When I left my first marriage, my future ex-husband sent me this e-mail: “Don’t talk about me to anyone. If someone asks why we have different phone numbers now, tell them it’s for business reasons.”
I teased out the implications of his request. If I stopped mentioning him to people who knew us, they would continue thinking we were married until the evidence to the contrary was overwhelming. If I didn’t mention him to people I met later, on my own, this important chapter of my life would be pointlessly cloaked in mystery. Unable to please him in so many ways, I knew that this wish, his last, would also be impossible for me to honor.
Tactless people asked if our marriage had run aground on the shoals of cultural difference—had my American habits and culture and his Soviet ones clashed and ultimately proved incompatible? How I wanted to believe that the answer was no. After all, we were two individuals, weren’t we?
Just as I was reluctant to admit the role of cultural difference in our marriage and its demise, I was loath to recognize that marriage to Aleksandr (not his real name) might have helped me speak Russian better. That would diminish my credentials as a translator and simultaneous interpreter, reducing them to an offshoot of wifehood.
But of course Aleksandr was central to my grasp of Russian. There are certain foreign words you are just not likely to learn except as part of a domestic arrangement: pilot light, pantry, cilantro, duvet cover, curtain rod. Building on my college major in Russian language and literature, with its emphasis on the instrumental case, War and Peace and verbs of motion (don’t ask; I’ve got them all memorized, but I can’t explain), I learned from him entire terminologies related to electronics, car parts and fly-fishing.
When we met in the USSR in 1987, I assumed, based on the occasional English word slipped jauntily into his speech, that he knew my language well and was just holding back so I could practice speaking Russian. And then one evening in his hometown of Tbilisi, Georgia, with separation looming as I prepared to return to my job on a cultural exchange project in Siberia, I spoke to him in English for the first time. As we started down the five flights of urine-scented stairs that led from his family’s apartment to the street, I poured out my anguish.
“What happens now?” I asked. “Tomorrow I’ll be thousands of miles away. When will we see each other again?”
I paused, certain that he had grasped every word.
He shot me a blank but feeling look that said, I can tell you’re very upset, and I can certainly guess what it’s about, but I’m terribly sorry, I cannot respond to the particulars. As we continued down the next four flights, I haltingly reiterated in Russian what had taken me just one flight to say in English. Now I knew that this business of expressing myself in another tongue was for real.
Aleksandr became my teacher, his Russian my model for how to speak the language. He was a skilled storyteller with wonderfully clear diction. I understood him easily when I still had difficulty with other Russian speakers. He spoke a vivid Russian, rich in comic images, retro Soviet hipster slang, and borrowings from Georgian, his second language. Chalichnoy was a Georgian-Russian hybrid word frequently on his lips: it described the local knack for wheeling and dealing, acquiring the unobtainable, knowing which palms to grease, and doing so with wit and grace. Another word of choice, more a sound, really, was eef, eef, an interjection employed mainly by men from the neighboring republic of Azerbaijan to express pleasure (or anticipation) at the sight of a well-endowed woman or the aroma of a good meal.
He didn’t go out of his way to correct me when I made a mistake, but simply incorporated the proper form into his response, so that I absorbed it without effort. If I thought I might have coined a word without meaning to, and then asked if it actually existed, he would grin and say, “Now it does!”
After we moved to the United States, we found that marriage conducted in a foreign language afforded certain advantages: we could stand at a shop counter discussing a prospective purchase without the vendor listening in, and generally engage publicly in secret exchanges. But at times we went too far. Looking daggers at each other in a public place, voices raised, did we really imagine that passersby would think we were conversing tranquilly about some matter of minor concern?
Once, as a tense exchange unfolded between us in the subway, a man who looked anything but Slavic—he was black—sat next to us for several stops without giving any indication that he understood. Then he turned to us. “Oh, you speak Russian!” he said delightedly, and this he said in near-flawless Russian. “I studied the language when I was growing up in the Dominican Republic. Please let me practice with you.” Startled, we complied. I now wonder if he inserted himself deliberately in order to play peacemaker.
