In today's issue we continue the publication of "Notes...", which we hope will help many Ukrainians understand the full "charm" of illegal overseas earnings
SABOTAGE
If only we had known earlier what fate awaited our food, we would have rather bought a few cases of beer with that money! After all, glass bottles would surely have been too tough for the night-time tasters.
While Petya mourned the irreparable loss, I brought a large old aquarium from the yard and built a primitive safe out of it, loading in the products that had survived the rat feast. All of this was covered with a sheet of aluminum with holes punched in it for ventilation. Petya didn't mind bringing a dozen bricks and, placing them on top of the entire structure, wished his offenders a painful death by starvation for the sacrilege they had committed.
After breakfast, which Petya turned into a wake for the sources of his good mood that had prematurely left us, we set about transforming the stable into an exemplary stall for the owner's daughter's beloved mare. Despite the apparent ease of the task at hand, we fiddled with it until evening.
All day Petya's mood was down the drain, and at dinner I nearly drove him to clinical death with my unparalleled ability to create culinary masterpieces from chicken legs. Burning with impatience to try out a microwave oven for the first time in my life, I, along with my impatience, burned the two largest of the six remaining chicken legs. Well, not exactly burned, rather dried them out a bit, bringing them to the condition of Egyptian mummies. Bush's legs became so tender that it was only possible to drive a fork into their juicy flesh with a hammer. If the microwave had been the size of a refrigerator, the grief-maddened Petya would surely have shoved me in and slow-roasted me. Crunching appetizingly, he ground the newest delicacy – chicken chips – with his millstone jaws, and then honored the memory of the mutilated legs with several hours of silence.
The first pancake of interacting with modern household appliances came out as a lump of dried meat in my comrade's throat, but I wasn't going to stop there. I didn't have to look long for a new object of research – it turned out to be the washing machine, fortunately, food products were not part of its diet, unlike the miracle oven.
Petya strongly disapproved of my idea to use the washing machine, because it required connecting it to the utilities, and he refused to take responsibility for possible damage to the expensive equipment. My reliable comrade generally refused to take any responsibility, but never objected if I did.
He also disowned the washing machine then, and I carried out this dangerous undertaking in proud solitude, spending a whole ten minutes on it. Connecting the washbasin took the same amount of time. Another twenty minutes went into trying to decipher, with the help of a dictionary, the explanatory inscriptions under the symbols adorning the programmer handle of the machine. There were practically no modern phrases in the dictionary, which had last been revised some thirty years ago, so I had to figure out the meaning of the inscriptions using my own chicken brains. Then, by trial and error, I selected the necessary program and gave the latest word in space technology a chance to demonstrate its superiority over a washboard. Shortly before the historic pressing of the start button, Petya dragged in a pile of dirty laundry and immediately fled to safety, not forgetting to warn: "If it burns, I won't pay for it!" but he left the laundry anyway. Good boy...
RAT CATCHER
We still had two days before Mama's arrival, and all of Palitra's assignments had already been completed. We didn't dare start the main renovation work without the blessing of Obloltus the Bauleiter, so we called him with a request to come to the House of the Artist to give us our combat mission. He wasn't home, so we dialed his Funk number. At the time of our call, according to Obloltus, he was on the autobahn heading in our direction. Promising to arrive no later than within an hour, he allowed us to proceed with the plan approved by Mama. The hour promised by Obloltus passed three months later...
First of all, Petya set about implementing the very last item of the plan – removing the wooden floors, under which his blood enemies, the rats, had woven their many nests. Thirst for revenge for their desecration of the holy of holies – FOOD – seized his entire being, and he furiously, foaming at the mouth, rushed into a deadly battle with the enemy hordes, despite their numerical superiority. The floorboards were half eaten by woodworms, having lost their former strength, but they were nailed to the joists with ancient forged square-section nails, which required titanic efforts from Petya to dismantle each board. But anger is a great stimulant in such cases – it helped Petya dispose of all eighty square meters of rat shelter in just four and a quarter hours.
