En 1-26 Hello Ahmed,...

Hello Ahmed, … 
               
- one thousand messages -      
notes for a psychiatrist    
               
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
“Whoop De Doo” A sarcastic way to express joy or pleasure, when truly your feeling is the exact opposite.
“An idiot is the same idiot everywhere, even in Africa.” Russian expression about foolishness.

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Part 1 Hello Ahmed, ...

Imagine that you are somewhere in the darkness, you don’t know where. Patches of the light sometimes show you a tiny chunk of the surrounding place… You cannot see the whole picture, from the beginning. But bit by bit you start to see and understand something in that...and then, with the last ray of the light, you get where you are and what the place is like. But don’t be in a hurry and think...it can be, the truth is the exact opposite.
Представьте, что вы где-то в темноте, не знаете где. Пятна света иногда показывают вам крошечный кусочек окружающего пространства... Вы не можете рассмотреть всю картину с самого начала. Но постепенно вы начинаете видеть и понимать что-то в этом...а затем, с последним лучом света, вам понятно, где вы находитесь и на что похоже это место. Но не спешите и подумайте ... может быть, настоящее положение вещей — совсем иное.

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02 January 2020, Kochi, Japan
In the darkness, the statues were expressively majestic, illuminated from below by spotlights. He wanted to reach out and touch the hilt of the katana to feel the coolness of the sword. Instead, Ahmed scratched his palm, took a photo of their huge figures on his phone and glanced at his watch: the round watch face was black, and white numbers seemed to hang over the wrist in the dark: he spent his first one day and 23 minutes of the new year in Japan. He was in this station for the first time. He took off his glasses with an awkward but elegant gesture and again looked around the three bronze statues that stood motionless above him. The sky was indigo blue, but the photo turned it completely black. It is a pity that the smartphone’s camera is unable to convey all the charm of the moment: the muffled noise of the night city, the slight rustling of leaves and the repeated clang of trains nearby.

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Kochi Station greeted him with shining turnstiles and a lightning placard. It showed his train was going to come at 4:05 am. Ahmed looked up at the stairs. There were smiling cartoon faces: advertising fabric was so glued to the verticals of each stair that it all combined to form three not-quite-human faces against a rainbow background.
He went out into the air .. crossed the road looking along a string of poles above the train tracks. They were curiously shaped, like long, thin, and straight men with small, luminous, and round heads without faces, and long, wide-spread arms, outstretched either in a desperate attempt to stop the trains, or in a grand gesture of a welcoming hug. Ahmed climbed the worn and rotten walkway stairs. The roof of the station looked from his position now like a giant insect, a centipede, perched on the building as if protecting its clutch. Ahmed counted the number of legs: fourteen. "Twenty-eight-millipedes. Bionic architecture." - grinned Ahmed. The insect and all its outbuildings fit perfectly into the landscape. A low, gently sloping mountain darkened under the deep blueness of the sky. Three dark green figures of bronze samurais matched the scale of them with mountains and the centipede.

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He remembered the other statue of Ryoma in Katsurahama Park. Now, this giant is standing there on a hill, just as he, Ahmed right now, is looking at the ancient pines in the darkness. He imagined the Big man leaped easily from his pedestal. His weapons clanked heavily. He headed to the ocean, undressed, and carefully folded his clothes and military equipment on withered grass. He went into the water and swam to the moon, to its reflection, surfing the surges under him, and riding upon their backs. Ahmed turned to see the moon. "If your finger points to the moon, look at the moon, not at your finger," he remembered: "Oh, I have to go, the train will arrive soon." His thoughts were already far away. There will be a lot of hustles and bustles after his return.

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A cheerful green-orange train with a railway smiley face on the nose of the leading locomotive bravely crawled under the belly of the giant insect, which turned out to be lame on all 14 right legs, and carried Ahmed away from the samurai, from the most preserved ancient castle in Japan, from cherished thoughts and feelings, past rotten lawns with flowers, past yellow trees, past many concrete parallelepipeds and cubes of houses: to Okayama.
Since ancient times, the Japanese worshipped some strange scary creatures. Japanese folklore is built based on superstitions that have many images taken from usual life and daily routine. Sometimes it seems that some modern things created by the Japanese engineering genius are also animated by spirits from ancient times.
Dark nightscapes floated past the window. Untreated concrete with black streaks, metal from time to time with peeling paint with rusty streaks pleased with the variety at each station. It was getting brighter. Beautiful and lush flora in the background of the shining sky already got his eyes tired of it. Ahmed dozed off.

