Megrelburg: The Heart of Van Helten [English Version]

Megrelburg: The Heart of Van Helten [English Version]

PROLOGUE

The more we try to control everything, the more reality slips through our fingers

Sigmund Freud

It is human nature to want to control everything around us—even that which cannot be controlled. We make plans, draw routes, arrange the future on neat shelves, as if life were a mechanism with understandable gears, where one only needs to twist a single part for everything to go as intended. But life is not a mechanism. It is a river—fast, murky, unpredictable—and any attempt to hold it in our palms always ends the same way: the water seeps through our fingers, leaving behind only a cold dampness and the bitter taste of helplessness.

This was precisely what Howard was thinking as he stood by the window on that raw autumn day. Beyond the glass, Mergelburg seemed like a town forgotten by time and weather alike. The gray facades of the houses, as if faded by endless rain, loomed over the narrow streets, while the wet cobblestones reflected the dim glow of the streetlamps like shards of a broken mirror. The rain did not pour—it slid down the windows in slow, unhurried tears, blurring the outlines of the world into vague silhouettes. The air was heavy, saturated with the smell of dampness, cooling smoke, and something elusively sorrowful—as though the town itself was mourning something long gone.

The room breathed with an era its owners had no wish to chase away with modernity; on the contrary, they preserved it carefully. It was not a museum, nor was it an ordinary home: here, the style of the nineteenth century did not seem deliberate—it was a way of life. High ceilings with molding, heavy curtains of dark green velvet that muffled both street noise and light, and wooden furniture with fine carving, darkened in places by time but polished to a soft gleam—all of it created a sense of reliability, almost eternity. Dark oak bookshelves, filled with leather-bound volumes, covered nearly an entire wall; between them hung old engravings and yellowed maps, as if to remind one that the world was far larger than a single room or a single town. On a massive writing desk with bronze fittings lay an open atlas; beside it stood a copper inkwell and a quill, though no one had written with ink for a long time. In the corner, a grandfather clock ticked quietly; its steady rhythm was not intrusive but soothing, like the pulse of an old house.

The air carried not only the dampness from outside but also something homely: the wax used to polish the floors, old paper, and strong coffee. Howard wrapped his fingers around the hot cup, but the warmth did not reach inside—the cold seemed to have settled somewhere deeper than the skin, in the very chest. He watched the drops slide down the glass and felt a familiar, almost habitual tension rising within him: the desire to fix everything, to foresee everything, to hold on to everything.

At seventeen, Howard looked as though he was trying to seem older and more serious than he really was. He wore a dark blue shirt made of thick fabric, its buttons carefully fastened all the way to the top—as if he wanted to hide his vulnerability within it. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and this single touch of carelessness betrayed his inner restlessness. His trousers, made of fine wool and dark gray in color, fit perfectly—recently bought, most likely at his father’s insistence. They felt too “grown-up” for a teenager, but Howard wanted to look like someone to be reckoned with. There was a tension in his posture, as if he were constantly ready for an argument or for defending his rightness.

“You’re making plans again,” came a quiet voice from behind him.

Howard did not turn around. He knew that voice, knew its intonation—there was no reproach in it, only a gentle, almost weary care.

Victor van Helten, Howard’s father, at nearly sixty looked like a man who had lived a long life without squandering either his intellect or his dignity. He held a doctorate in philology and was a professor, and there was an academic composure to him that never hardened into dryness. He wore an old tweed jacket, worn in places but carefully mended—a garment he had kept for so many years that it seemed a part of him. Beneath it, a knitted dark brown vest was visible, and around his neck hung a thin wool scarf, draped carelessly yet tastefully. His gray hair was cropped short, and in the deep wrinkles around his eyes lingered a habit of smiling, even when the conversation turned to serious matters. In his hands he held a worn volume of Kant, as though he had been about to read, but had set it aside to talk.

His father stepped closer and stopped beside him, also staring into the rainy haze.

