Spring 2024 - Recrudescence

“Mrs. Vogel Doesn’t Need a Visa”

For his acquaintance with Zoriana, Ernst was indebted to Oksana. Oksana was beautiful and energetic, she loved to dress elegantly, and she was a good mother to her three-year-old daughter. She was the wife of Joerg, a friend from Ernst’s school days. They had married four years earlier, about a year after Oksana had arrived in Heidelberg from Lviv, in order to work on her graduate research at the University Library. She had been awarded a scholarship for young researchers. Their daughter had already been born when Oksana travelled back to Lviv to defend her dissertation. Joerg was happily married, and Ernst wanted the same for himself. Loneliness bore down on him, he had just turned forty-four, and he wanted children and the comfort of family life. Alongside that, the modest restaurant on the ground floor of their building, a family business, required more attention, and his mother, who had just turned seventy-five, no longer entered it. For Ernst, relationships with women had somehow never worked out. His last girlfriend, to whom he had proposed marriage two years earlier, turned him down, saying that they could date, but she did not want to marry because she had good career prospects in her company. In a year, she could head the department in which she now worked. Her boss would soon retire, and the company director had hinted that, if she did not get married, she could prepare to take his place. So, once during a visit to Joerg and Oksana, Ernst jokingly asked Oksana if she perhaps had a good-looking and unmarried female friend in Ukraine, one who might know German. The question was, in fact, a serious one, even though Ernst had framed it with a pretend playfulness. Oksana responded with enthusiasm: she did have a friend, from her cohort at university. She was thirty, lived in a small town, and dreamed of a family, but there was no man in sight with whom she could make plans. Did Oksana have a photo? asked Ernst, trying as much as possible to appear neutral. There was a picture, Oksana found it in an album she had brought with her from Lviv. Dark-brown eyes, large and smiling, peered out at Ernst. The woman’s face radiated joy, and a faint trace of flirtatious provocation. This might be her, Ernst thought, feeling his heartbeat 49