Mark was from a small industrial town where the only prospects were either to work as a streetcar driver or in a factory. It was impossible to get out to the big city because of his grades, and his friends kept leaving and leaving. All his childhood, Mark looked at his father, who worked in a factory and had a wheezing cough and later developed lung cancer, and he never wanted such a future for himself. He started looking for girls on the Internet. He first met locals, hoping that one of them would decide to move in with her, but everyone was a regular in the town and had no plans to move anywhere. So he had to widen his radius. That’s how he met Monica, who lived in a small town just outside the capital, in the city itself she was studying to be a nurse and would later have to work in the capital’s hospital.
Mark flirted with her in every way possible online and traveled hundreds of miles for her. He was very lucky that Monica was not the prettiest girl, she had no boyfriends before him, and no one looked at her, so she began to cling to Mark herself. She paid for their dates out of her own pocket, for the rent of the apartment too, and then it was her parents who paid for the wedding.
Mark’s happiness did not end for about a year, but over time he began to think too highly of himself – the girls in the capital still paid attention to him, until they found out he was married. He started cheating on Monica, and she knew and tolerated it. She thought he would get married and come back, but he got to know a fifty-year-old woman who had family and children in Israel. She had three apartments in town, and she promised to sign something over to Mark someday. This really won him over, as well as the opportunity to travel. For the sake of this, he completely abandoned his wife and took advantage of the new relationship. He went to live with Anna, lived at her expense, did not deny himself anything, not even working. He could have lived like this for the rest of his life if Anna had not had a stroke. They took her to the hospital, and Mark had to take care of her there, hoping that she would recover, because she had only promised to sign something over to him, but she never did.
He took care of her, hoping she would get back on her feet some more, but it didn’t get better and after a month and a half she was gone. All of her possessions went to her children and relatives, and Mark was still a nobody. He asked Monica back, begged her not to file for divorce, but she turned him down. Without money and having achieved nothing in life, Mark returned to his native town, lives with his mother, works part-time as a lawnmower and still hopes to find some mistress. But he is already thirty-three, his life has worn him out, maybe nothing will work out, and he will have to go to the factory…
