, and sat beside a campfire until late at night, when the stars seemed closer than ever.
Lyuba stopped caring about her diet and ate baked potatoes and sausages that she and Bogdan roasted over the fire on skewers.
Something developed between them that could no longer be called mere friendship.
Their gazes lingered longer than necessary.
Accidental touches made their hearts beat faster.
And their silences contained too much that remained unsaid.
Lyuba thought her mother noticed everything, but she said nothing.
Only once did she ask about Semyon.
“He went to the festival with his friend.”
At first, Lyuba and Semyon had spoken on the phone every day.
Then every few days.
Now they only exchanged messages.
Strangely enough, Lyuba didn’t miss him at all.
No, I haven’t fallen in love with Bogdan, she kept telling herself. Semyon and I just need a little break from each other before the wedding.
Bogdan taught her not only photography but also how to see the world: to notice the reflection of the sky in a puddle, the play of light on leaves, fleeting emotions on people’s faces.
And Lyuba taught him to enjoy simple village pleasures: eating raspberries straight from the bush, listening to the birch trees rustling, and not being afraid to get dirt on his hands.
“I’ve got another assignment coming up soon,” Bogdan admitted one day.
For some reason, Lyuba’s heart sank.
“When?”
“Friday.”
“So soon?”
The words slipped out before she could stop them.
She quickly tried to correct herself.
“And when will you be back?”
“In six months.”
She nodded, but everything tightened inside her.
Six months felt like an eternity.
Suddenly, Bogdan took her hand.
“Lyuba, I don’t want to leave.”
And then she was the one who leaned toward him.
Their first kiss was awkward, as though both of them were afraid they were making a mistake.
But then the fear dissolved into the warmth of his lips and the security of his strong arms.
The birch leaves rustled above them, and somewhere in the distance corncrakes cried out as though hurrying to finish their summer song before the season ended.
They didn’t speak of love.
Why would they, when every touch was already a confession?
On the morning of Bogdan’s departure, the village was quiet and wrapped in mist, as though nature itself had slowed its breathing so as not to disturb their final moments together.
Bogdan loaded his belongings into the car, occasionally glancing toward Lyuba.
She stood on the porch wrapped in her stretched old cardigan, clutching a photograph they had developed the night before.
It was a self-portrait of the two of them laughing with their heads pressed together.
“Bogdan…” she began, but her voice broke.
He slammed the trunk shut and walked toward her.
His eyes were hard, harder than she had ever seen them before.
“Lyuba, no tears,” he said roughly, although the fingers brushing a strand of hair away from her face were gentle. “You know who I am. A wanderer with no permanent home. Here today, at the other end of the world tomorrow.”
“I can wait,” she whispered.
“Don’t.”
He abruptly moved away and lit a cigarette.
The smoke mingled with the fog.
“I’m not Semyon. I can’t give you a home, children, stability. Even if I come back, it won’t be for long.”
Lyuba nodded, looking somewhere past him toward the fields wet with dew.
Suddenly, she understood that this was precisely why she loved him—for the wind in his hair, for the fact that he would never become “like everyone else.”
“All right,” she said firmly. “Don’t expect me to suffer. I’ll take a hundred photographs, write ten letters, and by the eleventh, I’ll forget you.”
Bogdan laughed, but pain flashed in his eyes.
“That’s the spirit.”
He got into the car and slammed the door.
Through the dirty window, their eyes met one last time.
The engine roared, and the wheels sprayed mud behind the car.
Lyuba didn’t wave goodbye.
She stood there until the sound of the engine disappeared into the fog.
Then she slipped their photograph into her pocket and whispered:
“Idiot. I’m going to wait for you anyway.”
Surprisingly, by the time she returned to the city, all the emotional stress really had caused Lyuba to lose weight.
The wedding dress fit her perfectly.
But neither she nor Semyon felt particularly happy about it.
Lyuba had planned to tell him immediately about her summer romance, but at the last moment she lost her nerve.
Semyon seemed to compliment her figure, but he looked gloomy and was reluctant to talk about the wedding.
“Maybe we rushed into this?” Lyuba finally said.
Surprise flashed across Semyon’s face.
“What do you mean?”
“The wedding.”
He lowered his eyes.
“You don’t want to marry me?”
Lyuba felt tears begin running down her cheeks.
“No,” she admitted. “I don’t. I’m sorry.”
“You should forgive me,” Semyon suddenly said. “I was wrong to demand that you lose weight.”
“You don’t like the way I look now?”
“I do! But…”
Semyon lowered his eyes again.
“I met someone else,” he admitted. “And… I don’t care at all how much she weighs. Do you understand?”
It hurt.
It was painful to hear.
But Lyuba herself had become involved in another story too.
One in which she was willing to wait six months just for the chance to see him one more time.
“I understand,” Lyuba replied. “It’s a good thing this happened before the wedding.”
They separated peacefully.
Fortunately, they hadn’t booked the restaurant yet or sent out any invitations.
The only unfortunate thing was the dress, but Semyon decided they could sell it.
He moved out of the apartment, and now it wasn’t easy for Lyuba to pay the rent alone.
She had to look for additional work.
Lyuba decided to prepare preschool children for school, and it turned out that there was quite a lot of demand for that kind of tutoring.
Her weight soon returned.
There was simply no way Lyuba could give up potatoes and pastries.
Of course, she tried not to overdo it, but now it was mainly for health reasons. After so much dieting, her stomach had begun to hurt whenever she ate all that fast food.
How wonderful it would be to have some rabbit stew or her mother’s homemade soup.
Then, a month later, a package arrived.
The sender was an online store, but Lyuba hadn’t ordered anything.
What on earth was going on?
She opened the box and gasped.
Inside was a camera.
She didn’t have Bogdan’s phone number. They had deliberately decided not to exchange numbers.
But she was certain it was from him.
Well, then.
She would wait for him so she could thank him.
Even if it took six months.
Even if it took forever.