2025-07-10, 03:42 PM
A few days ago, I came across the little box with the photos and my notes from that time. I had originally written them for Tom, or rather for a letter to him.
But the letter to my brother never got past the stage of a mere intention, which was repeatedly postponed. In the end, he, like me, fell victim to the circumstances of the time, which were really not such that they encouraged the writing of long letters explaining one's own situation.
Again and again I postponed the task of telling Tom about the wild events around me, and in the end the letter remained completely unwritten. Everything happened so fast back then, and when I read my old notes today, more than ten years later, I can still feel the fear and agitation of that time between the lines.
It was in the fall of 2004. I had just arrived in distant Dnipropetrovsk – well, at least physically arrived – and quickly found myself on a merry-go-round that seemed to spin faster and faster with each round.
The ride was like one of those events where, from round to round, you can feel that disaster is inevitable and the worst is yet to come. I am still amazed that I didn't get dizzy during the ride and that I wasn't thrown out far.
Maybe it's because you don't even notice how fast your own little world is turning and changing from minute to minute. You think you're young and still have all the time in the world, but the hours and days are already running through our fingers like fine sand.
While the music plays and the carousel turns, it's easy to lose your sense of time and space – at least it was for me and for some of the others back then.
As I said, ten years have passed since then. A long time, during which plenty of grass has grown over many things. But the grass has hardly taken root. When I picked up my old notes again a few days ago and the photos refreshed my slowly fading memory, everything came back to me immediately. It didn't take a second for me to see the faces and hear the voices again.
Some voices I can no longer hear today, although they are more present to me than they were back then and also more present than other voices that I have around me every day. Why this is so, I am beginning to understand today. At the time, in the winter of 2004/2005, it was not clear to me. How could it be? I was too young and inexperienced back then and certainly not the man I am today.
For a while, I tried to forget. But I couldn't. I couldn't forget and suppress what was deeply ingrained in my memory. Probably I didn't want to at any time. My experiences were too valuable and precious to me.
They are the experiences of a young person, almost still those of a child, who suddenly encounters the harshness of life with full force. You don't see it coming and it's hard to avoid. At least I couldn't do it back then, and that is probably also part of the guilt I have taken upon myself.
Yes, guilt is the right word, because I have owed a lot to many people. Not only to myself, actually to everyone, especially to Vlad and Lucca.
Today it is too late to change anything. I can neither stop nor turn back time. All I can do is accept my life story for what it is: my very own story, which I can no longer rewrite and which will always belong to me.
It didn't take long for me to realize this while leafing through the old photos and documents. There is no escape and mistakes remain mistakes, no matter how much you regret them. What counts in the end is the love that remains and the guilt that still stands between us years later. Nobody takes it away, nobody makes it go away.
It all started quite harmlessly with a careless promise and a crazy party. In the end, there was war in all its severity. I survived it. Whether rightly so, I have often asked myself and never found a satisfactory answer to my oppressive questions.
Maybe there is one and I just have to keep looking for it. Maybe silence is the only appropriate answer. I don't know.
The box of photos opened a door that I believed was firmly closed. It was a mistake, like so much of what I will tell, was a mistake.
Today I might know how it could be done better. At that time I certainly didn't know. But what I do know is that things happened as I will describe them.[/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]
[HEADING=1]2. An fremden Ufern[/HEADING]
[size=18][FONT=Lucida Sans][color=#FFFFFF]“This damn cold weather is killing me. If only it wasn't for this disgusting wind!” I turned up my collar and checked the zipper of my jacket again to make sure it was closed all the way up. It was, but I still felt like the cold was coming in through a thousand open holes. Who expects such cold weather at the end of November? I certainly didn't, and if the thermometer already falls to minus twenty degrees Celsius at night, what will it be like here in January or February?
By the way, this is Dnipro, 35th degree of longitude, the same one near which are also Murmansk and Jerusalem, so, seen from Germany, quite far to the east, to the end of the world, and then another ten kilometers further. As for the parallel, the city is located at about the same height as Vienna. 'City' is, by the way, a slight understatement. It is, after all, the third largest city in the country. One million inhabitants live here, most of them in some unsightly socialist prefabricated concrete tower blocks. It is an important center of the metal industry, and in Soviet times it was a strictly guarded center of the arms industry. That means that foreigners couldn't get in and locals couldn't really get out, at least not if they were employed in the relevant factories. A large-scale prison, and all because the infamous SS 20 missiles were manufactured here. In addition, there are chemical, building material and wood processing industries. Food is also produced and industrially preserved in Dnipropetrovsk, and more recently also by my father's company. No idea which oh-so-clever mind at the corporate headquarters came up with the crazy idea of tapping into the emerging Eastern European markets here, of all places, at the lower reaches of the Dnieper.