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In a dream, he saw the recently abandoned Algerian landscapes, fabulously, in the east manner, mysterious in the dark, blinding-sandy and dusty in the daytime. He saw the students, whom he had launched in the big professional world last year, are all different, but always cheerful and confident. He saw the brown curly-hair head of his son, bent over his working desk and some other vague, half-forgotten bitter images…
They had arrived...There were several minutes to walk around the station before they went further. In the pre-dawn twilight, the fresh cold, and damp air tickled nostrils with small light clouds of steam, making the people on the street look a little like fire-breathing dragons.
Momotaro, shielding his eyes from the dazzling glare of the rising sun with a bronze hand, peered at the groups of people standing there, clearly plotting something heroic. The monkey held on trustfully to the hem of his coat. The impudent pigeons dozed on his head and arms, and one perched directly on the back of the bronze pheasant. The bronze dog, similar to its owner, stared intently at one of the groups of tourists.
It was perfectly clean and tidy at the station, except that the demon hunter was smeared by pigeon droppings.
One by one, luxury trains on the Shinkansen high-speed line passed by. A dark green train with gold dragon trim was waiting for Ahmed. The pilot's cabin was high on the nose of the train, and there was a statuesque young Japanese man dressed in an elegant uniform and a cap, driving the machine. The interior of the train car was spacious, clean, comfortable, and normally quiet. Ahmed pulled an old laptop out of his backpack.

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He carefully sorted the videos made during the holidays. He had a great time with his Japanese friends and colleagues. The many-hour drive through a series of tunnels, along country roads to the park and back was somewhat tedious with its monotony, but the sunrise on the ocean was unforgettable and the photographs were excellent.
Ahmed carefully sorted all the photos by topics. He accurately kept his diaries, where he wrote his thoughts, visits, ideas, photos, and screen-shots, as well as links to interesting articles and sites. He liked order in his head, in his environment, and in his computer. He also hoped to see the same order in other people's heads, but this usually didn't occur, which upsets him, but not too much: diversity is a good thing after all. If he noticed the order in other people's heads, it was more often a chaotic arrangement of ideas and thoughts, similar to fractal structures, where neighboring ideas did not contact each other and might even contradict each other, but at the same time they got along well in the brain and way of thinking, in attitudes of the same person. Ahmed, knowing about this trick of development of thoughts, tried to connect the incongruous and look for inconsistencies, to increase the number of connections between different areas of the ideological series within his stream of thoughts. However, he deliberately limited the scope of application of such techniques to his professional field and in martial arts, where he did not allow chaos, and he did not extend too close attention to other areas of life.

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Now they were racing through the small, cozy neighborhoods of Japanese towns. The houses were more often low, similar to each other: many two or four-pitched roofs covered with typical knotty Japanese tiles. A series of roofs resembled a series of receding, as if they were separated by translucent overlapping layers of the thinnest white rice paper hills, hill behind hill, many chaotial rows of mountains till the horizon. Ahmed remembered an impressive and spectacular advertisement for Japanese roof tiles in which hundreds of Japanese people lay hand in hand in dense layers, withstanding a storm, then rain, fire, cold and snow, and then an earthquake, firmly holding each other without losing their grip. "Standing strong together", was the slogan of the video advertisement.
And those houses were closed together, each of them had a very small garden or no garden at all, and there was always a good multi-car garage next to the house. The train was going so fast that the houses flew by in seconds and only the sky moved relatively lazily against the background of flashing buildings. It seemed that the train was going to circumnavigate the sky, trying to go round tho-o-ose clouds far away. The train seemed to be flying over the surrounding area.

