Chapter 48: Nadja’s Story

Mark

“May I offer you something to drink? Wine or Water?” I asked Nadja, after she came back down the stairs after getting settled in my old room.

“Do you have beer?” she asked.

“Beer? Sure. I wouldn’t have expected that from a Russian,” I said with a snicker and walked to the fridge.

“I train in Germany most of the time,” she reminded me. “And beer has become quite popular in Russia too, because of Gorbatchev.”

“What does he have to do with it?” I asked as we sat down on the sofa.

“Back in the 80s he started a campaign advertising beer, to get Russians to stop drinking Vodka. It worked in a way, but not how he had wanted.”

“How so?”

“If you’re ever in Russia, and someone asks you to go to the kiosk to buy a sixpack of beer. Don’t. You will have to schlep eighteen kilos. Beer is sold in 3-liter bottles.”

“Ah, so instead of getting hammered by drinking 2 bottles of vodka, Russians started to drink 20 liters of beer.”

“Indeed,” she confirmed with a chuckle. “But don’t worry, I’m not like that. I can’t afford more than one or two bottles, and only once in a while. You know marathon runners have to be very careful with their weight.”

“How come you and Lydia are such good friends?” I asked her. “It’s not really common among competitive athletes, especially when they are direct rivals.”

“We have a lot in common,” she explained. “We both grew up under an oppressive regime, my coach was her coach when she was younger, and he saved both of us from getting involved in doping. And we both suffered a horrible loss. I lost my mother five years ago, and she lost her grandparents, who were her parents in a way.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

“That’s why I came here for the charity run four years ago,” she said. “My mother died from breast cancer.”

“They’re doing another one this year,” I said. “If you want to take part again, just give us a call. You can even wear your kit this time.”

“You’re not doing the body paintings again?” she asked, genuinely surprised.

“Well, Lydia will certainly be wearing one, but I wouldn’t want to presume on your preference.”

Nadja laughed. “She didn’t tell you much about me, did she?”

“Frankly not, no,” I admitted. “I only learned about your visit two days ago.”

“Sorry for making it such a surprise,” she apologized. “I was registered for this event at the last minute, because a meeting in Russia was canceled.”

“So I take it from what you tell me, Russians are not quite as inhibited as the stereotype has it.”

“Oh no, we still are, or at least were until the Soviet Union fell apart. Today it’s complete pandemonium. One half of people became obsessed with naked flesh, the other half became deeply religious and even more prude.”

“Jeez, no wonder you prefer to stay in Germany.”

“You should have seen the upheaval in the Russian press, when I ran without a top during that race in Utrecht over five years ago. I was only twenty-one at the time. One half of the papers condemned me for running topless, the other half complained that I had not taken my pants off, like Lydia.”

“Seriously? So which side are you on, if that’s not too personal?” I asked.

“I think of myself as normal, before and after the Soviet Union dissolved. The trouble is I wasn’t considered normal before, and I’m not considered normal now.”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite get it,” I admitted.

“How can you, Mark?” she said with a smile. “You come from the former GDR. Things were different there.”

“I sense a story in that,” I said, smiling back at her.

“In 1985, when I was fourteen, I got the chance to spend two weeks in a holiday camp in the GDR, in a town called Seddin. Do you know it?”

“Seddiner See, yeah, I know it. It’s not too far from where Lydia and I lived. No more than an hour by car.”

“Getting a chance to go to the GDR was huge. It was to Soviet people what West Germany was to you. A place we could only dream of.”

“And considering how bad things were on our side, I don’t even want to think about what it must have been like for you,” I said. Nadja just nodded.

“So we were 10 children from the Soviet Union, a few from Czechoslovakia and two from Poland. All other children were from the GDR. When we went to the lake to go swimming, nearly all the GDR children took off all their clothes. We were completely shocked. Being naked in front of others was completely taboo in the Soviet Union.”

“That explains, why some are now obsessed with it,” I realized. “It was like the forbidden fruit.”

