Russian Lessons

 

 

My first Russian teacher–a dark and handsome sailor with curly black hair, violet eyes and a wide white smile without a single metal tooth–disappeared after we were arrested for kissing in front of the Kazan church in Leningrad. A real comrade should have known better than to fraternize with a capitalist in public. 

 

No more trouble, Student Affairs told me when she came to get me from the police station.

“It was for the tongue,” I tried to explain. My Russian wasn’t all that good yet. “Native tongue practice.”

The best way to learn a foreign language, all linguists knew, was to find a motivated native teacher, AKA boyfriend. 

“Language,” Student Affairs corrected, looking pained. No more trouble, or my visa would be revoked.  On my Finnish exchange student’s honor, I promised. No more kissing in public.

 

My second Russian teacher was a misfit, expelled from an economics program at the university for asking too many questions his teachers didn’t have communist-party-approved answers for. Yuri was blond and gaunt with hungry poet’s eyes above razor-sharp cheekbones, and studied Swahili, hoping to be sent to Africa instead of Siberia when he graduated.  On our first date, Yuri took me to meet his parents in the kommunalnaya, a communal apartment his family shared with an old woman and her granddaughter, son-in-law and their newborn baby. Yuri, his parents and two sisters had two rooms; the other family only one. They all took turns in the kitchen and toilet. Yuri’s family had been on the apartment waiting list all his life. But the phone waiting list was down to ten years, and they expected the refrigerator they were qualified for in another year or two.

 

Yuri’s mother set the table for tea with her best porcelain cups and sweetest strawberry jam. His sisters smiled shyly whenever I looked at them. His dad talked about the war, how he’d shot at Finns like they’d shot at him because the generals made them. 

“And now here we are. Best friends!” Yuri’s dad said. He produced a bottle of Stolichnaya and gestured for the mom to bring schnapps glasses he filled with vodka till they flowed over. She sent the girls out of the kitchen to do their homework.

“Da dna!” Bottoms up for friendship, peace and mutual cooperation.  

“I wish your papa were here,” Yuri’s dad said after the fifth bottoms-up. “We’d drink to each other’s health.” 

“He wouldn’t,” I said. My dad never talked about the war that had claimed his right leg and the Karelian lands his family had farmed for four generations. He’d stopped talking to me when I decided to study Russian. Job opportunities, I tried to explain but Dad didn’t want to know.   

Yuri’s dad darkened. 

“My papa, he only drinks tea,” I amended. “No vodka.” 

Yuri’s dad laughed himself to tears. A Finn who didn’t drink vodka? Khoroshaya shutka, good joke, good joke, he said filling my glass again, and we drank da dna to Finns and Russians, to teetotalers and drunkards till the bottle was empty. Next, we sang “Kalinka” four times in a row because it was the only Russian song I knew words to. We were about to start again—with feeling–when the woman with the baby came to claim the kitchen. 

 

“Saturday, we go pick mushrooms,” Yuri said when he took me back to my dorm. “All Russians pick mushrooms in the fall.” 

  

It rained all week. 

“I ordered the rain. For mushrooms,” Yuri said when he called. “And sunshine for Saturday.”

Right, I thought, but the sun shone from cloudless skies when I woke up on Saturday. His friend had a dacha, a summer cottage near the Finnish border, Yuri explained when we walked to the train station.  

“That’s real nice of him,” I said. “Letting us use it.”

Yuri smiled a little oddly and I felt stupid. I should’ve known. I wondered how much the dacha had cost him. A term paper? A bottle of imported cognac from the hard currency shop, Beriozhka? Or more?

 

“Don’t talk on the train,” he warned. The KGB were probably still sleeping off last night’s vodka and caviar but one never knew. My visa didn’t allow me to travel outside Leningrad but no one would care once we got out of the city. The KGB didn’t like the way the countryside smelled.

We stepped down from the train in a village with a gingerbread station house decorated with icing lace. Yuri took my hand and led me across the tracks onto a dirt road that wound through harvest-ripe fields and hay pastures like a dry river. The air smelled of summer dust and newly cut grass, and the wind carried strains of an old Russian folk song someone somewhere was playing on an accordion. Ever so often we surprised a weathered cottage hiding amidst gnarly old apple trees. Without the war, I might have been born in one of them.

Like walking in a Soviet propaganda movie, I thought. Happy young proletarians marching through ripe yellow fields under cornflower skies. Socialist realism at its best. Only the sickles were missing, and the voice of the announcer, energetic, enthusiastic, triumphant. The harvest would once again break all records and surpass quotas by at least 30%. 

Through a stand of birch trees, up and down a hill we walked till we came upon a small gathering of people. 

“A store,” Yuri explained, nodding at a line of women in tightly knotted scarves and well-worn aprons in front of a small mud red building with dusty windows. The men were smoking mahorka at the roadside, next to a couple of horses harnessed to rough wooden wagons.  

“We need vodka,” Yuri said, joining the line of women. “Cream and onions. For the mushrooms.”

