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by Alexei Iakovlev
avantoure | jackpot
Stranger thanfiction
One Moscow summer night, I was talking with a scriptwriter friend on his balcony. “Look,” he said, “Something’s going to happen – something always happens to people at this crossroads.” Sure enough, a cheerful group of pedestrians came to a standstill, unaware of us watching. Several of them abruptly broke away and hurried into a side street. “I told you,” my friend said. “Last time I saw a couple reach this place, the girl threw away her bouquet and ran off. Some people break up, some just turn around and walk back,” he added. Jokingly, I suggested he install a camera on the balcony, to film such events and make a documentary about the secret of the crossroads. What happens to people as they approach it; what notions start to pulsate in their
brains? What happened in their lives an hour or day before that moment? There would be raw material for horror movies, melodramas, thrillers or comedies… However, my friend’s imagination was fired by the lover’s tiff he had witnessed. The flowers in the gutter, the girl’s heels echoing on the pavement as the young man fumbled for a cigarette. Though life itself allowed us a glimpse of these events, it felt like having watched a movie. Yet its