For my father's career, the idea was the chance of the century, for me it was the biggest catastrophe of my short 17-year life so far. How I envied my brother Thomas. Two years older, with his A-levels in the bag, he is now studying in Hamburg, while I am struggling through my days here at the end of civilization with my non-existent knowledge of Ukrainian and Russian.
“Sebastian, it'll be fine. Don't worry too much,” Thomas, whom I had always called Tom like all his friends since I was very young, had said on our last evening together in Germany. It was easy for him to say, since he was staying in Germany. Well, he also had to move because of the start of his studies, but at the university, surrounded by German-speaking fellow students, he will find it much easier to make friends and meet people than I will here.
Speaking of friends, Ryan had slowly caught up with me. He laughed happily and for days now has been enjoying himself whenever I complain about the cold. Well, mostly I don't just complain, but curse like there's no tomorrow. Somehow it's a kind of outlet for me to let off steam before the frustration destroys me internally. I suddenly felt Ryan's hand on my shoulder as we looked across the river to the other side together. Over there, on the other side of the bridge, was where Siberia began. No, not really, but in all my despair it seemed that way to me again and again.
“Don't you think it's time you arrived here, too? I mean, really arrived. You've been here for a month now, but your heart is still in Germany.”
I looked at him sadly. He was so right about what he said. I really have been living in a kind of daydream since I came to Dnipro. Everything seemed unreal and untrue, like a bad dream: my father's transfer in the summer, my own arrival in the city with my mother in mid-October. I kept waiting to wake up, wanted my life to continue in Germany, and at the same time was not ready to face the world and the facts here, right in front of me and my frosty cold nose. That was what Ryan meant by arriving.
He was actually in the same situation as me, but he was able to cope with it much better. His father works for the same company that my father works for. It is an international corporation with employees from all over the world. Ryan's family is from England, from Salisbury to be precise, but Ryan has long since become something of a citizen of the world due to the frequent moves in tow of his father, who is a business man roaming the world. He can quickly feel at home anywhere, even here in deepest Russia, sorry, in deepest Ukraine.
“And what do you think I should do?”
“Maybe you should say goodbye to Germany for a while, not forever, but for a longer period of time. I know you love your home and the many friends you left there,” said Ryan, who always spoke to me with great empathy. ”But you live here now and it looks like it will be a little longer than just the next three weeks.”
I looked at him sadly, but I didn't need to say anything, because he knew how I felt. We had often talked about this topic, but given my inability to respond to his thoughts, Ryan must have felt that talking to me was like Don Quixote's fight against windmills.
“What do you think about me taking you with me this weekend? A few Ukrainian friends have invited me to a small party. Just go with them, meet a few new people and, above all, don't shut yourself away all the time. You know how keen Russian women are on you.”
And how I knew. Hook one of the cute foreign sons, wrap him around your finger, maybe have his child, get married and then be “abducted” to the golden West. That, in a nutshell, was the dream of the average Ukrainian girl my age. It goes without saying that we foreigners must have seemed extremely wealthy to them all. What could be more obvious than to grab a golden goose like that? For most of them, beautiful or ugly, stupid or intelligent, love or marriage of convenience, it was always a ticket to a better future.
“You know how I feel about these parties,“ I replied to Ryan.
“Yes, I know, all the alcohol and the annoying girlies, but is there anything else that really bothered you and was different from the parties you know from Germany?”
“No, not really,” I had to admit.
Ryan smiled. “There you go. Besides, you've only been to one party since you arrived and all your prejudices are based on that. If you really want to do justice to the people here, you have to give them a fair chance. If after twenty parties you still haven't had any other experiences, then I'll leave you alone and will never ask you again if you want to come to a party, but so far you're missing at least nineteen examples in your collection.” He laughed, as he always did when he knew he was right and sensed that I was running out of counterarguments.
“All right, I give up. And which Natascha has a reason to celebrate this time?” I asked back with biting irony in my voice.
“Hey, I'm happy if you come with me, but do yourself and me a favor and try to approach the evening reasonably open-mindedly and neutrally. If you only go because you want to confirm your prejudices, it'll never work.” He shook his head. “I can't promise you'll have fun, but I do know one thing for sure: if you go there just to confirm your prejudices about the country and its people, you definitely won't have any fun. So don't make things harder for yourself than they already are.”
I nodded my head silently. He was right, but I didn't need to confirm that in writing.
