Emotions rule

‘That’s interesting… Can we talk it over tomorrow? You can have me the whole day, the whole Sunday will be yours, I promise,’ Katya reassured him.

‘Ok, tomorrow then,’ agreed Sasha.

‘And prepare the Teach Me, Tiger song. I’m totally into it now,’ added Katya.

‘I will. See you,’ said Sasha.

‘See you, Tiger,’ responded Blondie and hung up.

Katya entered her kitchen a bit perplexed but with a wicked playful fire in her eyes. This air of confidence about Sasha drove her crazy. Confident voice, confident posture, confident gliding arms…

‘Who was that, Mum?’ wondered Varya raising her voice from a low to a high note. She noticed every change in her Mum’s face.

‘Just a man. You don’t know him,’ answered Katya, sipped some coffee, took a spoonful of tiramisu, and placed it in her mouth. As she finished chewing, she announced, ‘So… my life story… I guess I’ll begin with the trip to Germany.’

Chapter 1

Katya, Yulya and Tanya go to Berlin

The girls became friends at Moscow State Pedagogical University, Foreign Languages Department. Although they’d been learning German for a year already, they could hardly speak it. Thus, the ladies had decided to spend their summer holidays together and brush up their German. The trio believed the fastest and surest way to learn the language was to stay in the country where the very language was spoken. That was their recipe and they felt a strong urge to give it a try. What they had to do was to mix the following ingredients: A) socialize with native speakers, B) stay open to communication, where making mistakes was not only inevitable but also contact-finding and amusing, C) get acquainted with the culture and compare it with your own and D) have fun obviously. If you followed the instructions correctly, you would master the language pretty fast. Bon appetit!

Back to Moscow Vnukovo airport.

The blonde-haired Katya, a tall, slender girl was in her hyper mood waving happily b’bye with her long palm at her parents. Her Mum and Dad were masters of a farewell scene with a real pep talk of be careful here and there spiced up with lots of examples from newspapers, books, news and movies of young ladies who go on adventures abroad and end up deceived serving foreign pimps. Every time they saw her off they would spill on her the same stories. They wanted to give her all the opportunity in the world but at the same time protect her. She was an only child, as her Mum had been advised against any other pregnancies due to her catastrophically bad eyesight.

Katya didn’t want to let down her worrying parents and like a really good-natured daughter, she pretended to listen to them with great attention. To herself though, she was thinking if she took to these horror stories she would spend the rest of her life in Moscow being afraid of the rest of the world. Or she might even consider going back to her home town, where there were only about one hundred thousand people compared to Moscow official thirteen million. Instead, Katya chose to trust in good. And the good would take care of her. She cherished the notion of thinking positively in order to attract it in her life. That was her faith.

She was so excited to escape. Freedom was about to come! No irritating small laws of parents, teachers, elderly people to obey, at least for the time being! You could forget all about ‘Don’t swear! Don’t come home late! Don’t get drunk! Don’t mess up with guys till you’ve graduated from the university!’ Although in the back of her mind she knew being alert would do no harm obviously. Shit happened. No one was ensured against crooks.

Red-haired, miniature pretty Yulya with her outstanding lips and freckled face was hugging her Mum and Dad telling them in her high-pitched voice not to worry. Having never flown in a plane, they were really worried about the flight, more than Yulya herself. While the latter was just thinking of a new experience with the excitement of discovering a new world and new feelings, her parents had these terrible pictures in their heads of plane crashes they’d seen so often on TV. On seeing her Mum’s wet eyes and Dad’s absent look Yulya was obliged to quote the three Musketeers saying ‘All for one and one for all’. She squeezed her Mummy hard and cheek kissed her.

‘I’ll be very prudent, Pa, I promise,’ she whispered in her Dad’s ear. After all, it wasn’t like going alone, but with very, very good friends of hers. They were like her elder sister, very care-taking.

