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By Russell Working
It has gotten this bad: Whenever anyone asks how long I have been in Russia -- a storekeeper, an acquaintance, any unemployed sailor who drives me around for a few rubles -- I tell him, "More than a year." "A year!" they cry, and I cringe at the unstated question: So why is your Russian so lousy? Actually, it's worse than that. I have lived here for two years, and my Russian can generously be described as halting. "Yes," I will chuckle at my driver's tattooed knuckles, avoiding his gaze. "I speak Russian badly." "Oh-ho-ho, no! It's not bad at all for a year. Two years -- well, that would be different." Precisely. And so I have finally decided to do something about it. I have gone back to school for a month. I came to Vladivostok knowing not one word of Russian, not even what to say if you tramp on someone's foot on the streetcar (I soon learned the answer: Nothing). And I have since survived in the cocoon of an English-speaking workplace, assisted by a translator when I interview. My girlfriend Nonna did her best to teach me, but I nodded off during lessons from our Soviet-era textbook. My lousy Russian was well known at work, and I felt a Nixonian paranoia when my American employees took to conversing in Russian in my presence: REPORTER A: Do you have the dictionary? REPORTER B: The big one? REPORTER A: Yes. Why the secrecy? What about the bigness of dictionaries were they seeking to hide from the boss? Should this be confronted at a staff meeting? On Monday I started at Far Eastern State University. I took a long written test in which I purposely marked numerous answers wrong so I wouldn't be placed over my head. But somehow the strategy backfired, and I ended up in a second-level class with two Japanese women who write graceful cursive Cyrillic and whisper fluent, inaudible witticisms. Our conversations would drive some instructors batty, but encouragingly, ours spends most of her time correcting the Japanese students' "r's. HARUMI: (extended incomprehensible monologue ending in the word lisovat). RUSSELL: (winging it) Da! My name is Russell Oo-orking. I come from Seattle. I have four brothers. Want some gum? PROFESSOR: That's "risovat," Harumi. Nonna is hopeful that I will be reading Pushkin and Speed Info any day now. I will be happy just to walk away with a few more vocabulary words. And if not, I have a plan. I'm telling the next driver, "I've lived here for more than a month."
Russell Working is editor of the Vladivostok News. "Letter from Vladivostok" runs weekly here and the Moscow Times.
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