That summer, as I prepared for my final year of school, I took a job organizing the papers of a well-known psychologist. Dr. Tíba had spent his career developing a theory on masculinity in post-communist Eastern Europe, and despite the hyper-specification of his field had a small but devoted following who awaited his newest publications with a zealous devotion. Though our fields didn’t necessarily cross (I was still leaning towards a career in clinical psychology in the financial sector), my grandparents happened to be from a village in Slovakia nearby his own, and he must have seen in me the paradigm of the harshness he studied, evaded.
Whatever attracted me to Tíba was quickly faded in the face of my incompetence, which I admit was little more than well-disguised apathy. We spoke little, and he often told me, after I’d arrived down the long promenade which separated his manse from a rural Georgian road, that there was no work to be done. Nevertheless, I’d remain at his house for the allotted time in order to justify the measly paycheck.
He was a fading man, though I observed several times in him certain surges of energy. In such a state he would feverishly scribble notes which I’d later transcribe. They seemed, to me, to be the product of a mind with its final brilliant idea far behind it. One warm afternoon, as the roar of locusts drowned out the persistent hum of his neighbor’s leaf-blower, the old man sat out on his portico and sipped brandy from a mug. As I busied myself with the meaningless shuffling of papers around his desk and toyed with the set of Newtonian balls on the ledge of his window, I caught sight of him outdoors, and was curiously struck by some significance in his look; something in his distant stare which looked uncannily like yearning. He was staring down the row of the hedges towards his lawn— a meadow which he allowed to grow wild for the sake of local fauna. He was not in one of his energetic moods, but there was a concentration in his posture, as if he was admiring that something tangible and geometric was his, protected by contracts and courts. I felt overcome by the urge to step outside and ask if there was anything else I could do.