T H E   W E B   O F   F A T E

The black spider that spun the silver threads of fate did not confine itself solely to the material world. It also cast its cunning lines into the digital realm, for it is there that the next chapters begin… chapters without which the biography of Jurii Kirnev cannot be complete. And I, describing these lines, myself can scarcely believe that this could truly have happened to my husband. For this story is so incredible that it resembles more the plot of some fantastical teenage anime melodrama than reality. Yet every witness of these events confirms that every word described below was pure truth, which once again reminds me that reality is sometimes far more absurd than the brightest fiction.

In 2004, when Jurii transferred to the embassy school, he was in the ninth grade. By that time the boys from the eleventh class had created an online school forum where all the pupils could converse with one another. When Jurii entered it for the first time, the administrators said something that displeased him greatly. In response, Jurii resolved to take revenge.

Together with Grigory Lyakhov (OG BUDA), they launched a massive assault upon the forum, flooding it with viruses and the most extreme gay pornography. The administrators struggled desperately against them and blocked Jurii repeatedly. Yet every five minutes he changed his IP address and continued the attack. Because he was aided by his comrade, they never realised that the operation involved not one person but two, and thus did not know whom precisely to block. By nightfall of the same day the forum had been utterly destroyed. The site lay broken beyond any hope of restoration. For Jurii it was a victory… though afterwards, of course, he had certain difficulties at school with those seniors. But that no longer mattered. Jurii had proved to the entire school that he was a person who demanded respect.

A month passed after that event, perhaps even two. Jurii no longer remembers the exact dates, yet he distinctly recalls that someone named Evgeny wrote to him through the ICQ programme via a mutual acquaintance. Evgeny said that he had been a graduate of the school in the nineties and wished to find his old classmates, and asked Jurii to go into the archives and seek out any information concerning the former students. This was the year 2004, and there were as yet no social networks in which people could search for old friends. Those networks that did exist were places where people almost always sat under nicknames.

The very next day Jurii went with genuine interest into the school archive and found the information about the people required. Yet afterwards a thought struck him: how splendid it would be if there existed a website dedicated to their school, a place where people might find their old classmates. Reflecting upon this, he realised the full irony of his own idea, for in a certain sense such a site had already existed… and only a month earlier Jurii himself had destroyed it. And if one has destroyed something, then one must create it anew.

Thus he coded a website dedicated to Russian Embassy School in Hungary (orosziskola.hu). When he showed it to the school informatics teacher, the man immediately took from Jurii the right of ownership over the website, declaring that it was far too good to be managed by a schoolboy who might write whatever he pleased in the name of the school. Remarkably, this website at once became the official site of the school and one of the calling cards of the Russian Embassy. Yet anyone who understood computer coding could open the source and see there the most vulgar and foul messages, hidden in plain sight. Only Jurii and those who possessed even a modest knowledge of computers knew of this. As it turned out, for the following twenty years neither the school administration nor even the informatics teachers proved to be such specialists. At the moment these lines are written, in the year 2026, the site continues to exist, and with it the message of Jurii Kirnev concealed within its code.

But while the school administration had not yet taken the website from him, his name and ICQ number stood in the main list of creators and contacts. Many people wrote to him with requests to find contacts of former pupils, old friends, or with various questions concerning the school. And Jurii answered each one. Then, at a certain moment, Jurii received a message from someone under the nickname POLITIKA. The person said that he was searching for a boy named Stas (his surname, unfortunately, has already been forgotten) who had studied at that school. Jurii assumed that this was most likely another old graduate trying to find his former classmates.

The next day, before going into the closed school archive, Jurii first asked the lads whether they knew anyone called Stas. His friends answered at once that they knew him. “Stas is you,” they said in one voice.

“What?” Jurii was astonished. “My name is Jurii, not Stas.”

“Oh, right,” the boys immediately grew embarrassed. “You see,” they explained, “the situation is this: in the very same year that you, Jurii, came to our school, a boy named Stas left us. And now you sit at his desk, use his textbooks, hang out with his friends. He, too, had long hair, he too had a low, deep voice, he too possessed a similar sense of humour. And to this day we still sometimes call you Stas behind your back. That is why we always mix you up with him.”