Only after tearing off the last board did Petrukha begin to slowly come to his senses, regretting that he had not been lucky enough to meet the enemy face to face in an honest fight. I decided to spare his nerves from another stress and kept quiet about a dozen fat brown predators that had slipped away right from under my comrade's nose. I am not a supporter of vendetta, so I let the cowardly pests take cover in the saving grass of the clearing surrounding the house. The rat catcher had almost calmed down, when suddenly his attention was caught by some rustling from above. "Son of a bitch!!!" cried the leader Rat Death in a voice not his own, and in a graceful leap plunged a crowbar into the ceiling. It took me great effort to persuade the enraged rat slayer to interrupt his noble activity for a lunch break.
I was still finishing my portion of spaghetti with microwaved sausage when from below came the sounds of the woodcutter chopping a hole in the ceiling to continue chasing the cute fluffy animals. A byproduct of this royal hunt was the fulfillment of another plan item – removal of the suspended ceiling, which had reduced the living space by half a meter in height. Petya tackled this task with joy and without visible effort. He got so carried away that he paid no attention to my pleas to occasionally look down, where under a hail of falling board fragments and plaster I could barely collect everything and haul it out to the yard. He stopped only when a stub of a board with a long rusty nail whistled past my head, and I angrily threw it back where it came from. My protest march had the desired effect, and Petya finally regained the peace of mind he had lost since the rat sabotage. We made it to evening without injuries.
«TOTAL KAPUTT!»!!!
Tired and satisfied, we silently climbed the stairs. Petya was glad he had deprived the defenseless little animals of a roof over their heads, and I was glad I had come out of it without serious injury. Opening the door to the second floor, we froze, stunned by what we saw. A sinister picture presented itself to our eyes – clouds of dust, writhing bizarrely in the drafts caused by the open door, filled the entire interior space of the second floor.
After a few minutes, the dusty fog cleared, and we realized that we wouldn’t be able to rest before bed – everything was covered with a thick layer of dust that had seeped through the numerous cracks in the interfloor ceiling during the dismantling of the first-floor ceiling. A thorough cleaning was only done the following evening, on the eve of Mom and Palitra’s arrival, and that day we limited ourselves to clearing paths to the food storage and the beds, whose covers we had to shake out for a good half hour.
... The washing machine worked all day non-stop, eliminating the consequences of the dust fallout that had occurred the day before throughout our residence. Before Mom’s arrival, we had to wash and dry all the items that had been hit by the disaster. Half of the boxes with clothes, towels, and Palitra’s bedding were poorly closed, and so much dust had accumulated in the cracks that the only way to restore the items to their former appearance was washing. We were lucky – that day the weather was beautiful, and the laundry dried extremely quickly after the powerful spin of the high-speed centrifuge. We managed to hide our mistake – no one noticed anything.
To the rhythmic sloshing of laundry in the depths of the intelligent mechanism, we equally rhythmically scraped the walls with spatulas, removing old wallpaper. Despite all our efforts to do this as carefully as possible, despite abundant soaking of the multi-layered paper facing, plaster fell under our feet along with it. When only memories remained of the wallpaper, only a third of the original area of plaster remained. We gladly noted the increase in workload – minor plaster repairs were within our rights. And now, apparently, we would be entrusted with major repairs as well.
Finally, we removed the old windows from the window openings, which was not difficult at all – window sills at low prices and half-rotten frames practically fell out with a light push from outside, once we pulled the retaining brackets out of the wall. We didn’t remove the doors – you never know, maybe we’d need to go somewhere, and this way we could always lock it with the key! Jokes aside, Mom and Palitra, and why hide it – we ourselves several times, when stepping out briefly, seriously locked the door with both locks. And that with the windows removed!
“Yeah! We took it apart quickly! Now how are we going to put it all back together...” a friend of mine would have said about the mess we had made. The house looked something else! From the outside it was still okay – only the windows were removed, but inside... It was scary to look inside, let alone enter! “Total kaputt!” – the only correct and succinct expression capable of characterizing the interior of the Artist’s House that we had created with such diligence. By the way, Palitra uttered this catchphrase when she crossed the threshold of her house the next day. Mom expressed her opinion of the ruins that their once cozy and nice little house had become more than laconically – with a single word. The Germans use that word too often to express their negative emotions, so there is no need to reproduce it in writing.