“Not plans,” Howard replied quietly, without taking his eyes off the window. “More like... insurance. If I think everything through, nothing bad will happen.”

His father gave a soft grunt—not mockingly, but with a touch of sad irony.

“Insurance against life?” He paused, watching the rain draw its incoherent patterns on the glass. “You know, when you were little, we used to float paper boats down the stream. Do you remember?”

Howard gave a barely noticeable nod.

“You folded them so carefully—every corner had to be even, every crease perfect. You thought that if the boat was made right, it wouldn’t sink. But then the current would catch it, spin it around, sometimes flip it over, and you would get angry. You wanted it to sail exactly where you had intended.”

“I wanted it not to break apart,” Howard corrected quietly.

“Yes,” his father agreed gently. “You wanted to protect it. But the river doesn’t listen to our wishes. And do you know what I told you then?”

Howard finally turned. His father’s face was calm, but in his eyes there was that particular wisdom that comes not from books, but from years lived—and from pain a man has learned to accept.

“That the current is not the truth,” Howard said almost in a whisper, as if tasting the words.

“Exactly,” his father nodded. “Going with the flow does not mean giving up. It means accepting that you cannot control the river. But not taking the current for truth—that is what matters. The current simply carries. It does not know where you need to go. It does not decide what is right for you.”

Howard looked out the window again. The rain was still sliding down the glass, and the town was still sinking into gray twilight, but now it seemed that there was not only sadness in it, but also a strange, harsh beauty—the beauty of untamed reality.

“Sometimes I feel that if I don’t control everything, everything will fall apart,” he admitted, and in those words there was no bravado, only a sincere, almost childlike anxiety.

His father placed a hand on his shoulder—light, yet firm, like an anchor in a storm.

“What is meant to fall apart will fall apart,” he said calmly. “But you will remain. And you will build again. Not because you calculated everything, but because you know how to rise. But don’t try to make the current your compass. It will carry you somewhere you don’t need to be.”

Howard took a deep breath, and with that breath, some of the tension that had been building for weeks seemed to leave his chest. He looked again at the rain, at the blurred lights, at the town living its own life without asking anyone’s permission. And for the first time in a long while, he allowed himself not to try to hold on to everything.

Let the river flow. Let the paper boat sail wherever it wants. The main thing is not to confuse its path with your own truth.

Victor settled into a deep armchair that stood in the corner of the room opposite the window. With a quiet, familiar creak, the wood accepted his weight—the armchair was old but reliable, like everything in this house. He clicked the switch of a desk lamp with a yellow frosted shade, and the room immediately became smaller, cozier, as if it had narrowed the world down to a single warm circle of light. Shadows fell upon the carved patterns of the cabinets; the gilding on the spines of books flared softly for a moment and then dimmed.

Taking a pair of thin-framed glasses from their case, Victor put them on unhurriedly, adjusting the temple with a habitual movement. Then he opened the book—that same worn volume of Kant—and found the page where he had previously stopped. He paused for a second, as if listening not to the words, but to something behind them, to the silence between the lines. His fingers, slightly trembling with age but still steady, began to slowly stroke his short gray beard and mustache—an old habit that betrayed deep concentration. He was lost in thought, though certainly not over the concept of the categorical imperative.

His blue eyes, once bright and now slightly faded from the years but still alive, lifted and came to rest on his son. There was so much in that gaze at once: fatherly care, weariness from trying to guess another’s thoughts, and a quiet, stubborn desire to understand after all. One could read parental worry in them—not hysterical, not loud, but deep and patient, as if he were already taking upon himself part of the weight pressing down on Howard.

Victor closed the book carefully, without irritation, as if apologizing to it for the interrupted reading, and set it aside on a low carved table, where several pencil-written pages, a silver pen, and a small bronze owl figurine—a gift from Elizabeth on their anniversary—already lay.

