Manage your dream. Your opportunities are endless. Vlad Rekovski
the temperature rises to thirty degrees. I write every morning, sitting on a cozy semicircular balcony, planted around the perimeter of green plants in flower beds. I can smell a pleasant fresh scent of flowers, brought by a gentle breeze. Sometimes tobacco smoke from the neighboring balcony suddenly interrupts him. We have a spacious room overlooking the garden, behind which the pool of an unusual shape with a well-equipped adjoining territory is located.
Yesterday our three-year-old daughter took three new steps in her knowledge of this world. These were three discoveries for her.
– First: she learned to immerse herself in the water with glasses and hold her breath while doing so.
– Second: we climbed with her by parachute and made a short trip along the coast. We both shouted with delight: “How cool, we are flying!”
– And third: when we returned from dinner at a coastal restaurant, Vlada learned to find hidden crabs in the sand and pull them out of the shelter, taking them by the shell with her little hands! It was something! She screamed so much with pleasure when the crabs ran away from her on the sand, and she ran after them, illuminating their path with her phone.
Here it is, happiness – when we see and experience with our loved ones such moments in life. This is my new life, which began only six years ago.
After I returned to Russia from Germany in 2005, where I lived for eleven years, I worked for five years in Moscow, then for two years in the Moscow region, and in 2012 fate brought me to Nizhny Novgorod, where my ancestors come from father. After moving to Nizhny Novgorod, for the first year I lived in a two-room rented apartment in the Seventh Heaven area. I met Ekaterina by chance one Sunday afternoon. This happened in the “New Age” auto center, an official dealer of one of the European brands. I drove there that day after work to wash my car, and I drove out forty minutes later in high spirits after a short acquaintance with Ekaterina. It was actually Sunday then – at that time I often went to work on weekends, as new projects required it. I invited Ekaterina for coffee during a short meeting at the auto center, and we exchanged phones. She moved to Nizhny Novgorod from the Perm Territory with her parents ten years ago. In the city of Chernushka, where they lived before, the volume of oil production began to decline sharply since 2002, and later the prospects in their native land became less and less.
Forty minutes after our meeting, I was leaving the auto center and was already making plans on how to meet this bright brunette again. We began to meet on weekends, traveled around the outskirts of the city, went to the very village of Berezovka, where the story of my great-grandfathers begins. I was getting to know the city and at the same time looking for a suitable area on the outskirts, where I planned to buy a piece of land and build a small house from natural solid wood. At that moment, I assumed that I would stay in Nizhny Novgorod at this stage of my life for at least five or six years. That’s what I thought in 2012. As a result, I lived in this city, or rather, on its outskirts, for a full six years and four months. This place on the outskirts of the city has become another dear place for me, where I want to return again.
1994 year. Ural. Start into an unknown future
We submitted all the necessary documents for registration of our departure to Germany, and after six months a confirmation came, on the basis of which we handed over our foreign passports to obtain a visa for permanent residence. And then the moment came when it was necessary to get ready for departure. We had to sell our four-room apartment in Miass, all the furniture in it, a Niva car, a land plot for building a house near the village of New Andreevka, and it was not clear to us what to do with a huge amount of everything that had been accumulated over the past nineteen years and remained in the reserve at the cordon: agricultural machinery, all kinds of tools, boats, outboard motors and the like. We distributed a huge amount of all this to our relatives, including Father’s brother Nikolai. He lived in the village of Turgoyak, in his private house on the shore of a unique lake with the same name – the pearls of the South Ural. My father had three brothers – Gennady, Victor, Nikolai – and a sister Tamara. Only Nikolai and Tamara survived until the nineties. Gennady died in a fire, and Victor died at the age of 52 from tuberculosis. Tamara’s husband died at the age of 40 due to a heart attack, and ten years after his death she moved to live in the village of Upper Crucian Carps, in the house of her parents.
My ancestors on the line of my father moved from Murom to the South Ural, to the village of Upper Crucian Carps in 1938. In these, at that time deaf, lands, it was possible to feed the entire large family by hunting and fishing. The village is located on the shores of one of the largest lakes in the Southern Ural – Big Miassovo, and the southern border of the Ural Mineralogical Reserve lies seven kilometers from the village.
In the late summer of 1994, I quit my job at the UralAZ automobile plant and was finishing my last unfinished business deals. I sold the apartment to one entrepreneur, collected all my cash and agreed to buy currency at a special rate thanks to my friend Vadim, who was then working at a bank in Yekaterinburg, in a branch of this bank in our city. The amount for us at that time was considerable. My brother and mother and I arrived at the bank in two cars. My brother and I had the same sports bags with us. Despite the fact that no one except the bank employees and our family knew about the deal, I prepared and implemented some security measures. Times were not very calm. They were waiting for us at the bank, we promptly completed the transaction, packed the currency into one bag. I put my jacket in the second bag, which I was wearing in the bank. We left the bank and got into two different cars with my brother. Mom got into the third car, which was parked at the bank and was waiting for us even before our arrival. The road to the reserve was calm, no one followed us, everything went well. Two weeks remained before our departure at that time.
The next day – I don’t even know how to express my feelings – the default happened in Russia: the ruble exchange rate collapsed four times in one day! If we had delayed even for one day, we would have lost a colossal amount of money for us at that time.
What was it for us then – luck or accident? Today I would say – a pattern, or, in another way, our thoughts, goals and actions led to the outcome of these events.
On October 10, 1994, the whole family boarded the train at the Miass station and set out for our new life. We didn’t know what it would be like. We drove with the hope of saving our father – that was the first. Everything else will definitely be there – I thought so, I spoke about it aloud, reassuring my parents, who, for their part, also worried about us in the first place.
Hello, Germany!
Germany greeted us on October 14 with wonderful weather in the city of Braunschweig, located in the northern part of Germany, a hundred kilometers east of Hanover. When we got off the train at nine o’clock in the morning, the platform of the station, to my surprise, was practically empty. Mother’s sister Mina with her husband Victor and son Vladimir were already waiting for us at the station. We drove off with our suitcases loaded into two Audi cars. I didn’t remember my aunt at all, since her family left for Germany back in 1978 from Latvia. They specially moved there from the city of Frunze in the early seventies for this purpose. Since then, the sisters have not seen each other.
We drove along an incredibly flat autobahn to the neighboring town of Salzgitter, which translates as “salt grate”. It was founded in 1937 by General Goebbels. Here is one of the largest and to this day in Germany, the Prussian Metallurgical Plant, and the city has grown since its foundation due to the construction of standard housing for the families of the workers of this plant. I watched the extraordinarily well-groomed and colorful farmland as I drove along the Autobahn. Some of them were already plowed, some were full of different shades of green and yellow. These sections, with incredibly flat borders, were tightly adjacent to the freeway and gave me the impression of a neatly drawn picture. We were driving, it seemed to me, not fast, about a hundred kilometers per hour, and