by Sigrid Nunez
Just arrived in America, the students speak little or no English, but class is conducted entirely in English. “Another language, another soul.” A pretty saying, but not everybody is going to see it this way. The slowness of my class’s progress fills me with anxiety. Oh, the stubborn resistance of the adult mind. For every one like my mother there are ten like my father, those who will never know English as a second language.
In the back of the class, by the window, sits the Russian. No better than the others at first, but soon my best student. A seaman from Odessa, but not Ukrainian, and not Jewish, as are most of the other Russian immigrants here. In fact, Vadim would never have left Odessa, he says, were it not for his wife, who is Jewish, and most of whose relatives were already in New York. He is fiercely proud of his Russian blood. The Communists may have destroyed his country, he says, but the Russians will always be a good people. (“Russians have a wide soul.”)
Taller than everyone else in class by at least a head. Sharp cheekbones, slanted blue eyes, full lips, large teeth, and a way of smiling that makes you understand why we say to flash a smile, because that is just what he does. I think it is the smile that makes me think of a gypsy. (And what makes Vadim smile like that, apropos of nothing, in the middle of class? I find out later, what he had promised himself: “By end this class, I fuck this teacher.” And every time he remembered this resolution, he would flash those teeth.)
Teaching the conditional, I ask the students to say what each of us would be if he or she were an animal. I am told that I would be a Siamese cat. And Vadim? “A wolf! A wolf!”
Nothing about him that is not long—long face, long arms and legs, long waist. In youth, a competitive swimmer; at thirty-seven, still long and lithe. An adolescent body, all muscle and bone. But the face is worn, already old, the face of a longtime substance abuser. And the hair is mostly gray. He has the throaty bass voice common to Russian men, and he wears the international uniform: black leather jacket and very tight jeans—the uniform that would not be complete without the knife in one of the pockets. (Walking in the park with him at dusk, I tense at every man who approaches. “You don’t have to be afraid,” he says. “I am from Odessa. I very good with knife.”) When the weather turns warm, I catch a glimpse of the crucifix he wears on a chain around his neck and wonder: What must his wife think of that? In the streets of Brighton Beach, it draws stares and occasional comment. A habit of kissing it when he wants you to believe something he says: not at all convincing.
I am proud (unduly, maybe) of his progress in English—as if he could not have learned so well from any other teacher but me. At a certain point, I have no choice but to recommend that he go to a higher level. When he refuses, I am secretly glad. I give him extra homework, he writes me long letters, which I read and correct, and his progress continues at the same fast rate.
When he asks to see me outside class and I tell him no, he blames his poor English. If I understood Russian, I would not turn him down, he is utterly sure of that. The better his English, the better his chances with me. So he works and works, until he is way ahead of his classmates. Over their heads, he and I hit the ball, our talk full of the double entendres that are the heart of flirtation.
About his own progress he later says: “I did it only for you, because I knew I have only a little time, and I study, study, study, because I want to—to—”
I teach him the word seduce.
He laments that he cannot do his seducing in Russian—a richer language than English, he insists, better for making love.
“I like to dream,” he writes in one of his letters. “Because in dreams you can have all what you want.” He says that he often dreams of going back to Odessa and taking me along as his wife.
In my own dream he stays married, takes me as a lover, and teaches me Russian.
Thirty-seven years old and already two years a grandfather. A not uncommon Russian story. Married at twenty, he became husband and father at once, for his wife had a two-year-old son by another marriage. “We meet first time on tram.” Of course: “I wanted son of my own blood.” But: “When I went to place where my daughter born” (Russian style, the father is nowhere near the mother when she gives birth), “and they tell me she girl, I run out from that place.” The grudge against mother and daughter lasted for years. He had little feeling for this baby girl who did nothing but “all time cry.” But once she outgrew her infancy everything changed. Telling the story, he makes small clutching and clinging gestures, he imitates her childish cry: “Father, Father.” She got her message across. “From that time I begin to love her, and I always love her since.” Now Svetlana is fifteen and: “She has my head. Mother’s face, but my head.” Proud. He has high hopes for his girl. Only a few months in this country, she is doing well in school, and her English is as good as his. “She will go to college, no doubt about it.”
