The Snug: A Blog

From Ohiowa Impromptu:

       Marina learned from the Nutlanders about odd weekend events called "yard sales," or "garage sales," at which American families flung open their front doors and garages and divested themselves for a price of unwanted belongings that would have furnished a dozen comfortable homes back in Russia. The point seemed to be to stand outside one's house and make deprecating remarks to strangers about one's own possessions, thereby smearing both buyer and seller with the opprobrium of bad taste.

            "Oh I don't know what ever possessed me to buy that silly old thing, but I can tell you I can't wait to get rid of it."

            But Marina didn't care about taste; or rather, she knew what was good and what was poshlost. Mostly, she knew what she wanted, and went in search of it. And at one of these yard sales, in her second week in New Ur, she found an ornate standing lamp, a bronze Doric pillar crowned with a tasseled shade depicting unicorns, identical to the lamp that had illuminated her childhood readings of Gogol, Paustovsky, and Tolstoy, in the parlor at No. 117 Yanitsa in Rostov, across from the old V. I. Lenin Shoe Factory (from where twice a day for decades emanated a piercing whistle, which, one day in 1991, fell silent forever). She gazed at the lamp and thought of home, her papochka and mamushka who were now dead, her sister Ivana who was now a "limousine hostess" in Petersburg, her little brother Oleg who was now the owner of the Ritz-Monako taxi and bus service in Rostov. She thought of them all, but she shed no tears.

            A gilded leather set of the complete works of Nikolai Nekrasov, acquired for a dollar at the Horned Rim bookstore downtown, adorned the top shelf of the glass bookcase in the living room, through whose French windows the setting winter sun cast a melancholy–purplish–almost Russian–light. It threw the Stranglers into shadow but illuminated the Pont des Arts and silhouetted the spidery shapes of barren sycamores against bleached-white stratocumulus daubed across the sky-canvas by some divine Fragonard.[1] Marina was simultaneously put in mind of eighteenth-century France and her Slavic homeland, via the Hermitage: then she felt the winds blowing across the black steppe of her soul and she was glad to be in America.

                                                *          *          *          *

            Academic life at Downstairs State, she found, was mostly sidelined by silly meetings, long lunches, and an incredible number of games–volleyball, American football, basketball, baseball, softball, handball, netball, kickball, ball-ball, etc.  She met few people in her first days on the job, mostly because her classes had been delayed by some computer-generated irregularity in the registration of her courses at the Department of Slavic, Slavonic, Slovenian, and Slovak Studies—“Old Slavonic Epic Verse 203A” and “Basic Russky 101” had been reversed and renumbered 1 to 43—that would require postponing everything until the second week of the new semester.

            “New computer system,” said Helen Hillendale, the Dean’s secretary, a motherly-seeming specimen, rotund and smiling, with an unmotherly coldness of eye. When Marina went into Helen's office to receive her identity card, she was greeted by several pictures of cats, or possibly the same cat, where one might expect to see human family photos. They reminded her that she had been contemplating acquiring a dog as to mitigate the solitude, but she felt the stirrings of second thoughts, contemplating Helen Hillendale. Maybe it was better to be just by yourself instead of ending up with an animal substitute for human company. And treating humans the way you should be treating animals. (Marina had a very Russian attitude, composed in equal parts of cynicism and tenderness.) Besides, at 38 she was still youngish; and as a woman, not to mention the former Miss Rostov Greater Metropolitan Oblast, she knew human (i.e., male) company would be along in due course, want it or not. And that might render the presence of an animal redundant, or superfluous.

“You know how it is,” said Helen.

"How is what?"         

“With computers. Don't worry, we’ll get it all sorted out soon enough. Meanwhile, be sure to drop in at Chuck’s for the cookout.  He does a great brisket. It’s the best place to meet everybody.”

            “Everybody?”

            “Your colleagues, you know.”

            “Ah. Of course. And Chack….? He is….?”

            “Oh I’m sorry. Dean McCantinflas. We all call him Chuck."

            "Why?"

