A column by Todor Ovtcharov
It’s damn hot. I’m going over the belt and I feel like an ice cream that’s regarding to melt on the asphalt any moment. Across from me is Mihai. He’s wearing a jacket. A thick blue jacket you wear when you go skiing. people avoid him. They think he’s crazy. And they are not entirely wrong. I, on the other hand, like talking to Mihai. I ask him why he’s dressed like that. “I’m gathering warmth for the winter,” he says, smiling at me with his horse’s teeth.
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Mihai loves horses. All day long he watches the carriages driving past lazily leading tourists around. But he doesn’t care regarding the tourists and the carriages. Mihai watches the horses. He knows the name of every horse.
Once Mihai was sad. “Maximilian injured his knee!” he said. At first I thought that this Maximilian was a friend of Mihai’s, but then understood that it was a bay horse-drawn carriage that always stands to the right of the carriage. Unfortunately, the Fiaker driver was ill that day and his deputy let Maximilian go to the left of the carriage. That led to the injury that has made Mihai so sad.
I asked him if he was there when the horse was injured. He wasn’t there, but he felt everything, said Mihai. He feels all the horses and can read their minds. As I said before, Mihai is a bit crazy. But soon a fiaker drove past us, on the left a brown horse with an injured foot. Is Mihai really mad or is he a prophet living among us? Mihai was already looking at the next horse. “Someone should look at his horseshoes, a nail is loose,” he said.
Mihai cannot remember where he was born and how long he has been in Vienna. All he knows is that his family had a horse-drawn carriage when he was little. One day his father was driving it drunk and the carriage had an accident. Mihai came under the hooves. The horse might have trampled him, but jumped over him and Mihai survived. Since then he hasn’t remembered anything.
I’m already sweating just looking at Mihai’s jacket. He’s not sweating and smells like he just took a shower. It gathers warmth for the winter. In the winter he wears his undershirt and sleeps under a ping-pong table in the park. Maybe he actually gathers heat for the winter. An oriental proverb says that the madmen stand on a bridge between two worlds. What world does Mihai live in?
