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Chapter I – 2091

"Joschi!"

It was his mother's voice, clear despite the distance and squeaking of the swing. No, he didn't want to answer, not yet... not to interrupt the momentum, the tingling flying, and buzzing. The air of early summer caressed his naked arms and legs and through his thin shirt also his upper body. Strongly his hands held on, his body drove the swing to new momentum, the squeaking became short, high. He lay far back, legs and upper body almost horizontal, his head in his neck. The blood flowed to the brain. A reversed world swung effortlessly around him, the sky, the apartment blocks, the treetops, the trunks, the lawn, trunks, crowns, houses, sky, houses, trees, lawn, swung in ecstasy, up and down, turning, reversed, forgotten world. He 'upswinged' himself. That's what he called it. Swinging to ecstasy... he didn't understand it, just did it. People's remarks had already made him careful. The more important the ecstasy became to him, the more he took care that nobody noticed.

Although he was too old for the playground being almost fifteen, not only in his parents' opinion, they preferred to see him there rather than with the older ones, who were cavorting in the large parking lot of the supermarket on Electrometalurhiva Street with their skates, bikes, mono flacs... and with girls.

Yeah, Joschi knew he was different. Rather swinging than stand swaggering and attitudinal with his peers. He wasn't a child anymore. Last night at last had shown him that, and Svenja. Svenja with her small, wet hands, her hasty kisses, her awkward touching and exploring. A quiet, secret and yet final farewell to childhood. Was that feeling they called 'love'? It had been very beautiful, but nothing that made him die of longing, nothing like how it was always described. Sky, apartment blocks, trees, lawns, apartment blocks, sky, apartment blocks, trees...

"Joschi!"

That was clearly nearby. Hastily he straightened up. He suspected that his mother would not approve of the dream position with his head hanging down at the back. Curious, he expected her. He had no idea why she came looking for him. There was still time before 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, and Joschi 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."

"Well, of course! You have a different climate, a different culture. You know, France, for example, they have been in the Union with us from the beginning, almost 150 years. Back then you had thirty years of Stalinism ahead of you. So... even in France you still feel today that some things are different than with us, not just the old houses or the names, I mean. Although my father always says France has lost all its identity."

"I don't know any French people. There were none in our settlement. Maybe somewhere else in Nikopol, but not in Gagarin Park. But I don't think you can compare that... because... for example, like... how people walk around here. That is not possible back in Ukraine."

"How people walk around?"

"Yes... the... not dressed, without..."

"Ah! Now I get it! Yes. My father mentioned something like that... that you don't know it. Although, it started with you guys, too. In the parks of Kiev or Kharkov there are naked people."

"Yes... in Kiev or Kharkov..."

Joschi had heard about it on the news, of this crazy fashion from the west of the Union, of which it was expected... hoped... that it would soon fade away.

"We started out the same way... some people in the parks of some big cities. And there are still enough dull areas in Germany, where you would go naked for a swim at most. Didn't your father tell you what it's like here? He's already been here twice. But... there's probably so much that's different with us than with you, it hardly matters."

Joschi wondered if his father had kept his mouth shut because of his mother. Maybe she wouldn't have agreed to the move if he had prepared her for the fact that she could easily meet a naked man here on the street. Or him a naked woman. His mother came from a rural region where naked people were known only from the media, which nobody watched officially.

So that was his adventure: naked people in public, the chaos at the airport or the still unknown secrets of the big city. He would have to get used to reacting quite normally... after all, he couldn't look to the side all summer. But it would be difficult... especially with the good-looking girls.

In the evening they sat around the big dining table... he with Axi, with whom he had been out and about all day... his parents, exhausted and immersed into some papers... Adrian's cousin with his wife and kids. Adrian's wife was out in Frankfurt. Adrian and Yilmaz prepared dinner in the kitchen. An extra chair inspired Joshi's imagination. Clarissa was expected for dinner. Joschi was very excited after Axi had dodged all questions about his sister with a "wait and see".

Yilmaz Örgün was a friendly man, slim, smaller than Adrian, with ice-grey hair and a deep black, dense moustache. Joschi noticed that he was involved everywhere in the household, and in the best of moods, while Adrian's cousin and his wife behaved like hotel guests. Unhappy, grumpy hotel guests. They paraded their fate so demonstratively that Joschi noticed it immediately... although it was not so terrible compared to that of most of the 300 million poverty and war refugees around the world. They didn't have it bad, they behaved badly.

"All they do is get mad because they fell on their faces," Axi had explained to him. "You should've heard what they used to say in the mails or on the phone. Australia is so nice and neat and clean and safe. And us, with our filth and our immorality and blah."

"Immorality"?

