It's me - not a duck

Здравствуй Kоля! Папа дома?

Zdravstvuy, Kolya! Papa doma?

(Hi there, Kolya! Is papa home?)

Папи нет. Мама дома.

Papi nyet. Mama doma.

(Papa’s not, but mama’s home.)

Russian classes at the DLI began each morning with a recitation of the dialogue we had memorized overnight. The dialogues were a brilliant teaching device. They embedded the grammar points they were about to teach us into the dialogue, so you had the pattern in the brain when they launched into an explanation in the second hour and drills in the third hour. The teaching method was an effective one and the desire not to look like a damn fool was motivation enough to make us perform well, for the most part. Years later, when getting together with colleagues from the day, we’d entertain each other by pulling out a line and seeing who could come up with the next one. The early lesson from above was something you could guarantee everybody would remember. Somebody would say, “Zdravstvuy, Kolya, Papa doma?” and you were pretty much guaranteed to hear, “Papi nyet. Mama doma!”

Another line from a dialogue that stuck with me, from further along in the course, was built around a duck hunting scene. The line was, Не стреляйте. Это я, не утка! (Ne strelyaitye; Eta ya, ne utka! - Don’t shoot; it’s me, not a duck!). Having seared that into memory in 1963, it still served me well years later when I was getting my doctorate at Stanford in the 1980s.  I was having lunch in the cafeteria one day when the people sitting to my back at the next table were listening to a visiting Russian scientist telling a story.  He was doing fine until he stumbled around looking for the right word in English. “Utka…utka…” he said. “Duck,” I said.

You could hear a pin drop. Too late I realized I had done something pretty stupid. First of all, I had revealed that I was listening in on their conversation. And secondly, it’s likely the guy was going to spend the rest of his time at Stanford wondering about the CIA spy they had brought in to keep tabs on him. I sheepishly tried to talk my way out of the embarrassing scene. I never was sure they bought it.

I was among the large contingent of folk assigned to Berlin after graduation. Berlin, right plunk in the middle of the Russian Zone, by now called the German Democratic Republic, had in the American Sector, in the Southwest part of the city, a huge mountain that had been built up of rubble from the war. “Teufelsberg” (Devil’s Mountain) it was called. On top of Teufelsberg was a cluster of quonset huts jutting out from a central point, each one housing “spies” working on separate projects, listening in on what the “commies” were up to. One was the Russian military section, another the German political section, a third housed the Brits who listened in on the Poles. I was assigned, of course, to the Russian military section, along with several of my friends from R-12-100 and R-12-101 at Monterey. To the technical crew, the guys who maintained the radios and antennas and worked with Morse code, we were known as the “Monterey Marys.” Officially, the military referred to us as “linguists.” The lack of language sophistication that enabled them to confuse someone who spoke a foreign language with a specialist in the field of language study bugged me no end. I didn’t mind being called a “Mary” at all, but for some reason being called a “linguist” really got under my skin. I was a linguist, in fact. That wasn’t the point. The point was they were calling me a linguist for the wrong reason!

Which says a whole lot, I suppose, about what a tight-ass I was in those days.

By the end of the first month, I had come to believe that I was going to lose my mind. After a year at Monterey where I had developed sufficient proficiency in Russian to be able to follow Shaky Jake’s lectures on Tchaikovsky, here I was listening to Russian soldiers on the radio counting up to ten and back down again.  1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10. 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10. 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10. 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10. 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1. On an on all through the day.

They were keeping the lines open and in working order in case the Americans invaded. They had to keep talking and soon ran out of idle chatter, so they simply counted to ten.

The idea of Monterey Marys marching through the Brandenburg Gate and down Unter den Linden into Alexanderplatz had to be one of the most ridiculous notions ever conceived by the mind of man or woman, but we soon realized the Russian military was never going to take second place to the American military when it came to absurdity and paranoia. 

I took my headphones off one day and announced that I was done. I would not be listening to Russians count to ten any more.

Whereupon I was arrested and removed from the base for three months until they could get me an appointment with a shrink in Frankfurt to see if I was mentally stable enough to withstand a court martial.

When the day finally came, the shrink asked me if I had ever wanted to have sex with my mother or my father or my sister, and when I said no he pronounced me “arbeitsfähig.” That’s not the word he used. It means “capable of work” and it’s the word the Nazis stamped on Jewish documents to signal a prisoner who could be worked to death rather than eliminated immediately. I know. A bit on the dramatic side. But that’s what I had to work with in those days.

By a great stroke of good fortune, they had just put a new young captain in charge of my unit and when I was brought before him for a decision on what to do with me, he revealed his Minnesota good Lutheran boy roots. “What am I supposed to do with you?” he asked, inviting me to help him in his new job.

In the three months’ wait to see the shrink I had gotten to know the other misfits hanging around the day room watching television and playing flamenco guitar and reading Thomas Pynchon. The guitarist was a German “linguist” and through him I got to meet the civilians who ran the German political section and learned they were having difficulty.  Russian was, in the army’s eyes, a “hard” language - ergo takes twelve months to learn, but German was an “easy” language which one could be expected to get under one’s belt in merely six. Problem is the Marys who had studied German were not properly primed for the Saxon dialect of the speakers from Dresden, Leipzig, and Karl Marx Stadt (today’s Chemnitz). I had grown up speaking with a German mother and grandmother and although Saxon was not familiar to me, it didn’t take me long to realize I could fake it. And soon understand it, actually.

“Put me in Violet section (the German political section),” I said to the kid still wet behind the ears (a fact for which I will be thankful till my dying day). The civilians were glad to have me. In a couple weeks I went from jailbird material to guy in charge.

I bade farewell to Russian and it fell to tatters. If I could do anything over, I’d go back and not let that happen. Don’t know what I’d give up in life to keep the Russian going, but I’d like to think I’d manage somehow.

I miss it. Thanks to the internet, all manner of things Russian are at my fingertips, and I do tune in from time to time. These days the vocabulary I encounter is much more the балетная терминология (ballet terminology) than words like проволочное заграждение (provolochnoye zagrazhdyenie - barbed wire entanglements) of military terminology.

And that, of course, is just the way I like it.

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