 

Morning mist still shrouded the trees when we went mushroom hunting. Dewdrops clung to turning leaves, glittered on spider webs and the spongy bear moss on the forest floor. The air smelled of early fall, sweet and musky, the smell of death and decay. 

I wasn’t of much help picking. The only mushrooms I know for sure are the yellow chanterelles and the woolly milk caps. Yuri laughed at my offerings. The one he was hunting was the Queen, the maclenok.  

“Vot,” he whispered, twisting aside a small birch and pointing to a glistening brown glob, his yellow boletus, the butter mushroom. Talk low, he’d instructed me before we left, or the mushrooms go hiding. He’d pulled a ratty old sweater from his bag and given it to me to wear. Old clothes bring luck. Mushrooms don’t like new clothes.

“Nyet, nyet!” he exclaimed when I thought I found a Queen. “That’s poisonous. Don’t touch! 

I gave up and walked after him and watched.

 

Back at the dacha, I watched Yuri clean his Queens, cut deep into the spongy flesh to check for worm paths and rotten spots. My spine tingled and the little hairs at the back of my neck stood up. I’ve always liked watching men’s hands at work. Yuri lit a fire in an old iron stove and melted gobs of yellow butter in a large cast-iron skillet, added onions and mushrooms and finally sour cream. We ate the mushroom sauce with new potatoes and knocked it down with vodka the Russian way: inhale, toss back and exhale. Eat bread. Repeat.   

 

Later, after too many vodkas inhaled, tossed back and exhaled, I remember lying next to Yuri who was having a conversation with himself. He’d wanted to make love to me and I’d apparently said yes. The trouble was, he considered me too drunk to be trusted. He didn’t want to have sex but make love. He’d visualized something beautiful, sacred even. A union of minds and souls, an earthquake in the very least–not just a drunken fuck. The trouble was, this was it. There wouldn’t be another time: I lived in a dorm, he shared a bedroom with his parents and sister. Miss the opportunity and it would be gone forever.

So what was a man to do?

He turned his back and refused to touch me. 

 

I pretended not to remember anything in the morning, but Yuri proposed anyway a few weeks later. It was mid-November, the night before I was leaving for home. We were on the way back from his best friend’s wedding. The party had been long and wet, with Soviet champagne followed by bad Georgian red and worse Armenian cognac. Afterwards, the newlyweds returned to the one-room flat they shared with the bride’s parents, and Yuri walked me to the dorm for the last time. It was way too late, my head was hurting, and I had a train to catch in the morning.  

“Let’s hurry,” I told Yuri but he didn’t reply. He’d been acting strange all evening, looking glum and saying little. We walked in silence until we came to my dorm, and he stopped me under the streetlight. Shouldn’t, I thought. A thousand eyes were watching.  

“You go. I stay. But I have to know. Would you marry me?”

The sinking feeling came first. Then anger. What did he think he was doing? 

“Not here. Not now.”  

“Here. Now.”

The dorm guard, dezhurnaya, came out, rattled the keys in her hand and stared at us. I stole a glance at Yuri’s watch. Seven minutes to ten. I’d be locked out for the night. The guard would file a report. Yuri would never get out of Russia. My kids would grow up in a kommunalnaya. How do you tell someone you can’t marry him in seven minutes? 

“It’s too late.” 

“Who cares about time when I want to marry you?” Yuri said. “Time doesn’t matter.” 

“Yuri, Yurenka,” I pointed to his watch. Six minutes to ten. “It’s time–” 

Yuri’s eyes flashed and he jerked the sleeve back, ripped the watch from his wrist and threw it down the street.  

“No more time. Time’s stopped. All the time in the world now.” He held me by the arms, forcing me to look straight into his eyes. “I love you. Will you marry me?”

The wind was throwing cold snow in my face. Seconds ticked by, and I found nothing in my heart but the urge to run. I shook my head, and Yuri let go. I reached the door just as the dezhurnaya was locking it. I turned to wave but Yuri was walking away and didn’t see.   

“I’ll call you,” I shouted at his back but the wind took my words and scattered them on the dirty street.

Running up the dorm steps I wondered if Yuri went back to look for his watch. I imagined him finding it, broken, in the snow. He’d get over me, I knew, but good watches were hard to find in Russia. 

 

He couldn’t be just a friend, Yuri answered my first letter, and then none. It was for the best, I told myself. A job in Vladivostok, his family kicked off the apartment waiting list. Still I kept on sending him birthday cards and seasons greetings he never acknowledged.  

 

I heard Yuri was conscripted after he graduated but didn’t remember it when a small package came from the Russian embassy in Angola.  Didn’t make the connection until I saw the handwriting. The vehicle operated by Comrade Yuri Ivanov had hit a landmine near the village of J., the terse cover letter said. All five Russian conscripts on board had been killed. The enclosed item had been found among Comrade Ivanov’s effects.  

 

The envelope was folded over and over, rubbed fuzzy the way paper gets when carried in a pocket; the ink had bled till my name was barely there.

Inside, Yuri’s old watch. 

 

It had stopped at six minutes to ten.

 

 

First published in Rosebud, 2003

©Tua Laine 2003, 2020