"Well, for example, you saw the neighbors on the left this morning on their terrace. Three men, five women. They live together as Conglobat. A multi-person partnership. They all sleep together, too. They're everywhere in Europe. Everybody's all right, but not monogamous. You should have heard what a riot Johanna made about it! Fornication' and 'perversions', in front of their children! Male and female wildly mixed up! That was quite a performance..."

"I believe it. What an idiot! What does your uncle do for a living?"

"Good question. He's an engineer, something like construction work. They say he's looking for work. But his ideas... we don't have a million square kilometers of desert to build on like in Australia. But instead of looking for something reasonable, he dreams of bombastic large-scale projects with which he wants to put concrete over our landscape here. They lived like they were on the moon. No one in Germany plans such large-scale projects anymore. But he doesn't want to go south or east either, where they occasionally plan such big things as highways or artificial cities."

"And his wife? Does she have a job?"

"The wife, work? She thinks she doesn't need to. You know, in Australia you could live well if your partner was an engineer... with a house and a maid and everything... but not here. If you don't live alone, but only one person earns, then you don’t have much. In Germany, one income might be enough for the flat, the debts and insurance and something to eat. Where do you think we'd all be sitting today if my parents hadn't inherited this house? And yet my mother works at the university."

"Life here... is very difficult?"

"Well, difficult... I mean, you can live how you want, but without money... you'll get nothing but problems. And you'll end up in the dirt real quick. Once you get a bad address, you don't stand a chance. If they give you a good job with us today, they will check where you live. And if your costs are too low, you won't get the job because they fear that you are too independent and may cause trouble. Or that you're antisocial."

"The people here... they do fine. I didn't see anyone today who is antisocial."

Joschi understood Axi quite well now, but struggled with the tricky German grammar.

"Of course! Though it doesn't matter. Ghetto remains ghetto, even if it's the other way around at Bad Homburg."

"Ghetto? This isn’t a ghetto!"

"Well, what would you call it? Just another kind... but, tell me... you don’t know that at all? Sure, nobody told you, and we weren't at the gates today. The whole of Bad Homburg is a ghetto. Closed. A protec. A protected area. It used to be only in America, for some housing estates... but for about ten years now, it's been with us, too. Bad Homburg was one of the first. Around the whole city there’s a fence, dressed up as bushes or soundproof walls, everywhere with cameras and motion detectors. There are controls at the gates, and if they get suspicious and can't verify you, you stay out."

"Controls"?

"For illegal drugs or guns. Of course, you can own a weapon, but then your card must be ok. Did you see the flat gray box in the trunk of my dad's car? In there's a Riot Booster, something with sound pressure. But he wouldn't stand a chance against the big gangs in Frankfurt."

"And the whole city is... locked up?"

"You mean 'locked'. Not really, because of course, everyone has the right to move freely. But you need a reason for places like Bad Homburg. In practice, they frisk you at the gate and ask you where you're going. Then you say, for example, 'to the spa' or some business, and you can go through. They don't ask questions until your card is out of order or you look really bad."

At that moment Yilmaz came out of the kitchen smiling... a full bowl of salad in his hands, followed by... it hit Joschi like an electric shock... it had to be Clarissa! In the family she was called "Riss". Joschi knew instantly that this sharp sounding word fit her better than "Clarissa".

Definitely. She resembled her father, a younger, more feminine version of Adrian. Slim, at least 180 centimeters tall, with somewhat angular shoulders, strong-looking arms, only half as wide as Katja at the hips, only the hint of a breast under a loose shirt... confusing, the stubble-short, black hair on the high skull... confusing, the face, Adrian's face, with a high forehead and strange, hard lines, the cool amused look, especially about the pale cousin and his family... a scornful smile around the corners of her eyes that became friendlier as she looked at him and her brother.

She wasn't a second Katja. Nevertheless, Riss possessed everything that Joschi had always found fascinating in Katja... her figure, posture, movements, charisma... in a highly concentrated, almost painfully direct form. This woman... Joschi didn't even think for a moment to call her a girl... was none of what a good woman should be, according to the experienced opinion of his peers or their fathers at home in the Ukraine. Katja had always defended herself against such ideas.

Riss. Joschi could see them... the precocious young machos from his school and neighborhood, as they would have fallen silent under this look. There was strength and self-confidence in a form that Joschi had never felt before with an adult woman, let alone a teenager, only a little older than he himself... self-confidence up to the tips of the brush haircut, distributed with casual gestures that filled the space like the hero of an action series... yes, like a man... and a subliminal menace. Joschi speculated on the world out there, which made such an attitude possible... or indeed necessary. Suddenly he felt a violent rumbling in his stomach, which certainly didn't come from hunger.