He knew that thoughts of “control” did not arise from nothing. Howard had grown up in the family of philologist Victor and psychologist Elizabeth van Helten, and this had left a particular imprint on him. From childhood, he had not simply noticed emotions—he had read them like text, broken them down into meanings, compared intonations and glances, searched for subtext in every word. He felt the world more keenly than most of his peers, and this sensitivity was both a gift and a curse: it allowed him to see hidden motives, but it also made him vulnerable to any falseness.

That was why the elder van Helten understood: if he began asking directly, it would not be a conversation but a psychological duel. Howard, raised on discussions about the mechanisms of consciousness and the nature of anxiety, parried any questions brilliantly. He knew how to defend himself with words, to build logical barricades, to hide pain behind flawless arguments. And if his father made a mistake in phrasing, the son would simply point it out politely, almost tenderly, and avoid answering.

His father was silent for another moment, as if sorting through not words but entire worlds in which those words had once lived. He knew: if he pushed too hard, Howard would immediately raise his defenses—politely, logically, flawlessly. An endless analysis was always running through his son’s mind: every word from his father was broken down into possible meanings, every question into a dozen possible answers, every tone of voice into hidden intentions. For Howard, a conversation was not an exchange of thoughts but a chess match, in which he calculated his opponent’s moves in advance.

But Victor decided to make a move his son’s mind was most likely not prepared for. Not because he was cleverer, but because he was coming not from logic, but from silence and vulnerability. Such a turn either did not exist in Howard’s calculations at all, or had been dismissed as improbable. And it was precisely this uncalculated scenario, accepted now by the teenager’s consciousness, that could break through his armor.

Victor tilted his head slightly, as if listening not to his son, but to himself, and said quietly, almost to himself:

“You know, when I was about seventeen, I also thought that if you arranged everything correctly—the words, the pauses, the glances—you could make the world follow your script. I was sure: if only I found the right phrases, she would understand that I was the one.”

Howard flinched almost imperceptibly, but did not turn around. Only his fingers tightened around the cup, until his knuckles turned white.

“Her name was Marta,” Victor continued, not looking at his son, as if telling the story not to him, but to the rain outside the window. “I was living in a different town then, in a smaller house, without engravings and old books. And I thought love was a problem that could be solved if you didn’t make mistakes. I rehearsed phrases in front of the mirror, counted how many seconds to hold a pause so as not to seem pushy, and at the same time not let her forget about me. I thought that control was the same as caring.”

He paused briefly, remembering not so much Marta herself, but the desperation with which he had tried to hold on to a feeling that was slipping away.

“And then I understood something that at the time felt almost like a betrayal of my own efforts: you cannot force another person to feel what they don’t feel. And no perfect words will help. It was... hard. As if you were standing on a stage, saying everything exactly as written, and the hall was silent.”

The room grew quiet; only the grandfather clock steadily counted the seconds, and the rain continued whispering something of its own against the glass.

“For a long time I couldn’t accept it,” Victor added quietly. “I thought the problem was with me: I had said something wrong, looked at the wrong moment, smiled the wrong way. And only years later did I realize that the mistakes weren’t the point. The point is that not all stories end the way we want them to. And not all feelings can be earned.”

Howard finally turned his head a little, though he still did not look directly at his father—his gaze slid over the dark wood of the cabinet, over the dim glint of bronze, over any point that was not Victor’s face. But in that half-turn there was already something new—not defense, but expectation.

“And what did you do then?” he asked almost in a whisper, as if afraid of frightening away this unfamiliar, honest tone of conversation.

“Nothing special,” Victor answered calmly. “I simply stopped trying to control everything. I allowed myself to be imperfect. And you know what the strangest thing is? When I stopped trying to be the person I thought I had to be for her, breathing became easier. Not because she suddenly fell in love with me, but because I stopped breaking myself for someone else’s silence.”

He tilted his head slightly, watching his son attentively, but without pressure.