            "Why? Well, because it's his name. No, actually his name is Charles. Well, because he wants us to, I guess."

            "But he's Dean of Faculty, no? And so how is calling Dean of Faculty 'Chack' is showing respect?"

            Helen Hillendale, who had been looking bemused, sat forward with an expression of sudden comprehension on her pseudo-motherly face.

            "I understand, Marina, that people like you, from the Old World, if I may, find our American informality a little, ah. Surprising. But don't worry, you'll get used to it."

            "Ha! Maybe. Maybe not."

            But she was unsurprised. It was nothing that she hadn't seen in Russia, where such informality, not to say rudeness, represented the "new" thinking, especially between Russian guys who called each other by American names: Hi, Frank; hey, Bobby; yo, Dzhim....[2]        

            "So anyway, Chuck throws this big faculty party at his house at the start of the semester every year, so people can get acquainted. It’s on for this Saturday night. Haven’t you met him yet?”

            “No. Not yet.”

            “Why, hello. How are you?”

            Helen was still looking at Marina, but she was addressing her remarks to the caller at the other, invisible end of the phone on her desk, which had suddenly emitted a gargling sound, like a person taking mouthwash. 

            “Yes, funny, I was just talking about you to our new ah ah ah,” she covered the mouthpiece with a plump beringed hand, “I’m sorry, you are Russian, aren’t you?” she inquired in an undertone, as if apologetic for such indiscretion. “Yes? Ahem. Our new Russian professor, Miz ah. Marina um.” She nodded pleasantly at Marina. “She says she’ll be there.”

            It wasn’t as if she had any choice, not as a newly-hired Adjunct Professor who’d been damned lucky to get the job and knew it.

            "Yeah, I'm looking forward."

            She was, in a way. In another way, of course, she wasn't, not at all. Even (or especially) back in Russia she was no good at social events. She'd always been solitary, preferring an imaginary voyage to (say) Provence, aided by Daudet's Lettres de mon Moulin and Bizet's Arlésienne at hollow and scratchy top volume on her old record player, to a real journey across town to (say) a birthday party at her uncle Spivakov's apartment on Krupskaya, even though back in the day uncle Spivakov was a high-ranking Party member and had, as her papochka always said, "the best damned apartment a lifetime of palm-greasing and ass-kissing can buy." But that wasn't it, although uncle Spivakov always made her want to move rapidly away in the opposite direction;[3] rather, it was the prying–the artificiality–the mediocrity–the mendacity of social chit-chat, post-Communism especially. Under Communism, for all its miseries (maybe because life was so miserable), people were mentally more alive, they talked more about serious things like Marxism vs. the West; freedom of expression vs. the dictatorship of the proletariat; world revolution vs. socialism in one country; the extent of individual artistic license vs. the demands of socialist realism...that was their compensation, then, having big subjects to talk about. (And vodka to drink, even when that idiot Gorbachev tried to crack down on the national pastime and forced people to distill their own samogon rotgut.) You never knew, then, who might not be there in the morning, so the biggest subject of all always loomed in the wings. Anyway, Marina had always wanted to talk about big subjects, feeling that Life was too short and precious to be whittled away with penknife-strokes of "Did you see Lyubov Maximova's new perm?" and "Ivan Ivanovich just got a BMW" and "I think I'll take Mutzi to the groomer tomorrow." Not that mundanities didn't have their place, in this most mundane existence. It was just that, beyond the billboards and factory chimneys and powerlines of Life, there was the vast restless sky; and that was God, if anything was. Or at least Art, and there was no difference, really.

