Notes From the B Train: Part 2

by Lucy Morris

View: Part 1

V.
It goes dark and cold in Brighton Beach without me noticing. The Christmas wreaths have been lit and a staff of what seems like dozens is hard at work on holiday displays, bringing me signs to proofread. An outrageously sized television has been placed in the front of the store facing the street. It plays loops of video advertisements that feature a series of blonde, high-cheekboned Slavic women who all look alike. The sound is muted and they move their facial muscles double time and try triply hard to entice you into the store without making a sound.

I have been coming here every day for six months and it turns out I am lonely. So I am plotting friendship. The only thing I miss about working with Americans is the ease with which camaraderie can be established between two people. There is always a crazy customer with an inflated sense of importance or a secretary meaner than her job description should allow, and stories about those characters and circumstances keep conversation going throughout the day and, if you are lucky, after work hours are over.

My rare conversations at this job are almost entirely about my understanding of Russian, my coworkers’ misunderstanding of English, or some genial combination of the two with a touch of humor about cultural drinking practices. There is also my constant suspicion that I am somehow the butt of a joke I can’t understand. Nobody knows where I live or whom with, what I do at night or on weekends, or even my age and education level. I would like to change this, at least a little bit, and my best prospect looks to be Igor. Igor wears a cell phone holster, occasionally asks my opinion, and makes good use of his limited English to cobble together Dick Cheney jokes. In general, I think he's magnificent. There are days when I believe he does nothing except read whatever website provides information on both Iraqi insurgencies and Lady Gaga's new videos – a combination that I find amiable since it is reminiscent of my own liberal arts college curriculum.

My second prospect is Alyosha. Alyosha is a Gogolian figure, with an oversized overcoat and gut, a sparkle of gold teeth, and the air of a civil servant about him. He and Igor are – for now – the best of friends. I like to see myself going on cigar breaks with them, or stepping out for lunchtime pierogies: two middle aged Russian peas and a confused American girl half their age, all in the pod chairs of the Cafe Arbat.

If that fails, there is always Anastasia, the kind of Russian woman that inspired the folktale, “Princess Never-Smile.” Occasionally Anastasia is given the impression that she is responsible for my work, and as a result we are bound together by a series of knowing looks and nods, which indicate her accountability and my submission to it. She has a deep look of sadness about her at all times - permanent frown lines that exaggerate her age by perhaps as much as a decade - and a fleece vest she keeps at work, the lapels of which she clings to for warmth and comfort. Anastasia consumes more caffeine than me, visiting Starbucks sometimes twice a day for the largest sizes of the blackest coffee. One Monday I run into her in the morning, just about to clock in. She doesn't look like she has ingested any caffeine yet, frown lines firmly in descent. I ask her how she is. She glances up at me appraisingly. "Excellent," she says in robust Russian, smileless, without the slightest hint of either sarcasm or enthusiasm.

VI.
Sometimes I work with Lyonya, and by virtue of him being the person I sit closest to most often, I suppose he is my closest friend. Lyonya has hooded eyes, sharp Slavic features and skin so pale it all conspires to make him look exotic, a hint of the Mongol about him. He makes it a practice to ignore me whenever I am in need of technological guidance, technology being his area of expertise. When I am busy, though, he occasionally makes time to be friendly. Lyonya was the underdog of the office before I arrived, and once I arrived, instead of conspiring with me, he turned on me. He specializes in a kind of undermining that never reflects all that well on him. He got picked on for not eating meat, something he was fiercely proud of in the face of office jesters who urged, “Just a little bit of hotdog, it’s barely meat!’ – but when he found out I'd been a vegetarian longer, he immediately distanced himself from his principles. “Well, at least I eat fish,” he said. I liked Lyonya immediately for both his ability to be humiliated daily and his total antagonism toward me. It seemed like it required effort to suspend his empathy so thoroughly.

My relationship with Lyonya consists of periodic sympathy over crazy people who call his customer service line, and a strict game of favors in which one of us strives to have one up on the other at all times. At best this might be considered unhealthy competition, but what makes it really unfortunate is that, at times, I seem to be the only one playing. I make a call to Immigration on Lyonya’s behalf, to straighten out some issues he’s encountered in registering for the Selective Service. He can’t understand the Southern employees at the call center, whose accents are so thick even I have to unstick their words one by one in my brain. In exchange, on a day when I'm working from home and my numbers are worse than usual, it seems fair that he would hold off on reporting me to our superiors. Instead, I get a call from my boss while I’m working at a West Village café, informing me I’m a disappointment. After the confusing phone call, which ends, like so many Russian conversations, with both parties shouting “We’ll see!” in defiant tones, I walk inside to see a friend working behind the counter. “This figures,” I grumble, “You can never trust a Russian not to inform on you.”

VII.
Besides being tenuously in-house, I am also a freelance translator. The idea of freelance, from what I gather, is not to have a single boss, but I have one and his name is Oleg. Oleg runs a legal firm with a Yahoo email address and is the man who funnels clients to me. He calls me up sometimes and says, "Lucy, my dear, do I have work for you!" and then repeats the sentence in Russian. Oleg originally came to me in two voicemail messages I ignore, because I do not make it a practice to return calls from strangers who leave no reason for their call, just an emphatic plea to return it. I wonder what kind of mess I've gotten myself into, like maybe the Russian version of those fraudulent collect calls from prisons. Or was this the result of earlier job hunting? Perhaps my offer to take part in a research study of Russian DJs via Skype? On his third message, Oleg admits he has been referred by my boss. “Call me as soon as you get this!” he says with an air of merry urgency, the kind used by the office gossip barely containing some salacious news.

Of all the things in the world that I hate – people who do not walk as fast as they might on subway stairs, ants inside a candy apple, that the working world turns on an axis that requires waking before noon – speaking on the phone in a foreign language ranks high among them. But I call Oleg and he asks me to come see him Friday at 10 AM. It somehow fails to occur to me that this is an interview. I neglect to bring a resume and forget to brush my hair. But by the end of our meeting, we’ve surfed the web some, I’ve been called dear several times in several languages, and I’ve named a mostly arbitrary rate. I do own what was known a decade ago as a “power suit,” three versions of the same resume to highlight different skills, and I pride myself on my cover letter mastery. But with Russians, my professionalism always fails to assert itself, replaced by a kind of lethargy that extends not just to interview dress but to my general air with my coworkers and superiors: one of, at best, half-hearted interest, and of virtually no investment. I know many people who utilize this approach in their romantic lives on the premise that the less you act like you want someone, the more they’ll want you. I know few people for whom this has worked in relationships, and no one for whom this has worked in business. Then again, I don’t know anyone else who works for Russians.

Contact Lucy at lucyqmorris@gmail.com.