“That doesn’t mean the pain disappears. It just stops being fuel for endless calculations. That’s what you’re doing right now, isn’t it? Running through every possible scenario in your head, searching for where you went wrong, what you could have said differently…”

Howard slowly lowered his gaze to his cup, as if searching the dark surface of the coffee for an answer he didn’t dare speak aloud. His shoulders, tense until now, seemed to drop slightly—not from weakness, but because part of the weight had finally found something to rest on.

“Her name is Emily Moore,” he said, and his voice sounded unusually brittle, as if the words were scraping his throat. “We sit two rows apart in class. Sometimes she laughs at someone’s joke, and I catch myself trying to figure out: is it just laughter, or is she looking at someone, or… well, I don’t know. She doesn’t look at me. At all. As if I’m not there. And every day I try to think of a way to make her notice me.”

He fell silent, as if frightened by what he had allowed himself to say.

“And every time I think that now I’m about to say the right thing, I immediately imagine how it could go wrong. Ten different versions, a hundred… I don’t even manage to start, because I can already see everything falling apart.”

Victor did not nod, did not rush to answer with comfort. He simply sat a little longer in the silence, allowing those words to take their place in the room, without trying to immediately correct or smooth them over.

“You know,” he finally said quietly, “sometimes the bravest thing you can do is not to calculate every possibility, but simply to say: ‘It matters to me that you’re here.’ Without a plan. Without strategy. Just the truth. Even if it changes nothing. Because you have the right to be heard, even if the answer isn’t the one you hoped for.”

Howard looked out the window again, where the rain was still blurring the lights of the town into dim smudges. But now there was something less hostile in that gray light—not a promise of happiness, but an acknowledgment that the world doesn’t have to be comfortable.

“But it’s easier to say nothing,” he said almost in a whisper.

“Yes,” Victor agreed calmly. “Easier. But not freer. And not more honest with yourself.”

And in that silence, filled with rain, old wood, and a heavy but necessary confession, something fragile and real finally settled between them—not a solution to the problem, but the right to have it. The right to feel, and not to hide it behind flawless calculations.

Howard said nothing more. Not out of distrust—he simply suddenly felt that the words that had seemed necessary a minute ago had become too heavy to speak. They seemed to catch on his ribs, unwilling to come out, and he decided to keep them to himself—let them lie where they were more at peace.

Victor understood. Not through any special insight, but by the way his son turned back to the window, by the way his fingers relaxed slightly on the cup, by the way there was no tension in the silence—only the quiet weariness of someone who had finally allowed himself not to defend. The professor did not push, did not search for new detours to the truth. He simply remained seated in his armchair, in the warm circle of light from the yellow lamp, and let that silence become something reliable—not an emptiness, but a space where one could breathe.

The rain outside gradually weakened. It no longer lashed against the windows, but rustled softly, as if the town itself had finally exhaled and decided to quiet down a little. The drops slid more slowly, as if in no hurry, and there was something soothing in that unhurried pace. The lights of Mergelburg, previously blurred and dim, now stood out more clearly, reflected in the wet asphalt like timid sparks of hope.

Victor took off his glasses, placed them on the table beside the book, and closed his eyes for a second, as if giving himself permission to share in that silence.

Howard stood by the window, and his reflection in the glass seemed a little less sharp, less tense. He wasn’t looking at his father, but he felt his presence—not as pressure, but as a support that asked for nothing in return. And in that, too, there was a form of trust: not to pour everything out at once, but simply to let someone know that things were hard, without demanding to be “fixed” on the spot.

“If you ever want to tell me more,” Victor said quietly, almost in a whisper, without opening his eyes, “I’ll be here. And if you don’t want to, I’ll still be here.”

Howard gave a barely perceptible nod, without turning around. That was enough.

Outside, the town was slowly waking from the rain. The sky had lightened a little, and the gray shroud was beginning to break into separate layers—paler, almost pearlescent. Far away, a car passed, and its headlights cut through the damp twilight for a moment, leaving behind only a brief trail of light.

