23, 654 Words Of...

Munich (2000-2005)

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...Ach, Du Land der sch;nen Tr;ume –
Was ist Dir nur so passiert?               
Keine Lieder singen V;gel,               
Alte M;rchen sind verwirrt.               

Du erkennst hier kaum Bilder               
aus Kinderb;chern mehr               
und nimmst Abschied von der Wiege             
deiner dichterischen Welt .               

Introduction

I loved Germany from the very beginning, without any preconditions or doubts. I was dying to see the land of my dreams and romanticists, whom I hated because of their literature and sometimes literal virginity but who created this image of the land I was longing for. I was leaving Russia with its roads and fools, dirt and swearing, authoritarianism and unbounded freedom to come back for short vacations only. I had 1,000 Deutsche Marken in my purse - a donation from my parents for the first month of stay, a phone number of my father's sworn friend, and a luggage full of expectations.
Apparently, I was flying via Amsterdam or another hub of that kind, and my newly issued passport (in 2000!) awoke curiosity and fright of border guards: I suppose, the Russian issuing body discovered a handful of old good Soviet forms for foreign passports in its cellar and decided to let Russian students promote hammer and sickle for the following five years Europe-wide. The first reaction of the border guard was not to allow me to pass through. After other passengers of all possible nationalities had succeeded in going through the gate, he came back to me, examined my passport squeamishly and - finally - got out of my way. (I wonder which poem our Comrade Mayakovsky would have written upon the incident.) 
Well, that was certainly not the welcome I expected from the "Brave New World" community, but I did not care much about the Dutchmen, or junkies, if you allow me to be not an adept of the Political Correctness. After I had landed in Munich, I headed directly to a Jugendherberge, or hostel, whose address I had from the net, highly undeveloped at that time - in Russia at least. I was trying hard to understand, what the driver was saying on the S-Bahn but could not recognise a word from the language I knew relatively perfect already. I was panicking and wondering which language I had been learning for 8 years to fail at the very start of my studies in Bavaria.
The next shock was a group of young punks smoking and drinking nearby the U-Bahn Rot-Kreuz-Platz. I was afraid and shy but could not find the right path to the hostel and had no other choice than come up to them and ask for the directions. They answered something, what I did not catch, but the hand movement showed me the way - and - finally - I was standing in front of the hostel's door. They seemed not to have any bed to lie down. I was at a rate: I did not expect the beds should have been booked in advance and had no idea where to go. Probably, the porter read all this despair from my face, started searching again and found a bed but for one night only.
That turned out to be pretty enough to make me happy. During the followed days, I instantly changed my locations, as long as you were not supposed to stay at the Jugendherberge longer than a couple of days. I phoned my father's sworn friend: He - along with his family - was off to the wedding in Belgium. So, I visited all the hostels in the city, traveled to a cozy house in Steinebach, where I was walking at the lake and in the corn field at night remembering "Children of the Corn", but the most exciting experience was a castle in Pullach in the magnificent Isar valley and next to the BND headquarters, as I discovered later. I really liked it sitting alone at the edge of the steep, learning German grammar, drinking canned beer and talking to old ladies who were passing by and encouraging me to have time for the rest and not only for studies.
Nevertheless, I got bored with Germany at that time already. 'It cannot last for ages,' I was re-assuring myself. 'Maximum one year - and you are back!' Well, I stayed a little bit longer.

