by Lucy Morris
View: Part 1, Part 2
VIII.
Winter comes to Brighton Beach, and as it turns out, winter there is barely acknowledged. The thermostat does not appear to ascend past 60 degrees and my pal Misha rubs his hands together for warmth over his keyboard. I turn so my feet are pressed against the cozy computer hard drives. We all wear hats and nurse hot beverages; I buy larger coffees. Friends in their first years of employment elsewhere across the city are thrilled by the realization that snow days exist in their professional worlds. I scoff and trek to work through snow up to my knees. “You think Russians are going to shut down because of snow?” I ask, followed by a requisite dramatic pause. “They invented snow.” This is, I suppose, what I talk about when I talk about Russians – their vodka and blizzards and great fur shapka hats - because it is easier than saying almost anything else, anything more nuanced or complete.
It’s the second half of my first year with them. With my hands on the keys and eyes on the screen, the Russians keep passing around me. They bustle and lurk, yell maddeningly and conspire in whispers, they laugh and they eat. A girl cuts her foot on glass. “Where is the vodka?” is the first question someone asks. On another day, a different girl cuts her hand. “Why isn't life easier?'” she wonders through tears with her hand under running water. “Come on,” says another Russian impatiently. “Who would want to live an easy life?” I concede that this is a fair point but I am not sure that it is.
My office is small and windowless and closed to the natural elements, but it hums and swells with philosophical questions and spiritual contemplations, with mixed-language idioms and jokes. I am drinking tea on a break and evaluating the state of my nails. “Lusya,” says a woman I am sure I've never met. “What are you thinking about so seriously?” Moved by the Russian spirit of things, I answer with seriousness, “Life.” The woman, who is somewhat brusque, flashes her gold teeth at me in approval.
Over lunch, conversations of similar import commence. Is the lychee fruit related to a leech? Is couscous the American kasha? What exactly is a bad romance, in the GaGa sense? What are the origins of the term “Limp Bizkit?” Is being married on the Sims really so different from being married in real life? Are we all just controlled by aliens? Where can you find a decent banya in this town, one where you're allowed to sip beer while you steam? In the morning, Vanya asks me how I am. “I'm fine,” I say like an American, but in Russian. “And you?” “Everything is terrible,” he says. I spit out my coffee laughing, but I should know better, that he is serious, because Russians are when it comes to these things.
IX.
As the only possessor of a United States birth certificate, I am exempted from staff meetings and USSR t-shirt uniforms, but I sense that I am a step outside the ring in almost every other respect as well. This constant need to prove yourself on behalf of your entire culture makes, it turns out, for an exhausting way to spend your days, and there are a number of occasions over the course of the year when I think I might give up the Russian racket for good, get out of the business and back into English.
Over time I realize that I am prone to forgetting that the strict militancy of the Russian environment conceals the fact that there are actually no rules at all. The law of Brighton Beach is that there isn’t one: you can do whatever you want, more or less; a hangover or a desire to go to the beach is, after the most unconvincing sigh or slightest good-natured berating, a perfectly legitimate reason not to come to work. But arriving in the office each morning as an American, raised in the great tradition of defense as the best offense, I feel compelled to offer excuses for my behavior, the good and the bad, and grandiose reasons for any absences. I find that for as many things as I do not understand about them – the constantly raised voices, the endless appetite for mayonnaise – there are a lot of things the Russians do not understand about me: my willingness to wear used clothing or scuffed shoes, how I can be a Jew without a last name like Goldsteinberg, what exactly I, as a vegetarian, eat and how I stay alive, so far from my mother’s home cooking, too. But one thing Russians are very good at understanding is chaos, the dramatics of love and family, personal crises, the kind of lack of direction or tendency toward major life upheaval that may or may not afflict you, intensely and suddenly, when you are twenty-two or twenty-three.