“Indeed. When they saw how shocked we were, all GDR children had to wear swimsuits from then on. It made it easier for us, but I felt bad for them. They had clearly enjoyed it.”

“Let me guess, you secretly tried it yourself and you found out you liked it,” I said with a chuckle.

“I did, back in Russia,” she confirmed. “There was a little lake near the village we lived in, not far from St. Petersburg. The water was not very clean, so all people went to the outdoor swimming pool in the neighboring city instead. It had long grass around it, so nobody would see me, but one day in 1987 someone must have seen me and reported it to the police.”

“They arrested you for swimming naked?” I asked.

“Not even naked,” Nadja said wringing her hands. “I had only taken my top of the bikini off. I didn’t even have real breasts yet, I was only sixteen.”

“And they threw you in jail for that?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I got a very stern talking to from the Sampolit, the political officer of the police station, and my parents got an official reprimand for ‘not raising me in the spirit of socialist decency’.”

“Goodness me,” I said. “I can tell where this is going. Back then they thought you were not normal because you took your top off, and today they think you’re not normal because you only take your top off.”

“Exactly. Russia went from one extreme to the other.”

“Well, we have no Sampolits here,” I said with a chuckle. “We don’t have a lake and no long grass, but we have a pool, and this is a free nation.”

“I know,” she said, and I stared in surprise when she chucked her shirt off and unclasped her bra. She giggled when she caught me staring.

“It’s nothing you haven’t seen before,” she said casually.

“And it looks exactly the same as I remember it. Is this a thing among marathon runners that you don’t age at all?”

“Aw, you are sweet, Mark,” she said with a happy smile. “Well, the sport certainly helps, and perhaps there is something to it. Marathon runners have their best years at an age when others already retire from their sport. I’m twenty-five now, so I’ll have a good fourteen or fifteen years still ahead of me.”

“That’s why things work out between you and Lydia, isn’t it? You know you’ll have at least ten years to go without her being around anymore.”

“Well said,” she confirmed. “If we would be the same age, we could never have become friends. The rivalry would be too big.”

“Another beer?” I asked her and I could see she was weighing up the pros and cons, giving me precious time to check out her physique.

“Do you have a treadmill in the house?” she asked. “I would have to put in some extra training.”

“We don’t have one, Lydia switched to using her bike for training years ago. We have that one here.”

“Fine, then I can afford a second one,” she said, smiling at me. I had to admit, she had a beautiful smile. It somehow reminded me of Regina.

Lydia

Femke and I had laughed our heads off, after an audibly flabbergasted Mark had told me on the phone about his first evening with our esteemed guest. I knew that boy was in for a surprise.

That Nadja resided at our place had been a spontaneous decision, because she wouldn’t have found a hotel at an acceptable price on such short notice. But that had also given me the idea to let ‘therapeutic Mark’ have a go.

Unlike him, I did know the entire sorry story of Nadja’s life, but how much of it she wanted to disclose to him, was something she needed to decide upon herself, which was why I had told him nearly nothing about her that he didn’t already know.

He had proven it three times by now that he was quite capable when dealing with other people’s problems. He had rebuilt Meri’s self-esteem more than once, reconciled Regina with her past in Prerow and had helped bring Femke from a point at which she had lost all faith in men to looking forward to move in with Jonjo. If that involved some hefty bouts of sex, so be it, it had obviously worked.

He knew, and Nadja knew, independently, that they had my blessing for just about everything short of marrying each other, so what would come of this would be down to them.

Mark

I was in for a surprise. Due to the jet lag, Nadja slept way into the morning. When she came down to the kitchen, she was still naked from the waist up.

“I take it you want to make the best of this weather,” I said with a chuckle.

“Definitely,” she answered with a smile.

“Do you drink coffee or something else for breakfast?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I only eat an apple or an orange in the morning.”

“Okay, one orange coming up,” I said and started to peel one.

“What a service,” she said and giggled.

“Well, it’s the least I can do to repay the privilege of such an exquisite view,” I said.

