May 26th 2024
Lenin was surprised how he had so fast achieved the role of chef in the kitchen of the Hotel Metropol. The former business consultant explained that a partner of one of the companies she had worked for was actually a good friend of the owner. Or better to say of the man who financed his wife the maintenance of the building. The latter was a former Italian pop singer, who made quite a fortune during the 1990s with a couple of hits performed in English, and further consolidated her wealth by getting married with a prominent Russian businessman. Lenin did not want to go too much into the details. He had indulged too long on gossip once in Zurich and during his exile in the previous life. The Russian revolutionary leader was now ready for action and there was nothing more than he desired. Like a child waiting for Christmas, he tried to figure out, even during his dreams, how the encounter with Putin would have taken place. Both of them were called with the same Christian name. Lenin considered himself the master who inspired the lost Soviet autocrat, but he was not sure that Putin would have agreed. Since the mummy was aware that a good amount of sleep hours were required before entering into action, the Russian thinker tried to divert his attention by inviting the business consultant and the art dealer in his room, thirty minutes before going to bed. They exchanged stories about the day and the little expectations about tomorrow. Since there was not a lot to be done, if not waiting for the prey to take the bait, each of them focused on what was required from their current roles in the hôtellerie.
The art dealer was still finding himself extremely at ease and he conjectured that his hotel was the ideal place to secure some exchanges. He did not have a gallery anymore, but he could still rely on a network of collectors, most of them dismayed by the negative trend of the market. After all, he had come back to his usual life, just in another city and beyond the new iron curtain. That was not necessarily a disadvantage, because the high taxation to which even a small and average income, in the former prosperous Western world, was subjected, annihilated the purchase power and the quality of life of the middle class. Thanks to the anarchy reigning in Russia, despite the tight control of the public opinion that was irrelevant to his daily existence, the young Briton realised that he could afford himself a decent time. He was missing home, but not necessarily the way in which Britain, and many other countries, were reforming the mindset of the common man. It was too radical for his traditional views and he did not feel able to express himself anymore. That politically correctness, pervading even the slightest detail of the routines of a modern British citizen, was becoming suffocating. For sure no employer would have forced him to attend a street parade or wear a rainbow t-shirt while on the job, in Russia. However he also felt himself a traitor whenever the idea to stay even longer, after the mission was completed, occurred to his mind. After all, Russia was the immediate threat to what was left of European freedom and prosperity. He was also smart enough to understand that the woke movement had not already wiped out the democratic process and there was still a hope to come back to the proclaimed independence of thought of the 1980s.
The former business consultant was perhaps the one who found herself most unsecure. The Russian society reminded her too much of the American organisations she had learnt to detest. Instead of a bossy and irrational partner, there were the oligarchs and their wives. Perhaps it was the reason why main consultancies looked so similar to socialist institutions and, more recently, behaved on the same principles. Assuming to be the brilliant and intellectual ones, while on the contrary, these companies prospered only thanks to good marketing, superficial slogans, networking and self conscious adepts. Every evening, or night, she went to bed without forgetting to read Heidi's book. In the beginning she thought about her grandfather and the never ending stories somehow connected to WWI. After a while, she began to go through Spyri’s text, trying to imagine how life on the Alps should have been. She grew up in Milan, a city that in the time in which the novel was written could be considered far from the mountains as much as Hamburg could be distanced, from the skiing slopes, in the XXI century perspective. After all, with modern transports even Frankfurt had an active skiclub organising a weekend in the most fashionable European resorts. The former business consultant would have desired to forget the big agglomeration and move in the country side.
