First encounter with the West. Cologne, 1984

 

Cologne. Railway station

On the way to France, I had a change in Cologne, and I had to wait there for a train to Paris for almost the whole day, until late in the evening. The very phrase "West Germany" sounded scary for a person who had lived half his life in the USSR. Soviet propaganda did its job, and West Germany was associated with "neo-Nazis", with "Bonn militarists thirsting for revenge," and so on. Some strange and confused feeling I still felt, I must admit.

The train dragged slowly over the long bridge across the Rhine and stopped at the huge Cologne railway station. I unloaded my luggage and took it to left luggage room. And - went to see the city.

From the railway station there was a long pedestrian street (Hohe-Strasse), full of shops, restaurants and some establishments. In fact, it was the center of the city. Along this street-exhibition, I began to walk back and forth. I immediately wanted to find some signs of gay life. After all, we were told so much about the West, that “there are many” and that “such things are happening there” ...

I returned to the station. Toilet. To enter it you have to pay 1 mark (I had to pay, although for me it was considerable money). True, I noticed that some people were hanging around without going into the main toilet. I don’t remember how, but I met some faggot, already aged, or rather, without a certain age and without appearance at all. The German faggot was very interested in me, because I was Russian (exotic!), and immediately dragged me to the porn cinema to the hall for gays.

The porn itself did not attract me in any way - what is there to watch? - I went with this man just to learn something about this side of life. But in the darkness of the hall, the faggot immediately began to touch me (my crotch, of course). I removed his hand several times. The short session ended and we parted ways. Well, that's how they meet - at the main station and in porn cinemas.

Later, in the evening, I had the opportunity to observe a busier movement of faggots at the station. There was also a large beer hall, where they all went (I could not afford such a thing then, and I did not know how it was done and how much it cost). Actually, I did not expect anything from Germany. I saw enough of Germans back in Bulgaria, these here were the same. They are plump, with beer bellies and as if without faces. Only later, a few years later, I learned that, as elsewhere in the civilized West, active men, fuckers, are represented by southern peoples, immigrants. In Germany, mostly Turks. They know that they are in demand, and, as a rule, they fuck faggots for money or for some kind of benefits.

Square in front of the train station in Cologne:

Somehow I didn’t really like it in the West on the very first day. I felt that I was not needed here, that this was not mine. But I have pushed those thoughts aside for the time being. After all, there is Paris, France ahead. Maybe it's different there...

Here comes my night train to Paris. A compartiment for six people... All the same, I was somehow unhappy. Feeling like I'm doing something wrong. But there is no return, all the bridges were burned, it is necessary to do this "wrong thing". The train started moving.

Farewell to Russia

People began to leave the USSR back in the mid-1970s, but that was mostly Jews, or, as they said then, “following the Jewish project.” Later, people in my circle began to prepare for departure. Since they were not Jewish, they entered into marriages with foreigners and thus left. At one time, I had such a chance. The decision was difficult to make, and accounts of life abroad were conflicting. I don't know if I would have left if it weren't for the persecution, albeit sluggish, by the KGB and the police a set on me by them. And if I knew that a couple of years after my departure from the USSR, Perestroika would begin and everything would change.

Different thoughts came to me. Having gone there, will I be there alone or will there be many different and interesting acquaintances? One Swiss friend, to whom I told about my plans, answered me this way: “People do not emigrate because of sex.” Looking back, I will say that he was right. And what did it matter to me that in the West there is freedom for my sexuality, there are gay bars, clubs and all that?

Before leaving, fate seemed to tease me. Quite easy meetings with straight people began to happen often, just on the street or somewhere else. I remember some occasional guy, not at all gay, whom I met in a shop when I was buying port wine and who wanted to come to my house. We drove for a long time, through the whole city ... We drank together at home, then went to bed. Fuck... In the morning he said to me: "uh, just don't tell anyone in particular what we were doing here."

Then there was a naval officer, whom I met late in the evening, when the transport was no longer running. I invited him to my place, and we walked for a long time to my house. At home, he asked - "do you want me to be with you?" In general, we drank and lay down together. We fucked.

And in the end, literally on the last night in my house, when it was already torn apart, everything was taken out, there was nothing left there except a bed and things scattered on the floor, I went out in the evening to take a walk to the lake, which was nearby, and right there met a Russian soldier who was hanging about. We immediately went to my place, began to drink. Then we went to bed, but his dick didn't get hard. He began to apologize and say that it was my fault, because I gave him too much wine to drink (“the second bottle was superfluous”), and therefore he did not need it. He said: "wait a little, now I'll sleep for an hour and the dick will get like wood, and I'll fuck you." And so it happened. And in the morning he fucked me again. And there was a feeling that this was almost the norm of life, because there was no embarrassment, no feeling of inconvenience, and this fucking between men in those days was not called in any way, it had no name. I won’t say that there was just such a paradise, but however, what I am writing about - it was.

And there was a premonition that all this would not happen in the West.

The train bound for the great western capital has started moving. With bated breath, I drove past my dear suburb, stood in the vestibule, smoked. I wanted to pull the stop, get out and run there, to my place, to the already half-broken house ... Then there was a stop in Pskov, and when I stood on the platform, a wild idea arose - to leave the train, leaving all the luggage in the carriage, to return back home.

And that night on the train I didn't seem to sleep at all. I smoked in the vestibule all the time.