MUSTANG
But all that was the next day, when Palitra brought in a special horse trailer her handsome – a black horse (correct me, connoisseurs of horse terminology, if I expressed it incorrectly – I am a complete layman in this matter).
I’ll tell you, groom to groom – this was a real Mustang, as far as I can judge horse breeds. Unlike Petya, who grew up in the countryside and understood such complex concepts for me as bits, bridles, stirrups, and saddles, I had only seen horses in movies and at country picnics when some local horseman would pass by in a cart drawn by a gray mare. So for me, all horses that, with their powerful muscle play, reminded me of Schwarzenegger, snorted like a locomotive, had a wild look, were pitch black and taller than me – were mustangs. And the rest were ponies, or at best, dappled horses. That’s it! That’s where my knowledge of hippology ended, and the dense forest of petty bourgeois prejudices began, like “Don’t change horses midstream,” or “They shoot horses, don’t they?”.
The little, fragile girl Palitra was identified in my mind only with a small, meek horse, but not with this stubborn stallion, constantly trying to rear up. And who would have thought that this monster became as meek and harmless as a rabbit at the slightest shout from his miniature mistress! But then Palitra gave her charge some slack, considering his stressful state due to a multi-hour move in a cramped trailer, and allowed him to express his displeasure in every way he knew, without pulling him up.
Mustang's stress relief was accompanied by an escalation of my own, and at the moment when this jumper galloped past me, his bulk weighing a third of a ton briefly coming dangerously close to my puny body, my stress level reached its peak. It was one of those rare moments in life that last an eternity and are remembered in the smallest detail, yet there is no desire to recall them. At that minute, I was ready to sell my soul to the devil just to be half a meter farther away, or even better, to become half a ton heavier, in order to instill respect for my person in the nervous Little Humpbacked Horse. Then I wouldn't have had to press myself against the wall of the house in panic, mentally saying goodbye to all my relatives in anticipation of an imminent meeting with my deceased ancestors. The horse's rump was just a few inches from the tip of my nose...
To my great pride, I discovered that my trousers remained completely dry, even without the use of tenderly caring diapers for dry and healthy baby skin. Pretending that nothing extraordinary had happened, I followed the kicking Mustang with a loose gait, carefully watching whether Palitra was holding the reins of the prairie master firmly in her gentle hands. The neighbors who had gathered to gape at the hypertrophied pony looked at me with undisguised respect, not even suspecting that I was ready to jump onto the nearest tree at the mere suspicion of a careless movement of Sivka-Burka in my direction.
HOW MUCH IS OPIUM FOR THE PEOPLE?
Before leading Mustang out of the trailer, Palitra visited his personal stall, which we had prepared to receive the most worthy representative of the horse family, providing him with maximum comfort. The granite-paved floor of the stable was covered with soft straw so that the horse could lie down on cold nights without risking rheumatism. In the corner of the stable there was a pile of hay waist-high to me, and a full bucket of water. All this was prepared by Petya just before Palitra's arrival.
Palitra, and subsequently Mustang, turned out to be very pleased with the preparation of the apartment for receiving the distinguished guest. She was particularly impressed by Petya's carefully chosen color combination of the stable walls and panels – dirty white with nasty dirty blue. Palitra was literally jumping with joy, clapping her hands. Petya modestly placed on his head the wreath of the greatest designer of all time and could not part with it until the evening. He was flattered by the praise of our little boss, which he took as recognition of his hidden artistic talent, and he finally believed in his proximity to the imperial court. At one point he even tried to start bossing me around in the presence of the owners, ingratiatingly looking into their eyes. I had to urgently bring him out of this 'star' state with a warning that I would obey his orders only if he agreed to take full responsibility for their execution. It worked flawlessly.
