Spring 2024 - Recrudescence

“Mrs. Vogel Doesn’t Need a Visa”

Kurt probably did have a point, Ernst thought, as his BMW lost speed on the poorly lit Polish roadway that led to the Ukrainian border. It hadn’t been worth it to come here by car. Not only was the road badly lit, its state of repair also left much to desire. Ernst’s car, pampered by the impeccable German autobahns, bounced and wobbled weirdly from time to time. By Ernst’s calculation, it was only fifteen kilometres to the border. He was driving to Ukraine, led by a light. A woman’s name – Zoriana, meaning “star” – was that light. He had already exchanged letters with Zoriana for seven months, since March 1996, and had been cultivating serious intentions toward her. And here he was, travelling to see her at last, excited, chewing over the possibility of disappointment. Yet Zoriana’s letters were sensible and smart, and she sometimes responded to what he had written with irony and wit. No tense resistance could be found in her correspondence. Her German was quite decent. Ernst perceived in Zoriana the mother of his children. He thought about this with a warm thrill in his chest. Of course, Ernst had never been to Ukraine. A year ago, he had not even realized that such a country exists. For him, just like for ninety-five percent of Germans, the immediate neighbour to the east of Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary was Russia. And even though the Soviet Union had collapsed five years earlier, the place it had claimed in the minds of West Europeans had now been taken up by Russia. Only through Zoriana had he learned, with astonishment, that there was a language called Ukrainian, spoken by thirty million people. She insisted that Ukrainian was not a dialect of Russian, that it was as far from Russian as Dutch was from German. Ernst had discovered an entire world about which, until then, he had not had the faintest idea. He learned that many of the things around him that were taken for Russian, were actually Ukrainian: Cossacks in wide trousers, embroidered women’s clothing, soup made from red beets (he had forgotten the name), and even the world’s largest aircraft, Mriya, as well as Serhiy Bubka, whose athletic accomplishments Ernst had long followed. 47