And so the public bickering ceased, until the end, when it became impossible to contain. And still, I sometimes turn to a shopping companion to discuss the merchandise in our secret language, only to realize that we have none. Russian became the language I spoke spontaneously when awakened from a sound sleep. After I left Aleksandr, I surprised myself and a few other people by suddenly speaking Russian in bed.
About three years into our marriage, we became engrossed in Eduard Limonov’s Eto ya—Edichka (It’s Me, Eddie), a profanity-laced roman à clef set among down-and-out Russian immigrants in 1970s New York City. We took to emulating the main character: laughingly, playfully, we cursed each other out in the foulest terms imaginable— the book contained much that was altogether new to me, and for Aleksandr, seeing these words written down was a novelty, not to say a shock.
After a day or two of this, we’d both had our fill. “Let’s get it out of our systems!” Aleksandr suggested, and like golden retrievers shaking off the water after a swim, we swore with gusto for a few moments, and then returned to the loftier registers to which we were more accustomed.
He learned English quickly, speaking it “frighteningly well,” according to the Englishman who was his boss at his second job in America. But for our nine-plus years together, most of it in the United States, we carried on our relationship in Russian, switching into English only for quintessentially American topics such as credit cards, MTV and presidential primaries. Sticking with Russian for all those years suited us both. It eased his adjustment to life in the United States, giving him a piece of home to hold onto. It kept him articulate and at ease, as I had first known him on his home turf.
In later years, he would sometimes—but not often—shift into English when speaking with me. At certain moments, he would pronounce my name in a way slightly different from his usual, tipping me off that a stream of English would follow. I felt at these times that he was possessed by some alien being, and that an exorcism was called for.
When my family gathered, he often stuck with my little niece and nephew, especially early on, when his English was still shaky. They furrowed their brows and struggled to make sense of his unusual syntax. When he read to them, they corrected his pronunciation with excruciating politeness.
Once, we faced off for a playful skirmish, my nephew on Aleksandr’s back and my niece on mine.
“Charge!” bellowed the little boy, aged four, bouncing up and down on Aleksandr’s back.
“Charge!” he cried again, seizing Aleksandr’s shoulders and shaking vigorously. “Charge!”
Aleksandr looked puzzled. “What is ‘charge’?” he asked mildly, adjusting the weight on his back.
DURING OUR last months together, I was translating a book about Russian obscenities and slang for the Sexy Slang Series, put out by an imprint of Penguin. Dermo! the Real Russian Tolstoy Never Used was the title, which was similar to those of the companion volumes. (See also: Merde! The Real French You Were Never Taught at School.) The author of Dermo! (a word that lies equidistant between ‘turd’ and ‘shit’ on the crudeness continuum), was a plainspoken émigré living in Brooklyn who had boasted in New York’s Russian-language press that he and Solzhenitsyn were the only Russian authors in America to earn their living by their pens. This my client did by churning out skillfully plotted post-Soviet potboilers punctuated with hired killings and rough sex.
“It’s a smutty book,” he said to me when he called to propose the project. “I would rather have a man translate it, but the translator I wanted is busy with another book. You’re the best I could do.”
I took the job, but decided that I would contact him frequently with queries about the filthiest terms in his manuscript. I would make him squirm.
The book, mostly in prose, also contained eight or ten obscene ditties by Pushkin and other towering nineteenth-century figures, as well as some anonymous snippets of off-color and scatological folklore. Each time I crafted a rhymed, metered English version of one of these, I would call Aleksandr at work to share my accomplishment, launching without preamble into the Russian, followed by my English rendition. He would pick up the receiver to hear me gleefully reciting something like this:
“Kuda nam Vasha Pol’sha!
Pizda nashay Yekateriny gorazdo bol’she!”
“Catherine the Great had such a large twat,
By comparison, Poland’s the size of a gnat!”
Meanwhile, I kept my vow to call the author regularly. One day, some months into the project, when Aleksandr’s and my marital breakdown was too clear to ignore, I phoned my client with a question. After a halting explanation of some coarse term, he sputtered, “Your husband’s from over there, isn’t he? Can’t you ask him?”
“No,” I said sadly, “I can’t.”
Uncharacteristically tactful, he said nothing. I daresay he was a veteran of several marriages himself.
