Dialogues and Misunderstandings 

The seminar "East - West: Dialogues and Misunderstandings" took place in Germany in a little, medieval town of 5,000 inhabitants in the very heart of the country. Not by accident was the place chosen - not far from the border between the former Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. So much money was put into the seminar that even the guests from Western Europe were amazed, let alone the East European participants. Suites were reserved for every participant in Silbergloeckenblueme Hotel, complete with sitting room, bedroom, and two bathrooms. There was a breakfast buffet; lunch and dinner menus were in several languages; seven kinds of coffee were served at the coffee breaks between sessions. Drinks, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic, were on the house at every bar in town for everyone identified by his or her seminar badge. The organizers were as polite and tactful as only the punctual Germans could be, when ordered to be polite and tactful for a certain period of time.

The incredibly high level of scientism entirely justified the sums invested in the seminar. The East-West dialogues took place not only in the sessions, but in informal conversations at lunch, during breaks, on excursions, in bars, and in the king-sized hotel beds. On all levels, not only were traditional economic issues discussed, but also ones of a psychological, linguistic, eschatological, intellectual, national, psychosexual, existential, or provocative nature. Reports were extraordinarily polemic, discussions were extraordinarily sharp; and the initiators of that sharpness were usually "Easterners." They spoke of the difference in the dynamics of the emotional sphere, and the low standard of living, about different mentalities, the war in the Caucasus, and still more about things Western intellectuals are usually incapable of understanding.

In spite of continuous misunderstandings between the underfed East and the overfed West, there were no misunderstandings among the seminar participants. The sharp dialogues between the Eastern and Western participants were accomplished without hostility -- quite the contrary. The organizers with foresight had taken care of everything in a marvelously masterful way. The participants were made up of the exact same number of men and women. Guests from the well-to-do West were overwhelmingly psychologists, sociologists, and Slavic specialists of the male gender, while guests from the East were well-educated Slavic women no older than forty. 

Informal contacts as a basic instrument of deepening scientism of the humanities were fixed during the first dinner and intensified during the first night. And only the buff guy from Malmo, Lars Morson - psychologist and Slavic specialist, professional connoisseur of the mysterious Slavic soul - remained alone for long. Evenings he sat in the hotel bar with a glass of his favorite Rhine Riesling, indifferently looking over materials from previous conferences, and pretending not to notice how the Frenchman Henri Peret, specialist in socio-cultural contacts, was caressing, under the table, the knee of Peta Rachkova, who had delivered a speech on the subject, "Presentation of Western Masculinity in the Post-Communist World;" or how his compatriot, Lars', the mighty Viking Anders Rondebier, psychologist specializing in the international subconscious, was squeezing both hands of Muscovite Natasha Orlova, who had also researched the collective subconscious, or to be more precise: the Berlin Wall of Europe's subconscious.

Toward the end of the first week of the seminar, however, a new participant showed up - Ruslana from Kyiv. She spoke not only very good English, but German as well; and her business suit for the sessions, and her jeans for everything else, fit her ideally. So Lars understood that it was necessary to make a move before the smooth Corsican Zigomar, author of a monograph on cross-cultural research for European identity, managed to take a seat next to the slightly bewildered Ruslana. Moreover, it has never been easier and simpler to begin a conversation.
"Your speech was simply brilliant. Honestly speaking, it was the best speech on all East Europe."
"A pity I didn't hear the other ones."
"You were detained?"
"My mother fell ill. But later she got better and insisted that I come anyway."

"I hope your mother will be even better when you return."
"I hope so, too. My son and I decided that I had to come. Especially since this text was prepared a long time ago."
"Your speech is marvelous! The sense of one's own dignity as a prerequisite for holding a dialogue and resolving misunderstandings! There are so many ideas in your speech! By the way, that's brilliantly observed: dignity that is grounded in material well-being and social guardedness is not an existential manifestation of human dignity! What is needed here is an irrational dignity as essential human trait independent of whether one has had one's fill or is hungry. "

Lars wanted to tell Ruslana about how a year ago he found himself in the middle of nowhere in Ukraine absolutely alone in a cold downpour, where neither the passport of a citizen of the free world, nor a credit card, nor paid up insurance could save him in any way. Only the hardiness born of being a sailor's son came to his aid. Well, also the old man in the canvas jacket who called out to him, "Schnell!" (the only foreign word he knew), pulled his Swedish guest onto the truck in which he was hauling pigs and other domestic animals, and got him to a more-or-less dry place. Lars almost told Ruslana about that adventure, but then he would have had to explain by what wind he was carried to a Ukrainian field, and this he didn't want.

The waiter removed the salad plates and brought the second course. The dish was Chateaubriand, served on "marmite," and eleven plates with an array of side dishes were arranged in a circle. Ruslana did not shriek, "God! What luxury! How marvelous!" as would have done her colleagues from the Slavic world, although this was only her second time abroad (Lars had already asked her about it). Again he thought of the trip to Ukraine a year ago, and the woman he went to see. He recalled how they ate schnitzel with vermicelli in the train station restaurant with aluminum forks. Even though he had been hungry, he just could not begin his meal. The woman, who finished her portion in a flash, gladly seized on his hesitation and, asking "You don't want yours?" impetuously, pulled his plate to herself.

For the participants of the seminar "Dialogues and Misunderstandings," the tables in the restaurant were set only for two. Lars, who throughout the first week, ate alone, and for all his pensiveness and introspection felt alone, finally appreciated the deep wisdom of the seminar organizers. No one would prevent him from having his own dialogue with the woman from Ukraine.
"How beautiful you are!"
Ruslana glanced at him with astonishment. Lars understood the banality of the compliment, and deepened it with scientific generalizations of a historical-geographic bent:
"In your countries there are very many beautiful women, and this is not a compliment but a statement of fact. It's a counterbalance to our countries. It's the consequences, you know, Ruslana, of many centuries of witch-burning. For more than one century very young women were destroyed, before they became mothers for the most part. It was long ago, but then, in those long ago times, beautiful women were liquidated - forgive me for such a bureaucratic term - so many women that irreversible, anthropological changes took place in Western culture."