Mother is a different story. She speaks no English at all and she will not learn it.
Yet another marriage doomed—it seems to me, at least—from the start.
Right after the wedding, Vadim moves into the single room where his wife and stepson have been living with her parents. A newlywed’s hell. At night, only a curtain separates the beds. Though Vadim and his wife hardly dare to breathe, the father complains every morning about the creaking mattress, how it disrupts his sleep. Between Vadim and his wife’s people there will always be trouble. In time, husband and father-in-law come to blows. More than once the police are called in to restore peace. Vadim insists that his wife’s people do not like him because he is Russian. In Russia, he says, every Jewish joke is about the stupidity of Russians. He blames a lot of the problems of his marriage on race. “It is mistake to marry other race, now I see it,” he says. Homesick, he never forgets that it is because his wife is Jewish that they have come to the United States.
One last hard drunken brawl ends with the father-in-law falling down dead. Murder? An autopsy shows a cerebral hemorrhage. Enough to clear Vadim in the eyes of the law, but not in the hearts of his wife’s family.
Incredibly, no one thinks of divorce. And now, many years later, family history repeats itself, in a Brooklyn housing project. Vadim and his wife and their daughter, his stepson and his wife and their two-year-old boy, and Vadim’s mother-in-law, all squeezed into the powder keg of a small one-bedroom apartment. The very windows hum with the tension. Vadim and his mother-in-law have exchanged hardly a word since her husband’s death. Daily fights between Vadim and his wife. “She scream and scream.” He says that when he runs into his neighbors, who are all Russians too, and who can understand every word, they look at him with disgust. Since there are more people living in that apartment than the lease allows, it is folly to draw attention to themselves. And so Vadim sees his wife’s refusal to lower her voice as a sign of madness. But she will not be shut up. And what does she scream? That Vadim is no good, that he is ugly and useless, and that his penis is too small. Be all that as it may, she is his wife. No matter how bad the fighting gets, she always does her work. Always food on the table, a tidy house, clean clothes. Every penny Vadim earns he turns over to her, and when he needs money for something he must get it from her. How strange, I think, but: “It is Russian style.”
Money. As always, the first order of business. How to make a living in the new country. In the beginning there is help: welfare, food stamps, free medical care, free English classes. (Hard to imagine how my students could do without such help, though of course my own parents had to do without it.) Repeated attempts to find work at the Brooklyn Marine Terminal come to nothing, and Vadim begins training to drive a cab. The owner of a Queens garage pays for his training, and in return Vadim must work for him for two months. (On his first day of work, he calls me from the street: “Are you free now? I wanted to take you for walk in my cab.”) At first he does not know the city, where and when to get fares. He works the night shift, and in the small hours sometimes cruises for miles without finding a fare. As a new hire he is not permit
ted to work Friday or Saturday nights, the best nights for business. Almost impossible to make much more than the $120 a night he must pay the garage for the use of the cab. Counting his money in the ash-pink dawn, he sees that, after ten hours, he has made only a few dollars for himself. More drivers than cars at his garage. Some days he goes to work and waits up to five hours for a car before giving up and going back home.
He sees an ad in the Russian newspaper: asbestos workers, thirty dollars an hour. “Oh, you don’t want to do that!” But it is like trying to warn the Russians against swimming in the waters of Brighton Beach. (“Cleaner than Black Sea,” they insist.) Vadim says, “If I must be afraid of everything I cannot live.” He smokes four packs of Marlboros a day. What’s a little asbestos? Both of his parents died in their early fifties, his mother just weeks after Vadim left for America. (“Today I received big sorrow,” he wrote on his homework. “My mother is no more.”) It was the hardships of Soviet life that killed them, Vadim believes. “I will not live long either. I have maybe ten, maybe fifteen years,” he says. Calm.