 

Muhammad

Thirty years ago it was a bright summer night, a white night, I could not fall asleep, tossing and turning in bed, although before that I had already searched our entire suburb on a bicycle looking for a guy or man walking alone. It seemed to me that I didn’t finish my search, that maybe somewhere on the streets someone was still wandering around, not settled, having missed his train. And at one in the morning I got out of bed again, took my bicycle and went to the railway station. In those days, the station did not close at night, people were sitting and lying on benches in the waiting room. So I went in there and lit a cigarette, looking at those sitting and lying in the hall. I spotted two guys there - one tall, just about two meters tall, handsome Caucasian, the other small, unsightly. They also couldn't sleep on the hard bench, the tall one went out to smoke. It was then that I talked to him and got to know him. It was easy in those days.

They turned out to be Dagestanis, Avars. They came either to get a job here, or to go to college. The tall, handsome Avar was called Muhammad. He was then 23 years old. I immediately invited both of them to my place, told them that they could stay with me, live there. And so the three of us headed for my house. It was two o'clock in the morning, the sun was already rising, and when we got to the house, the sun was beating down so strongly. Muhammad in soldier's uniform:

 

At home, under some far-fetched pretext, I separated the little friend of Muhammad, who was of no interest for me, isolated him in another room, and lay down on the sofa with Muhammad. All this was in the order of things in those days, and only later Muhammad told me that at first he did not suspect anything about me.

We lay down together, but on the first night we did not fuck, but only rubbed hard and pressed against each other. He had a hard-on. Nevertheless, after such a mutual frottage, he guessed something. He guessed that I liked him and that I wanted something from him.

He fucked me the next day. He fucked me in the ass. And in broad daylight. I don't remember how it happened. I only remember that I was very worried and at the end of the fuck I farted a little. "What! Are you farting here!" he said to me, laughing.

Muhammad stuck with me for two years. True, at times he went to his place in Dagestan, then again unexpectedly returned. Then everything was without warning - suddenly the doorbell rang - Muhammad arrived again.

I must say that Muhammad was not a fan of fucking in the ass. And in general he was not a lover of assholes. He was attracted to women. But it also cannot be said that he dreamed of them strongly. True, he once brought one to a room on the first floor. He fucked her, and I, hanging my head from the second floor, peeped. A disgusting spectacle! She lay like a mattress, and he screwed her. But, apparently, he needed it for the sake of prestige. Once I asked him, why the hell does your dick get hard when I touch it, if, as you say, you are only interested in women. He said: it doesn’t matter who touches, my dick always gets hard when someone touches it.

Muhammad during a walk in Leningrad:

In general, compared with modern Dagestanis, he was just Socrates. Modern people are short, dumb, not interested in anything, their speech is extremely poor. But Muhammad was interested in everything, he talked about something endlessly, chattered, asked something, played with words, liked to joke, made fun of us. Sometimes the bell at the front door downstairs rang, and we would go up to the window overlooking the porch to see who was calling. He would hang on one arm holding on to to the banister somewhere on the porch so that he was not visible, and then he would call again. Like trying to frighten us...Our house. Entry and doorbell:

We didn't sleep together like husband and wife. So, for a while we met in bed. But there were nights when we slept together until morning. And in the morning, having the morning wood, he fucked me in the ass, after which I happily walked to work with an ass full of sperm. Nice feeling! Morning, the birds are chirping, and I'm going to work, and the sperm strives to escape from the ass, it must be kept there ... I come to work, I talk to someone about serious matters, and I have sperm in the ass! “You are talking to me about some important matters, but you can’t even imagine such a thing that I was fucked in the ass all night,” I thought. Sometimes he crawled up to me in the middle of the night - “My dick gets terribly hard, I could make a hole in the couch right now.”

Yes, we lived together for two years, you can say ... And we fucked. I had to learn how to cook dinner, I had to feed meat to him. And in those days it was not an easy task! Somehow I managed. After fucking, he was hungry, sometimes at one in the morning it was necessary to pour out a bowl of soup with meat or fry a steak for him. I had to buy a new TV so that there would be some kind of entertainment at home.

And how he perked up when guests came to me! There were different kinds of guests, including foreign ones. He really liked this company. And I really liked that everyone likes him. One faggot managed to get him photographed in various poses in the nude. These photographs of thirty years ago remained. He also fucked this photographer, it seems. And the photographer licked his hairy ass. One of the photos taken by the photographer:

 

Muhammad had a sense of curiosity. He probably felt that the faggots valued him more than the straight ones. Because one day I was told that he was seen walking in the center of the city in the main cruising area. He heard from conversations where "such" people gathered. Apparently, he wanted to see if it would work. Although he did not cease to assure me that he did not need “all this” ...

It seemed to me that I squeezed everything possible out of the situation of living together with a straight man from the Caucasus. There could be nothing more. He needed to build his life, and not hang out with me and my company.

And he left. I saw him off at the station. We said goodbye. Just before departure, he sat down in the carriage by the window and began making playful winks at me. But when the train started, he suddenly rushed to the vestibule in order to say something to me again, but did not have time, because the passage to the vestibule was clogged with people and their luggage. So he didn't say anything.

But he said it later in letters. He went to his brother in Kyrgyzstan, where he worked at the state farm. It must have been very dreary for him there, and our life in my house seemed to be a bright and happy period. There are five letters of passionate confessions of friendship left. Terrible regrets that we can’t meet, that he can’t come to me in any way.

He only wrote that he was married in Kyrgyzstan. But without much joy about it ... Everything showed that he was eager to come back to me. Because:

"My best friend, of course, is you."