In 1962, the year I graduated from college, I had to go into the army. The U.S. had a draft in place and I was at the age where the Cuban Crisis and the impending war in Vietnam meant I could be forced to carry a gun and kill people in the name of "defending freedom." I didn't want to do that, but I also didn't want to take advantage of the usual methods of escape. I knew I could declare myself a homosexual, but that was the equivalent of hanging myself from a tree. I could take a hammer to my instep, but I've never been very good with pain. I could run to Canada. That was an attractive prospect, actually. I have an emotional home in Nova Scotia, where my maternal grandmother was from and where we used to spend all our summers growing up. But that too was unappealing, in the end. I had too many ties to the United States.
I got wind of another alternative. I could take the bull by the horns, volunteer to join the army before they could draft me, and apply for the Army Language School in Monterey. As a volunteer I had a decent chance of avoiding the infantry and determining my own placement.
Let me continue for a while in Russian. I'll provide a translation in the next paragraph, so you can skip right over it if you don't read Russian.
Примерно в полутора часах езды к югу отсюда находится город Монтерей. В Монтерее есть школа под названием Армейская школа языков. Пока я был там, его название изменилось на Институт Иностранных Языков Министерства Обороны, но я присоединился к нему, когда это был ALS. Этот опыт стал поворотным моментом в моей жизни. По трем причинам. Во-первых, потому что меня потом отправили на командировку в Германию; во-вторых, потому что у меня сложились многие из самых важных дружеских отношений в моей жизни с людьми, которых я впервые встретил там. И, наконец, из-за близости к Сан-Франциско, где я проводил много выходных, меня познакомили с местом, которое, как я сразу понял, станет моим домом в ближайшие годы.
About an hour and a half drive south of here is the town of Monterey. In Monterey there is a school called the Army Language School. Its name changed to the Defence Language Institute while I was there, but I joined it when it was the ALS. That experience was a major turning point in my life. For three reasons. First, because I was sent to Germany on assignment afterwards; secondly, because I formed some of my most important lifetime friendships with people I first met there. And finally, because of its proximity to San Francisco, where I would come to spend many weekends, I was introduced to a place I instantly recognized would be my home in the years to come.
The Cold War was at its height. In order to get the assignment to study at the Army Language School I had to enroll in the Army Security Agency. I had to become a spy. Not a cloak-and-dagger spy, but a much more mundane kind: somebody who sat in a room listening to Russian soldiers in East Germany talk to each other, hoping that if they were going to start World War III they would talk about it in advance.
I did this in Berlin. I lived in a barracks where Hitler's former elite guards were once housed, and every day climbed into a bus to be transported out to the pile of rubble that had become a mountain of the ruins of the buildings of Berlin. The place had an ironic name: Teufelsberg - Devil's Mountain. It was in the American Zone, and restricted to Army Security Agency people only, who built a site on top where they could raise antennas and scoop up all sorts of radio waves, including those of the entire Russian Army stationed in the German Democratic Republic, which Berlin was, conveniently, located right plunk in the middle of.
My year at Monterey had been richly fulfilling. By the end of it I was able to follow lectures provided by some of the 150 Russian faculty members now living as exiles in the U.S. and unable to follow their original professional paths as doctors, lawyers, and intellectuals of all sorts. They were lucky to get jobs as teachers of Russian for the American military and largely hid their lights under a bushel. Fortunately for us, some of them couldn't keep that light contained and it would leak out. Such was the case with one member of the Romanov family who lived and died for Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. In the last few months at Monterey, while I missed many of the fine points I was nonetheless able to listen to Prince Romanov (whom we cruelly called "Shaky Jake" - I think he had Parkinson's and we were young and stupid) lecture on and on in Russian about what a great man this guy Tchaikovsky was and what he had contributed to Russian culture.
We were not supposed to be exposed to this kind of positive view of things Russian, I am sure, but fortunately the Americans making the decisions about things like this had next to no knowledge about what they were doing. They even stamped our bilingual dictionaries "Confidential" because they contained Russian words. And while we're on the topic, despite the fact that they threatened to jail us if we said word one about our work, they issued insignia for our uniforms that carried the image of a cloak and dagger. No shit.
When I got to Berlin, that knowledge of Russian I had spent a solid year acquiring, six hours a day in class plus homework, five days a week, was put to use. I'd go into the windowless quonset hut, put on my earphones, and listen to Russian soldiers count to ten and back down to one. They had to talk because they had to keep the lines open - just in case the American invaded - and when they had nothing else to say - which was most of the time - the simply counted to ten.
After a month of this I was convinced I was losing my mind. In retrospect, that is probably less of an exaggeration than it now sounds. I ended up being transferred to the German section because I was raised in a sometimes German-speaking household and could handle the Saxon dialect my colleagues who had studied German at the ALS found overly taxing. But that's a story for another day. How I had almost not gotten my security clearance when they found out I had a German-born mother and had relatives living in Germany. How the army had not wanted to allow native speakers of German to work as German translators but believed it was safer to train people with no German backgrounds instead. The point is, after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach me Russian, the army was now faced with a choice: throw this loser in jail for a while and give him a dishonorable discharge, or take the deal he was offering and get some use out of him. I am happy to relate the army made what was the best choice for both of us.
I once swore I'd live a life of no regrets. It was a childish goal, totally unrealizable, but I was sincere when I made the vow. I couldn't know then how much I would regret not continuing to study music and develop my skills at the piano, not learning Japanese early on, before spending 24 years in that country with very imperfect Japanese, not spending more time in France, not studying Chinese. And allowing my Russian to dry up and blow away. I'm a linguist, and know a bit about language, but I live with gigantic gaps in my knowledge of actual languages themselves.
But along with the regrets come the consolations. I can't play the piano anymore, but the years of practice gave me an appreciation for music that I credit with getting me through the hours of isolation during the Covid crisis - with full credit going to YouTube, of course. And, it turns out, my Russian may be on life support but it's not dead. And with a familiarity with the language came the even more important familiarity with the culture and love of all things Russian. Well, most things Russian. I learned from my German grandmother in the first ten years of life to distinguish between good Germans and bad Germans. And in later years to extend that to the point where I now agonize over Putin's invasion of Ukraine not just for the death and destruction of Ukrainians, but for the cannon fodder Putin is making of young Russian lives.
We recently had major reconstruction done on our house. The company we hired is owned by Moldovans and the workers who came to the house were two Moldovans, three Ukrainians, an Uzbek and a Kazakh. They were fantastic siding replacers, painters, plasterers and all-around fixer-uppers. Their working language was Russian, and you can imagine the pleasure it gave me to realize I could follow much of their conversation.
They caught me listening to them.
Ой, вы говорите по-русски?
Ah, do you speak Russian?
Я изучал русский язык, когда служил в армии, 60 лет назад.
I studied Russian when I was in the army, sixty years ago.
To counter the awkwardness I felt being so out-of-date, I thought I'd make some nice idle conversation.
"So you all speak Russian because you grew up in Soviet Union days?"
A brief moment of silence.
Then, "Oh, no. We were all born after 1991."
Not friends of Russia. But fully accepting of the Russian language as their own. The Kazakh told me he never learned Kazakh properly, that Russian was his home and school language from the beginning. These are people who had their own version of a grandmother to teach them how to tell the good guys from the bad guys and not jump to conclusions.
You can see why my heart aches when gay people on American university campuses form groups carrying pro-Hamas signs "because they support the Palestinian people."
Where were their grandmothers when they needed them?
No comments:
Post a Comment