... Mustang was already peacefully chewing his late breakfast, Palitra was scraping his yesterday's dinner out of the trailer, and Petya, suffering from an acute attack of star fever, was walking around the ruins with Mama, discussing the upcoming work with her. My presence during the conversation between the hostess and the newly-minted Bauführer seemed superfluous, and I decided to leave the house, but at the door I ran into Kvach, who had decided to personally pay his respects to Mama as the nearest neighbor. After exchanging pleasantries on the occasion of the meeting, Mama led the guest through her property, and together they delivered a verdict: 'It's impossible to work like this!', referring to the unexpectedly large amount of work done. When I told Mama the number of hours spent on this work, she was simply stunned: 'Fantastisch! I thought it would cost twice as much!' We realized that our position had strengthened, and it was not impossible that we would now be given more trust than at the first meeting.
We were given our first salary, and it came in very handy – our food supplies had run low, largely due to a rat banquet, and it would have been very nice if someone could give us a lift from this wilderness to the nearest store. And we wouldn't mind if that someone brought us back with a mountain of purchases. Mama looked very tired after the long drive of the car with the trailer carrying Mustang, so it was decided to entrust the transportation of the precious cargo to Kvach. He himself was about to replenish his beer supply, and we asked to be his fellow travelers.
The nearest store turned out to be the ubiquitous 'PLUS', which cannot be considered cheap, but the quality of goods in it, in my opinion, is excellent. Our purchases barely fit along the entire length of the conveyor belt in front of the cash register, not counting two cases of 'Berliner Kindl' sitting on the lower shelf of the cart with a grocery basket. After paying the bill and with difficulty arranging the purchased items in plastic bags for easy loading and unloading from the trunk, we wheeled the cart out of the store, almost knocking over a Vietnamese man from whose bosom the corner of a carton of 'WEST' cigarettes was temptingly sticking out.
The temptation was so great, and the coveted pack of poison so seductively accessible, that I couldn't resist and, after looking around and not spotting any police cars nearby, immediately made an illegal deal. The password "How much?", the reply "Thirty!" – and the smoker's toxic joy quietly moved from under the jacket of a nimble Vietnamese national into our car, and my thirty marks into the pocket of a native of the Land of American Shame. The contraband dealer did his job so deftly that it might have seemed from the outside that he was just adjusting a bag of potatoes sitting on top of the grocery pile, but in fact ten packs of "WEST" with a Russian excise stamp miraculously appeared under the potatoes. A circus, nothing less!
Right after arriving, we returned to the Driver a dozen bottles of beer that we had shamelessly drunk last week, which mortally offended him, and we only made amends by offering him another case as thanks for his help in finding us jobs. Our parting with thirty-two containers of the most precious drink brought a tear to the Driver's stern eyes and gained us an utterly reliable friend and assistant for the entire duration of our work stint at Palette's house.
FORMAL DINNER
During our absence, Mom had gotten a bit hungry, and it suddenly occurred to her that she simply had to thank us for our excellent work by inviting us to dine at a little restaurant she had taken a liking to on her previous visit. I started to refuse, citing lack of appetite, though in truth I was short of funds and simply hated to spend the money, but once Mom gets something into her head, there's no talking her out of it. Besides, she perfectly understood the real reason for my refusal and declared that the modest dinner would be at her expense and that my refusal would greatly upset her. Of course, I had heard that men in Western Europe feel no embarrassment if a woman offers to pay for them in a restaurant, but I still couldn't agree to such humiliation. Shedding tears, I slipped a fifty-mark bill into my pocket, intending to at least pay for my share of the gathering, and obediently headed toward Mom's car, where Petrukha was already seated, clearly unburdened by complexes, especially when it came to free food.
The people who designed the interior of the little restaurant we entered half an hour later certainly knew their craft. They managed to create a cozy atmosphere for a pleasant time, so that every visitor could fully relax and feel at home.