On her own stood dark-haired Tanya with a thick fringe of hers which had provoked her friends to call her just Fringe. She was chewing gum, eyeing the ceiling. She looked as if she was somewhat irritated with her friends whose parents were such Mummies and Daddies as if their kids were leaving for war. She had handled her b’bye procedure at home telling her Mum not to worry as she was capable to get to the airport on her own. She didn’t need that puppy-love scene performed at the airport.

Since the age of sixteen, Tanya had been making clear to her Mum that she’d grown up. Fringe began to feel her growing independence when she started earning her own, though little, money by typing texts for some publishing house. With her own money, she could indulge in her own wishes without begging her Mum to give her some cash. That was the turning point for the newly-acquired phrase she threw whenever her Mum was about to lecture her. With a slight note of irritation Tanya would say, ‘I’ll decide by myself what to do with my life, I’m big enough, Ma.’

Maybe it had not been only her own money that had made her rely only on herself as a teenager.

She had become aware that life was not only honey and sugar at the age of twelve, the personal experience mutated through a psychological trauma into the secret she’d kept to herself in the lowest drawer of her memory.

Plus, at the age of fourteen, she’d witnessed her Dad get himself utterly drunk and bit up her Mum. In a panic, Fringe’d called an ambulance to take her Mum to a hospital where the latter had spent a week. That week Tanya’d spent alone with her beast Dad home. Fringe had been afraid he might perform the same beating act on her, so she’d always kept a pocket knife on her for defense, even though she hadn’t been quite sure she could raise a hand on her own Dad. Surprisingly, she had been relieved to observe his permissive beating had only been directed onto his wife. The attitude toward his daughter hadn’t altered. Nevertheless, she could not forgive him for her Mum’s beating.

When her Mum had been released from the hospital Fringe’d told her she didn’t want to live with her Dad and she would run away if they kept on living together. Mum’d replied she needed time to think.

When Mama Irina had been beaten one more time, she’d filed for a divorce and arranged to stay at her sister’s place where the latter lived with a daughter of hers. Two sisters and cousins had to endure a little inconvenience of being packed like sardines in a one-room apartment during the process of changing the beating husband’s three-room apartment to two one-room apartments. As a matter of fact, Tanya and her cousin, Anya, had become quite close at that time and had been determined to keep their friendship after their inevitable separation. Soon the exchange had been performed. The sisters and their daughters had been back to living apart.

Since then Fringe had been living in a one-room apartment with her Mum. Tanya believed she was deprived of her private room only temporarily. She valued that she and her Mum resided in a safe and non-violent place now.

Maybe because of all the family cataclysms Fringe looked older and wiser than her besties. It was her eyes that could flicker a sullen twinge at times. In reality, she was even a year younger. Besides, her looks were just super womanly as she was shaped like the yummiest donut on earth. Such an appearance was due to her big heavy breasts which she only used to curse when she ran in PE classes – so dangly and heavy they were that they even hurt. But in all other cases, Tanya was extremely proud of them. The pride that was strengthening with each lustful male stare or an envious female glare.

Finally, the girls lost a glimpse of their parents. If they could’ve screamed without frightening the airport staff, they would’ve gladly done it. Instead, Katya began singing as if an opera singer ‘Parents, see you soooooon and freedom, weeee are cooooming!’

Yulya just made a silly-goose dance and jumped forward to the pass control as if she were a ballerina. Pretending to be embarrassed, Tanya said to the security guy, ‘I AM NOT WITH THEM!’ and rolled her eyes up.

Finally, Moscow Duty Free was offering its services to them: Vodka or Tequila would help them celebrate their soon arrival. They chose a huge chocolate bar and Tequila Silver for their dinner in Berlin.

‘Shall we take one or two ciggie cartons?’ Tanya was referring to Yulya with a mocking seriousness.

