: A single man and a married woman meet on the Internet and fall in love, a woman becomes pregnant. Not knowing who the father of the child is, she finds out a relationship with her husband, decides to save the family and leaves her lover.

The narration alternates on behalf of two heroes: the scientist Yakub and his nameless lover.

@1

Mid 90s of the 20th century. Genetic scientist Jakub, accidentally found himself at a train station in Germany, without knowing it, saves an accidental homeless from suicide.

You are lonely only when there is time for it.

The heroine is a Polish engineer, married, but love has long gone from her family life. She misses, not averse to have an easy affair. By chance still unfamiliar heroes find themselves in the same German hotel and do not notice each other.

Then the heroes travel in one train to Poland and watch each other, but they do not get to know each other. Former lover Jennifer sends an e-mail to Yakub, who found him after many years and confessed her passionate love and longing for him.

The hero is touched by recognition after many years.

@2

The fashionable ICQ program is installed on Yakub's computer, which allows you to communicate with the interlocutor in real time. During work, he receives a sad letter from a stranger with an offer to chat.

The heroine searches for information about a new acquaintance on the Internet and finds out that he is a famous scientist, a researcher of genetics problems. Reading information about him, she is fascinated by his personality. It turns out that he loves art, literature and his life is sad, like her. Almost immediately, they become intimately close and frank, a sincere dialogue is established between them.

From the first day, conversations with him were like experiences that are not forgotten.

She does not believe that their relationship is developing too quickly, although yesterday she did not know him yet, and today she is ready to answer the most intimate question. Perhaps she just wants to be listened to, wants to become someone interesting.

Communication takes place daily from Monday to Friday, while both are at work, and it becomes important for them. Yakub begins to get bored without daily communication with her and dream of a real meeting.

She asks him to tell about the fashionable genome. Yakub poetically describes the process of decoding the genome in which he had to participate. She feels that she has met an extraordinary person and wants to always be with him, to feel "truly chosen and unique."

@3

After the heroine recognized him as part of her world, Yakub talks about his one, the greatest love that happened in his youth. Studying in two universities at the same time, he accidentally met a deaf-mute girl Natalya and fell in love at first sight.

Natalia is the daughter of divorced parents, she has a loving and caring mother and an official father. For her sake, he learned sign language, and she read the same scientific books as he did.

At a scientific symposium, he met with a surgeon from Lviv, who returned deaf to hearing. Yakub agreed on the operation of Natalia. In Lviv, waiting for the operation, the girl died tragically. Her parents fell ill with grief, Yakub committed a crime in a stressful state, and he was expelled from both universities.

There are times when the pain is so strong that it is impossible to breathe.

Being very depressed, Yakub began to drink too much, and his father put him in a psychiatric hospital.There he heard the story of a priest, whom the church and special services brought to madness because of love for the nun. Then Yakub recovered and tried to live on.

With the help of Natalia’s father, he was reinstated at the university, and he enthusiastically took up science. Coming to the grave of Natalia, he talked about his successes, knowing that she would be proud of him. Since then, he devotes all his scientific achievements to her.

The heroine is waiting for a letter from Yakub and realizes that she was carried away by him, but she is terribly afraid of it. She reads a letter about Natalia and is shocked by the trials endured by Yakub. He recalls how, after the death of Natalia, he could not be with a woman for a long time. And only while studying in England, student Jennifer, subsequently abandoned by him, returned him to a full life.

Virtual interlocutors exchange gifts by mail. Jakub sends a mock DNA model and asks her to consider this a talisman of their relationship. Both realize that they are starting to fall in love.

@4

The heroine is seriously interested in the Internet, connecting her with Yakub, is experiencing his new opportunities, which she was previously indifferent to, reading with interest his opinions on various scientific issues: “... She ... shared his enthusiasm with the achievements of the mind. And besides, she was not ashamed of her ignorance ... ".

A woman spiritually moves away from her husband, leaving only the intimate aspect unchanged. Now she wants Yakub, whom she finds very sexy. He is jealous of her husband, whom she never mentions in letters.

Yakub writes to her that he would like to see her, and asks to send a photo so that she is always with him at least in this format. She carefully selects the photo in which she was photographed with her husband, and sends it to him.

@5

Programmer and former hacker Jacek lives and works in Hamburg.

He is a classmate of Yakub, who always surprised him with his mind and tenacity. In his youth, Yakub was defenseless and weak, despised by classmates. But thanks to internal work on himself, he overcame these shortcomings and caught up with his comrades. In college, he became famous for his love of poetry and the continuous expansion of intelligence.

After Yakub began to study further and did not see Jacek for many years, until his eight-year-old daughter fell ill with cancer. In desperation, having tried all the remedies in Poland, the inconsolable father turned to Jakub, who was then an intern in the USA. He promised to help, but Jacek did not believe and drank uncontrollably.

There was no God and could not be. Because if it existed, it was either evil or powerless, or maybe evil and powerless at the same time.