The furniture, with its pleasing rounded shapes, and the wall panels of solid oak – and not of low-value wood covered with oak veneer; the warm tones of the walls, adorned with paintings depicting scenes from German provincial life, painted in real oil on real canvas and set in hand-carved wooden frames; the lace linen tablecloths, whiter than snow, and matching snow-white linen napkins rolled into tubes and encircled with wooden rings; the impeccable table setting and, of course, the candles – in elegant candlesticks on wooden saucer-stands for dripping wax – all created an atmosphere unusually conducive to unhurried conversation on eternal themes and inspired an irresistible desire to definitely visit this truly masterfully designed place again.
But the most amazing part was that the entire dinner, not at all as modest as Mom had promised, cost her just under a hundred marks! And that was with four adults eating, one might say, to their heart's content. Once, after walking around the Ku'damm, I popped into an unremarkable café right at the entrance to the U-Bahn station Zoologischer Garten, and what the dark-skinned waiter in a suit and bow tie brought me cost almost thirty marks, but there was nothing to look at, and I left half-hungry. Now I have something to compare it to.
To my shame, I had no idea how to handle a knife and fork. My clumsy attempts to bring a piece of meat to my mouth with my left hand looked like a one-year-old's first tries with a fork, so I gave up. I found a solution purely by instinct – I cut the meat as one should, with the knife in my right hand and fork in my left, and then, with the dexterity of a magician, I swapped them, and the cutting and stabbing utensils changed places.
But I couldn't avoid embarrassment anyway – after my clumsy knife-and-fork manipulations, small pieces of the beautifully fried, delicious meat remained on the bone, and I couldn't resist the temptation to gnaw them off. As a result, I drew the attention of all the cultured patrons of the restaurant with the loud scraping of my teeth on the bone, which I had gnawed clean. Even Petya, with his ability to eat absolutely everything without leaving a trace, did not permit himself such disregard for good manners. Mom tactfully broke the oppressive silence that had fallen over the entire room: "If I had known they cooked meat THIS well here, I wouldn't have ordered fish!" Satisfied with this explanation for my gluttony, the other patrons resumed their meals, and half of them later ordered the same entrecôte, though they did not proceed to gnaw on it.
Then over beer and a cigarette, a trusting conversation began by candlelight, during which it turned out that Mama had decided not to undertake a grand renovation, but to limit herself to cosmetic repairs only. There was no longer any talk of removing the roof of the house and installing a new one. Napoleonic plans gave way to more realistic ones, corresponding to the hostess's financial capabilities. It was decided not to resort to the expensive services of renovation and construction firms, but to make maximum use of Petya's and my abilities, about which she had already heard, and she was simply amazed by our diligence. And if we continue in the same spirit, we will get a significantly larger volume of work than we agreed upon, but on one condition – we must not work more than forty hours per week each. This requirement was explained by Mama's unwillingness to take out a loan, hoping to get by with her own funds. She decided to postpone the originally planned major renovation until better times, when her little daughter would start earning her own money by selling her wonderful paintings, which no one but the household had yet seen. And then, God willing, the daughter herself would be able to pay for the expensive renovation.
In our situation, it would have been unforgivable stupidity not to agree even to three working days a week, let alone four, and no one forbade us from working on weekends, so we unconditionally agreed to the set condition.
EVENING PROMENADE
After a delicious lunch, according to Archimedes' law, one is supposed to... no, not to sleep, but to take a breezy ride through evening Berlin. The idea of an evening promenade was born in Palitra's rich imagination even before our visit to the pub, and was eagerly picked up by Mama. If a woman asks, as is known, one cannot refuse, and if she insists...
A short pit stop at a gas station, and our 'automobilus' burst into the City. Violating the prescriptions of almost all road signs that came her way, Palitra only had time to blow air kisses and flirtatious smiles at male drivers stunned by her recklessness, asking for leniency for her inexperience and the purely female art of confusing the gas and brake pedals. Sitting in the back seat, we silently fastened our seat belts – the young lady drove a car better than Schumacher. I even suggested she try her hand at Formula 1, at which Palitra burst out laughing (while the car almost swerved into oncoming traffic) and told an instructive story from her short driving practice.