Well, damn it. They swapped one person for another and nobody did not even care to notice the4 difference. Or else Jurii wondered whether he was truly so ordinary that he could be so easily replaced. This became for him a strong incentive to begin working upon himself.

That same day after lunch Jurii returned home and recounted to POLITIKA this amusing situation. POLITIKA, in turn, told Jurii that Stas had been an interesting lad with whom they had periodically conducted engaging conversations over the internet. Yet at a certain moment he simply ceased to answer. It took Jurii a couple of days to find the contacts of that boy. However, having become acquainted with Jurii online, POLITIKA was no longer interested in continuing the search for Stas. Now this person from the internet was far more interested in conversing with Jurii himself.

Very soon it became clear that under the nickname POLITIKA was a girl, and that she was of the same age as Jurii. Her true name was Yuliania, yet for Jurii she would forever remain POLITIKA. The young adolescents quickly found a common language with one another and became the closest of friends through correspondence. They wrote to each other every single day, recounting everything that happened to them. There was no secret between them that a teenage girl could not confess to a boy, or a teenage boy to a girl. At the same time one must understand that in those years they did not even possess a single digital photograph with which to show how they looked. Jurii clearly recalls that only in the summer of 2005 — more than half a year after their acquaintance — did he, using a scanner, digitise his paper photographs in order to show them to her. That girl did the same. And both were pleasantly surprised to discover that Jurii had been corresponding with an attractive girl, just as she had been corresponding with an attractive boy.

As has already been said, she had long since forgotten about Stas, for she was already speaking with Jurii. And Jurii, for his part, marvelled at the fact of how easily people prove interchangeable: he had completely taken the place of that boy at school, taken his place among his friends, and now had even taken his place in internet correspondence with his girl.

Jurii remembers that POLITIKA became for him a secret pleasure. None of his friends, nor even his relatives, knew with whom he corresponded every day. And when at school the boys recounted that they were going out with girls, and even when girls at school clung to Jurii in hopes of forming a relationship, Jurii always treated this with coldness, for he considered first and foremost as his girl the one who was on the other side of the internet web. He even jokes that this is precisely why he began writing his first novel Lips the Colour of Blood in the autumn of 2004 — as a cunning way of attracting the girl’s attention. You see, at the age of fifteen it is very difficult for a teenager to find a common language with girls, and therefore he decided to create a shared topic for discussion. Thus he wrote the novel, gave her the chapters to read, and already while discussing the book they had something about which to speak constantly. This scheme proved so effective that he at once began applying it not only to POLITIKA but to many other girls at school, which made him extraordinarily popular among them. POLITIKA, however, remained his principal feminine interest and his first teacher in the art of conversing with girls, for Jurii could ask her certain things directly, and she always answered him honestly, without any silly girlish affectations or prejudices.

It was perhaps precisely thanks to this unbiased, clear-sighted common sense that she appealed to Jurii so strongly. He also notes her impeccable taste in matters of music and art, for it was she who introduced him to a great many creative works that left upon him a most pleasant and indelible impression. And if he could somehow describe her character, judging by their correspondence, then in this girl there was something incredibly elegant and aristocratic, refined in every word she wrote, and even in the order in which she arranged them.

Their close correspondence lasted more than two years. And in February 2007 they were at last able to meet. As it turned out, POLITIKA was from the city of Saint Petersburg. Yes… that very city which Jurii calls his personal purgatory.

For his eighteenth birthday Jurii was obliged to travel to Saint Petersburg in order to complete certain documents… to transfer from childhood disability status to adult. Unfortunately the bureaucracy was so absurd that this had to be done precisely on the day of his coming of age, otherwise the entire process of proving his disability would have to be begun again from the very start. Thus Jurii Kirnev spent his eighteenth birthday in the most tedious Russian corridors of administrative buildings.