While Tanya adored the act of smoking in general and treated it as a means of thinking, relaxation, and meditation, Red-haired didn’t much care about inhaling and exhaling the smoke, she just did it to keep a company, because everybody did it, so she never felt real satisfaction in the act. Her elder sister smoked too, but her parents didn’t know Yulya was smoking. They still treated her as their little one. And Red-haired was trying to preserve the corresponding behavior of an ignorant, innocent girl. When they felt the cigarette smell around her, she would always say it was the university girls who had smoked her over, her hair and clothes.

‘I thought you were going to quit, young ladies?’ Katya needed to drop her word in there too.

‘Alright, alright, we’re taking only one carton. One carton should be quite enough for a month. Katya, you should become a damn health coach,’ uttered Tatyana in a fake irritation. And so their trip began.

Berlin. Everything seemed different. Even the air seemed different. The smell of bread and freshly-baked buns greeted them at the airport. In the train from the airport they heard a couple speaking Russian, who appeared to be living in Berlin for a long time already. Katya was holding a note with the address they were to live at and asked if, by any chance, they knew the street.

The couple had a look at the address and uttered, ‘Nope. But we’ll help you to find out when we are at the railway station.’

No one seemed to know where the street was.

‘Look, there’s a city map,’ there came Tanya’s voice.

No such street to be found. The map was enormous. Berlin seemed to be as big as Moscow. Taxi-drivers should know! Beige Mercedes taxis were lining up for their clients. Everyone was asking what district the street was in. But the girls had no idea. No idea the first driver had as well. What about the second one? Alright, at least he managed to find the street on his map. Quite easy to find if one knew that it was in Charlottenburg-Wilmesdorf, West Berlin. And the happy girls put their luggage in the trunk; gave the Russian couple a Russian chocolate bar Alyonka and got into the car with relief. Why it was such a riddle for Berliners to find a street remained a big question.

‘Twenty euros,’ pronounced the taxi-driver. The girls paid and got out. What now?

It took them about twenty minutes to look for the landlady. Not a soul seemed to know where she was. Their first brainstorming idea was to call up all the apartments one by one and ask. They started with the basement.

A tall, brown guy with long arms and fingers, his body wet, wrapped up in a towel, gestured vividly to come in. A broad smile on his face. Yves was his name. He excused his wet appearance as he’d been taking a shower when he’d heard the doorbell ring. He suggested calling the landlady. What a cutie pie! No dangerous crooks so far. He called, told the girls to go to the second building, fourth floor imitating the landlady’s voice melody. The ladies thanked him and left.

Katya volunteered to be a pioneer that day.

‘These walls definitely need some repainting,’ she thought observing the dilapidating walls as she was climbing the stairs with wide steps skipping every second step. She saw an open door, knocked and in she went. The old wizened lady with unkempt grey hair was standing in the middle of the room vacuuming.

‘Hello, are you Frau Wolf?’ yelled Katya to deafen the vacuum cleaner.

The decaying lady turned off the noisy machine, greeted the girl with a fake smile and began telling things about the flat. Katya had to explain that she first needed to call up the other girls and left. The German landlady resumed vacuuming while Katya ran down the stairs in the same hyper mood.

‘Oh my!’ Blondie yelled to the girls. ‘Ancient building with an ancient landlady. The Wolf lady is much more like a Lamb lady, wizened Lamb lady.’

Blondie grabbed her luggage and hauled it to the fourth floor. She went down again to see how little Yulya was handling her luggage, the size of nearly her own height.

‘I’ll help you with your giant stuff. Did you pack your whole wardrobe or what?’ Katya offered a helping hand feeling like Hercules energized with excitement of an adventure.

Evening. Unpacked. Windows wide open. Hot, stuffy air of the apartment was slowly being mixed with transparent waves of a slightly fresh evening of the outside. Fringe was opening the bottle, Blondie fetched the cups (the only drinking vessels they had) and Red-haired was breaking the thick chocolate bar against the table into small squares with loud bangs. After feasting over the chocolate and the booze they were ready to go out.

They popped out with the question ‘Hey…. Anyone knows where the city center is?’