“Lydia didn’t exaggerate when she said you’re quite the flatterer.”

“I mean it,” I said and put the fruit on a plate in front of her. “Don’t let anyone anyone tell you otherwise. Lydia hopefully also told you that I don’t give false compliments.”

“It’s the first time, you know,” she said in sad voice. “I’ve been ‘told otherwise’ a lot.”

“Are you around a lot of blind people by any chance?”

That had been a bad idea. Desperately trying not to laugh, the slice of orange went down the wrong pipe and Nadja ended up coughing with me thumping her back.

“I sense a story in there,” I said when she had regained her composure.

“I told you, when I was sixteen I didn’t really have any breasts. Other girls had huge ones,” she explained, holding out her hands way in front of her chest. “I’ve always been the ugly duckling of the class. And even today most men think they’re way too small.”

Well, she was definitely smaller than Lydia, about the size of Femke before her belated growth spurt, but there was absolutely nothing wrong with the pair I was looking at. Unlike Femke, who had muscles on top of muscles, Nadja was very slender, just like Lydia, and in those proportions they looked more than fine.

“Nadja, you are so slender you could hide behind a bicycle spoke. They are absolutely fantastic for your stature. And didn’t people notice you have a face, too? I mean, seriously, your smile alone is enough to light up a room.”

Bad idea again. She suddenly started to cry. Horrified, I went around the table, and gathered her in my arms, ignoring the fact that her upper half was naked. Thankfully I was too worried about that outburst to react in a somewhat obvious male fashion.

She had obviously lost the appetite to finish the orange, so I guided her to the couch and we sat down when she had calmed down a bit.

“Nadja, what did just happen? Was it something I said?”

She nodded and I felt even more horrified.

“You did not say something bad, the opposite. My mother always told me I have a beautiful smile. You are the first man who has ever told me that. Nobody else ever noticed.”

“Maybe it’s not the right thing to say, but Russian men seem to be blithering idiots.”

“It’s quite the right thing to say,” she said through her drying tears. “Well, most of them are constantly drunk anyway. I was such an idiot.”

There was definitely a story in that.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

She nodded again and I could tell she was steeling herself for telling a tricky tale.

“When I was nineteen, things really turned ugly. The Soviet Union was dying and it was basically the Wild West. Everybody did what he wanted. We had drive-by-shootings somewhere in St. Petersburg nearly every day.”

“Shit,” I swore.

“All the girls with, you know, the big ones, they all tried to find themselves men with money. All the other men were piss-poor and mostly drunk, many were unemployed. And Dura that I was, I panicked, fearing I would never find a husband, so I married the first one who didn’t say no.”

“I guess Dura isn’t a nice word?” I said.

“It’s the female version of idiot.”

“You are not an idiot. Remember, I come from the eastern bloc myself. I was only a little boy, but Lydia has told me enough about how hard life was. Judging from your reaction, I suppose things didn’t work out the way you planned?”

She shook her head forcefully, tears welling up in her eyes again.

“Shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, he lost his job, and what little money I earned with my first competitions, he drank away in a week’s time. All the time he kept swearing at me, how I was too skinny and how that reflects bad on him, and how my tits were to small to feed our future children, he treated me like dirt.”

I buried my face in my palms and groaned.

“Okay, one thing at a time. This dude must have been quite the idiot. Why would he think that you being slender would reflect badly on him? That doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s a Russian thing,” Nadja explained. “He came from a small village in Siberia. In the big cities, men live by western standards, so they want skinny wives, but out there in the countryside, it is considered a bad sign if a woman is skinny. It means the man doesn’t provide for her well.”

“Bloody hell, that sounds like the nineteenth century,” I gasped.

“If you want, I can take you there. They do live in the nineteenth century, even today.”

“Nadja,” I said and gathered her in my arms. “He did abuse you, didn’t he?”

I didn’t have to wait long for an answer as she started to cry again. I swayed back and forth with her in my arms, as if I was trying to soothe a baby. It took her quite some time to regain her composure.