Curious was the fact that in reality he was needed there only for a single medical examination. A delegation of doctors gathered who were to assess the severity of his disability, and since their conclusion determined the level of pension a person would receive, everyone said that these doctors never believed their patients and that even people without arms or legs they still considered perfectly healthy. Yet when Jurii went to them for the appointment, he accidentally caught his foot on the door threshold and, opening the door, simply fell flat upon the floor before them, breaking his nose. Seeing this, the doctors at once assigned Jurii the maximum degree of disability and ceased to find fault with him. Thus he had come to Saint Petersburg for an entire month solely for the sake of those five seconds.

As was told in previous chapters, life in Saint Petersburg was for him always a nightmare. Jurii sat for whole days in that empty apartment and rejoiced at every second that had already passed. But to his good fortune, this time everything was different. Before arriving in Saint Petersburg he had asked POLITIKA to give him her telephone number, so that he might call her and arrange a meeting when he reached the city.

Yet here was the difficulty:… Jurii had completely forgotten that in that empty apartment there was no telephone. Therefore for the first week Jurii simply waited for the workman who would come and connect a telephone line to their flat. When this finally happened, the workman said that one should not rejoice too soon, for although the physical line might already be laid, the signal itself would be given only a week later. And besides, what use were these wires if there was no telephone set itself? Fortunately from an old neighbour Jurii managed to obtain an antique Soviet telephone of the Stalin era with a rotary dial, which he took from her and was able to connect himself to the line by twisting the wire electrodes together.

It remained only to wait for the telephone signal to be given. And every five minutes Jurii lifted the receiver again and again to check whether there was a dial tone, constantly doubting himself — whether he had connected this old phone correctly and whether it worked at all. What if the signal was already there, but precisely because of this ancient apparatus nothing functioned? The stress was at its limit.

In those days, every time Jurii left the apartment for the city and the hospitals, he looked at the girls passing by, believing that POLITIKA might be somewhere nearby. He peered into the face of every young woman, trying to recognise in her his friend, yet every time it was not she. Thoughts of her helped him not to go mad in his purgatory, but unfortunately Saint Petersburg is far too large a city, and Yuliania could have been anywhere. Jurii constantly reproached himself for not having asked her address, and for relying upon a telephone call that might never take place at all.

One evening, taking the old phone receiver in his hands, Jurii heard that it was giving a dial tone. At last! Jurii unfolded the scrap of paper upon which he had written the number by hand, and at once dialled the figures. With impatient expectation he waited for the dial to return after the last digit.

“Hello! This is MIRACLE Confectionery. Which pastry would you like to order?” came a woman’s voice from the other end.

What confectionery? Jurii understood nothing, although he was certain he had dialled the number correctly. He asked to be connected to a girl named Yuliania, or simply Yulia, but they told him that no one by that name worked there. Strange.

Jurii dialled the number again, which he had written on the paper, carefully and attentively turning each digit to make certain everything was correct.

“Hello! This is MIRACLE Confectionery! Which pastry would you like to order?” The same voice again.

Jurii supposed that perhaps it was a prank and that the girl was simply playing a joke on him by pretending to be some confectionery, yet such jokes were completely out of character for POLITIKA. And so he called once more.

“Hello! This is MIRACLE Confectionery.”

Why? What could have gone wrong? Jurii stared at the sheet of paper and, to his horror, began to fear that when he had copied the number from the monitor screen onto the paper he might have made a mistake and written somewhere an incorrect digit. But which one? To rearrange the numbers at random or to replace one figure with another without knowing where the error lay was mathematical suicide. And therefore Jurii continued again and again to dial precisely the number that was written down by him.

“Hello! This is MIRACLE Confectionery.”

Again. Jurii even supposed that perhaps the problem lay precisely in the old telephone box. What if, because it was a rotary dial with numbers, while turning it some digit might catch incorrectly? Conducting experiments with other numbers, the calls seemed to go in the right direction. That meant the apparatus itself was in order, and Jurii continued to dial the one and only number of POLITIKA that he possessed.