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Each time it seemed to him that he flew not just the distance between the two countries, but each time he also moved in time not for eight hours, but for eighty years forward and back. Japan, no matter how accustomed he was to living here and constantly moving back and forth from Algeria, did not cease to amaze him with its contrasts.
It was difficult for him to adjust, tune himself between the two countries. Many in his homeland spoke of him as a pro-European man with the northern mentality ... In fact, Japan in large cities sometimes resembled Europe more than Europe itself, but the residents looked a lot like the Japanese.
It’s true that a lot of Japanese women now lighten their hair, and sometimes you don’t understand from the back, that red-haired one is Japanese or a tourist from Europe. But often one can recognize a Japanese woman by a nice light club foot and a manner of pigeon-toed walking. Also, they have very clear crystal voices and laughter. If you take a walk in the evening in the center of Tokyo, you can often hear classical European music and good jazz coming from cafes and restaurants rather than Japanese pop music. People walk drunk and relaxed, consistently polite, even tipsy, albeit noisy. At the end of the week, Ahmed often went to some of such places with his colleagues to skip a tiny glass or two of sake or beer. It was traditional and polite.
Ahmed respected and appreciated the culture of this country, which, on every visit, welcomed him so warmly. Deep empathy for people, natural gentleness, simplicity, and years of sincere involvement in Japanese society made him a little unlike a typical representative of Algerian men.
And outwardly he did not look like an Arab, rather like a Frenchman, all the more so since he talked in French like a native: he had light, almost white, skin, curly brown hair, Apollo corpus, a long, strong white neck, large, but neat facial features, bushy eyebrows, and marvelous lively brown eyes, thin lips. He had a light grey stubble that grew very quickly and even in a clean-shaven state darkened his cheeks and chin. He almost did not wear a mustache, but sometimes he let go of a short goatee. His hands were not like that of a Frenchman: completely hairless. By nationality, Ahmed was a Berber.

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“How was your journey?” Shinji met him at the subway station. Ahmed warmly patted his shoulder,
“As good as it gets. Good to see you, Shinji!”
“Tell me how you are!?”
“I'm struggling with the life here…” ... Ahmed grinned.
“What does not kill us, makes us stronger.” Shinji recited the popular motto and laughed.
Ahmed smiled back and gazed steadily at his comrade. Shinji was seven years younger but looked skinny and tired. In his student years, he acquired the nickname "Genius", he gave hope for a fast and confident career. However, his health did not allow him to maintain energy and former activity. An elusive expression, either disillusionment or anguish, which is often found among the Japanese who were not too spoiled by fate, froze on his face. Shinji had a wife, two daughters, his parents, and his wife's very old and poor parents. They lived separately. Shinji had to provide three houses and pay for daughters' schools. Ahmed remembered him as a cheerful and active guy, full of strength. It was bitter to see the change. Shinji invited him to a country house where his father and his mother lived. The wife with their daughters was now resting with her parents in Tokyo. They sat. They slammed the doors of the car rhythmically and set off.
“How's the family?” Ahmed politely asked. Shinji winced.
“Well!” He said cheerfully and began to talk about the successes of the youngest of daughters in a music school. Both his daughters in schools wore uniforms, which greatly saved the budget. In the photo, the chubby faces of slender Japanese girls smiled shyly and cunningly. Ahmed knew that in the family the girls were not shy and poor Shinji was plagued by their whims. He, as he could, tried to develop girls' intelligence, went with them to museums, drove to various famous places in Japan, paid for additional schools and courses as far as earnings allowed.
At first, he worked as a lecturer at the university, he read free barrier design for doctors, but then he gave this place to Ahmed, moved to live closer to his parents, and got a job as a first-class instructor in fashionable pottery. Learning to sculpt clay pots has become popular and expensive in Japan. Famous craftsmen sold their ceramics for good money.
He toiled and worked part-time in different places, which was especially tiring when groups of children came across.
His name "Shinji Ono"  looked beautiful on his author's products and sometimes they were sold. He always deftly arranged the lines of hieroglyphs, two simple and two with "windows-like", as the youngest girl said. The impression of the stamp was obtained with two sweeping hieroglyphs at the edges and two compact angulars in the center. Quite handsomely.

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The house of Shinji's parents was very old. They got it from their parents and ancestors. The house seemed to be entirely made up of different types of wood: bamboo, plywood, cut boards, bars, carved roof details. Even the lightweight sliding triple window frames were wooden. Glasses in the windows on the side of the street were not smooth so that by glancing at such a window, it was possible to see only blurred outlines of furnishings. Part of the windows was partially boarded up by pieces of plywood a long time ago. Its long pieces hung down like long drawn bangs of anime characters. Along the slope of the roofs, grooves, green with age, that were made from halves of bamboo sticks were let through so that rainwater flowed into thin metal pipes. Here and there were pinned plywood sheets instead of rotten wood parts. The roof was built of bamboo tiles with a very beautiful, bumpy shape. The house was large and tidy, despite the dilapidation and obvious signs of the destruction of the materials from which it was built.

