Sometime in the early 1970s - I think it was 1972 - I got word from Berlin that my Tante Frieda seemed to be on her last legs. So my friend Ben and I hopped an Aeroflot flight to Moscow, intending to spend a couple days there before taking the train to Berlin. Everything had to be arranged through Intourist in those days, right down to meal vouchers in the hotel we were assigned to. Much as I wanted to get to Tante Frieda, I was counting on her surviving long enough for us to have a look at the Kremlin. She lived another dozen years.
Aeroflot felt no need to accommodate passengers. The eleven or twelve hours, whatever it was, were boring as hell, "in-flight entertainment" evidently being a decadent Western conceit. And when we reached the air space over Moscow, the plane simply dived straight down without any warning. No way to know whether they were doing this to save on fuel or whether we were facing certain death. I assumed the latter but managed to calm down when I noticed the Russian passengers were taking this move in stride.
It had been a decade since my Army Language School days and my Russian was pretty rusty. Ben and I were given rooms miles apart, for some reason. No cell phones, of course, in those days. I wanted to shower and sleep, but there was no soap in my bathroom, so I wandered into the hall to find the overseer, a woman sitting in a raised booth in the middle of the corridor. "Soap?" I asked, rubbing my hands together. I had forgotten the Russian word. "Ah, мыло (mylo)," says the lady in charge, and produces a tiny bar from under her desk. Without trying I had hit upon the secret to getting soap.
Somehow Ben and I found each other and before going out into the freezing cold - it was December - we went back to the soap lady to ask where we could eat. She didn't bother to look up from what she was reading, but simply indicated with her head that we should follow our noses to the end of the corridor. Which we did. When we got to the cafeteria, there were two women in waitress uniforms watching us approach. I summoned up my Russian, with all its limitations. Instead of saying, "Can we use these coupons here?" I said "Is it possible to use these coupons here?" (Возможно использовать эти купоны здесь? - Vozmozhno ispolzovat' eti kuponi zdyes?) The answer came back with what I swear was a sneer. "Все возможно! (Vsyo vozmozhno! - "Everything is possible!"
We were in the Hotel Rossiya, right next to Red Square, so we didn't have to go far to see the main sights. Ben freaked out at the total absence of cars. Only one car passed us on our walk and a policeman stopped it. We never understood why. I can't remember where we were going but I knew it was on Gorky Street, so I stopped a kindly-looking elder gentleman and hauled out my Russian once more: "Can you tell me where Gorky Street is?" He stares at me for a minute. Then says, "Gorkovo? Gorkovo?" and reaches down and touches the pavement with the back of his hand. "Vot Gorkovo" "Here is Gorky Street."
I had never had so many humiliations one after the other in my life. What is it about these people? They're going to win the Cold War on intimidation alone.
Other than a quickie walk around the Kremlin - at least we managed to do that - we missed the chance to do much else and made our way to the train for Berlin. Once again, Intourist showed a complete lack of consideration for what its "customers" might want, and put Ben in the forward set of coaches and me in the rear - with no way of crossing from one to the other. I was totally on my own for the entire distance, in a car filled with sullen Poles who were teachers of Russian on an excursion to Moscow.
Sullen, that is, until we reach the Polish border when all hell broke loose. Out came the bottles of vodka, the sandwiches and salami, and suddenly everybody wanted to know who this strange American was travelling alone through their country. For the first time, I began to relax and let my Russian do what it could. But the time we reached Warsaw, where they all got off, I was snockered and quite fluent.
Well, fluent may be going too far. Because I had been living in Japan for a couple years, my mind did that trick that often happens to second-language learners. The brain divides the language storage space into two compartments - English and "Other." Try as I may, I couldn't keep myself from sticking Japanese words into my Russian sentences.
That memory was brought alive this morning when one of the guys working on my house stuck his head through the door to the patio. The electrical socket on the outside of the house doesn't work, so we told the guys to use the one just inside the door to keep their batteries charged. The guys, as I explained elsewhere before, are from Moldova, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan and their common working language is Russian.
"Mozhno?" says Yuri. "May I?"
"Mochiron," I respond.
"Er... "Konyechno."
Amazing how the mind can turn an awkward, slightly unpleasant memory into a fond melancholic one over time. "Of course," is "konyechno" in Russian. Or "mochiron" in Japanese.
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