I take off my shoes and wade into the dark water. When I wiggle my toes, grapes of fluorescing bubbles bunch around my feet, making the water glow from within. This happens only in August, Boris says, the result of sea plankton that floats close to the shore. Around me, the outlines of rocks are slowly dissolving in the dark, and the top of the white moon, like the heel of a loaf of bread, looms above them. Everyone is about to go to sleep in Novy Svet, the new world that suddenly feels so old.
17. Facilitator of Acquisition
YOU AND YOUR FRIEND Nina can celebrate,” whispers my English professor, Natalia Borisovna, into my ear. “The head of the department and the leader of our local party cell have approved your candidacies. You’re starting next week.” She wraps her arm around my shoulder to indicate her approval: I am considered mature enough to teach Russian in the six-week summer program for American students. I don’t know why she has to whisper; maybe it must be kept secret that there are live Americans wandering around the university premises in such close proximity to Soviet citizens.
Nina and I have just graduated from the English department of Leningrad University. As soon as Natalia Borisovna releases her hold on my shoulder, I rush across town to tell Nina the good news, and we celebrate in her kitchen with menthol cigarettes, pondering through the clouds of smoke how brilliantly we are going to lure our capitalist students into the world of Russian language and literature.
At home, I don’t feel so cavalier. Aside from a freshman class I was assigned to teach in my senior, sixth, year, I’ve never stood in front of a group of students. Especially foreign students, who are probably used to teaching methods that are uncommon and advanced, like everything else in America. We get reports from emigrants—stories that reach us through a complicated chain of connections—that in America you can buy mushrooms in March and strawberries in December; that there is never a shortage of books—any books; that a police officer who stopped one such emigrant for speeding asked him to step out of the car because he didn’t want to humiliate him in front of his ten-year-old son. The last story seems so unbelievable and maudlin it makes me snicker. What kind of government worries about hurting the feelings of its citizens, especially children? Everyone knows that a government is supposed to govern, not sympathize, as Lenin pointed out in 1918. Ours is busy enforcing residency regulations that ban us from moving, and issuing refusals to emigration petitions, which guarantee that applicants will be kicked out of their jobs and then publicly humiliated. If our feelings aren’t bruised, we instantly become suspicious.
I realize I know so little about America it’s embarrassing. I’ve never seen an American newspaper or magazine; decreed subversive and dangerous, they are all confiscated at the border. The only American English I’ve heard was an interview with Angela Davis, the head of the Communist Party of the United States, whom I could barely understand because she rolled her r’s in a way our phonetics professor called “utterly un-British.”
I haven’t read anything besides what we all read in class—Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (an anti-war declaration) and Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (an exposé of capitalist ulcers). The rest of the books, the ones that don’t denounce or expose, trickle in at unpredictable intervals, like deliveries of mayonnaise or imported shoes to local stores. Recently one of our professors snuck in a contemporary novel called The Other Side of Midnight from her recent trip to England, and I’m now in line to read it behind all the full-time faculty of the English department. I’ve estimated that at the present rate it should reach me in about four weeks since the first person in line read the book in two days.
And I’ve never seen a live American.
CLASSES START IN THE middle of June. I teach three times a week, from 9:00 to 11:50 A.M., grammar and conversation. I’ve prepared myself for the nauseating feeling of first-day trepidation, a familiar gut jiggle we all know from annual school visits to the dental clinic or from quiet struggles with school authorities who try to arm-twist good students into serving as local Komsomol, or Young Communist, leaders. Yet, surprisingly, I don’t tremble inside when I walk through the door of my first class and face fourteen Americans, staring at me with the same intense curiosity with which I stare back at them. My Russian is by far superior to theirs, and since this is an immersion program and we can’t use any English during class, I will always have the upper hand, at least linguistically.
