Taken by Berlin. Nicolas Scheerbarth
can sleep with our son. At the moment there is a Turkish colleague living downstairs. But he's going back to Turkey in a few weeks. So, we invited him to stay with us, although you should get the basement flat. Yilmaz is a nice guy, and we'd had to have literally throw him out on the street. But you'll see: Yilmaz is no trouble."
Adrian's German was very clear and almost as soft as that of a Ukrainian. They had squeezed themselves, the luggage partly on their knees, into Adrian's small car, a bulbous Toyota, now just another white and red double light for some other airplane passengers.
Joschi wasn't on an alien planet. He had already seen a crowd like in the airport a hundred times on web TV. The immediate, real presence was the actual sensation sensational... the inkling of achievable desires, blurred dreams, which had left him restlessly sleeping lately. Right here, in the cauldron of a Union metropolis, far away from the still somewhat stiff, orderly life of the former Stalinist sphere. Joschi was equally familiar with the circumstances that had brought the cousin or Mr. Örgün into Adrian's house. The world was a small, overcrowded village. An event like the Indonesian civil war immediately set millions of refugees in motion, in this case also back to Germany, where many of the Australian citizens came from. Every apartment, every house, even the gigantic residential complexes up to seventy floors high were filled to bursting point. Even a Turk had no chance of finding affordable accommodation unless he was related to one of the wealthy Almanturk families.
The small electric car hummed quietly through the bright city night, controlled by the autopilot and the computers of the traffic control system.
Adrian turned directly to Joschi: "I have a son who is about your age. Fourteen and a bit. He even has a Russian name, Alexander, but we call him Axi. He's looking forward to you moving in with us. He's already made room for you."
"Is he... single?" asked Joschi in bumpy German.
Adrian laughed.
"No, he's not an only child. Axi has a sister... Clarissa. She's seventeen. But you'll barely get to see her. She still lives with us... officially... but if she ever sleeps at home, you and Axi have to bunk in together; my cousin's children sleep in her room... but that's rare. She usually sleeps with her girlfriend in Frankfurt."
Joschi asked no further questions. Not quite knowing why, he had warmed to the thought that a girl the age of his cousin Katja belonged to this family.
The Kreutzers lived in an almost two-hundred-year-old villa in a suburb of Frankfurt. Joschi had never seen such a spacious and at the same time crooked private house. Modern villas in Nikopol were clear, open constructions with little fixed partition walls. Of course, he also knew the old, pompous houses of the Stalinist fat cats. But they were dark and dull. Even older houses were almost non-existent. Under the Stalinist regime, they had mostly become so decrepit that renovations had been dispensed with and most of them had long since been torn down.
Joschi did not get to bed until after two o'clock... the top of a stable, wide double bunk bed. But already at 10 am he was awake again. He found a note... in Russian, in his mother's handwriting. His parents had gone to town with Kreutzers to take care of some formalities. The note showed him the way to the bathroom and kitchen and informed him that Axi was probably waiting for him in the garden. Joschi found his things and the bathroom. He put on a T-shirt and shorts and went down to look for Axi.
From Adrian's announcements, he had instinctively expected to be in a small, dark, overcrowded house... with boxes full of refugees' belongings in all corridors and drying laundry in the rooms. But here there was no trace of overcrowding or darkness at all. All the rooms and furniture kept in light colors throughout. All the doors and most of the windows were open. Sunlight streamed into the large, bright house, behind it a steady buzzing hummed from the nearby thoroughfare. It was already very warm now, promising to be a hot summer day. On the large dining table at one end of the living room stood a jug of milk, a pot of red jam... "Strawberry Acerola" he deciphered, whatever that was... a basket of fresh rolls, in front of it plates and drinking cups and another note, "Welcome to our home, Joschi" in rounded handwriting, perhaps that of Adrian's wife.
Half a roll with jam in his hand, he stepped out on the porch. In front of him... a lawn, a hedge of dense conifers to the left, behind it a vegetable garden... to the right a sandpit and a swing! Two young children were playing in the sandbox, probably the cousin's daughters. Joschi stepped forward a few steps. Further down on the lawn a large bath towel was spread out. A boy lay on it and read... slender, about his height, with short, black hair, sun-bronzed skin... Joschi blinked in the brightness... and stark naked. The boy noticed him before he could make himself disturb this seemingly intimate sunbathing.
"Hello! You're awake. Wait a minute. I'm coming."
He put a bookmark in the book, jumped up and came naked as he was, towards Joschi, stretched out his hand towards him.
"I'm glad you're here. Did you sleep alright? Did you find your things? There was a note... but I can see... and tell me if I'm talking too fast."
There was good reason to do so, though, because Axis words jumped and bolted like a landslide. Joschi himself brought out at first only a labored German "Guten Tag". He was confused. He could not have said what unsettled him the most – the nakedness of the boy, the unfamiliar language or this feeling of moving in a strangely clear dream.
In any case, Axi did not attach any importance to his nakedness. Friendly and with patient repetitions he explained to Joschi what he should know about the house and its inhabitants. He didn’t mind Joschi’s stares and stuttering in the least. Still naked as Adam, he joined Joschi at breakfast, guided him through the house and garden, and helped him to store his things in their common room.
"I can show you the surroundings and the way to school," Axi finally suggested. "You can ride a bike, can't you?"
"Yeah, sure," Joschi replied.
"All I have to do is close the windows and tell the kids first."
"And... suit?" Joschi found himself saying, instinctively.
"What? Again..."
"I... I mean... that you're so... not going. Outside," stuttered Joschi and felt the blood shoot into his face.
"Ah... to get dressed! Sure, you're dressed too... it wouldn't matter around here, but down to the school, you're right. All right, just a minute."
While everywhere in the house the windows folded and the blinds squeaked, Joschi stood at the foot of the stairs in the hallway, bewildered. This boy would actually have sat naked on his bicycle to show him the surrounding area!
Joschi felt something rising from very deep down inside himself, a dull pulling. It wasn't fear. And he had gotten used to the nakedness of the other boy after five minutes. But only the hint of the possibility to cycle naked down a public street! It was instinctively clear to him that Axi was no eccentric nutcase or wanted to tease him with such ideas. He otherwise behaved quite normally, at least by the standards Joschi presumed to apply to a boy his age in this country. No, it was a feeling of strangeness that occurred to him for the first time... an abysmal strangeness: the weather was warm enough, so it wasn't worth dressing. It was that simple. Joschi swallowed.
After an hour of cycling, they took a break in the old spa park. They sat at the edge of a wide meadow in the shade of a bush. With a thick lump in his throat Joschi watched the ubiquitous nudity. In the center of the town, there had been only a few young children playing naked at the fountain in front of a shopping center, and some bare-chested men and women in front of a café in the blazing sun. But in this park, dressed and unclothed people mixed in almost equal numbers, children and teenagers as well as younger adults. Only the older ones... mostly spa guests, as Axi said... limited themselves to naked sunbathing, and wore light leisure wear on the paths and streets. Especially the sight of the women made Joshua's heart beat faster and gave him a painful permanent erection. Every moment he expected his seed to shoot into his underpants spontaneously. He hardly dared to touch himself there, to push his boner at least a little to the side.
"It's great, yes!" he laboriously answered a question from his guide. "But also funny. Almost like at home... and yet different."