"And in our countries for the most part men were destroyed, and as you know, the very best. It was not long ago at all. Our inquisitions and wars have not even become history yet."
The waiter cleared the unfinished Chateaubriand, and served tutti-frutti ice cream with fresh tropical fruit. Music began to play. During dinner it was always switched on. The multicolored candelabras over the tables blazed up. One could have wine at the table or go down to the bar.
"Would you like wine? White? Rose? Red? Or perhaps, a martini? Sherry?"
"How about champagne?" Ruslana smiled for the first time. Artificial light played in her eyes and on her earrings. THAT woman was also beautiful. She was an instructor in the provincial university. Lars met her through the personal ads. After he turned thirty he realized that the time to get married had arrived, and he was also aware that of all women around him, there was in fact no one he wanted to marry. The specialist on Slavic mentality decided to search for a wife in the Slavic world. He carefully fashioned Cyrillic letters on the envelope. After half a year of corresponding, he proposed meeting. She answered that she didn't have the money to come and meet him by plane in Kyiv, nor even someone she could borrow it from for a week; so he decided to come himself. From Kyiv on a beat-up stinking train he got to the regional center. Buses weren't going to the small town where she lived due to the weather, so he went by private car, which broke down in the middle of nowhere, where he found himself in a downpour in the middle of the night. Then he was taken to a neighboring town in a truck with pigs. Then somehow he got to where he wanted. On the third day Lars escaped like a deserter from the field of battle from the woman for whom he had come via three horrific transfers; consoling himself with the thought that firstly, she was no longer a young woman, and secondly there had been nothing between them. After that he decided to meet only with well-educated women from Eastern Europe, for he couldn't forget his irrational feeling of guilt because of his brand-name suitcase on wheels and high-quality shoes in a world where everyone goes about in rubber boots and lugs enormous, filthy shopping bags.
"…Champagne isn't served in the restaurant for dinner. But we can order it from the hotel room. What do you think about that, Ruslana? After all, drinking champagne was your idea. Moreover, you can see the grounds of the monastery from the window in my room. You won't regret that. Your rooms look out onto Market Square, an entirely different perspective."

A silver bucket with "Bon Courage" champagne and two tall champagne glasses were already waiting for them on a little cart next to the door of Lars' suite. No sooner had Lars put his plastic key-card in the slot than a waiter appeared out of nowhere, uncorked the champagne, and then disappeared into nowhere again. Lars let Ruslana in ahead of him, pushed into the room the little cart, on which, beside the bottle, chocolate bars lay, fanned out. He remembered how he had given chocolate to the neighboring boys of his last Ukrainian acquaintance, and how they grabbed the sweets and vanished without thanking him.
Lars took the chocolates from the table and put them on Ruslana's lap. "Take these for your son. It's very good chocolate," he said, and then shrank back. Maybe something was wrong?
But Ruslana smiled and put the chocolates in her briefcase. 

Lars poured the "Bon Courage" champagne. The champagne glasses tinkled in A minor. It was very good champagne. After such champagne, ordinary wines won't do for the rest of one's life. The memory of "Bon Courage" gives one the courage to drink nothing until there is the chance to drink something of similar high quality.
After drinking the champagne, the man and woman went to the window and saw how the first autumn leaves were gently falling in the dusk onto the flagstone grounds of the monastery, and they both agreed: yes, this is one of the little corners of the universe where a sense of eternity is preserved. It had been a convent where aristocratic women who had violated the rules of morality had been sent in pre-Lutheran times. Then the man gently lay his arm around the woman's shoulders, and the woman did not push that strong and tender arm away. After dizzying kisses, the man lifted the woman into his arms, and she whispered, "My God, I have been alone for more than three years…

How much has been said and written about such liaisons that are called one-night stands? What are they then? A mockery of love, or on the contrary, is it only in such minutes that unspoiled feeling comes to two people, while everything else is a calculation, a game, a competition? Is it man's conquest over woman, or manifestation of woman's freedom? Is it something to be repented, or something to be remembered as a gift of fate? Is it something that can never last, or on the contrary, can only such impulsive passion be the beginning of a particularly deep union of a man and woman? There are no rules, no laws - only life. And in life there are moments of unreality when the laws of the real world are temporarily suspended.

...The second week of work of the seminar "East - West: Dialogues and Misunderstandings" is winding to a close. The organizers are beginning to remind the participants who are flying out of Frankfurt, and who are flying out of Berlin, and that everyone will be provided his or her own transportation to the airport. Home and work telephone numbers, postal and e-mail addresses are exchanged. Everyone hopes to meet again.
A farewell banquet in the Silver Room of the Silbergloekenblueme Hotel is organized, featuring live music and Europe's top wines, from both East and West. The men are dressed in three-piece suits and bowties, the women are decked out like peacocks. Only Ruslana appeared in a real evening gown.

Ruslana is distracted. She called home today. Mama is better, but so much happened in her absence. In her thoughts she is already home in Kyiv. Lars understands that he has not won this woman, even if there WERE moments of special understanding between them. Ruslana has permitted him to call and write, and she invites him to Kyiv. Maybe in Kyiv their dialogue will have a future… 

Yevhenia Kononeko,
writer, author of four books, numerous publications in periodicals,
and an unpublished book of stories entitled "Prostitutes Get Married Too"