As we go through the introductions, I look into their faces, not as foreign as their accents. Lisa from Vermont, blonde and broad-boned, could have come here on a weekend bus tour from Finland; Charles from Virginia, in round spectacles and pimples, looks as if he belongs in the advanced math and physics school, # 239, two blocks from where I live. They look familiar—Steven, Mary, Tony, who immediately become Stepan, Masha, and Anton—yet their otherness is exposed by their open glances, their straight backs, their eagerness to speak our convoluted language, full of conjugations, noun cases, verb aspects, and palatalized consonants that no foreigner can master. They are uninhibited and unafraid. They are earnest and straightforward. They are the opposite of me.
They are from good universities—Dartmouth, Columbia, Duke. I’ve never heard of any of those schools, but I nod as though I have. This is also a good university, I say, looking around. I don’t know if it’s true—I have no references, no comparison lists, no guides—but I sound as though I do. They nod vigorously, da, da, a very good school. Only the dorm is somewhat antikvarny, they say. No, I correct them in a teacher’s tone—staryi— old, not antique.
They laugh. Of course, not antique, far from antique. What I don’t tell them is that it’s not even old. It was built five years ago, when I was just starting at the university and passing the building four days a week on the way to school. The rickety scaffolding creaked in the wind, and the workers in quilted vatnik jackets and ushanka hats staggered around, half-drunk, taking with them at the end of the day everything they could carry—doorknobs, faucets, nails. It was a normal construction site, and the dorm is a normal new building—instantly old and as shoddy as everything else.
The Americans are diligent students. They do their homework and ask questions. During breaks they struggle with case endings to tell me what they saw the previous afternoon after class. The Hermitage and Peterhoff fountains. The cruiser Aurora, permanently anchored on the Neva bend not far from their dorm, which signaled the storming of the Winter Palace with one blank cannon shot. Lenin’s hiding place in the Leningrad suburb of Razliv, a straw tent with the leader’s cap and boots displayed on top of a tree stump. “Only they weren’t even his original cap and boots,” says Anton in an acerbic voice. Copies, the sign says; originals safe-guarded in the Kremlin. “Safe-guarded?” asks Anton, with amused disdain. “Cap and boots in a Kremlin safe?” “They’re afraid someone may steal them,” I offer, “some kapitalisty like you.” They laugh, thinking it’s a joke. I meant it as a joke, yet—although I’ve never been to Razliv, having somehow dodged every school trip that would herd us there—I know this is the reason Lenin’s cap and boots in his straw tent are reproductions. Capitalists, as we all know, are enemies not to be trusted, who won’t hesitate to stoop to such a lowly thing as pilfering Lenin’s real belongings and selling them on the market to the highest bidder.
They tell me about the food at the university cafeteria. Uzhasnaya, they complain—awful. As an instructor for the American program, I have a pass to the cafeteria. It’s really a faculty cafeteria, but the visiting American students have a meal plan there so they won’t be instantly poisoned. When I eat at the cafeteria, I can’t help but linger by the desserts enthroned seductively under glass: squares of cake with roses of butter frosting, flaky puffs covered with chocolate, mountains of whipped cream I’ve never seen anywhere else. I gawk at the stuffed cabbage, whose ingredients include meat, at the carrot salad studded with raisins. For one ruble, I load my tray with delicacies and wolf them down at a corner table, away from other people’s eyes. For some reason I feel as if
I were here illegally, undeserving of all this hard-to-get food my American students mock.
On Fridays, Nina and I and all the teachers go to the main auditorium to hear lectures on Russian history and literature given to the American students by our best university professors. It isn’t that we’re so eager to be enlightened about the Decembrists’ uprising of 1825 or Lermontov’s “useless people.” After the lecture, the head of the program, an elegant young woman who is rumored to be married to a KGB colonel, unveils a table with an electric samovar and a pile of big poppy seed bagels called bubliki, and, along with our students, we drink tea out of traditional glasses propped in metal holders. The real reason we come here is to hear and speak English.