This all comes to a head in March, when a trip to visit family turns into one of these crises, just the post-grad kind, the end-of-a-long-relationship kind. As soon as I get back to New York I decide I have to leave again, and while I am prepared to work off-site – “Telecommuting,” I tell them like I know anything about business at all, “It’s very popular in American management” – I am also prepared for the likelihood that I could be fired. But instead of chastising, the Russians swing into action, full of advice, completely in their authoritative element. On the hunt for an apartment, I ask Misha if he has ever moved within New York before and if he might recommend a moving company. “Oh man,” he says. “You’ve got me. I still live with my parents. I tried to move out three times but my mom just wouldn’t let me.” When I announce with exaggerated optimism that I am moving in with male roommates in Crown Heights, the reception is as though I have announced I’m quitting drinking during a long winter; there are sharp exhalations, some muttered disbelief at how far I’ve fallen and intimations of, “This can’t last.” Several people suggest I move to Brighton Beach instead. I entertain the idea so far as a cursory Craigslist search and setting up an apartment visit, but at the last minute I back out and don’t show. There can be, it seems just then, distinctly too much Russian in one day.
Oddly, when I return from my second trip away from New York, my employers are moved by some sort of pity or regret or other kind of mysterious Russian logic to promote me. My boss corners me and asks me about my plan for the future. Being the kind of person who consults airline ticket prices so frequently I know which days a month are best to fly from New York to LA or from New York to Chicago, I do not like to commit to any kind of plan that might keep me in one place. I swallow and tactfully say that I enjoy working with the business and hope to continue working with it somewhat longer in whatever capacity both parties agree on. My once mainly academic and survival Russian vocabulary, full of words useful for describing the Imperial legal system or ordering Baltika beer, has taken a turn toward “amateur lawyer with a taste for idioms.” “How long will you stay with us?” my boss wants to know. I say six months with a question in my voice. He says a year. I counter two years. He suggests three. It is bargaining, the Russian way of life, the trait I find to be most frustrating and advantageous at once. By the end of the conversation, he too has offered to find me a studio apartment in Brighton Beach to spare me a commute and keep me close to the fold. He takes particular joy in imagining depriving the MTA of the $89 I pay for my monthlies. The thought of relinquishing my Metrocard seems like a fate significantly worse than unemployment. “We’ll see,” I say, which is a phrase Russians like very much and use to signify the end of many conversations, their special non-committal yet all-knowing refusal to ever concede the last word.
X.
For a while, moved by enthusiasm and perhaps some post-holiday rush boredom, my boss decides to try convincing me to work longer hours, preferably ten hours a day, six days a week. For various reasons, chief among them my embarrassingly meager pay -- although spending most of my waking hours confined to a space where people think microwaving fish is acceptable is also an unappealing prospect -- I do not find this to be a reasonable expectation. I spend a week refusing to submit a new schedule. “Ten hours is not possible,” I say. “I have classes, I have another job, I have things to do,” trying a new excuse every day in the hope that one will strike my boss as sufficiently convincing, but he doesn’t give up. “Well, what’s wrong with nine and a half hours?” he asks reluctantly, like he is sacrificing something major and not just a few hundred words about translations of Dr. Spock books. After work, I fume to a few friends. They are Jewish and sympathetic. “Didn’t our great-great-grandparents work 18 hour days for their Russian overlords so they could emigrate and we wouldn’t have to?” someone asks. I outwardly agree, as carried away by American indignation as I was before by Russian moral meditation, but I stop to consider that our ancestors’ Russian bosses presumably did not try to lure them in with afternoon sake or pirozhki.
The Russians get more comfortable with me as time passes and spring arrives. When the men ask me to name my favorite alcohol and the women start asking to borrow money, I know I am more or less part of the family. They enjoy sharing with me their vast repertoire of Jew jokes, as though they believe that as a Jew I might especially understand and relate to them. When I cannot bring myself to laugh uproariously they think I may not understand. “You see,” Misha explains with patience, “It is funny because there is a thought that the Jew people are very stupid and greedy.” After a pause and a bite of potato salad he asks breezily if “Hava Nagilah” is my favorite song. Still, they take nearly endearing pains to assure me that I am not quite as bad off as other members of my culture. “You have some Irish heritage, yes? Don’t worry, that is much more important. Your children will be great drinkers.” I am not sure what scientific grounds they might have for this conclusion, but as with much of the dubious information they present as indisputable Russian fact, I accept it tacitly and with a tight smile. It is not often that I actually disagree with them entirely, but they are not to know that; such is the nature of our bond: the old believers and the new disbeliever, the confident and the skeptical confidant, the Slavs and the American.