“Oh yes, before I forget: the Natasha, with whom there is something to celebrate this time, is called Dima, by the way. You know him very vaguely by sight. It's that tall blonde boy you almost spilled your cola glass over at your first and so far last party.”
I was horrified. “What about that pretty boy you told me about, who is the crush of all the girls in the local music temples?”
“That's the one,” Ryan laughed.
“Impossible, I'm not going there,” I blurted out. ”I don't want to experience another embarrassment like that. The one time he looked at me like I came from another star is enough for me.”
“Don't talk nonsense,” Ryan said angrily. ”You accepted and now you're coming along. Besides, Dima is all right. He's a really nice guy and he doesn't hold a grudge against you. On the contrary, he's already asked me twice if I want to finally bring you along and I'm going to do it next Saturday, whether you like it or not. And if I have to organize some kind of Ukrainian mafia commando to drag you there by force if necessary, but you're going whether you want to or not!”
I knew Ryan well enough by now to instinctively feel that any further resistance would be futile and ultimately counterproductive. So I didn't even make the mistake of trying.
We had met for the first time a few days after I arrived, quickly became good friends, and now spent a lot of time together outside of school. It was convenient for me that I could easily talk to Ryan. He didn't speak a word of German at all, and my school English was, as my various English teachers in Germany had repeatedly assured me, definitely in need of improvement, but here in my daily contact with Ryan, the other foreigners in the city and the few Russians and Ukrainians who mastered it, it proved to be quite good.
Ryan was a character who had fascinated and captivated me from the very beginning. He had a strange flair and a cheerful openness towards everything and everyone that I had never seen in a boy of our age. He was educated and well-read, but anything but conceited. He was one of the handsomest boys of his age, one who knew all too well about his physical attributes and their effect on other people, especially on the opposite sex. But he didn't put much stock in it. Ryan remained natural, uninhibited and affable. He was someone you could just love, and he was a friend to me that I couldn't have wished for better. He was sensitive and empathetic and could listen to me for hours when I complained about my troubles, but he could also be merciless when he sensed that I was hesitant about a jump that he thought was due. That was the case now, as he wouldn't let up for minutes until he had wrung my consent out of me.
So I would only be doing it for him if I went to this damned Russian party on Saturday, senselessly pouring vodka down my throat until I no longer knew where the front was and the back, and hoping that no one would ask me how I liked it here in Dnipro. If I were ever put in the embarrassing position of having to answer the question, I basically had two options: I could answer in a symbol-didactic way. In this case, the vodka would have left my body the same way it had entered me. Alternatively, I could also lie through my teeth and babble about German-Soviet, er, I mean German-Ukrainian friendship, which would have done honor to any diplomatic New Year's reception. But I didn't really like either of the two alternatives.
“Come on now. You haven't been transferred to a Siberian penal camp,” Ryan laughed, trying to cheer me up. “There are plenty of girls here who would love to compete for the place at your side. Maybe they're not as pretty as the young women you know from Germany, but why don't you get yourself a nice girl to at least have some fun in a foreign country?”
'Oh, no, not this discussion again.' Just yesterday Ryan had really pushed me hard with this tiresome topic. He just couldn't understand that I, in his eyes a good-looking, attractive young man, should have forgotten how to 'catch mice', as he called it, here in a foreign country. I should finally come out of my shell, play my charm and turn the heads of the local ladies so much that they wouldn't know whether they were left- or right-handed.
'Oh Ryan, if only you knew how little your image of Sebastian matches reality.' But how could he know something that I never told him? After all, I had always kept silent on this point, just as I did now, or replied with meaningless phrases. So he couldn't know and basically I don't know either. Only so much was clear in the meantime: While my friends in Germany had repeatedly fallen ill with love over the last two years – at first less often, then more and more often – they were already looking forward to their evening meetings with their beloved at eight in the morning, as if they were delirious, and before and three days after that date, not even the German national soccer league, this contagious infectious disease had somehow passed me by, for some reason I didn't understand, but also without it really bothering me.
“I'll give the place at my side when the time comes,” I mumbled, hoping to quickly turn the subject aside with this meaningless phrase.
“But why are you taking so long with it? Do you want to wait until you're 25 and only some over-aged ladies who have foolishly missed the boat on marriage will take care of you?” He looked at me uncomprehendingly. “Sebastian, you're young, you live now and you only live once. So finally get involved in life. Let yourself be embraced by its wild power and drift away until you reach a new shore.”
“Maybe you're right, let me think about it a bit and give me some time.”