The English we hear is more robust, more dauntless than the British voices on our language-lab tapes. These vowels split jaws; these consonants clatter. My students don’t hesitate now, trying to remember a word or think of a correct noun ending. They are fast and at ease. Navigating their own language puts them in control.
The students from my class have crowded around the samovar and are taking turns swiveling the handle that releases boiling water into a glass.
“You look a little like Natalie Wood,” says Charles from Virginia, biting into a bublik.
I don’t know who Natalie Wood is, but I wrinkle my forehead, not quite sure if I heard the name correctly. “Natalie Wood?” I ask and squint my eyes. She is probably someone everyone knows but me.
“An actress. In movies, you know,” says Charles. “Her parents were Russian, you know.”
I don’t know. But should I know? Should I be happy that he compared me to an actress with immigrant parents?
I smile and nod. “My sister is an actress, you know,” I say, trying to carry on this conversation.
Charles utters something in response and I pretend I understand it. I pretend I’m happy.
Then I notice the program director, the one with the KGB husband, giving me sharp looks, and I wonder if I’m pretending too zealously, if she might think that I’m really feeling happy among these students, whom we are glad to introduce to our language and culture but who will always, no matter how innocent they may sound, remain our ideological opponents in the world struggle for mankind’s bright future.
I decide to change position and move to where Nina is standing with two of her students, looking just as happy as I must look to the program director. Cynthia and Robert from her class are older, both graduate students in schools whose names come rattling from their mouths, indecipherable, like a good part of what they say.
“Robert is a writer,” says Cynthia. “Science fiction. He just had a book published,” she boasts, as if it was she who had published a book. “And it’s a good one.”
Robert rubs his forehead and smiles a crooked smile, half timid, half haughty. His eyes squint through thick glasses, and his hand rakes his hair, so curly his fingers get tangled.
“Robert Ackerman,” says Cynthia. “Remember this name,” she mocks, wagging her finger.
Robert smiles and rolls his eyes, chagrined but flattered. I also smile, but not too eagerly, because the program director is again looking in my direction.
THE FOLLOWING WEEK, AFTER my class, when I walk out of the building nicknamed “Catacombs” into the drizzly grayness of the university yard, I find Robert leaning against a tree, waiting.
“Nina told me this is where you’re teaching,” he says, his hands in the pockets of his corduroys, his hair like tiny corkscrews standing on end around his narrow face. Visually he clashes with everything around him—with the birch trunk he is leaning against, with the feeble pansies by his feet, with the cracked and flaking walls behind him—looking utterly un-Russian, looking as if he’d fallen from space. I glance around to make sure the program director isn’t anywhere near to witness this unsanctioned, after-class contact with a foreigner.
We walk out of the courtyard through the main building, past the marble staircase and the huge mirror where Nina and I used to meet before classes, into the gray expanse of the Neva Embankment. The clouds are so low that they have swallowed the top of the Admiralty’s spire on the other side of the river; the end of the gold needle looks as if it’s been broken off.
“It’s so damp,” Robert says. “Like being under water.”
“It’s normal,” I say. “It’s the river, the sea, the swamp, you know.” I’m proud of myself for using that American colloquial “you know,” which I learned from my student Charles. I feel remarkably nonchalant walking past the university with such a foreign-looking man—both American and Jewish, both unwelcome here—whose otherness announces itself in his long, corkscrew hair and well-fitted corduroys and leather shoes that don’t seem to maim his feet. Who, in addition to all these improbabilities, is also the author of a published book.
We slowly walk along the embankment, looking down at the slabs of granite under our feet, not knowing what to say.
“So what do you do when you don’t teach Americans how to speak Russian?” Robert asks in his restless American English after a few minutes of silence.
I’m not sure if this is a question about my official life or my private life. Is he asking what I do at the university or what I do at home, what I say to my English professor or what I say to Nina? Which me is he interested in, the proper university teacher and Komsomol member or the real, smirking, cynical person I am with my friends?
“I teach English,” I say. “Grammar, reading, conversation. We read Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga. Volume One, The Man of Property.”
