Dancing Under the Red Star

THE PAIN OF SEVENTEEN If the comforting passage of time, coupled with God's gentle mercies, kindly erases the tragic memories of my life, even so, June 29, 1938, will still remain the one particular day that I will never forget as long as I live. I was seventeen years old, and destiny was coming, whether I liked it or not. When I awoke that morning, I think I already knew. In my heart, or maybe it was the pit of my stomach, I sensed there would be something out of the ordinary about this day. It was an eerie premonition, something you could unmistakably identify but not necessarily explain. Just in my waking up, the day already felt strangely surreal and separate from all others. It was an unusually splendid morning. The entire sky was uncommon, painted a crystal clear blue, with no clouds, and I felt oddly euphoric. And in the midst of the otherwise chaotic circumstances surrounding this time in my life, this day seemed filled with hope and promise, and I couldn't wait to get it started. Peering out the window of our second-floor apartment in Gorky's American Village, I felt the warm and deceptively soothing rays of the Russian summer sunshine on my skin. I was eager to get outside, to meet my best friend, Maria, for a tennis match. I was surging with adrenaline and expectancy. My body, rather than my mind, was happy, perhaps outside of itself. And happy was not an easy thing to be in Russia, in those unpredictably turbulent days, when confusing changes were occurring all around us. Through no choice of my own, Russia had become my home, although in my mind and in my heart, and sometimes even in my words, I still referred to it as a foreign country. This was not America, where I was born, and no matter how long I stayed, I simply did not belong here. This was not my true home! Here in Gorky, we feared that anything could happen at any moment, and no one ever really knew what to expect from one minute to the next. I speedily ate a very light breakfast, mainly to satisfy my mother's demands, then grabbed my tennis racket and hurriedly kissed Mama good-bye, nearly tripping over her feet as I jolted down the stairs to meet Maria. The brick wall and empty lot of an abandoned storefront around the corner from our tenement was a perfect place to practice tennis by myself or when Maria could not play. We had planned to meet there that morning and then walk to the nearby tennis courts together. She hadn't arrived yet, so I decided to stretch and loosen up on my own. Maria was eighteena beautiful, green-eyed Ukrainian girl who lived in our village because her father and older brother also worked in the automobile factory with my father. She was an excellent athlete and competitor, a renowned young gymnast in her hometown, and now a topnotch tennis player here in the village. We enjoyed each other's company and athletic competitiveness immensely. In fact, Maria was the only other girl my age in the entire village whose love for sports and general athletic prowess rivaled mine. I'm quite sure that's why we got along so well. Here in Gorky, Soviet sports had become my life. Athletic competition and organized sports were highly esteemed in Russia and taken very seriously. This suited me! Since early childhood back in Detroit, I had been raised to be athletic and physical, and my nature was to be competitive in everything. Maria and I were highly touted swimmers for the Gorky region, having won several district and regional competitions together, and we were now ranked high in the national statistics. She swam the fastest 100- and 200-meter backstroke I had ever seen. She was absolutely phenomenal. I swam the best freestyle and butterfly sprint events in our region. Competitive sports made a positive place for us within this unfamiliar society. Russia was a place where we felt free to excel. But today was not a competition; we planneTobien, Karl is the author of 'Dancing Under the Red Star ' with ISBN 9781400070787 and ISBN 1400070783.