“All right, have it your way. You have until Saturday to think about it, but then you have to jump. And don't come back to me with any lame excuses again. If you don't take the necessary steps yourself, I'll take matters into my own hands and help you.” He grinned from ear to ear as he said this.
“What are you going to do?”
“Well, for example, I'll get myself a beauty from the country who isn't quite as shy and uptight as you. I'll put her in a cell with you, and it'll be so cramped that you won't be able to avoid physical contact.”
“Then I'll probably become a murderer,“ I replied with a slightly resigned tone of voice.
“Nonsense, you'll be grateful to me afterwards, believe me,” Ryan assured me.
I tried to give the situation an ironic touch. “Who says I want to kill you? Maybe the poor girl will be the first to believe it and you'll blame yourself afterwards.”
“Oh, don't worry,” Ryan laughed. ”I'll pick out a beauty for you, one that will make even you think of something other than murder and mayhem. But now come on, your nose is all red. It's time to get back into the warmth. Let's take the bus and go home.”
Home was a relatively new housing development on the northern edge of the city. It was one of the residential complexes that had been newly built after the fall of the communist regime. It lacked the socialist, square, practical, unified character. The complex was medium in size, the facilities were normal by German standards and the prices were modest. From the perspective of an ordinary Ukrainian, however, we lived in a luxury palace that was second to none.
Ryan's family lived just two blocks away, so we had the same way home. Ryan already knew his way around the city much better and in most cases didn't even need a map, even though he had only arrived two weeks before me. As I said, a real globetrotter, someone who swims like a fish through Amsterdam's canals, confidently walks the streets of Hong Kong the next month as if he had always lived there, or dominates the terrain here in the middle of nowhere in Ukraine as if it were the backyard of his parents' property.
When I unlocked the front door, I heard my parents' familiar voices coming from the kitchen and went inside. “Well, are you so early or am I so late?” I asked my father, because I was not used to seeing him at this time.
“Both, I'm too early and you're too late,” he laughed happily.
Normally, he doesn't come home until quite late in the evening. The new position was an ideal career opportunity, but the workload associated with it is a Herculean task that is almost impossible to manage in the long term. In the first weeks of October, while my mother and I were still in Germany and making the final preparations for our own move, he only came to the apartment to sleep. Now that we've arrived, my father is spending a little more time here. Last Sunday, he was here all day! I couldn't believe it. It was like Christmas and Easter had fallen on the same day.
Officially, he is still married to my mother, but no one in our family believes him anymore, because unofficially, the office has long since taken precedence over her in recent years. Dad is one of those modern-day work slaves who crave to become senior department heads in whatever-town and live in constant fear of being pushed into early retirement at 55, exhausted and decrepit. Here in Dnipro, he is the new deputy regional director for Ukraine and, as such, is only subordinate to Ryan's father and the large corporate headquarters in Amsterdam.
The two of them get along quite well, which Ryan and I are very happy about. In the city, they are courted by all sorts of people. No wonder, after all, most of them hope that their good relationship with our fathers will one day enable them to find jobs in the newly emerging factories for one of their family members.
The only ones who regularly enjoy the directors' titles of our fathers are Ryan and I. For us, 'Mr. Vice Regional Director' or 'Mr. Regional Director' sounds like a lot of sound and even more smoke, just like 'Admiral Atlantik' sounds to the commander of an ordinary rowing boat on the Wannsee or a pedal boat on the Binnenalster. We think our part, but say nothing.
The cozy warmth in the kitchen allowed me to slowly thaw. I listened to my father, who spoke of his working day and the talks with various city officials, but to be honest, I was only half-listening.
My thoughts were consumed by the afternoon with Ryan and the prospect of going to a Russian vodka party with him on Saturday. How could I be so stupid as to get involved in such nonsense in the first place? The prospect of becoming the object of desire for some Ukrainian Natasha at the end of the party, who dreams of a better life for herself and has discovered me as her fairy-tale prince and savior, quickly lowered my mood to the evening's outside temperatures. No thanks, I don't need it. I want to go back to Germany, I want to be around my old friends and acquaintances again. But Germany is far away and there is snow outside, lots of snow, and it feels cold.
In the next few days, I hoped that the end of the world, which had already been announced several times by the German tabloid press, would finally take place and release me from all my problems and worries in an instant. But the gods seemed to have no mercy for me and my miserable existence.
On the contrary: it was getting colder outside every day, and the dreaded Saturday was approaching inexorably, like a snowstorm from which there was no escape.
“I'll pick you up tomorrow evening around seven,” Ryan had called after me cheerfully yesterday when we parted. He was looking forward to the new day, but I had more the feeling of heading towards some kind of boredom overdose.