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The fence was made of roughly processed large bricks, with insets of a pattern of hexagons. The modest gates from the armature led into a small courtyard where, however, several trees grew: dwarf Japanese cedar, ficus, and a tree with burgundy leaves. Under the awning on the left was an old open-body truck, on the right, there was a garage where Shinji parked the car. To the right was a residential building and white lace curtains were visible through the windows.
They were being waited for. The old men looked warm and cheerful. The house smelled of wood, old people, food, and mint cigarettes. The old woman, shuffling by her furry slippers. She paced to and fro from the kitchen to the table, smiled white-toothed and bowed, trying to please the men.
Ahmed was placed on the second floor, in a spacious room.  Father and son smoked a lot and spoke Japanese until late. Ahmed could make out a little: the old man spoke a local dialect.
Ahmed looked around. Parquet and mats on the floor. Solid wooden, a little bulky furniture. Modern kitchen. Cozy interior details: sliding light wooden partitions in the space of the room, which divided it into several rooms, when there was a need, a wooden traditional lantern on the chest of drawers, a miniature plastic multi-colored chest of drawers in the same place, a European-styled table and chairs in the kitchen, armchairs and an undersized table in the living area. A lot of small souvenirs and books where they could be placed.
By morning, after a short conversation with the host through Shinju's help in translating, Ahmed was treated to excellent rice and drinks, and sent to bed, patting his shoulder with approval.
The tiredness of the day's moving and the impressions of the meeting fatigued Ahmed. He fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow.

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There was an electronic clock on an old wooden chest of drawers. It was 3:00. Ahmed stared at the glowing, warm orange numbers floating in the half-light. "It's a beautiful combination of numbers." thought Ahmed. The numbers were nicely rounded in design. It reminded him of his baby's bulging eyes. He left his favorite goldfish in his Japanese home.
The fish on the right, which was black, blinked its telescopic eyes, then turned to the smaller fish, golden one, on the left. He stared at it for a long moment, his dark-brown eyes filled with either anguish or hatred. Then black reached out a strong thin hand to its face and cupped its cheek. His beautiful face contorted. It got almost cruel. With his other hand, he pulled the fish to him and kissed it savoringly on the lips. The long kiss seemed to last forever.
The victim of the kiss could not move in the iron grip of the samurai giant, which now seemed to be the black fish. Ahmed heard a heartbreakingly tender melody in Italian, and the fish sang in a soft, hoarse voice, finally breaking away from the blue lips,
“Cancellavi con un attimo di vita tutto il triste mio passato come all'alba nasce un giorno dalla notte.”
“Lack of ability among simple people to judge what is beautiful, good, and proper, exists only in the imagination of narrow souls and snobs. The nature of people is higher and more reasonable than any borders.” the second fish whispered softly in bad English and turned back its tail.
Ahmed flinched and woke up. The 4:00 numbers glowed in the dark.

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All the following days passed quickly in a good company. Full of sunny mood, encouraged by success in training which he attended with Sinji together, and absolutely happy, a week later Ahmed returned to his fish in Nagoya. They swam peacefully in the aquarium, curiously meeting the owner. Ahmed did not want to return to boring reality. He hesitated and procrastinated until the last day of returning to his duties at the university. He finally had to open a working laptop.
First of all, it was necessary to check the email letters. “Everything is as always in this dull society…”
A letter came to one of the addresses:

"Hello, this week I have found an architecture portfolio of your young years you sent me about one year ago. I decided to find you on the Internet, probably don't know why. Just want to know how you are. What's new? I lost your email address, so I have taken it on a site where I was lucky to see it. Also, I've found you on Tiwtter. It seems you are an interesting, very pleasant, and real human. I just would be happy to continue our communication if it is not annoying for you. Olga, Russia. My Viber / Telegram / WhatsApp +7 *** ******* ".

He vaguely remembered this woman with whom they had barely exchanged a pair of meaningless messages.
“Oh, why not?”, Ahmed thought thoughtlessly and gave the answer on Telegram: “Hello Olga. I am the architect from PenPals...” He adhered to such a point of view that you never know whether a person will be useful and interesting or not, and he never avoided meeting anyone. If the acquaintance did not bring him any benefit, he easily ignored or negated all communication. He could not cope with himself and added: "I am in Japan again."
He was really happy to work again in Nagoya. He loved this nice city as a native. He knew all its streets, which had got well-known throughout all those many years, fish markets, snack bars, parks and alleys, cafes where one can spend all day for a small fee, fountains, statues, metro and train stations, gyms and arenas, shops and eateries, and he even knew where to find a good dentist.