“Hello! This is MIRACLE, damn it, Confectionery!”

The girls at the other end already hated him, although Jurii had repeatedly explained to them who he was and for what purpose he was calling. But they could do nothing about it and even confirmed to him that he was dialling precisely the number he had written. They even joked with Jurii that they were specially prepared to hire a girl named Yulia in order to fulfil his telephone request. Jurii asks for Yulia? Here she is. Or else they already contemplated creating a new cake recipe and naming it “Yulia,” so that Jurii might order it.

Then Jurii even began to think that perhaps this was indeed some kind of prank, only far more long-term and cruel. What if she had deliberately given him the number of a random confectionery? After all, pastries are usually dusted with powdered sugar, and in the Russian language there exists the expression “to powder someone’s brains.” What if throughout these two years she had simply been powdering his brains? How did Jurii even know that she was from Saint Petersburg? She had told him so. And how did he know that her name was Yuliania at all? Again, she had told him. How did he know that those were truly her photographs and that all this time he had been speaking with a girl of his own age, considering that she was far too wise beyond her years? They had never spoken by telephone, and there had never been any video connection between them. What if all this time he had been corresponding with a fake? Jurii, being a hacker and an internet troll, knew better than anyone how easily one can pretend to be someone else online. What if at the other end sat an old, fat pervert who was merely pretending to be a teenage girl, entertaining dirty fantasies while speaking with a youth? Jurii could imagine a thousand different variations of why a person might pretend to be someone else. Yet what sense there was in continuing such a theatre for more than two years remained a mystery to him. In any case it was too cruel, yet for Jurii there remained nothing else but to dial again and again, several times a day, that number which had been given to him, hoping he knew not for what.

“Hello! This is MIRACLE…”

Time was slipping away uselessly, and already only the last week of Jurii’s stay in Saint Petersburg remained, and still he had not met with POLITIKA… now he even began to doubt that she had ever existed. Yet a deep feeling of denial gave him no peace, and he continued stubbornly to call again and again… perhaps now simply out of habit. For him, hearing the voices of those outraged girls was already far more pleasant than sitting in the silence of the hated apartment. And one evening, when he once more dialled that same number and already expected to hear the familiar greeting, something clicked at the other end and a completely different voice sounded in the receiver.

“Hello, whom do you need?” asked a woman.

Jurii said that he was looking for a girl named Yuliania. And the woman replied that Yuliania was her daughter and that she would call her at once. Boom!

This is a MIRACLE!

A few seconds later the voice of that very POLITIKA truly sounded at the other end of the wire. It turned out that she existed and that she truly was a young girl.

But then why, dialling one and the same number, had he been connected to the wrong place? As later became clear, for Saint Petersburg such behaviour of the telephone lines was in those years quite ordinary. Because of the great surge in means of mass communication in the large city, very often the same numbers were issued to completely different people or companies, for the numbers were generated not in random order according to which figures were free, but generated according to geolocation. That is, simply by looking at a telephone number a knowledgeable person could accurately determine the location of the telephone installation… and if one compared the number which Jurii had received when the line was connected to his flat with the number he had been dialling, they differed by only three digits. Yes… that’s a spoiler.

In any case it was already unimportant what the cause of this failure had been. What mattered was that Jurii and Yuliania had at last been able to establish contact. And even more astonishing in this was the fact that from the moment the contact took place, when he dialled that number again, it never once more switched to the confectionery but rang precisely where it was supposed to. Thus the foolish stubbornness of Jurii in dialling one and the same number, expecting that there would be some other result, ultimately justified itself.

POLITIKA was surprised that Jurii had called her at all. She had believed he would never do so. And when she heard his story of how long he had tried to reach her, she could scarcely believe it, yet she was clearly flattered. But here was the difficulty… She said that for her this was a very busy week of studies and that she returned home very late every day, and therefore on those days she was physically unable to meet with Jurii. Yet Jurii did not mind that. He was already glad of the mere fact that he could dial her number every evening and speak with her. And so they did, every day of that week. Their conversations differed in nothing from their daily internet correspondence… only now they had become verbal, through the phone line.