But as it turns out, like so many ads for jobs in the immigrant papers, this one is a scam. To get the job you must have training, and to get that training you must pay a fee. When he goes to apply for this job, Vadim strikes up a conversation with a supervisor, who is Polish. They speak half in English, half in Russian. Vadim asks him what the chances are of getting the job after paying the fee of four hundred dollars. The Pole answers honestly. Vadim thanks him and leaves.
Before his obligation to the garage that paid for his training has been fulfilled, Vadim moves on. He has met another Odessan who lives in his neighborhood and who has his own cab. The owner agrees to let Vadim have the cab every other day. Vadim can keep it for twenty-four hours and drive whatever times he wants. Most days he sets out at dawn and drives between ten and fifteen hours, and on a good day manages to earn about three hundred dollars, half of which goes to the cab’s owner and to pay for gas. By this time: “I know city like palm of my hand.”
But there are bad days too. Very soon he is robbed. “Where did it happen?” “Amsterdam and One-oh-two.” “One hundred-and-second.” This gets a laugh. “I get robbed with gun, and you can think only to correct my English.”
It is summer now, and I find myself often thinking of him, putting in over two hundred miles a day, not using the air conditioner so as to conserve gas (“I tell passengers it broke”), while my friends and I discuss the difficulties of making ends meet, over frozen margaritas in SoHo. My students never go to bars or restaurants. Most of them have eaten in a restaurant only once or twice in their lives. They try not to go anywhere that costs money. They hardly ever go to the movies, but they all have television, and they all have seen The Terminator. (“Arnold Schwarzenegger. He is your minister of culture, yes?” one student asks.)
Every day, when he goes off to work, Vadim’s wife packs him two sandwiches and one or two pieces of fruit. He eats these sometime during the day, and that is all he eats, because he is too tired to eat when he gets home from work. Soon he has lost ten pounds. Stopping for a meal during working hours is a luxury he would never allow himself. But going without cigarettes, expensive though they are, is just as unthinkable.
By now he has been in America for four months. The English course in which I taught him has come to an end. He is the first one in the class to find a job. Most of the others are still on welfare. And so will they be for a long time to come. Many for the rest of their lives, predicts Vadim. Disdainful.
Though he is proud to have found a job, he makes no secret of how much he loathes it. He is appalled at the whistling doormen of Park Avenue. “You know what I do to someone in Odessa if he whistle for me?” He stacks his fists and twists them in opposite directions—a gesture that he uses all the time but that never fails to unnerve me. But here: “Nothing I can do. I am nobody in this country. I must be as nigger here.” The whistles are only a means of getting the drivers’ attention, I suggest. But Vadim scoffs. “All doorman has to do is put out his hand and all drivers will see him. No. People whistle for you because they want to make you feel like dog.”
In spite of everything, he never loses his humor. He is easily amused, he is a good talker, and he likes to tell stories about what happens on the job.
“Black man get in my cab, light up marijuana and say, ‘Russian, eh? So, how do you like black people?’”
He is convinced—and what immigrant isn’t?—that all Americans are crazy. The man who says he prefers to sit up front, then offers Vadim ten dollars to pull out his cock. The women who leave business cards with their tips: “Call me if you want to practice your English.” (American women are not shy, I tell him. “But in Russia only a whore would do it so.”) The young man who obviously has money but whose jeans are all holes. The foxy blond who turns out to be a man. The dog walker who hails a cab to go one block home, because his dog got tired. Vadim discovers that many New Yorkers are fascinated to meet a Russian. “Are you really from Russia?” “Yes, really.” For the hundredth time. “You may touch me if you want.” The Barnard student, a Russian major, who chats in nearly perfect Russian and leaves twenty dollars for a three-dollar fare.
One day he makes an illegal left onto Fifth Avenue. A policeman sees him. Vadim thinks he is dreaming when he gets out of the cab and hears the cop shout “Ne dvigatsya!” Every New York cop must have to learn this one Russian phrase: Don’t move.
“But how did he know I am Russian?”
Making small talk with his passengers, or eavesdropping on their conversations, he picks up more English. “What means take it easy?” “What means actually? Why everyone use this word all time?” I tell him that actually is one of those words that can’t be explained, but he will understand it after he’s heard it enough times. And sure enough one day I find this message on my answering machine: “I know what means actually now!”