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He didn't like classic suits since he was a student and preferred to wear jeans or trousers with a sweater or a suit sports jacket. Sweatshirts were always a little small and with a geometric pattern, trousers, on the contrary, were loose, and the jackets were loose and baggy. The pockets of trousers were always stuffed with something, and if a jacket had a pocket, that one also remained empty for only a short time. We cannot look into these pockets, so their secrets will be forever buried in their black depths. Only his wives knew what was in them.
And he had two wives. Old and young. He divorced the old one and married a young one. He then divorced the young one also. Both of the wives were well educated, from worthy and wealthy families. He had been divorced for two years now. He believed that sadness is part of his happiness and remained cheerful and strong.
Ahmed pulled on his trousers, shirt, and jacket, put on dark-brown suede shoes, smiled at his two fish, black and gold, grabbed his laptop bag, closed the door, and went out into the shining streets.
It was late morning. It was damp. Young Japanese girls were pushing big pink boxes on bike-like wheels with babies from kindergarten inside. A black cat with his broken tail shied away from them into the alley. The girls chatted loudly and had curiously and fast examined the handsome, respectable-looking foreigner. He politely bowed with a light smile and they giggled in embarrassment looking at one another.
He preferred walking at a brisk pace to taking the subway. The University was not far from his Dorm. He liked clean streets, beautiful, albeit somewhat monotonous, houses, covered streets of markets, spotty and rich in textures sidewalks, cyclists and bicycles, sculptural figures at intersections, and at the entrances of buildings, and flowering green plants in pots near the walls of houses everywhere. Now, however, it was cold and there were few flowers.

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He was walking along the railway bridge next to him, whose silky side, like the scales of a long dragon from a Japanese anime, reflected sunlight so that a long rainbow strip formed on the sidewalk along which Ahmed walked.
He paced and thought about his work. He often had to deal with translations into English for a Japanese professor, more often than he would like, as part of the research work in which he was interested. Ahmed was very good at learning languages ;;and knew some very well, which attracted Japanese professors. The Japanese language also succumbed to him. In the past, Ahmed used his knowledge of Japanese to write petitions and applications for grants from the Japanese government and private foundations. These small financial streams had helped him a lot. There was a lot of spending on housing, training, alimony, and living. He was finally building a house somewhere.
It is almost unrealistic for a foreigner to get a permanent position as a university teacher or leader in Japan, but temporary positions also brought considerable income by Algerian standards, and his travels from country to country were paid by the employer…
The rainbow strip ended, the bridge turned slightly, taking the trains into the distance.
Ten minutes later, Ahmed entered the inconspicuous glass door of a tall gray building. He looked at his reflection in the glass. Curly hair was sticking out unruly again. He smoothened his curls, thought briefly that it was time to get a haircut, walked through the checkpoint, and cheerfully shuffled the slippers that were given to him at the entrance through the corridor to the office, preparing a smile.
The working day started in 40 minutes, but most of the colleagues had already arrived. It was quiet. Everyone sat, buried in their work: waking up in the morning, they brought to perfection what they began to do yesterday. Smoking was now banned in the office, but the room had a strong smell of tobacco from those who entered. They smoked in the special zone very often and always brought this plume of heavy smog with them. Ahmed sometimes drank with his colleagues, but he was not used to smoking and the smell always irritated his nostrils somewhat in the first minutes.
He greeted them amicably and sat down at the table. A lot of paperwork had to be done again, and again he had to sit out a long boring meeting, and then work with the students …

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A Telegram message came from that woman: she was surprised that he was again in Japan ... He did not have a spare minute to answer, he barely noticed the next message three hours later and just brushed it off without reading it. But she continued to insist and wrote something else. He read it.
"Hello, Ahmed! You are a crystallization of all my expectations. You are the fittest person I've ever met .." ... and so on ... Ahmed was surprised also because all the previous messages that he did not read, except for the first one, have been removed. He replied: "..I am sorry?", He really did not have time, he put all his attention into his students. This judy clearly had nothing to do, and he still had a lot of important things to do. The woman did not leave him alone. She wrote that she didn't want to be rude, although there was nothing rude in her letters, just ... one can't be so intrusive.