But the letter to my brother never got past the stage of a mere intention, which was repeatedly postponed. In the end, he, like me, fell victim to the circumstances of the time, which were really not such that they encouraged the writing of long letters explaining one's own situation.
Again and again I postponed the task of telling Tom about the wild events around me, and in the end the letter remained completely unwritten. Everything happened so fast back then, and when I read my old notes today, more than ten years later, I can still feel the fear and agitation of that time between the lines.
It was in the fall of 2004. I had just arrived in distant Dnipropetrovsk – well, at least physically arrived – and quickly found myself on a merry-go-round that seemed to spin faster and faster with each round.
The ride was like one of those events where, from round to round, you can feel that disaster is inevitable and the worst is yet to come. I am still amazed that I didn't get dizzy during the ride and that I wasn't thrown out far.
Maybe it's because you don't even notice how fast your own little world is turning and changing from minute to minute. You think you're young and still have all the time in the world, but the hours and days are already running through our fingers like fine sand.
While the music plays and the carousel turns, it's easy to lose your sense of time and space – at least it was for me and for some of the others back then.
As I said, ten years have passed since then. A long time, during which plenty of grass has grown over many things. But the grass has hardly taken root. When I picked up my old notes again a few days ago and the photos refreshed my slowly fading memory, everything came back to me immediately. It didn't take a second for me to see the faces and hear the voices again.
Some voices I can no longer hear today, although they are more present to me than they were back then and also more present than other voices that I have around me every day. Why this is so, I am beginning to understand today. At the time, in the winter of 2004/2005, it was not clear to me. How could it be? I was too young and inexperienced back then and certainly not the man I am today.
For a while, I tried to forget. But I couldn't. I couldn't forget and suppress what was deeply ingrained in my memory. Probably I didn't want to at any time. My experiences were too valuable and precious to me.
They are the experiences of a young person, almost still those of a child, who suddenly encounters the harshness of life with full force. You don't see it coming and it's hard to avoid. At least I couldn't do it back then, and that is probably also part of the guilt I have taken upon myself.
Yes, guilt is the right word, because I have owed a lot to many people. Not only to myself, actually to everyone, especially to Vlad and Lucca.
Today it is too late to change anything. I can neither stop nor turn back time. All I can do is accept my life story for what it is: my very own story, which I can no longer rewrite and which will always belong to me.
It didn't take long for me to realize this while leafing through the old photos and documents. There is no escape and mistakes remain mistakes, no matter how much you regret them. What counts in the end is the love that remains and the guilt that still stands between us years later. Nobody takes it away, nobody makes it go away.
It all started quite harmlessly with a careless promise and a crazy party. In the end, there was war in all its severity. I survived it. Whether rightly so, I have often asked myself and never found a satisfactory answer to my oppressive questions.
Maybe there is one and I just have to keep looking for it. Maybe silence is the only appropriate answer. I don't know.
The box of photos opened a door that I believed was firmly closed. It was a mistake, like so much of what I will tell, was a mistake.
Today I might know how it could be done better. At that time I certainly didn't know. But what I do know is that things happened as I will describe them.[/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]
[HEADING=1]2. An fremden Ufern[/HEADING]
[size=18][FONT=Lucida Sans][color=#FFFFFF]“This damn cold weather is killing me. If only it wasn't for this disgusting wind!” I turned up my collar and checked the zipper of my jacket again to make sure it was closed all the way up. It was, but I still felt like the cold was coming in through a thousand open holes. Who expects such cold weather at the end of November? I certainly didn't, and if the thermometer already falls to minus twenty degrees Celsius at night, what will it be like here in January or February?
By the way, this is Dnipro, 35th degree of longitude, the same one near which are also Murmansk and Jerusalem, so, seen from Germany, quite far to the east, to the end of the world, and then another ten kilometers further. As for the parallel, the city is located at about the same height as Vienna. 'City' is, by the way, a slight understatement. It is, after all, the third largest city in the country. One million inhabitants live here, most of them in some unsightly socialist prefabricated concrete tower blocks. It is an important center of the metal industry, and in Soviet times it was a strictly guarded center of the arms industry. That means that foreigners couldn't get in and locals couldn't really get out, at least not if they were employed in the relevant factories. A large-scale prison, and all because the infamous SS 20 missiles were manufactured here. In addition, there are chemical, building material and wood processing industries. Food is also produced and industrially preserved in Dnipropetrovsk, and more recently also by my father's company. No idea which oh-so-clever mind at the corporate headquarters came up with the crazy idea of tapping into the emerging Eastern European markets here, of all places, at the lower reaches of the Dnieper.
