If you’ve ever traveled abroad to a country where your language is rarely spoken, you’ll understand when I say that it’s like being dropped to the bottom of the ocean.
Suddenly and immediately, from the flight over to the flight back, you are now effectively reduced to talking (and sounding) like an infant.
Even saying simple words and phrases like “water” or “How much?” just come out wrong. Every syllable feels forced, somehow, like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube with your tongue.
This was my experience going to Ufa, Russia this June.
Sitting outside the terminal at JFK Airport surrounded by old men and women in brown suits, frocks and crimson-and-gold passports, I tried my best to decode the simple conversations taking place around me.
There is something comforting about overhearing people talk. Simple chit-chat about family members, old friends, even the weather gives you some insight into what these people’s worlds might be like. They are food for writers.
(Even the guy who talks too loudly into his cellphone has a story.)
So when you’re sitting there, head pounding, trying your best to decode these conversations in another language, there is a feeling of complete disconnect.
These are people whose language and experiences are so radically different that even a discussion about, say, aunt Elsa’s new boyfriend, becomes like trying to translate Sanskrit without a dictionary.
Inside Ufa, a city “out in the boonies,” as described by one Russian friend, there isn’t much to do and it shows.
The buildings are rusted. You can see petrified cigarettes from the Soviet times embedded in the sidewalks. Music from the early 2000’s is blasted from cheaply made Chinese boomboxes. There are more statues of Vladimir Lenin in one Ufa mile than there are statues of Abraham Lincoln in the entire D.C. area.
(The idea that these bronze and marble effigies to the dead thinker come alive at night to congregate under the city’s streetlights never left my mind the entire trip.)
This was during the “height” of the ongoing Ukraine crisis. Our trip, sponsored by USC, had been modified in order to ensure our safety. When we learned of this, seated safely at the Columbia Cool Beans, we were anxious that anti-American sentiment would put us in real danger.
Happily, this wasn’t the case. In fact, most of the Russians who recognized our group (by our accents or our jeans,) were exceedingly friendly. When they ask, in English, “you American?” chances are you’re about to get a wide smile and a thumbs up.
I remember speaking broken Russian to a very old woman selling mineral water, (the only kind available anywhere in the city for some reason) she smiled a toothy grin and clearly annunciated “20 rubles.”
I nodded thanks. It was the best experience I had all year. Here we were, two people with a fragmentary knowledge of each other’s languages. Our experiences were so foreign (no other word), tempered by different places and different times. But, in each other’s spoken tongues, we were able to accommodate each other.
It made everything, the 20 hour plane trip, the expense, the “getting lost late at night in a foreign country,” everything, worth the while.
The only thing that came close to anti-Americanism was a poster, on the side of a white truck, depicting a bald eagle and brown bear staring fiercely at each other, about to be locked in combat. (And outside a McDonald’s at that!)
I was only there for a month. It wasn’t life-changing. I am not a different person than I was flying over there. It was good to be back in a country where a dollar will buy you a dollar’s worth.
Nevertheless, I think I was able to understand, briefly, just how radiant real communication, without the artifice and verbal tics of speaking the same language, can be. Humanity is a ball of tangled plotlines, weaving in and out of other people’s narratives and, usually, departing.
For a brief instant, I was fortunate enough to become enmeshed in (and emerge from) Russia, a nation that encompasses both East and West and wraps around the world like a headband. Russia, who lives by, betrays and immortalizes its poets in stone. Russia, whose desire for a tzar has stretched through the Soviet era, nodding its head reverently in Vladimir Putin’s direction.
Russia, which, nevertheless, wanders troika-less, searching for its future.