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In the evening Ahmed went to bed early. In the morning he was going to the train to catch a training session in a nearby town. He could not sleep. He looked at his fish and tried to get the problems of the day out of his head. Again the message gurgled musically: "How are you, Ahmed! I am awfully sorry .." - but what does she finally need?!
There were too many impressions of the day. Ahmed could not help but be surprised by the Japanese and their manner of work and communication, so unlike what he saw in Algeria. He did not try to delve into the relationship, believing that their cultures are so different that it is almost impossible to understand each other. He preferred to take everything for granted. No religion in the world answers the question "Why so and not otherwise?" Religion and human nature are extremely complex and unstable objects, the description of which requires its own specific language. And where language is invented for understanding, science appears and you need to learn this language in order to begin to understand at least something.
His scientific interests were far from these. Nevertheless, he was interested in Japanese theosophy and history and wrote several works for the defense of Dan on the theory and practice of martial arts.
The wider and deeper his knowledge and ideas about Japan and the Japanese became, the more confusing and complex the essence of the country and people seemed. He caught signs which were purely practical and applicable in life. What was certain, the Japanese could be trusted. They usually don't lie. They make their thoughts innuendo. If a Japanese says "maybe ...", it means "never", if "I think ..." means "maybe", and if he is silent for a long time, then he is interested, thinks, and is making a decision. In any case, if you are careful when signing a contract, then be rest assured that there will be no surprises or deception. He fell asleep at last.

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The train quickly, in a silent carriage, carried Ahmed to the station in the town of Kariya, and from there he reached his dojo.
The workout usually started early, but they were asked to come forty minutes earlier to tune in to classes. He usually didn’t shave on Friday mornings, and he got much prickly in three days. With dark patches of cheeks, dressed in dark-blue keikogi and barefooted, with disheveled curls, Ahmed looked a little like a respectable university teacher. It seemed that his small, neat hands, gracefully able to hold glasses and a microphone, here had become wiry, red, and even rough in appearance.
The training was everything for him. There was nothing more important except his family. He perfected every movement of his, every step, and counted so much that he was able to start and end the exercise in the same place on the tatami as if there was a position sensor inside Ahmed. If we watched different videos of his bowings at the beginning and at the end of the exercise, we would not find a difference in the angle of his body or head, or sword, as if it were a duplicate of the video of one the same movement. He looked completely human-like; there was some elusive indistinctness in the performance of these movements, but by comparing the two, you would be convinced of complete identity. Ahmed was a pedant and a perfectionist.

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It is said that some lives are linked across time. Connected by an ancient calling that echoes through the ages. Destiny.
That strange woman persistently continued writing her messages about nothing. He entered the account, and read:

The message -1-
Hello, Ahmed.
I've sent you many messages. You kept silent and ignored me. I cannot understand why you added me on Telegram if you are so busy and cannot talk to me. But everything always goes for the better. I decided you will be my personal Blackhole. I need such a quiet place where I could get rid of my heart and mind. Your account will be the place where I can talk a lot and where I will be absolutely free of all the conventions of society.
The peculiarity of a Blackhole is that nothing can come back from it, and nobody knows the transformation of all of that is inside of it. It would be interesting to imagine. I will send you my thousand messages and one, and then I will disappear from your life forever. For you, I will die.

He smiled indifferently and didn't believe this. He often corresponded with women on dating sites, but such strange statements he has not yet met. He calculated quickly..one thousand..even if one message a day....this is almost three years of messages.. He didn't exchange messages with any of the women on the sites so often or stay in touch for so long.
At first, a year ago, he and she chatted briefly on that site. She said that she works as a design manager in a small company that makes custom furniture. She was interested in his architectural portfolio and he promised to send it by mail. It would be interesting to hear an opinion, perhaps, praise, or a kind word, because it was a whole life. Many years of hard work.
Her answer seemed to him too direct, impolite, even rude: "I've found the architecture is a mix between Egyptian-like monumental constructions with some aggregates from a gas-oil refinery plant. You offer these buildings for living and working in it. The buildings seem a bit unfriendly to people. But I have liked some ..."
What right did she have to say even a word about architecture, let alone evaluate it, if she had no idea about it? Ahmed could not tolerate ignorance, especially in the professional sphere. He told her, with exaggerated politeness, that those were his old works and that he was building a house and would send her the photos later. This design will be more user-friendly.
A little later, she answered something, asking how he was doing, what was new. He wrote that he had been very busy with work lately and was tired of idiots. She asked him in the next letter, “who has caught you with this stupidity?” But he did not write to her again, forgot, put it out of his mind. And she didn't think of him. And so was that for about a year.
The Well-Tempered Clavier: Book 1, BWV 846-869 : 1. Prelude in C Major, BWV 846 (Live in Troy, NY / 1987)