Robert chuckles and scratches the back of his neck. “Isn’t it boring as hell?” he asks.
“It reveals the ulcers of capitalism,” I say.
He peers at me through his thick glasses to see if I’m serious, to see if it’s time for him to remember that he’s left a kettle boiling over back in his dorm or some other thing that will require his immediate attention.
“It’s boring as hell, you’re right,” I say and give him a smile. It’s not that difficult to choose between the two people inside me. With a Jewish-American writer who has chosen to wait for me, out of all the university women prancing around him with samovars and bubliki, I am going to be the real me.
“And what do you do when you don’t write science fiction?” I ask.
“I’m a physicist,” Robert says.
A physicist, I quickly repeat in my mind, not to be confused with a physician, one of my first lessons from a translation class. Not a physician, as my mother was during the war, a kilometer from the German front.
“Nuclear and astrophysics,” explains Robert. “The expansion of the universe, the theory of relativity, black holes. I’m finishing my dissertation at the University of Texas.”
I know nothing about physics. In high school, it was the only subject in which I received a final four instead of a perfect five, the four that prevented me from getting a high school diploma bound in red plastic instead of black.
“I also play the oboe,” says Robert, trying to soften the hard edges of science with music, probably thinking he’s intimidated me with his physics credentials because I don’t say anything. Indeed, I am intimidated; I know as little about music as I do about astrophysics.
“And why are you here?” I ask. “Taking Russian classes in Leningrad?”
Robert stops at the granite stairs leading to the water, to the small leaden waves that slurp onto the wet stone, and stares across the river at the gold cupola of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Even in this damp light it radiates a shine that lifts the clouds off its surface, a little halo of insulation against the rain hanging in the air.
“They covered it with gray during the siege of Leningrad,” I say. “To make it look like everything else.”
Robert focuses on the cathedral as if snapping a mental photograph, then turns to me. “I like the Russian language,” he says. “I want to read Russian writers in the original. That’s why I’m here.”
Now I’m truly awed. I feel u
ndeserving to be standing next to this brilliant American man who solves the problems of the universe during the day and then goes home to play the oboe and sweat over Crime and Punishment in Russian.
“Lenin-grad,” says Robert. “Doesn’t grad mean city?”
“Yes, the city of Lenin,” I say.
“But the form ‘Lenin’ is also the possessive of ‘Lena,’ isn’t it? ‘Lena’s’ in Russian is Lenin, right? So Leningrad literally means ‘Lena’s city.’” Robert looks pleased, as if he’s just solved a stubborn celestial equation. “This is your city,” he says and raises his arm as if bestowing the honor upon my head.
This never occurred to me, but Robert is right. He is even more right than he knows. Lenin’s real name is Ulyanov. Lenin is a pseudonym our legendary leader assumed to fool the tsar’s police when he was secretly shuttling between Russia and Finland to stir up the working masses in preparation for the revolution, and he chose it from the name of the great Siberian river Lena. So Lenin does literally mean Lena’s. Leningrad is literally my city.
ROBERT WAITS FOR ME every day I teach, three times a week, and we walk around the city’s center, looking at places he won’t find in his tour guide—real places, too ordinary to be included among the glossy snapshots of bronze statues and golden domes. We walk away from the baroque luxury of the Winter Palace to the part of the Neva where necks of construction cranes hang over the water, along the cracked asphalt side streets where crumbling arches lead into mazes of courtyards.
Robert is fascinated with courtyards. He’s read Dostoyevsky, and he wants to see those courtyard wells that depress the spirit and twist the soul into a truly Russian miserable knot. As far as I can see, a hundred years have changed nothing in terms of courtyards’ contribution to misery, so I delight Robert in stepping with him through the vaulted archways to gawk at aluminum garbage bins that spill rotting potato peels and chicken bones, at broken walls bristling with wires, at piles of rusted sheets of metal brought in at some point for a renovation that never happened.
A Mountain of Crumbs Page 25
