"I was sitting on a roof and working. Then I thought. I need to meet somebody. Somebody to talk to. Then I shot the wish into the cosmos. An encounter of two people does not just happen without a cause."
He didn't answer my question as to why he necessarily sat at the table where I was sitting in a restaurant three days ago. There were other empty tables he could sit at. By this moment, however, I already noticed that he would often give answers that did not exactly correspond to my questions, but the stories he told became, in the end, some kind of answers to what I wondered.
Three days ago, I was eating overcooked chicken with tomato sauce as my first meal in Riga. It was a restaurant where university students and people working nearby would come by for breakfast or lunch, eat quickly, and leave quickly. The restaurant was selling coffee, pastries, cakes, lunch meals, etc. An easy place where you wouldn't pay attention to anything but simply fueling your body. No interior design to comment on, no music to annoy or excite you, no complicated menu, just your plate and your seat.
A man in a working uniform sat down opposite me. First we ate quietly. And before long, I found out that he's Russian and a roofer, the one who builds and fixes roofs. There was a scar on his forehead, still fresh from an accident two weeks ago. His head would have been severely wounded by a chain saw without the helmet.
"My work is physical, and that fits me. It feeds me. It tires me enough to get a good night's sleep at the end of a day. It also gives me time to do my own work on mind."
"I've learned to do four hours of work for eight hours. In construction works, just being efficient often doesn't add anything."
Munching the overcooked meal, I learned a few more things about him. Not surprisingly, he was able to answer all kinds of electricity- or construction-related questions. But his personal interests have long been in rather metaphysical matters. Since that lunch, I met him a few more times, and we had many conversations while walking, sitting, eating, and drinking.
He shared with me a few thoughts.
"Being vegetarian? It makes your blood circulate more smoothly and it clears your head, but it's not suitable for physical works. You can fly with your mind, but you can't move heavy materials and build things all day long."
"Is it lonely to live alone? Not all lives are for family or love. The life I've got is more for mind."
"Emotion makes you feel alive. You feel your heartbeat when you do gambling or play games. It gives you that kick of emotions. So does sport. So does physical work. And so does being in love."
"Life fluctuates. That's the law of it. Ups follow downs, and downs follow ups. But it's not repeating such pattern, either. At the same time it fluctuates between ups and downs, it also moves along and moves forward. So you can't say it's a repetition of some pattern."
The self-cut cube-shaped crew cut, an old-fashioned jacket with broad shoulder padding, opinions that are clear but would refuse to be absolute. Those are the things that I remember about A, the Russian roofer.