In the beginning, before he has learned his way around, he announces to each passenger: “I am new to this city and I only begin this job. Can you tell me, please, how to get there?” Most people are patient. But one old woman going to Central Park West throws up her hands in disgust. “What business do you have driving a cab if you don’t know where you are going?”
“I say, Oh, listen, how do you think? I drive cab to feed my family. Believe me, I don’t do it to annoy you.” He hits the gas then, and soon—“like so many my passengers”—she is shrieking at him to slow down. “‘Slow down! Slow down!’ Why they all want me to slow down? Do they think I don’t know how to drive? No, I say them, I cannot slow down, I must make money. I don’t understand. This woman, for example. She must be eighty, maybe ninety years old, but she cling to life.” He shakes his head. “I don’t understand.”
No, he wouldn’t understand. He is not afraid of anything. He is not afraid to drive a cab at night, without a partition, even after he’s been robbed. He is not afraid to drive to any neighborhood, at any hour.
“Why do I have to be afraid? If my God want me to die right now, I die. If he want me to live, I live. You are like my wife, afraid of everything, I feel it all time. But then you are woman, it must be so. But my daughter is different, she is like me, she is not afraid of anything. She has my head, my blood.”
Driving in the cab with him, I see it for myself: precisely that combination of recklessness and expertise that I would have predicted. But something puzzles me, and as we career through the streets I have to ask myself: Why is it that the collisions he so skillfully avoids make me feel safer and in better hands than I would feel were he to drive slowly and sanely?
I know this: He is the only truly fearless person I have ever met. And his fearlessness is part of the spell that binds me. “You are safe with me,” he says. I want to believe him. “You don’t have to be afraid of anything when I am near you.”
I believe him.
The first time I see him without his shirt, I see the scars. On the insides of his arms, on his midriff; one curve
d like an eyebrow above the nipple-eye of his left breast. “Odessa. It is life in Odessa. Always trouble, always fighting. In Odessa, I was as an animal.” This is not the moment to correct the preposition, so I refrain. He says something in Russian that doubtless translates as dog eat dog, or kill or be killed.
The biggest scar is on the inside of his left arm, between elbow and wrist. “I was tired from everything,” is all he will say.
The oldest man I have ever been to bed with. The skin of his body is beautiful, tight and smooth, a decade younger than the skin of his face. Leggy blue-black spider climbs his arm. The crucifix keeps getting caught in my mouth.
On his body: “I am nothing now. But when I was twenty I was perfect man. I was sportsman, very strong. But then drugs … drink …”
Another question I ask myself a lot: Had I known everything about him, would I have resisted? (I did resist at first. I told him it was inappropriate for me to see him outside class. Impossible. School rules. Not to mention his being married. Impossible? He knew better. How? He says that after his first declaration of love—he managed to work a declaration of love into almost every homework—he noticed that I avoided meeting his eyes during class. His interpretation: She likes me too. It was so. But if I had known everything about him, would I have kept on resisting?)
“I was big drugger in Odessa.”
Vocabulary lesson. I teach him addict, junkie, needle, habit, shoot up, get high, OD.
About a year before coming to America, he tried the popular at-home cure: Knock yourself out with sleeping pills for a couple of weeks. It worked and it didn’t work. He could not resist shooting up a few more times before leaving Odessa, and in New York it is only a matter of time before the right (or wrong, I should say) passenger gets in his cab. In the way of these things, they know each other instantly (as I suppose we did too). They drive to East Harlem. (“That room. It was very interesting for me to see. Because it was the same like in Odessa. Empty room, one table, chair. Cards on table. Just the same. Druggers are the same everywhere.” He scores a gram of cocaine and goes home “to cook it.” He has never done coke before. It is not at all the high he expects but he has no regrets. He shrugs off my fears. “I just wanted to taste American drugs, but I am not going to get habit again. Now I have to work hard and make money, I can’t think about drugs. Maybe later.”