Elliott Holt - You Are One of Them

I found my way to the lights of Pushkin Square—home of Moscow’s first McDonald’s—and down Tverskaya toward the Kremlin. Stepping into Red Square was like entering a movie I’d watched a thousand times. It looked exactly as it did on TV, and yet the scale of the place—bordered by the imposing walls of the Kremlin and the candy-colored onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral—overwhelmed me. I stared at the armed guards outside the mausoleum. it said. It was Lenin’s tomb. Throughout history, Russian leaders—czars and then secretaries-general—had set out to make people feel small and powerless, and my insignificance as an individual was especially clear to me as I stood there. I could feel the weight of history. I wanted to take it all in, but I was afraid to stay still for too long, as though my freedom would be confiscated if I didn’t keep moving.

I was afraid to go into a restaurant alone—I didn’t trust my Russian, was terrified to speak—but in a fit of hunger one afternoon I managed to order a slice of pizza. “Adin,” I said. One. I pointed at the plain cheese pie. As I paid the girl behind the counter—the price glowed on her register, which was a relief, because I couldn’t understand her—I sounded out the Cyrillic on the sign above her head. I was at Pizza Hut. I should have recognized the logo, but in a foreign alphabet even familiar signs were disorienting.

After only an hour or two, I’d retreat to Corinne’s apartment, just to feel invisible again. Every time I got home, I felt defeated. I wanted to be a fearless, adventurous traveler, but Moscow intimidated me. At home I boned up on Russian grammar. If I could just master the language, I thought, I’d feel less helpless. I perused recent issues of the Moscow Times, trying to make sense of the place. In addition to the world-news stories, there were a lot of pieces dedicated to adjusting to life in Russia. I read reviews of bars and restaurants endorsed by expats, recommendations for inexpensive cultural outings (the opera and ballet were a steal!), and local news items that had been translated from the Russian papers. Most of the news was bad. Moscow, I learned, led the developed world in the number of fire deaths. The current grain harvest was the smallest in thirty years. President Yeltsin and his first deputy prime minister, Anatoly Chubais, were trying to reform the country’s banking system in the wake of a liquidity crisis. Two American balloonists had been shot down and killed by a Belarusan air-defense unit. A government statement claimed that the balloonists were flying too close to a missile base. And Russia’s nuclear-safety watchdog voiced concern about supervision of the country’s military-industrial complex. In July, while in the hospital recovering from a heart attack, President Yeltsin had signed an order excluding civilian inspectors from military facilities. I decided not to mention this in my e-mails to my mother. I kept my missives upbeat. “The architecture is amazing,” I wrote . “The women on the street wear super-short skirts even when it’s really cold.”

The most harrowing news I read was about a nine-year-old girl who threw herself in front of a Moscow train. Only a few lines were dedicated to the story, as if it weren’t so unusual. Definitely suicide, the paper said. No known motive. I found myself thinking about that girl a lot, wondering what kind of pain could drive someone so young to give up on life.

One day I returned home to find the housekeeper in the kitchen. She was barrel-chested and smelled like mayonnaise. She lit up when she saw me. “Amerikanka?” she said.

“Da,” I told her.

She clapped her hands. She wanted to visit America. She wanted to learn English, she said. She said something else I couldn’t catch. “Medlenno,” I said. Slowly.

So she reduced her speed. “Nina,” she said, and pointed at her chest.

“Sarah,” I said.

She turned on the television set. There were two channels in English: CNN International and BBC World. She switched to the BBC, where a game show called Ready, Steady, Cook had just begun.

“Ya khochu ponimat,” she said. I want to understand.

So I got my Russian dictionary and sat there on the sofa with her.

“Chto eto?” she’d say. What is it? She pointed at the ingredients, waited for me to unlock the mysteries of the recipe.

I flipped through my dictionary as fast as I could to find the answer. In some cases this required two leaps of translation, first into American English, then into Russian. The aubergine of the Brits on TV—and of my father, I realized—was eggplant to me and baklazhan to Nina. Courgette was zucchini in American English, kabachok in Russian. Nina was avid and spirited; when I mispronounced a word, she leaned close to see the book herself. We were a good team.

Ready, Steady, Cook was on every afternoon. I began watching it even on the days Nina wasn’t at the apartment. The premise was simple: Two contestants each spent five quid on food, and then the competing celebrity chefs had twenty minutes to turn those ingredients into something palatable. The contestants would carry their groceries onto the London set, thrilled to be on the telly, and when they emptied the contents of their bags out on the kitchen counter, the chefs would study the ingredients and feign distress. “What am I going to do with a pineapple?” they’d say. But they always came up with something. They had to make do with whatever they got.

IN THOSE BEWILDERING EARLY DAYS, I dreamed often of Jenny. Sometimes we were in her pool, playing Marco Polo. My eyes were closed, and I was groping around the shallow end, trying to find her. Marco, I called . Polo, she said, in a voice that barely suppressed a laugh. Marco. Polo . Polo . Polo. But the closer I moved to the voice, the farther away she was, and then I wasn’t in a pool at all but in some kind of sludgy muck through which it was impossible to move. Marco, I called helplessly from the mire, but there was no answer, and I’d wake to find that my sheets were twisted around me because I’d been swimming in my sleep. It was embarrassing how unoriginal my subconscious was. But in the dream, she was so real that I could practically smell her. She was within reach, closer than I’d been to her in years, and her voice was urging me on— Polo! Polo!— as if she couldn’t wait to be found.

SVETLANA AGREED TO MEET ME by Patriarch’s Ponds. “I will wear the red hat,” she wrote . And on Saturday morning, at the appointed time, I found her sitting on a bench and wearing a red beret. She was slender and lithe, with the erect posture of a ballerina, and her legs looked especially long in her black miniskirt and tall boots. She wore a black wool cape with operatic proportions. In my corduroys and down vest, I felt crude. I felt a little better when I noticed a small hole in the left knee of her tights and observed that the elegance of her carriage was marred by her hair, which was brittle and streaked with peroxide. (“One thing the women here really need,” Corinne had said to me earlier, “is conditioner. All these bad dye jobs have totally wrecked their hair.”)

“So you are the Sarah Zuckerman,” Svetlana said.

“Ochen priyatno,” I said. Nice to meet you. It had been two years since my last Russian class, and the words felt heavy and hard to maneuver.