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The Master — a short, skinny, narrow-shouldered, completely bold, with a well-shaped nose, Japanese — was very old and looked incredibly decrepit, barely alive while he was motionless. It seemed so till he started his master-run. With clear and light movements, he marked important moments in sparring with a young partner. He had enough strong and resilient voice though a bit senile. His gestures were extremely fast and commanding. He had returned instantly to life, flashy making his tricky acts and froze, again turning into a living mummy. All of that fascinated and aroused respect.
Ahmed patiently and painstakingly followed his master's instructions. The group of students with Ahmed was small and consisted of elderly men. All of them easily handled weapons with a length of 3.6 meters and a weight of 10 kilograms. Classes were held in a low, nondescript building, covered with slate on the outside and plywood on the inside. The painted wooden floor and weapons, and equipment rack opposite the entrance, and against the walls made this small, elongated room even cozy.
The master, with his ancient bloodline, seemed to be a messenger from former worlds that had already passed away. Ahmed liked being here. It seemed to him that each time he touched a grain of that forever-gone history which carried real wisdom and nobility of thought. And was there any?

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Her next letters were addressed to stars
and sounded as echoes in eternity:
 
The message -2-
Hello, my Blackhole!
I should confess. I couldn't find your email in my mail, I deleted it one year ago, so I tried to search for it on the Internet. I remembered you gave me a link to your job account placed on the Internet a year ago. I didn't take my tablet with your portfolio file to check out your name and how to write it right, so I have known many people with the same or similar last name you have till found you. For example, in Wikipedia, I could find several footballers with the surname — from Algeria, in Morocco — several scientists. I found your email after I added the word "architect" in the searching line. It was one University with your CV.  I am awfully sorry I had found it again.
Now I know very much about you: where and when you studied and worked, who were your students, I saw the list of all your publications and know you are into martial arts. It happened casually, so I sent you the link on my VK account, in order to make us equal, for you to know something about me if you want.
Honestly, I have never had any photos of my face on the Internet until recently. Now I placed only several of them on Penpals, on Codepen, and, today, on VK. I even haven't a lot of photos of mine kept in my gadgets' memory. The photo placed on Penpals I made for my CV. That's why I look so strict there. Also, I have found your Tiwtter account :)

The message -3-
Hello, Blackhole!
When I think about you it occurs to me so many imaginations and pictures in an instant. I remember all the Arabian people I have ever known. I see those Arabic architects and designers that I know. I know a few of them: Haza Dahid and Rakim Sharid. I see those guys who helped me in studying Arabic. I see your portfolio, the photos of you,  your CV, all the names in it: Arabic, Japanese and European. I hear Arabic and Persian songs and music that I was listening to a lot of Iranian, Egyptian, Syrian musicians. And all other Muslim music, Azeric oud, and violin of Adalet Zevirov that can be merry as a child and thoughtful as a girl that fell in love. I recall all that I know about Japan: there was a time when I read a bit about the country. I was impressed by their parks and gardens and wondered by the level and style of life of simple people who are overworked regularly. I recall my father who was an architect. I see the palms I've never seen in real life, the sunrises over the mountains and over the sea in Japan and in Algeria I've never been to, the people there I've never met, the buildings and clouds far away.  I will talk about all the things that have some tiny hint of acquaintance with you. There will not be any petties here. You will be my personal obsession for that time being. I will send you my one thousand and one messages.

The message -4-
Hello, Blackhole!
I have found your Safebook account. I needed to know who you are indeed...

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Ahmed, following the instinct of self-preservation, rushed to the Safebook account. "I should at least hide my contacts from this crazy woman", he thought, while performing the procedure, and hiding friends from viewing, he calmed down. "Well, what harm can she do? As long as you don't embarrass yourself in front of your friends". And he left his friends hidden.

He did not like to show off his life, only occasionally, for the mood, posted pictures or photos that he made himself. He was used to living in isolation and modesty. Any close attention to his personal life disturbed him, though it flattered him a little. He was not a stranger to a little vanity; he was a man.

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20th January 2020, Tyumen, Russia
Olga was tired of looking for people to talk to. Tired of the endless "Hello and how are you, where do you live, where do you work, are you married?" She needed an intelligent and attentive companion, even if it is strange, or even unfriendly. She has chosen Ahmed because she came across his portfolio, which was gathering dust in her old tablet. Strange, of course, architectural solutions...and the choice of colors. But she liked the unusual.
She decided to write, immediately, on impulse. Half an hour later, she scored a combination of the last name and the word "architecture" and met a familiar, almost forgotten photo from the online curriculum vitae, link on which Ahmed sent her one year ago. The email address she was looking for was also there. She immediately sent the email and started waiting…