For my father's career, the idea was the chance of the century, for me it was the biggest catastrophe of my short 17-year life so far. How I envied my brother Thomas. Two years older, with his A-levels in the bag, he is now studying in Hamburg, while I am struggling through my days here at the end of civilization with my non-existent knowledge of Ukrainian and Russian.
“Sebastian, it'll be fine. Don't worry too much,” Thomas, whom I had always called Tom like all his friends since I was very young, had said on our last evening together in Germany. It was easy for him to say, since he was staying in Germany. Well, he also had to move because of the start of his studies, but at the university, surrounded by German-speaking fellow students, he will find it much easier to make friends and meet people than I will here.
Speaking of friends, Ryan had slowly caught up with me. He laughed happily and for days now has been enjoying himself whenever I complain about the cold. Well, mostly I don't just complain, but curse like there's no tomorrow. Somehow it's a kind of outlet for me to let off steam before the frustration destroys me internally. I suddenly felt Ryan's hand on my shoulder as we looked across the river to the other side together. Over there, on the other side of the bridge, was where Siberia began. No, not really, but in all my despair it seemed that way to me again and again.
“Don't you think it's time you arrived here, too? I mean, really arrived. You've been here for a month now, but your heart is still in Germany.”
I looked at him sadly. He was so right about what he said. I really have been living in a kind of daydream since I came to Dnipro. Everything seemed unreal and untrue, like a bad dream: my father's transfer in the summer, my own arrival in the city with my mother in mid-October. I kept waiting to wake up, wanted my life to continue in Germany, and at the same time was not ready to face the world and the facts here, right in front of me and my frosty cold nose. That was what Ryan meant by arriving.
He was actually in the same situation as me, but he was able to cope with it much better. His father works for the same company that my father works for. It is an international corporation with employees from all over the world. Ryan's family is from England, from Salisbury to be precise, but Ryan has long since become something of a citizen of the world due to the frequent moves in tow of his father, who is a business man roaming the world. He can quickly feel at home anywhere, even here in deepest Russia, sorry, in deepest Ukraine.
“And what do you think I should do?”
“Maybe you should say goodbye to Germany for a while, not forever, but for a longer period of time. I know you love your home and the many friends you left there,” said Ryan, who always spoke to me with great empathy. ”But you live here now and it looks like it will be a little longer than just the next three weeks.”
I looked at him sadly, but I didn't need to say anything, because he knew how I felt. We had often talked about this topic, but given my inability to respond to his thoughts, Ryan must have felt that talking to me was like Don Quixote's fight against windmills.
“What do you think about me taking you with me this weekend? A few Ukrainian friends have invited me to a small party. Just go with them, meet a few new people and, above all, don't shut yourself away all the time. You know how keen Russian women are on you.”
And how I knew. Hook one of the cute foreign sons, wrap him around your finger, maybe have his child, get married and then be “abducted” to the golden West. That, in a nutshell, was the dream of the average Ukrainian girl my age. It goes without saying that we foreigners must have seemed extremely wealthy to them all. What could be more obvious than to grab a golden goose like that? For most of them, beautiful or ugly, stupid or intelligent, love or marriage of convenience, it was always a ticket to a better future.
“You know how I feel about these parties,“ I replied to Ryan.
“Yes, I know, all the alcohol and the annoying girlies, but is there anything else that really bothered you and was different from the parties you know from Germany?”
“No, not really,” I had to admit.
Ryan smiled. “There you go. Besides, you've only been to one party since you arrived and all your prejudices are based on that. If you really want to do justice to the people here, you have to give them a fair chance. If after twenty parties you still haven't had any other experiences, then I'll leave you alone and will never ask you again if you want to come to a party, but so far you're missing at least nineteen examples in your collection.” He laughed, as he always did when he knew he was right and sensed that I was running out of counterarguments.
“All right, I give up. And which Natascha has a reason to celebrate this time?” I asked back with biting irony in my voice.
“Hey, I'm happy if you come with me, but do yourself and me a favor and try to approach the evening reasonably open-mindedly and neutrally. If you only go because you want to confirm your prejudices, it'll never work.” He shook his head. “I can't promise you'll have fun, but I do know one thing for sure: if you go there just to confirm your prejudices about the country and its people, you definitely won't have any fun. So don't make things harder for yourself than they already are.”
I nodded my head silently. He was right, but I didn't need to confirm that in writing.
