Igor’s idea of a university graduation party—vodka aplenty, food aplenty, reserved tables at some restaurant, dancing, proclaiming, eventually passing out on reserved tables—did not gel with Anya’s idea. It went to a central split between them: he was social and outgoing and reckless and hard-partying; she was shy and liked to spend time with her family.
Her graduation coincided with the one-year anniversary of her grandparents’ burial. Her grandfather was so in love with her grandmother after a lifetime together that he had died just a few days after her. They were buried at a cemetery not far from the family dacha, their graves marked with temporary wooden crosses with their names and dates carved into them.
This was what Anya wanted for her graduation: After the customary year, her family and Igor would erect proper gravestones over her grandparents’ graves. This and an iPhone. Igor came through on both counts.
Anya’s family’s dacha was far outside of town, near the edge of the Leningrad region. And across the street from the graveyard was a cement factory. The cement factory kept the air powdery, and everything was always covered in dust.
They pulled up to the graveyard in Anya’s father’s car, with the gravestones in the trunk. A cement dust–covered pigeon lit on the hood of the car. Anya tried to stir it away, but her uncle said that the pigeons were spirits from the graveyard.
Igor and Anya’s father lugged the permanent, polished-granite gravestones from the trunk to the graves. They cleared away the temporary wooden markers and levelled the earth. The gravestones weighed about one hundred kilos each. Igor called the gravestones “monuments,” as in, “Monuments are fucking heavy, dude.”
By the time they moved the gravestones into place, Igor was covered, like the pigeons and the trees and the ground and everything else there, in a layer of fine cement dust. When he breathed, it scratched his lungs. He coughed.
“In the US, people bury our dead for us,” I told him later. “I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to do it yourself.”
“This is disrespect. You need to do it by your own forces,” he said.
After installing Anya’s grandparents’ gravestones, Igor spent the next day with her brother, moving sand. There was a fenceline and a pile of sand, and the pile had been deposited on the wrong side of the fenceline. The rationale for moving the pile of sand was that, if it remained on the side of the fenceline where it was, it might be stolen.
While they were shovelling the sand, Igor noticed that Anya’s brother was wearing combat boots. This surprised him. It was summer, and it was hot. He asked him about them.
Anya’s brother told Igor that he kept being robbed at the subway station. Thugs had stolen three of his cellphones in three separate muggings. After the third one, he decided he would wear combat boots everywhere from then on, so as to kick any would-be assailants.
Moving the pile of sand took an entire day.
Anya spent the weekend trying to figure out her iPhone, Igor’s graduation present. She loved it. Simply typing out an SMS got her incredibly giddy.
Anya’s family dacha was nine hundred square metres. It wasn’t modern, not what they call Yevropeyskiy remont (European renovation), but they were updating it bit by bit. Igor helped Anya’s father repair a door frame and install some bathroom tiles.
The whole affair was a kind of test run, and Anya and Igor both knew it. He was auditioning for a part in the family life she imagined for them.
Igor went to the banya with Anya’s father and her uncle one day during their memorial trip. Igor had brought along the new paintball gun that I’d imported for him. Her father and uncle, both military guys, scoffed when Igor told them about paintball. It’s a rub Igor gets sometimes.
“You weren’t in the army,” they said. “That’s why you like paintball.”
They cool-guyed him. Then he switched to automatic and began painting the roof of Anya’s uncle’s banya. The older men were suddenly impressed. “Give it to me, give it to me,” Anya’s uncle said. From a distance of about fifty metres, he hit the banya’s exhaust pipe.
A little boy walking by on the road shouted, “Mama, Mama, what is this sound?” His mother saw the three shirtless men firing what looked like a machine gun at their banya, snatched the boy’s hand, and ran away.
“Oh,” Igor said, recounting the story later as we sat having beers. “Anya’s uncle has Staffordshire terrier.”
“What?”
“Staffordshire terrier. What’s in English the common attack command for dogs?”
“Sic ‘em.”
“Sic ‘em? In Russian, this is fass. But Uncle trained this dog not fass, not … how it?”
“Sic ‘em.”
“Not sic ‘em, but Nemtsi.”
“Germans?” I asked.
“Germans. And the dog like this, Nemtsi, Nemtsi.” Igor made a series of woofing sounds.
“Was her uncle in World War II?” I asked.
“No, just thinking all Germans are assholes.”
“That’s a good one.”
“Hey, you told me a lot of times that Russian are xenophobes.”
“It’s true,” I said.
“It’s really funny, man. I need to make a picture or a video clip.”
“Does the dog ever really attack someone?”
“It will attack,” Igor said. “It will for sure, but it’s well trained. The dog is patrolling the area for Germans or somebody else or whatever to destroy it. The dog is the kindest being I ever seen. Except when someone says, ‘Germans.’“
While Igor was off bonding with Anya’s family, anti-German dog included, I hung out with some American writers who had just arrived for the literary festival. I had taken them for dinner and drinks. We’d been together an hour or so when one of the women with us said to me, “Your English is fantastic. You hardly have any accent.”
This was the first time I became aware that I had begun speaking English with a Russian accent. I’d always had this subconscious thing that I was embarrassed about where I’d pick up someone else’s speech patterns. The year I lived in Arizona and hung out with a guy from Wisconsin, I latched on to some of his Northernisms. As soon as I arrived in Canada, I’d claimed the “eh” particle as my own. I’d even started shortening the a sounds in double-a words the way Canadians do: drama, Mazda, banya … But the Russian accent was more insidious because, while the modifications were still subconscious, I was saying words as Igor said them, and using Russian grammatical forms when speaking with Russians in English because it facilitated understanding. Then I’d get used to saying it that way and the form fixed in my regular speech.
I might have cured myself of this by simply speaking Russian and Russian only with Igor, but he still insisted that my Russian hurt his ears. And I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t, because all my formal Russian language teachers had been women. Women speak Russian in an almost singsongy way. They modulate their intonation, playing the language like a xylophone. But men tend to speak in a gruff monotone. They garble all their words. They also use a lot more mat. Through no fault of their own, female language teachers teach foreigners to mimic their intonations, giving their speech an inherently effeminate inflection.
I explained this to Igor at the Atrium. He seemed impressed by the information.
“Say something in Russian,” he said.
“Ty ochen krasivy,” I said.
“Hm,” he said. “Yeah. You do sound like gay.”
“Is that why it hurts your ears?”
“No. Sounding gay is okay. Will help in picking up chicks. Hurts ears because of mistakes. Keep study, grasshopper. Practise practise. One day.”