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Two days later, he added her in the Telegram app.
She sent what she thought was a polite reply. He didn't answer. She was bored. Waiting for a miracle always provokes rash actions. She deleted the message and wrote another one, also polite. Another silence...for the whole day, she indulged in this way, reaching a slightly hooligan message.
That's what Ahmed read. "Offended or decided that I am an idiot", Olga concluded. She tried to justify herself, wrote her apologies and explanations, but...he didn't answer.
Now, Olga began to remember what kind of person Ahmed was. "Our email correspondence one year ago also was very brief… Why?... He called some people idiots, he got sick of idiots… Where? in Japan, or in Algeria, or in general… Was that what he meant?" He was, as she remembered, polite and rude at the same time. He was very open. He immediately sent his photos with and without Japanese colleagues. And, he was very closed because he did not say anything about himself. And about his work, he wrote as if it was something uninteresting or ordinary. "He sent me the portfolio. It felt like it was important to him that I have a look at his portfolio."

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Ahmed didn't respond to her half-joking messages. "Then why did he add me to the chat at all?"Olga wondered, "The most interesting thing is that he reads all my messages and does not respond..."
Olga went online and found his University resume again. Everything was there: years of studying and teaching at universities in Algeria and Japan, years of research and experiments, articles, and a lot of information about working together with other researchers and students, his skills and hobbies. It turns out that he is a scientist or almost a scientist...a researcher.
The volume of everything was really impressive. She passed through the other available links: links to articles, diplomas, and the Tiwtter account. "At least he's not an idiot," she thought. "It would be nice to have, at least, an imaginary conversation with someone like that."  She hasn't had that experience yet, but it was a great idea.
She could practice English and she had a lot to say to this man, who was a quintessence of all the men she had ever met, or to a certain man that she has dreamed of all her life. Recently, she read Jack London's “Martin Eden” in English and there was a lot of undeveloped vocabulary from the book..
Ahmed's photos from the resume and from Tiwtter were small, blurry. But he looked good, alert, and fit. A few posts about architecture, study, some photos of some places, a photo from a conference and etc. “He is real, not fake. Alive.” But yet Olga presented the interlocutor as a huge void that contains everything and in which nothing is visible, that is as if it does not exist. Black black black black... hole, like the gaping, where nothing was known: maybe he was in Japan, maybe in Algeria. It was not clear where. He lived, walked, talked somewhere there, but here, with her, he kept silent.

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Five emails went nowhere. Нe got silent. But he read her letters! She found his Safebook account and had written to him about it in the Telegram. And then inflamed with curiosity, she carefully read everything available in the account from beginning to end. It was almost empty. There were a few photos: three to five photos of the autumn leaves as a reminder of the past in the oblivion world,  photos of statues at..., how she found out,...at the entrance to the train station in Kochi, Japan. It's a long way from Nagoya, where he studied and worked. "What was he doing there?" — Olga was perplexed.— "It is expensive to travel in Japan!" Google maps showed her the location and photos of places in Japan and in Algeria where the universities he worked were located. She knew the Arab world only from conversations with two guys — students from Yemen, who helped her in studying Arabic once. She decided that she needed to write every day, and the topic of those classes with the Arabs would not be easy for her expression in English. Olga studied English and there was a period when she was fond of Arabic.

The message - 5 -
Hello, Ahmed.
Arabic
The room was full of people. Most of them were guys of Arabian, Mongolian, African appearances. It was an auditorium with desks located one over another, like stairs. Student girls were sat upstairs and teachers were sat in the center of the room in the row over the guys. We went in and sat down at our bottoms near Evgeniy, the associate professor of the department who organized the meeting. Our two guys were there too, in the first row with many other students. One sat on the left far away from us and the other on the right in front of me.
Girls seemed to be afraid. All of them resembled mice: small, with light-blue or -brown eyes, looking scared at boys, had mostly brown-gray hair and clothes that melted among desks as a specific office camouflage.
No wonder: next classes each of those girls will teach those guys personally. The guys often turned out their heads to look at the girls.
The teacher was below, with her assistant. She was incredibly beautiful: black hair, good forms, bold view, clever eyes, nice face. Her voice was strong, high, and clear.
She confidently and energetically started the first tutorial.

The message - 6 -
Hello, Ahmed.
Lately, almost everybody hates Chinese people in Russia. Today our city became one of two coronavirus epicenters in Russia. One ill student from China was found in the University I told you about. She is in a hospital now.
Arabic
Fascinated, I was looking at the beautiful woman. She was teaching them how to pronounce Russian language sounds, moving her mouth widely or shrinking it in a tube, or relaxing and tightening lips and tongue.

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