“Oh yes, before I forget: the Natasha, with whom there is something to celebrate this time, is called Dima, by the way. You know him very vaguely by sight. It's that tall blonde boy you almost spilled your cola glass over at your first and so far last party.”
I was horrified. “What about that pretty boy you told me about, who is the crush of all the girls in the local music temples?”
“That's the one,” Ryan laughed.
“Impossible, I'm not going there,” I blurted out. ”I don't want to experience another embarrassment like that. The one time he looked at me like I came from another star is enough for me.”
“Don't talk nonsense,” Ryan said angrily. ”You accepted and now you're coming along. Besides, Dima is all right. He's a really nice guy and he doesn't hold a grudge against you. On the contrary, he's already asked me twice if I want to finally bring you along and I'm going to do it next Saturday, whether you like it or not. And if I have to organize some kind of Ukrainian mafia commando to drag you there by force if necessary, but you're going whether you want to or not!”
I knew Ryan well enough by now to instinctively feel that any further resistance would be futile and ultimately counterproductive. So I didn't even make the mistake of trying.
We had met for the first time a few days after I arrived, quickly became good friends, and now spent a lot of time together outside of school. It was convenient for me that I could easily talk to Ryan. He didn't speak a word of German at all, and my school English was, as my various English teachers in Germany had repeatedly assured me, definitely in need of improvement, but here in my daily contact with Ryan, the other foreigners in the city and the few Russians and Ukrainians who mastered it, it proved to be quite good.
Ryan was a character who had fascinated and captivated me from the very beginning. He had a strange flair and a cheerful openness towards everything and everyone that I had never seen in a boy of our age. He was educated and well-read, but anything but conceited. He was one of the handsomest boys of his age, one who knew all too well about his physical attributes and their effect on other people, especially on the opposite sex. But he didn't put much stock in it. Ryan remained natural, uninhibited and affable. He was someone you could just love, and he was a friend to me that I couldn't have wished for better. He was sensitive and empathetic and could listen to me for hours when I complained about my troubles, but he could also be merciless when he sensed that I was hesitant about a jump that he thought was due. That was the case now, as he wouldn't let up for minutes until he had wrung my consent out of me.
So I would only be doing it for him if I went to this damned Russian party on Saturday, senselessly pouring vodka down my throat until I no longer knew where the front was and the back, and hoping that no one would ask me how I liked it here in Dnipro. If I were ever put in the embarrassing position of having to answer the question, I basically had two options: I could answer in a symbol-didactic way. In this case, the vodka would have left my body the same way it had entered me. Alternatively, I could also lie through my teeth and babble about German-Soviet, er, I mean German-Ukrainian friendship, which would have done honor to any diplomatic New Year's reception. But I didn't really like either of the two alternatives.
“Come on now. You haven't been transferred to a Siberian penal camp,” Ryan laughed, trying to cheer me up. “There are plenty of girls here who would love to compete for the place at your side. Maybe they're not as pretty as the young women you know from Germany, but why don't you get yourself a nice girl to at least have some fun in a foreign country?”
'Oh, no, not this discussion again.' Just yesterday Ryan had really pushed me hard with this tiresome topic. He just couldn't understand that I, in his eyes a good-looking, attractive young man, should have forgotten how to 'catch mice', as he called it, here in a foreign country. I should finally come out of my shell, play my charm and turn the heads of the local ladies so much that they wouldn't know whether they were left- or right-handed.
'Oh Ryan, if only you knew how little your image of Sebastian matches reality.' But how could he know something that I never told him? After all, I had always kept silent on this point, just as I did now, or replied with meaningless phrases. So he couldn't know and basically I don't know either. Only so much was clear in the meantime: While my friends in Germany had repeatedly fallen ill with love over the last two years – at first less often, then more and more often – they were already looking forward to their evening meetings with their beloved at eight in the morning, as if they were delirious, and before and three days after that date, not even the German national soccer league, this contagious infectious disease had somehow passed me by, for some reason I didn't understand, but also without it really bothering me.
“I'll give the place at my side when the time comes,” I mumbled, hoping to quickly turn the subject aside with this meaningless phrase.
“But why are you taking so long with it? Do you want to wait until you're 25 and only some over-aged ladies who have foolishly missed the boat on marriage will take care of you?” He looked at me uncomprehendingly. “Sebastian, you're young, you live now and you only live once. So finally get involved in life. Let yourself be embraced by its wild power and drift away until you reach a new shore.”
“Maybe you're right, let me think about it a bit and give me some time.”
“All right, have it your way. You have until Saturday to think about it, but then you have to jump. And don't come back to me with any lame excuses again. If you don't take the necessary steps yourself, I'll take matters into my own hands and help you.” He grinned from ear to ear as he said this.
