Taken by Berlin. Nicolas Scheerbarth
dinner, he had only gone shopping with her yesterday, and there had been no trouble at school either.
"Joschi. There you are. I should have guessed. You and your swing..."
He didn't answer, let himself slowly swing out and looked at her.
"Come! You must come with me... home. Father's there. And we have a surprise for you."
He slipped off his seat, took a few steps toward his mother. Whatever surprise it might be, it couldn't be bad... he knew that sparkle from wet eyes. Had Katja come unexpectedly to visit, his cousin from Odessa? His mother knew how attached he was to her. Odessa was a different district than Nikopol. Maybe they already had vacations there. His mother pulled him into her arms.
"Oh, I'm so happy..." – almost moaning and more to herself.
"Uh... yes, about what?" he asked confusedly.
So much excitement... and his father at home... that meant more than a surprise visit.
"It's an honor for me. And it will be an adventure... for all of us," his father said.
Joschi would have liked to hug his father. He loved his father... the strength, the warmth, the reliability, just in this moment and with this message on his lips. But he hadn’t let him touch him anymore, not for years. 'You are no longer a child, and men do not embrace', his father had explained to him. And his grandmother had explained that this had come to an end with Stalinism a hundred years ago. In Stalinism, men would embrace each other all the time, and always for the wrong reasons.
Joschi would have liked to have squeeze himself to his father now... to show him his joy in a quite natural way and without the stale words that adults always used... and to muffle his trembling, from joy and fear... for suddenly a tremendous step lay before him, a leap into a distant world... so far away that it was clear to him that there would be no connections afterwards, no quick return.
They would move to Germany, to a city called Frankfurt, the powerful financial hub of the European Union. His father was a business journalist for the Kiev business magazine Economía, Nikopol office... and now its correspondent in Frankfurt. They'd be moving in two months.
***
For now, Joschi had forgotten the pain of separation. He literally crawled into the small window, stared down at the fairyland below, the nocturnal metropolis with its shimmering veins and knots. Frankfurt was not Moscow, Tokyo, London or Sao Paulo, but it was one of the centers of the European Union and was mentioned in the news almost every day. Economy, finances, riots, cults, fairs, muzic, evenz were reverberating with the name of Frankfurt. The city itself, he had learned, was not very big, no comparison to Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkov or even Kiev. But the whole area around Frankfurt was a densely populated cityscape, a human congestion of two hundred kilometers in diameter, and a region of Europe that had never suffered the devastation of Stalinism.
The trembling anticipation of a thousand miracles had added to the grief when he learned that the family had to leave virtually all their belongings behind. The newspaper could no longer afford the chic official apartment in one of the new, huge residential complexes. The new correspondent and his family had to move in with a friend of his predecessor.
The airport of Dnipropetrovsk, the modern Ilyushin Il 522, the food and the language of the stewardesses were new, interesting, but at the same time familiar. The closer they came to the fairyland, the more often the soft Ukrainian announcements were followed by a few sentences with popping and creaking sounds... German that he barely understood and that he had never heard spoken by a German. Even the German news on the web channel were read by Ukrainians. As he stared out of his airplane window, he thought for a moment how little this crackling language and the beauty down there matched.
It was eleven o'clock at night... half an hour waiting time above the airport, circling in a slowly sinking spiral, enough time to look at everything... the irregular web of light with its chains and knots, the interstates white and red in opposite directions, the bright orange axes and clusters, gleaming white bubbles, lettering in all colors on colossal cuboids, greenish spots like glowing mold, and again and again walls of yellow dots, the complexes that seemed to reach up to their flight level in the south... the plane sank deeper into the light bath, details became visible... that dense was the traffic on the streets... Joschi wondered whether all of these ten million people were still on the road at this time... a hard bend drew the towers of Frankfurt city center in front from his field of vision. And then it was like riding down in an elevator, lifting him up out of his chair into his seatbelt, screeching and whistling... Modern commercial aircraft landed and took off almost vertically, a must in a world where 11 billion people left no room for long runways near the cities.
On the ground, the chaos hit them. Stranded in the wrong terminal due to a diversion... one his father didn't know... a nightmare of crowded corridors, passages, and squares, a building that would have swallowed all of Nikopol. Music hammered into the stomach, from all sides, booming from small balls, which dangerous-looking young people and even children carried around their necks. Beggars of all races and stages of misery stretched out their hands towards them or what they used instead of hands... multiply mutilated victims of the countless fights, gang and civil wars. The German police didn't seem to care, faceless four-man patrols in uniforms like combat robots.
Pushed, punched, numb, the family escaped into a corner. A dark, bearded man with a salmon turban stood at a small flower shop opposite. Joshi's father spoke to him... in German and English... the man seemed to be Indian, but Russian was the language he understood best.
"The information center of the Ukrainian airline? It's in Terminal P, but you'll never find it. I'll take you there..."
"That's not necessary. Just show us..."
"No, no, it's not a problem. "It's hard to explain... and people have already been lost in this airport..."
"Or we could page our friend who came to pick us up..."
"Listen."
"Pardon me?"
"No, listen! Do you hear anything?"
"No... only that noise everywhere."
"Exactly! Forget about the paging, and come on. It's no detour for me."
Another kilometer they walked through the crowd, then down, over long escalators, through scraping glass doors... to a small station where a glass cabin with seats was waiting.
"The Skyline," the Indian explained. And, without malice: "You probably would never have found this station. You see how little is going on here. A lot of people don't know the skyline. And the signs are so often covered by gangs to lure strangers into traps that the administration has taken them down. The people who live in the building don't even come here, because you need a plane ticket or a worker's permit to use it."
They glided silently through light and darkness, kilometer after kilometer, with people from all corners of the global village... shoulder-length waving manes of African noblemen, glittering in jewelry... Americans in candy-colored sack suits, their bodies soft and puffed from neck to knees... the faces of Europe in all shades, women and men hardly distinguishable, under colorful caps, balloon bonnets and hats of the prevailing fashion, conservatively colorful and androgynous... and a few equally sexless, angular figures in the martial, elegant uniform of the Union forces. Joschi had always followed the info shows and news diligently, had no trouble identifying the types and their origin.
"Call me Adrian!" the tall, slim man asked the family. He had been waiting the whole time... it was now after midnight... Adrian Kreutzer, the friend of the predecessor with whom they were to move in. Joschi liked him from the first moment. The open smile, the strong hands, which without hesitation seized two of their suitcases, the tasteful rust-colored suit without shrill contrasts... inspired trust. He seemed human, not half as strange as the endless beehive they had stumbled through in the past hour.
"I hope Pogirev has told you that things will get a little cramped for some time. My cousin and his wife fled the Indonesian civil war in Australia and live with us too. But don't worry. We have a room in the apartment in the basement,