Admission

The main objective of my trip was the University of Ludwig and Maximilian. At that time, the studies in Germany were still free of charge, and the would-be students of humanities had to pass a written and an oral exam in German. That might be easy for me, as long as I had German at school and had had a 3 year track of German studies in St. Petersburg but I was too nervous - and only beautiful landscapes of the Isar Valley inspired me not to jump and stay on this side until the exams were over.
I thought out a trick: At the St. Petersburg University, the first month of the fourth year was practice at school. I skipped it successfully, as long as I used to work as a German teacher at my school for a couple of quarters before. That was a win-win situation: Should I pass the exams, I will have a year abroad and come back to join the next year's students; should I fail, I will have returned by the beginning of October and nobody will know my little top secret, which I was not inclined to reveal beforehand, especially to the head of our department.
After I had entered the University of Munich, I had much anger with my reserve. The authoritarian-like head of the Department of German Philology was shouting cats and dogs at me, because only she could decide, who was allowed to go abroad and who was not. My modest remark that I did not want to bother her without knowing the result of the exams was kicked back with a sarcastic allusion that I should have known the result from the very beginning: Otherwise, I would have confused me as a student of the St. Petersburg University. After the first furious wave had relieved, I got the permission for a 1-year leave and... did not come back anymore.
The written exam was easier than easy in spite of various tasks, including the most horrible one for me - the listening comprehension. In the lobby, I met a girl from Mongolia who was supposed to fail the exam, though she was attending the University preparation courses. She was talking and talking and talking her Mongolian German, and while leaving the College building, I was equipped with a plenty of facts and details about everything. The only thing, which turned out to be a real interesting stuff for me, was that teachers liked to mark the exam 'bad' just to make school graduates go through the same level again and again.
While approaching the College after a week or so, I felt heaviness in all my limbs and tried to get rid of unneeded thoughts swearing at that innocent Mongolian girl who knew too much. I passed the written exam. So did that Mongolian girl. So did the average of 96 % of all the applicants, as I learnt later on. This extraordinary result of Mongolia and further great countries cared for my confidence and a long and healthy sleep before the oral ordeal.
I was chatting of my Russian life and why I decided for Munich as a place of my studies. (The true story was actually a survey I did with the most "reliable" lecturers in my eyes. All of them were answering with such a crap like Paderborn, Heidelberg, or T;bingen. After I had lost temper and persuaded them that I would have become an honoured drinker in any of those small towns and they must choose between Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich, the most of them suggested either of the first ones - and I went to Munich).
At the oral exam, I even did not conceal that I liked Vienna (or Austria in general) more than Munich or that foreign state for Bavarians - Germany. The function of the jury was not to estimate the depth of the Bavarian patriotism but that of the communication skills according to the new Duden rules. I succeeded, expressed my congratulations for the Mongolian girl, who did it, too, and said to her farewell forever.
So, I paid the enrollment fee and officially entered the University with a naive hope that I was going to get a place at the students' dormitory at once. I was dragging my heavy bag (the money spent for the hostels were almost over) from door to door but that did not touch managers: Due to the lack of built infrastructure, all the dormitories were booked 2 to 2.5 years in advance. I was in despair and called my father's sworn friend again, who should have come back from Belgium already.

Orthodoxy

I cannot say I am a good Christian but the Russian Orthodox Church in Munich became a touch of fate, nostalgia, and home for me. While spending another 12 Deutsche Marken by talking to my father's sworn friend in an old-fashioned cabin somewhere in the middle of Steinebach (can you imagine that mobiles were a luxury even in Germany just some 13 years ago!?), I promised to come to the church for the Sunday service.
Unlike the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, which had a wonderful black and white house of God in Giesing, on the territory of the former settlement of American soldiers, what could have been derived from the address on Lincoln Street, the church of the Moscow Patriarchate had to share their premises with a Catholic Kolpinghaus in the very heart of Munich. There I came with my indispensable and heavy travel bag.
During my stay in Munich, I came to the church every or every other Sunday (dependent on my sleeping skills on that exact day), and I should confess I did it mostly because of a real soulful Russian communication inside of the endless sea of German pragmatism. Sometimes, I preferred the Serbian church, due to a couple of reasons - proximity to the place of my residence, shorter services, and an unusual and beautiful language.
By the way, the first visit to the Serbs was a kind of confusion for me: I was late (I could not have been earlier there, because - above all - the choice of the Serbs automatically meant that I desperately had missed the Russian service) and tried to be as imperceptible as possible, but men, women, and children started staring at me one by one putting me in a great embarrassment. I wondered why and caught the reason after a while only: The traces of the Ottoman Empire could have been seen on the black heads of all the parishioners - and I - along with colored hair of few women - had it blond.   
Another story with the Serbs was re-told by Nikolai, a corpulent joyful and melancholic (typical Russian character) successor of immigrants in the U.S., who came to Munich a couple of times, while I was studying there, and used to sing and read psalms in the church. He adored Father Slobodan for his feeling of life and - unlike at the Russian Orthodox Church - a broad treatment of sinfulness in terms of drinking, women, etc. While hearing Nikolai's shrift once, Father Slobodan literally expelled him from the church by asking questions as such: 'Do you really think these are the sins? Everything is in the human nature. Get out and do not let the others wait for their turn!'
Father Nikolai from the Russian Orthodox Church with his abrupt beard, a former husband of a daughter of my father's sworn friend, reminded me of the Antokolsky devil, especially from the side view. He was not that "out of the box" as his Serbian colleague, but he also enjoyed life and could make funny jokes, unlike most of those gloomy Catholic priests, who seem to have been fond of inquisition until now (celibate or just pragmatism?). Here is one of the jokes, which I heard much more later from a Jewish friend of mine but which probably forms an essence of the orthodoxy - a remark by another priest made in the steppe nearby Rostov-on-Don:
In a train compartment, a man and a priest are traveling. The man is reading a paper, while the priest is suggesting taking a glass of vodka. The man thanks him but refuses the suggestion. The priest is having a glass of vodka and suggesting going to the restaurant to have a dinner. The man thanks again and refuses that, too. After the dinner, the full priest is coming back and telling the man about two wonderful girls he has seen in the compartment nearby. The man thanks and stays alone. In a while, the priest - now fully content - is coming back, and the man is asking: 'Father, do I do anything wrong?' 'No, my Son, you do everything alright but... for nothing’.
Like priest, like people. Except for a couple of fake faithful old wives (that is not the age discrimination but a description of the type!) - probably, a mother and a daughter, who could have talked during the service loud but did not allow anybody to disturb them by fuffing at others and making threatening gestures, his parishioners were friendly, joyful, and kind-hearted. But let me speak more about the kindest heart in Munich, Germany and - probably, no, absolutely - in the whole world.