Yakub organized an operation for the girl, finding funding and agreeing on everything. After the shock, the Jacek family left for Germany. Since then, he and Yakub rarely see each other and call up.

After receiving a photo of the heroine with her husband, languid with jealousy, Jakub writes to her, but, dissatisfied with the too harsh content of the letter, calls Jacek and asks to delete his e-mail from the server. After spending all night at work and collapsing the server, Jacek fulfills a friend’s request. Unable to curiosity, he reads someone else's letter. This turns out to be "the most beautiful of all that he had read, a text about love, longing, loss, jealousy, infidelity and punishment for her." “What an unusual, unique woman that woman should be if Jakub wrote her such a text,” Jacek realizes with envy.

Yakub recalls years of internship in the United States after the death of Natalia, when he worked intensively in science, developing a genome map, and earned a name for himself in academia. It was not easy for him, the people around him treated the poor Pole with a hidden mockery, but he overcame everything, as he had done in his youth. He was friends with drug addicts: a drug dealer, who first tried cocaine, and with his girlfriend. It was they who helped to raise money and organize the operation of the sick daughter of Jacek.

For many days, the heroine comes to work earlier than anyone to check email.The first time she did not find a letter from Yakub, worried, she called him in the office and first heard his voice. Then the woman goes to a computer club and arranges a virtual sex session with Yakub.

@6

While at a symposium in the United States, Yakub discovers that she is going to Paris to meet him. Before flying out, he tries to find a student friend, and finds out that he was killed due to drugs several years ago. Yakub recalls the sad story of his mother, an illegal immigrant who gave birth to a son from an American official.

Memory is a function of emotions.

In July 1996, the heroine travels with her friends to Paris. The woman recalls her trips abroad and the adventures in college, about which she told Yakub. Asleep on the road, she repeats his name.

The heroine with her friends settles in a Paris hotel, she is full of hope and has already received a promising e-mail from Yakub. Both are very worried before the long-awaited meeting, fearing to be deceived in their expectations. Unable to restrain frank desires, the heroine masturbates in the room.

@7

Before meeting her lover, Yakub recalls his English mistress, Jennifer, whom he did not like, but was grateful to her for curing him of Natalia's longing. The girl was passionate about various forms and philosophy of sex and introduced the hero to them, and also introduced her to good classical music. At parting, Jennifer confessed her love to Yakubu.

After visiting several Paris museums under the strong impression of art, the heroine writes Yakubu an electronic love letter.

@8

Yakub flies to Paris, having heard before this amazing story about salvation in the name of love and for the science of Einstein's brain. He is late for his plane and takes off on the next flight. In flight, he recalls a letter in which she admits how important Yakub is to her: “Thanks to you, I have become more fulfilled, better, I feel exceptional and extraordinary.”

The hero sends an e-mail to the heroine at the hotel and announces his arrival on the next flight, as she intends to meet him.

@9

On the plane, Yakub discovers that the plane he was late for crashed, and all passengers died. At the same time, the heroine leaves the hotel to meet him and the receptionist does not have time to warn her that Yakub changed his flight.

At the airport, a woman finds out about a plane crash and heartbroken sits in the waiting room.

But he was always, always, when she was needed. And I didn’t want anything in return. He simply was.

The receptionist hurries after her to the airport and reports that her friend is alive. The heroine and Jakub finally meet. When meeting in great excitement, she kisses his hands.

Lovers have dinner and spend the night of love. Everything happens in full accordance with their expectations.

@10

After a while, the woman realizes that she is pregnant. She doubts the paternity of the unborn child. Her husband is against children, but she decides to keep the pregnancy. After a family scandal, her husband confesses her love and that he will be happy with the child. The woman decides to leave everything as it is, and save the family.

The heroine for some time did not write to Yakub, not knowing how to tell him the news and stop such an expensive correspondence. Jakub worries about the lack of letters from her, he is full of alarming forebodings.

A woman leaves her job to maintain a pregnancy; she writes the last letter to Yakub, where she says goodbye to him and asks to forgive her. She throws away all of his gifts, including a DNA model.

But her computer monitor looked completely empty. ‹...› Someone carefully erased even the fingerprints from the screen. Someone helps to extinct him from her memory ...

After reading her farewell letter, driven by an emotional impulse, Jakub flies to Warsaw to meet her. He briefly sees her getting out of work and getting into a car waiting for her. The heroine also briefly sees him, but decides that she was mistaken.

@11

Before the birth, while lying in the clinic for preservation, the woman asks her friend to go to her work and look at the email: didn’t Jakub send a letter.A friend reads more than 150 letters from him: Yakub wrote to his beloved every day, about everything as before. He forgave her, but could not forget. The hero asks God to return his beloved to him.

The heroine gives birth to a boy and calls him Yakub.

The retelling is based on the translation of Leonid Mikhailovich Tsyvyan.