SOMETIMES, LONG after a marriage is over, clarity comes about specific issues that sparked resentment. For years, you don’t have a clue what it was you did, or you think that one thing was going on, and then discover—far too late—that the issue was something else entirely.
One of our problems had to do with garbage—but not in the way I initially imagined.
Aleksandr loved to fix small appliances. After he arrived in the United States, friends and family took to giving us broken gadgets too cheap to have commercially repaired. Soon we were the owners of some eleven tape recorders, four television sets and three or four VCRs, all of which he swiftly got into working order. Some of these devices we put to use; some we gave away; some were stacked in closets, along with the remnants of others he’d cannibalized for parts.
The sidewalks of our Manhattan neighborhood were also a rich source of electronics. Neighbors set malfunctioning appliances out with the garbage, often in the original box, including fitted Styrofoam chunks and instruction manual, the cord coiled neatly alongside. Aleksandr was astonished at the things Americans jettisoned.
I was proud of his abilities, and amused by his strange hobby. And here too, my undergraduate studies served me well, for in those years I frequently recalled that while trawling through the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as a college senior, I had somewhere come across a comparison, now suddenly germane, of the Russian soul (deep, long-suffering) and the American national character. (Among Russians, it is a truth almost universally acknowledged that to pair the word ‘soul’ with ‘American’ would be a gross misapplication of the former, even if English ‘soul’ has nothing approaching the fathomless depths that characterize Russian dusha, a word redolent of spirit, inspiration, breath and a host of other things mystical and profound.) The great man observed in Americans a tendency to discard possessions promiscuously, whereas Russians, he said, fix and reuse every sort of item imaginable, extending the useful life of things practically out to infinity. I cannot cite the source, but if I’m not imagining things (always a possibility, especially after thirty years), Solzhenitsyn specifically faulted Americans for tossing out their shoes rather than taking them to the cobbler to be reheeled.
I was quite sure that my Aleksandr had never read a page of Solzhenitsyn—first, because when he lived in the USSR, he didn’t move in the daring and rarefied circles where Solzhenitsyn’s writings were passed illicitly hand to hand in barely legible carbon copies (typed nine at a time, because, through trial and error, some expert producer of these printed works had figured out that the tenth layer was utterly unreadable, and this became general knowledge in the samizdat crowd), and later on, in the US, because he just wasn’t interested. This gap in his reading notwithstanding, my husband’s way with electronics was for me emblematic of the spiritual richness, the avoidance of endless, destructive cycles of acquisition and waste and the ingenuity that can arise amidst deprivation, all of which Solzhenitsyn so admired in his compatriots, and probably also in himself.
“Would you like a Walkman?” my husband would hear me say on the phone. “Aleksandr found it in the garbage and made it work.” I would say this in English or in Russian, depending on whom I was talking to—we knew almost as many Russian speakers in New York as English speakers.
I felt him seething. Why? I thought what he was doing was so admirable, required such skill. I’d never known anyone with his talent for bringing machines back from the dead.
I polled my Russian-speaking informants. Musor, Russian for ‘garbage,’ was a most unsavory word, one of them told me. Since so many people in the USSR were poor, it was the custom there to throw out only those items that were utterly revolting or unusable. In addition, musor was related to the Russian word srat’ meaning ‘to shit,’ and its numerous colorful derivatives, such as sral’nya, or ‘shithouse.’ To the Russian ear, this person said, musor was far fouler than ‘garbage.’ And so, for a long time, I thought that Aleksandr was deeply offended to hear me say that he was rooting around in the musor, when in fact he was doing something much, much cleaner.
Over the years, though, I’ve asked many other Russian speakers about musor versus garbage, and I’ve encountered no one who agrees with this explanation, no one who finds musor more revolting than garbage or thinks that the word wanders dangerously close to the semantic defecation field. Just that one person, whose identity is now lost to time.
Yet I remain irrationally attached to the garbage/musor duality. I believed it for so long, and I want language to be at the root of everything, because language is what I do. And so I’ve come full circle: where once I was loath to believe that language and cultural difference had any bearing on our problems, now I see that I sometimes overestimated their role.
Garbage is musor is garbage, all of it vile and evil smelling. What happened was simply this: I shamed him—blindly, foolishly, inadvertently—in a way that transcended language.