And you re the real Man

One day in the late sixties at the airport I met a fellow student Yuri E.  More than ten years have passed after graduation, but we both felt something dear, we hugged and kissed.
 "Where are your braids," Yuri asked smiling.  He remembered  my school pigtails,  I wore in the first years at the  institute  and he, jokingly, at lectures pulled me for them and never confessed, but pretended that he was busy  with  recording a lecture. –
 “So, where are your braids? “
 "They are there where your hair is," I replied cheerfully.  Now Yuri’s forehead continued with bald patches, and gray hair appeared in his thinning hair.   A tired look, a face as if after a sleepless night, folds at the mouth and sadness in  his kind gray eyes resonated in my soul with inexplicable anxiety for him. It somehow did not fit with what my fellow student Tanya K. enthusiastically said:
“Yuri is a successful translator - "you can’t reach him” . He  translates from English and German, and works  abroad  a lot’.

Yuri and I were sincerely happy with the unexpected meeting and began to talk of the happiest student years in the 1st LGPIIA.   We were lucky: the old generation of teachers with St. Petersburg roots taught at the institute - ones of the founders of English philology in the USSR. With gratitude, we talked about our favorite teachers.  Yuri laughed, remembering the beautiful leather briefcase that our course presented to everyone's favorite English grammar teacher for her anniversary. So what?  The next day, she came to the institute with her old ragged briefcase, but a new one was inserted in it, and still the rope instead of the handle was thrown over her shoulder.   And I remembered fainting on a grammar exam; it seemed to me that I would not answer well enough to get the mark “four” (if it I were less I   would not receive scholarships).  Faina Iosifovna seemed to be the most frightened and hurried to put “four” in my student - book, and I, accompanied by students, was sent to the dormitory..

Our dear, kind teachers! With some regret Yuri remembered how he refused taking Post graduate courses, although he had received a recommendation from the Instructor of his research work in the SSS (Student Scientific Society). "I got so tired with unloading goods - wagons at the Moscow railway station at nights that I did not want to continue my studies and wanted to work".
  For the first time I learned that Yuri was from Belarus and his relatives were killed during the war.  We talked without noticing the time.   But the feeling of anxiety for the fate of my fellow student did not leave me.   And he, with keen interest, questioned everything and asked about my life and avoided questions about himself.  Finally I got to it:
 Yuri, what about you?  Are you translating? Where?
 Yuri somehow got bored and did not speak immediately. "I am after my shift work, a little bit tired”,-  he said quietly..  He was silent for a while and then added:
"I don’t work as an interpreter any more, but I translated a lot. 
 I didn’t stop questioning him, I asked insistently, and Yuri finally gave up.

"During the distribution, they persuaded me to serve as an interpreter, I agreed.    German, the second foreign language at the institute, soon became the first one – there was so much work to do. That's when I praised myself  for I  also graduated from the evening German department at the institute.    International conferences, seminars, support of specialists here and abroad, business trips around the Soviet Union and to Europe. And everywhere I studied, grabbing special vocabulary on the go.  After the well-known Hungarian events I took up Hungarian and Polish.    And  how  many wonderful people I met!

There was a business trip to the Caucasus. A group of Germans from the Federal Republic of Germany ended their stay in the USSR.  Traditionally, a banquet was held before leaving. Germans from the GDR and Germans from the FRG were markedly different.  People from the GDR dressed simply, many spoke Russian (they studied it at school, some graduated from our universities).   After a conference at the banquet, they could stick an unopened bottle of vodka into the jacket under the armpit and then in the hotel it was fun to drink it, etc. Another thing is the West Germans.. Foreigners were immediately recognized in them: by their clothes, by their imposing and arrogant manner of carrying themselves.  But the GDR and FRG Germans loved to eat and drink Russian vodka in the USSR.. That was taken into account and they were watered and fed "to the dump". That banquet I did not translate, but with the help of the interpreter   was founding out the culinary preferences of the guests and provided that the treat was replenished uninterruptedly.

The sunset was beginning. Large, almost to the floor, windows in the banquet hall made it possible to see the divine beauty of the Caucasus. The Germans got up from their tables and walked to the windows, clicking their devices.   It was heard: die Herrlichkeit!   Die Pracht! Wundervoll! They returned to their tables, raised their glasses and ate with  doubled appetite. Their voices grew louder, the banquet noise grew. At the table closest to me, there was a loud laugh. I heard the word "sibirisch" and moved closer. The German told of his father, who, as a prisoner of war, had a rare opportunity to see how rich and beautiful Siberia was. He was a chauffeur there. And when in 1955 he returned to his family in Freiberg, he began to steam on Saturdays in the bath- house, which he attached to his house; set the tables with his own pickles, wet berries, mushrooms; and  all guests of his necessarily had to sculpt  pelmeni.   The German worried that the Russians in Siberia had logs thrown out by the waves along the banks of lakes and rivers, and "niemand, niemand benutzt sie, ...

The German who sat to the left of the narrator was pretty drunk. His face turned red and whitish hair scattered across his wet forehead.   He slid slightly out of his chair, spreading his fat legs apart. Suddenly, without raising his head, he loudly and somehow significantly said: "Und all das ging an die russischen Schweine!"  (And all this went to the Russian Pigs!)  Blood hit my head.   Suddenly I saw that he was wearing a helmet, and playfully, was aiming at my grandmother, who was walking with a bag of bran through the village  in the summer of 1943; -  a shot, and she buried her face into the ground.. In an instant, I was near the fritz, grabbed him,   lifted him up and hit his chest with all my might so that he fell at the table. But two of our men were already holding me and we went to the exit.

"Warum bist du seine (Why are you doing it?), someone shouted from the audience.  "He knows Why,,"  - I said quietly,    "That  was the end of  my service”.
 Yuri became silent, then  said:, "I got away easily with it.  I was just fired”
.
 I was looking in Yuri's rejuvenated inspired face. The phrase flashed through my mind; - “Yuri, you're a real Man!” I looked at him as if  I saw  him  for the first time. I hugged and kissed him. 
At that moment my flight was announced.
We had a warm farewell..
 Later I found out that Yuri had returned to Belarus.