But time was drawing to a close. Jurii’s birthday had already taken place and he had completed all the necessary papers… consequently, in two days he was already preparing to return to Budapest. Naturally, Jurii did not wish to leave Saint Petersburg without having met POLITIKA in the flesh, and therefore, dialling her once more, he firmly insisted that he wanted to meet her, wherever she might be at that moment. It was already a late hour and she said that she had only just returned home after her studies. Yet since Jurii was so insistent, she too was ready to meet… tomorrow.

After all, Saint Petersburg was very large, and to travel from one end of the city to the other two hours might not even suffice. Therefore it was necessary to prepare thoroughly and to plan the place of meeting well in advance. And so she asked him then, over the telephone, in which part of the city he lived. Jurii named the number of the district.

“Oh, that is my district as well,” she answered at once.

Then he named the metro station near which his apartment was situated.

“Oh, that is my metro station,” she replied.

Then Jurii named the highway along which his residential complex stood.

“Oh, that is… my highway!” came the answer.

Then Jurii named the specific street where he lived.

“That… is… my… street!”

Believe it or not, but out of the entire vast city of Saint Petersburg these two people, who had become acquainted by chance over the internet, turned out to be neighbours living directly across the road and who could see one another from the windows of their apartments.

Having received such information, there was no longer any sense in postponing the meeting until the following day. The meeting had to take place today… or rather, right now. In five minutes… no, better in ten, so that there would be time to put oneself in order. Jurii’s mother, understanding that they were about to have an unexpected guest, at once ran to the nearest confectionery to buy pastries. Unfortunately they no longer remember whether it was that very MIRACLE Confectionery or not. Yet considering that the telephone number was tied to geolocation, one may make a certain ironic assumption.

That night Jurii and POLITIKA finally met. They met in the middle of that very road which separated their houses, and since it was a cold winter outside, they went into Jurii’s apartment to eat the pastries. It is worth saying that his expectations regarding the aristocratic refinement of this girl were fully justified. Every movement of hers and every spoken word truly promised a noble grace.

He calls this meeting his first date with a girl… his first true date. In a certain sense this is not entirely accurate, for he had already had girls before… yet even though many of those encounters led to physical intimacy, as he asserts they were not dates in the sense that Jurii places in the word. For him a date is the silent romantic tension between people who hope for a serious relationship. And POLITIKA was for Jurii that first girl with whom he would have wished to build a relationship, taking into account their past correspondence, the depth of their communication, and that completely incredible story of how they met. It seemed as though all the threads of fate were favouring this union.

If human life were a cinema film, then precisely at this beautiful moment of their meeting the closing credits would have begun to roll.

But this life has no happy endings… or the web of fate is a little more complicated than that.

The girl knew that Jurii had problems with his health. Those two had no secrets from one another. Yet it is one thing to know something in theory, and quite another to see it with one’s own eyes. And when POLITIKA saw the way Jurii moved, and when at one moment he even fell before her while walking through the apartment, there shone in her eyes a feeling of disappointment… yet not disappointment in him as a person, but precisely disappointment in the cruelty of fate. She tried in every way not to show it, but in her pupils Jurii clearly read her thoughts, which said: “He is so wonderful! He is so wonderful. Why is he so wonderful? Why is he like that? Why is he… like that? Why? Why?”

For Jurii this was a blow, because it was the first time a girl had, with polite and considerate disappointment, averted her eyes from him on account of his health. Before this there had been no few occasions when girls did not wish to communicate with him because of his physical condition, yet in those cases they usually gave no hopes from the very beginning, and Jurii himself did not even approach them, understanding at once that it was useless. And in those cases when Jurii succeeded with girls, as has already been said earlier, he himself built no serious intentions upon it, just as they had no initial intentions toward him. But with POLITIKA everything was different. It was too beautiful a story to end so coldly. Yet what happened, happened.

