vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #156 / Social life / Reading article...

Perhaps it was the moment we boarded an American jet in Vladivostok that our relationship began to transform — the American and the Russian newspaperman.

I am a foreigner who fumbles about in Russian when compelled to, and I settled into an English-speaking environment like a gray-muzzled hound dog that crawls up onto the sofa and collapses with a sigh. I was heading home on vacation.

Andrei is the editor of a Russian bi-weekly who was flying to Oakland, Calif. to observe a U.S. paper, and now he was the one flipping through a Russian-English dictionary and reduced to pointing at a tray of drinks when he couldn’t call to mind the words “apple juice.”

We were the perfect traveling companions. We spoke each other’s language with an equal difficulty, so neither us felt shy speaking in the other’s presence.

But as we arrived in Anchorage, everything for me became easy. For Andrei, it was the reverse — a world where customs agents want to seize your candy and the man behind the counter can’t explain in Russian how to find your bags when you missed your connecting flight.

Having been home in the Seattle area for about eight hours now, I am already savoring life in the U.S. I took a long walk crossing numerous thoroughfares without once having my life threatened by a car (twice a motorist stopped and waved me across as I jaywalked; I gaped, as if at a maniac). I window-shopped at a supermarket studying the fresh pasta and kumquats and wedges of parmesan cheese. I stared at the mowed lawns and at multistorey buildings whose facades were not made of prefab concrete.

Many of our national debates may seem like the squabbles of comfortable folks (you’ve got to be pretty assured about the rest of life’s needs to sustain a lengthy national debate on physician-assisted suicide). But easiness is a matter of perspective.

Human interaction begins with the ability to communicate by speech. It is no wonder the Soviet Union took such satisfaction in separating authors like Solzhenitsyn from their native tongue by means of exile.

As a writer of a somewhat lesser stature, I nevertheless was overwhelmed to enter the University of Washington bookstore and see thousands of volumes written in the language I first heard whispered to me in my crib.

I hope Andrei is having a great time in Oakland. But however comfortable I may find things here, I suspect he will be sighing with relief as he heads the other direction across the Pacific.