Synopsis
The forty-something highway engineer arrives at the scene of his most recent contract. The country has changed dramatically since he’d last been here, over 20 years ago. The language, which he now speaks with an accent, is of course the same, as is the distrust of the people, but the environment, the buildings, the streets are all new. He does not recognize them at all and is unable to orient himself. The first month he spends here will be spent alone, while he furnishes the suburban family house his company rents for him, and while the first phase of the project is completed. His wife and two children will then join him to spend the next year and a half, until the highway is completed, in this unpleasant country, together.
There was a time when this environment was not strange and threatening to him. It was here he met the love of his life, twenty years ago. He knew very little about her, other than her name, which he has not allowed himself to utter since. She had told him a vague story about running away from home, the mortal danger she’d be in if she went back, her stepfather, and some other details reminiscent of Greek tragedy, which seemed to change each time she told them. He never did find out which of these were true, if any. They could have been the imaginings of a playful, or even psychotic mind, but there was something about the girl that gave weight to her words despite their inconsistancy, that made her stories believable.
Then, as often in stories like these, the girl got pregnant, or at least claimed she was with child. The boy, whom the engineer remembers as himself twenty years ago, was unsure. The girl must have sensed his insecurity: during the few minutes it took him to take a shower, she diasppeared. Forever. Disappeared from his room, from town, from his life, and if an iota of what she had told him of her past was true, perhaps even from the ranks of the living.
The boy searched for her for a long time, in vain. Not a day went by over the past twenty years that she had not appeared in his mind. With time, of course, he got married and had children, but the love he felt towards the girl, and the guilt he felt for his momentary uncertainty, never subsided. With time he had become a mere shadow of his former self.
And now here he was again, back after twenty years. Everything’s changed, while at the same time remaining eerily the same.
Then one day, as he sits staring out of the bus window on his way to the construction site, he catches a glimpse of someone familiar. It‘s her. Unmarked by time she looks the same as she did twenty years ago. Impossible, but true…
The engineer‘s life slowly turns into a delirious nightmare as he begins his quest to find her. His search comes up with nothing. By the time the first month is over he still knows nothing about the mysterious girl, her disappearance twenty years ago and reappearance in the present, or the twenty years in between.
The mystery remains just that. The engineer‘s wife, who arrives with the children at the end of the month, finds a human wreck enveloped in madness instead of her husband of a month ago. No matter, she is strong. Given time, everything will be all right.