“What are you going to do?”
“Well, for example, I'll get myself a beauty from the country who isn't quite as shy and uptight as you. I'll put her in a cell with you, and it'll be so cramped that you won't be able to avoid physical contact.”
“Then I'll probably become a murderer,“ I replied with a slightly resigned tone of voice.
“Nonsense, you'll be grateful to me afterwards, believe me,” Ryan assured me.
I tried to give the situation an ironic touch. “Who says I want to kill you? Maybe the poor girl will be the first to believe it and you'll blame yourself afterwards.”
“Oh, don't worry,” Ryan laughed. ”I'll pick out a beauty for you, one that will make even you think of something other than murder and mayhem. But now come on, your nose is all red. It's time to get back into the warmth. Let's take the bus and go home.”
Home was a relatively new housing development on the northern edge of the city. It was one of the residential complexes that had been newly built after the fall of the communist regime. It lacked the socialist, square, practical, unified character. The complex was medium in size, the facilities were normal by German standards and the prices were modest. From the perspective of an ordinary Ukrainian, however, we lived in a luxury palace that was second to none.
Ryan's family lived just two blocks away, so we had the same way home. Ryan already knew his way around the city much better and in most cases didn't even need a map, even though he had only arrived two weeks before me. As I said, a real globetrotter, someone who swims like a fish through Amsterdam's canals, confidently walks the streets of Hong Kong the next month as if he had always lived there, or dominates the terrain here in the middle of nowhere in Ukraine as if it were the backyard of his parents' property.
When I unlocked the front door, I heard my parents' familiar voices coming from the kitchen and went inside. “Well, are you so early or am I so late?” I asked my father, because I was not used to seeing him at this time.
“Both, I'm too early and you're too late,” he laughed happily.
Normally, he doesn't come home until quite late in the evening. The new position was an ideal career opportunity, but the workload associated with it is a Herculean task that is almost impossible to manage in the long term. In the first weeks of October, while my mother and I were still in Germany and making the final preparations for our own move, he only came to the apartment to sleep. Now that we've arrived, my father is spending a little more time here. Last Sunday, he was here all day! I couldn't believe it. It was like Christmas and Easter had fallen on the same day.
Officially, he is still married to my mother, but no one in our family believes him anymore, because unofficially, the office has long since taken precedence over her in recent years. Dad is one of those modern-day work slaves who crave to become senior department heads in whatever-town and live in constant fear of being pushed into early retirement at 55, exhausted and decrepit. Here in Dnipro, he is the new deputy regional director for Ukraine and, as such, is only subordinate to Ryan's father and the large corporate headquarters in Amsterdam.
The two of them get along quite well, which Ryan and I are very happy about. In the city, they are courted by all sorts of people. No wonder, after all, most of them hope that their good relationship with our fathers will one day enable them to find jobs in the newly emerging factories for one of their family members.
The only ones who regularly enjoy the directors' titles of our fathers are Ryan and I. For us, 'Mr. Vice Regional Director' or 'Mr. Regional Director' sounds like a lot of sound and even more smoke, just like 'Admiral Atlantik' sounds to the commander of an ordinary rowing boat on the Wannsee or a pedal boat on the Binnenalster. We think our part, but say nothing.
The cozy warmth in the kitchen allowed me to slowly thaw. I listened to my father, who spoke of his working day and the talks with various city officials, but to be honest, I was only half-listening.
My thoughts were consumed by the afternoon with Ryan and the prospect of going to a Russian vodka party with him on Saturday. How could I be so stupid as to get involved in such nonsense in the first place? The prospect of becoming the object of desire for some Ukrainian Natasha at the end of the party, who dreams of a better life for herself and has discovered me as her fairy-tale prince and savior, quickly lowered my mood to the evening's outside temperatures. No thanks, I don't need it. I want to go back to Germany, I want to be around my old friends and acquaintances again. But Germany is far away and there is snow outside, lots of snow, and it feels cold.
In the next few days, I hoped that the end of the world, which had already been announced several times by the German tabloid press, would finally take place and release me from all my problems and worries in an instant. But the gods seemed to have no mercy for me and my miserable existence.
On the contrary: it was getting colder outside every day, and the dreaded Saturday was approaching inexorably, like a snowstorm from which there was no escape.
“I'll pick you up tomorrow evening around seven,” Ryan had called after me cheerfully yesterday when we parted. He was looking forward to the new day, but I had more the feeling of heading towards some kind of boredom overdose.