And when that light faded, Howard finally stepped away from the window. He set his cup on the windowsill, ran his palm across the cold glass as if wiping away the last drops, and quietly sat down on the edge of the sofa—not too close to his father, but not at the other end of the room either. Just nearby.

They sat like that for a while—in a silence that didn’t need to be filled with anything. Then Victor picked up the book, opened it to that same page as if returning to something long familiar, and began to read aloud—quietly, steadily, the way one reads when the goal is not so much to tell a story as to build a protective circle around it. And Howard listened, not so much to every word as to the rhythm of his father’s voice—even, calm, as if promising: whatever happens tomorrow, today, here, all is well.

CHAPTER 1

Do not seek to have everything happen as you wish, but wish for everything to happen as it actually does, and your life will be serene.

Epictetus

The Mergelburg morning showed no signs of softening. The wind still drove dry leaves along the sidewalks, flung prickly sprays of yesterday’s rain into passersby’s faces, and seemed determined to make every step heavier. Autumn had finally settled in, and the town appeared even grayer than before, yet there was none of the dull hopelessness that had weighed down the previous day. It was simply autumn—harsh, frank, and disinclined toward comfort. Howard pulled his coat tighter, feeling the fabric catch on his shoulders as though trying to hold him in place. In his pocket, he felt a small folded piece of paper—on it, the day before, he had jotted down a few phrases he wanted to say to Emily. Now it felt less like support and more like a burden: the closer Howard came to school, the louder a voice in his head insisted that all those phrases were foolish, ridiculous, clumsy, and destined to end with him face-first in the mud.

Passersby hurried past, wrapping themselves in scarves and hiding their faces from the wind. Some rushed, others wandered slowly, as if unsure of their destination. The town lived its ordinary life—indifferent and yet strangely caring: it promised no miracles, but allowed each person to go their own way.

At the school gates, Howard stopped for a second, drawing in the cold air deeply, as if gathering courage not for some great feat, but for a simple, human step. When he walked into the yard, where students were already crowding, the laughter and shouts sounded not like mockery, but like the ordinary noise of life—chaotic, alive, and impossible to calculate. Amid that bustle, a little apart from a noisy group of seniors, stood Emily. Alone. For a second, the whole world seemed to shrink to that point—to her silhouette, to the way the wind tried to tousle her hair, but it, thick and wavy, just past her shoulders, stubbornly fell in soft waves, as if it knew it was meant to be exactly that.

She was a brunette whose hair, in the dim morning light, seemed not merely dark—dozens of shades hid within it, from deep chocolate to almost black, with thin silver threads where the wind caught it. Her blue eyes, bright as shards of winter sky, looked somewhere forward, as if she were trying to discern something of her own in the gray day, something only she understood. Her athletic, toned figure was not deliberate but natural—as if she were simply used to being in motion, used to the fact that her body was an instrument, not a display. Her hands were lovely, with a neat manicure, not a single extraneous detail—but there was no coldness in that; on the contrary, that composure made her vivid, real.

In Howard’s eyes, she looked not like an unreachable statue, but like a person in whom everything was gathered at once: strength and vulnerability, confidence and a slight confusion that she immediately hid, as if ashamed of it. He looked at her and suddenly understood that he did not want to calculate possibilities. Did not want to think about how she might answer, how she would look, what she would do. He simply wanted to see her like that—real, without the filters of anxiety.

“Now,” he thought, squeezing the edge of his pocket where the paper lay. “Now I’ll go over. I’ll ask how her morning started. I’ll ask about the graduation project. Anything. Just to hear her voice.”

But before he could take a step, Tyler appeared beside him.

“Howard! Hey, where are you rushing off to?” Tyler clapped him on the shoulder, a little too energetically, as he always did when he wanted to share something urgent. “Are you even aware of what happened yesterday?”