The evening was not spoiled… on the contrary, they conversed very well, discussing Jurii’s novel, which by that time was already finished, ate the cakes, celebrated Jurii’s eighteenth birthday, and parted, remaining friends.

Throughout the long life that followed, many girls likewise averted their eyes from Jurii in silent disappointment due to his health, yet that girl was the first.

Two days later Jurii returned to Budapest with a feeling of a broken heart. From that time onward he never again built any expectations toward women and always remained a cold and dominant Lovelace. No sentiments.

Jurii and POLITIKA continued their correspondence on the internet. Yet from that moment Jurii felt that something had changed in their dynamic. Something had already been broken… and irrevocably. And half a year later, when they both entered university, their communication began to dwindle to nothing. Each began a new life, made many new acquaintances, because of which Jurii and Yuliania soon simply forgot one another. Just the innocent internet adventures of two adolescents who had seen each other only once and who had now grown up and left the past in the past. Nothing more.

Chronologically I ought to stop here. Yet in order that this story may possess a complete integrity of meaning, it is still necessary to leap forward several years. Somewhere around the year 2011 Jurii deleted her entirely from all his social networks, for communication between them had long since ceased. It is noteworthy that in those years a person could not simply register independently on many of the social networks… he needed a special invitation from a friend who was already registered in the system. And Jurii, deleting POLITIKA from everywhere, experienced very strange feelings, for it was precisely she who had once invited him to the absolute majority of those sites… she had been his first friend at the beginning of the path. And now he was deleting her, as a person with whom there was no longer anything to speak of.

At that point, as it seemed, their story was finished. Jurii lived his life, having completely forgotten her existence, yet unexpectedly in 2016 he received a message from her. This was a MIRACLE! POLITIKA was passing through Budapest for one evening and proposed that Jurii meet her. Naturally, from such a proposal all the old forgotten memories concerning this girl flared up in him once more, and he gladly agreed to see her.

Meeting in the centre of Budapest, they now, for the sake of a conscious and symbolic joke, deliberately decided to spend the evening in a confectionery restaurant. It was a beautiful evening in the lights of the night city, in a cosy restaurant with a view of the river Danube. Jurii was a young, solitary, handsome man, and she was a young, solitary, enchanting woman. Over these years the she had become even more attractive, and her noble grace and aristocratic manners had only multiplied. An ideal romantic moment for both, taking into account all their previous incredible shared histories, which they recalled while eating cakes, and in the course of the conversation already joked about something completely new, sincerely smiling at one another. Now this could be called a full-fledged date of two adults, and not of those two naïve adolescents who had been afraid to raise their eyes to one another. That evening they saw each other only for the second time in their lives, yet between them there was so much in common. It seemed that nothing could now prevent this pair from coming together… nothing, except death itself.

And it was death itself that stood between them that night.

As it turned out, POLITIKA was not merely passing through Budapest. That week her father had died, a man she loved greatly and with whom she was very close, and she was returning from his funeral. The most convenient route from the city of Uzhhorod to Saint Petersburg was through Budapest. Therefore the moment of meeting, though very pleasant for Jurii and POLITIKA, was nevertheless maximally overshadowed by the tragic events. And consequently there could be no talk of any amorous romance that evening. And Jurii sat, looking then at this woman, trying in every way to cheer her and raise her spirits considering her situation, thinking how beautiful she was, yet all the while realising the full mockery of fate. An ideal pair who simply were not destined to be together.

Jurii no longer particularly remembers what they spoke of then. It was more a communication of half-glances, and only the rarest yet precise words that, like music, broke their cosy silence. Having spent that enchanting evening together, the next morning she left Budapest. Between them nothing happened… yet the memories remained.

After that meeting Jurii became even more masterful and cold-blooded toward all the women he had, which later, as he says, would lead him to the darkest pages of his life, for there was nothing more cruel in this universe for him than the cruelty of women.

Jurii and Yuliania met only twice in their lives, yet each time it was a significant event. However as fate decreed, this was not the end of their story. For several years later they would meet once more — for the third time in their lives… and that time POLITIKA would save Jurii’s life.