For a whole year after completing driving courses and getting her driver's license, she drove observing every single traffic rule, and throughout that year she was stopped almost every week by the traffic police, suspecting an unacceptably high alcohol content in her blood. Like, the girl had 'had too much', and in order not to get a fine for drunk driving, she drove strictly by the rules, arousing no suspicion. After a year, the girl grew bolder and pressed the accelerator pedal harder to the floor. And a paradoxical situation arose – as the number of traffic violations increased, the number of police suspicions decreased. Since then, according to Palitra, she has never been stopped by traffic police, and her driving style began to resemble vertical racing.
At a furious pace we zoomed past Unter den Linden, and I terribly regretted that I didn't have time to properly see either the Brandenburg Gate, nor the Reichstag, nor (what was especially upsetting) some skillfully illuminated statue on a tall pillar pedestal. In daylight, all these calling cards of Berlin look less pompous than at night in the light of spotlights. At night, it's impossible to take your eyes off their splendor – they are so mesmerizingly beautiful. I had to content myself with contemplating the TV tower at 'Alex' – it doesn't disappear from view for quite a long time, unlike the architectural monuments listed above, which flashed by at ninety kilometers per hour.
We raced around the city for a long time, and frankly, I was getting pretty tired of these races, when Petya had a brilliant idea: why not combine business with pleasure and stop by – since we're driving anyway – at Gulliver's to pick up our remaining things?
– Echt?! I'll get to see a real safe house? Gute Idee!!! – following this enthusiastic exclamation, the steering wheel of our spaceship (in terms of speed) was sharply turned by Palitra in the direction indicated by Petya, and to the cannonade of indignant horns and screeching brakes of nearby cars, our flying saucer set course for the east.
Mama stayed in the cockpit of the racing car, entrusting us with her adrenaline-pumped child, and we, accompanied by James Bond in the person of Palitra, who walked on tiptoe (conspiracy!), entered the entrance. Apparently, the mustang tamer, who had watched too many spy films, expected to see a secret laboratory for producing illegal immigrants with an underground garage containing an Aston Martin or a BMW-Z3, a helipad on the balcony with a transformer helicopter on it, or, at the very least, a portable radio transmitter for communication with the center and a drunken radio operator Kat in addition, dressed in a Red Army uniform made of parachute silk, with a Kalashnikov assault rifle on her fleshy chest.
I cannot claim exactly which of the above she expected to see, but the sight of an ordinary apartment that appeared before her clear eyes terribly disappointed her. Even Gulliver, for inexplicable reasons, turned out to be suspiciously sober that evening. Except that the huge map of Berlin above Petrukha's bed could satisfy Palitra's inflamed imagination, though it lacked flags marking the places of secret meetings of Berlin's illegal underground and underground caches with top-secret construction equipment. The poor girl was completely dejected.
It is not fitting for the hostess to be in such a foul mood, so I decided, while my comrade packed our things into a bag, to try to entertain Palitra by marking the route of our evening excursion on the map, deliberately making mistakes at every turn. A heated argument ensued, which, of course, ended with my admitting all my mistakes. Gulliver, watching this scene, nearly died laughing – Palitra was speaking in the purest German, I in the purest Russian, and we understood each other perfectly! Before taking the map (it was ours) off the wall, Petya showed Palitra which road had constant traffic jams, which one had three 'blitzes' per kilometer, and ignorance of the latter, given Palitra's chronic inattention to speed limit signs, promised a steady presence in her correspondence of envelopes with photos of her car and the amount of the speeding fine.
We reached the House of Artists in accident-free mode and at minimal speed – Mom was at the wheel. I even dozed off to the steady hum of the engine, which moved the wheels via third gear – Mom remembered the existence of fourth gear only on the autobahn.
We went to bed early – the next day promised to be hard, and it indeed turned out to be so…
Read also material on the topic: NOTES OF A BERLIN ILLEGAL -5
Andrei YEVDOKIMOV.
Special for 'Zagranitsa'.