            But that was all over. Sure, she'd go to "Chuck's" barbecue on Saturday. Because she was lucky, it was true. Not just to have the job, which could go away at the end of the year anyway; she also got a green card and a house and maybe, someday soon, a car.  All because Pavel Andreyevich Pnin, an ex-professor of U.S. and Canadian Studies at Gennady State College who had been originally supposed to take the position at Downstairs State, went on a hunting expedition to the upper Yenisei with Simyon Ostrovsky, the media oligarch, and somehow got himself shot three times in the solar plexus. Big suspicion was that Ostrovsky had shot Pavel Andreyevich himself because Pavel Andreyevich, who was also some poet or other in his spare time, had published a poem in the local Literaturniy Zavod entitled “Klarissa,” full of “o”s and “ah”s and “breast” and “ass” and “let me in”s; and of course Ostrovsky’s new 19-year-old squeeze was none other than Klarissa Helmand, the Volga German starlet (Exciting Times at Ex-Collective Farm No. 114A; Meet Comrade Sputnika), so the connection was clear, even if the reason for Pavel Andreyevich agreeing to go on the trip in the first place wasn’t…apart from being told to by Ostrovsky, and when oligarch tells you to do something, you do it. Like, “Drop everything and go to America.”

            Anyway, upshot was that Marina got the phone call and was offered the job, plus residence permit and house, in record time, almost as if somebody knew how desperate she was to never again in her entire life see the view from her office window of Chaikovsky Steel Mill across the railroad tracks and the dead smokestacks and the streetcar rails and the Nativity's gaudy gilded domes under the smoke and fog of Rostov-on-Don. Plus, her English was pretty good, considering she’d only spent about ten days in an English-speaking country...in London, in '02, “studying” at a language school but really just having a good time at the Millennium Dom and Lambeth Church and Churchill Park Corner, all those places she remembered reading about as an eager, dreamy young English student in Dr. Oksana Kronwald’s literature course at Rostov State Pedagogical University: Dickens, Perkins, Powett, Powys, Poe….(too bad about Oksana, just think if she’d hung on a little longer the Communists would have made their big comeback and she with them, instead of which she’d disappeared on a “cultural” visit to North Korea, poor deluded thing)….

            Okh.

            Also, Marina needed to put behind all the memories of her ex-husband, stupid Khlebnatov. That was another reason she was so eager to get out of Rostov, out of Russia: The longer she stayed, the more likely it was that he’d pop up again, maybe sober, maybe not (hey, who was she kidding? Definitely not), making trouble for her one way or another. She was afraid he'd track her down over here, now that Russians could go anywhere. But maybe he got a job with some other oligarch. Those guys were always on the lookout for muscle, and Khlebnatov had more muscle than brains, she’d give him that: he came up the hard way, from Tamangorodok, a tough coal-mining town in the Donbass, through the old Pioneers and the Army and the Party, to the ideological conversion unit at Rostov State, where they met. Bogu moyu was he handsome, in those days. Like a blond Ukrainian version of the English actor John Blatt, or Blott. But he soon went down the spiral staircase headfirst in both hands, as they said back home. And they never had kids, another thing he blamed on her. Well, he was wrong: He was impotent as a stone, she had it from the nurse Ruzhina, who was one of those he'd tried it on with, without success. No; Khlebnatov was just one of those old-fashioned Russian guys who couldn’t get used to the idea that women could do a good job of life without some manly malchik hanging around. Five times a day he’d called her at first, after the divorce came through and she got the assistant professor’s job and he got, as he put it, “nu, shto, less than the nothing that’s at the bottom of an empty vodka bottle,” and the bottom of vodka bottles was something he sure knew a lot about, like half the men in Russia. By the fifth call every day, back in those days, he was drunk, bombed, blind ПЬЯНЫЙ, and full of threats and sentimental snatches of old Cossack army songs. More than once she had to get the militsiya to send a guy around; but when the militsiya guy showed up, he was usually drunk, too.

            So screw all Russian men.

            “Yeah. Screw Russian men,” said Marina aloud, facing the Stranglers. It was after dinner (a quite good borscht followed by OK golubtsy), vodka-on-the-rocks in one hand, navy-blue Combs & Duncan cigarette in the other. She found she was talking to herself aloud quite a lot, having lived alone for two years, so she forced herself to do it in English: good practice.

            “Screw them all.”

            Tricky, those “th”s. Always coming out like “z”: “Screw zem.”

Never mind, she’d get the hang of it some day