Suzanne

At the church, the father's sworn friend introduced me to a shining woman, who had her son by her side. At the first sight, I considered her to be Georgian. With her slight Georgian accent in Russian, she asked me why I had that horrible heavy bag with me. I explained the situation, and she invited me to be her guest immediately, as long as her elder son studied abroad and his room was free. I promised to stay, until I get a place in a students' dormitory but stayed a little bit longer... until the end of my studies. In the meantime, Suzanne asked me once or twice, whether I found anything. Finally, I quit looking for a dormitory place, and Suzanne gave up questioning me.
Sitting in her car, I was surprised that she originally came from England but had lived in Germany for a couple of decades already. She was married to a Russian, a successor of a Russian immigrant to the UK, who - being a religious philosopher - had to leave Russia on the no less famous steamer filled with the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia. Suzanne and he always wondered, why they settled down in Germany, but they got a job at the Radio Free Europe later and survived until the 1990s, when the headquarters were moved to Prague. Shortly after that, Vasily died and Suzanne stayed with two sons, a mortgage house, and a lot of further obligations. She had to work for the powerful German Patentamt, taught English and let rooms.
Nevertheless, money was irrelevant to her. I can claim that not because I should not have paid the rent first but because of the entire style of living. Once the Georgian (this time real Georgian) singer Manana, observing how Suzanne was paying my concert ticket again, said that Suzanne were a Schatz. 'No,' I contradicted. 'She is more than a Schatz'. Suzanne liked to be in the centre of life and joyfulness. The longer I knew her, the more she surprised me with her energy and talents - semi-amateur/semi-professional theatre, a handful of languages spoken, girlish adventurism, etc., etc.
Her house was always full of interesting people - more Russians (and Russian Jews) than English or Americans (Germans were not allowed to cross the threshold - one of our favourite jokes, which was not true, of course) - and was the unique centre of Munich's spiritual life. In old good dissident times, this house was visited virtually by all the former and even future nonconformists like Andrei Yerofeev, who arrived in Munich, but the most exciting fact for me was that my beloved Joseph Brodsky also visited Suzanne and Vasily once. I learnt it by accident: While I was lying on the sofa in the parlor, Suzanne approached me and told me I reminded her of Yosif, who used to lie on the sofa in the same manner once. That was a compliment!
Suzanne was so kind to me that she austerely survived all the tricks of a spoiled young man - or even a child, whom I used to be at that time, - arrogance of a molly, champs, regular fridge and cupboard "plunderings" in search for outdated products, which I was eating, should the expiration date have been not long away, and all my other roundabouts. She saved my life and - at least once - in the literal sense of the word.
I was coming back from the Oktoberfest. I met a company of Russian girls, and we drank too much - beer, Radler, and stuff. Moreover, while sitting at the big rectangular table, we saw Cuban or just a blackman passing by with a huge cigar we decided to smoke in the circle. After a couple of whiffs, I lost my mind and Russian girls completely but did not forget to take a 1-litre Bierkrug with me. (By the way, the price of the beer mug is included in the enormous cost of beer at the Oktoberfest. So, this was not a theft!) I could not remember how I found the underground station, and the great surprise was that it turned out to be Goetheplatz and not Theresienwiese. Anyway, my autopilot led me to my station, where I fell asleep on the bench and was hearing passengers laugh and joke somewhere far away only.
When I woke up, I tried to longer for the escalator but failed to catch the banister and fell on the floor. While standing up, I desperately fell again and smashed into the glass of my broken beer mug, When Suzanne saw my hand, she washed the wound and made a bandage, as long as I rejected her suggestion to see the doctor and considered this wound as a tiny scratch. Next day, I went to Italy and unwrapped the hand in the evening: It needed an urgent surgery, which took place the following day.

St. Petersburg - Tallinn, September 2013

Further chapters are available upon request.