In 1943, while the war was raging in the west and my 18-year-old Ukrainian-born maternal grandfather was freezing with other fresh recruits in the shallow trenches somewhere on the Mongolian border, far from action, the sergeant arrived with the question: “Anyone here finished middle school?” My grandfather raised his hand and soon was on his way to the city of Gorky, where he began his studies in the First Soviet Army Armor School evacuated there from Gomel in Belarus a year earlier. When, sixty-two years later, I heard this story from his Ukrainian sister, the point was that he had lied. He had never finished seventh grade, but he wanted to learn. My great-aunt cited this episode as an example of something, I was not sure what: her brother’s headstrong nature or sheer luck.
She was certain that her brother had participated in the war, but according to the official record by the time he got his shoulder boards in 1945, the war was over. The school in Gorky, plus a short stint at a “political school” in Lviv in western Ukraine, had been the extent of his education. He was not allowed to retire from the Soviet army for another nine years and then for twenty-six years worked as a truck driver in Siberia and in Kazakhstan.
His wife, the daughter of an unlettered rail inspector in western Siberia, was a technical school graduate, part of the new Soviet intelligentsia. To keep up with her, or for some other reason, my grandfather continued working on his secondary education certificate. He was in his thirties when he finally got it. When his daughter, my mother, was in high school, they used to read aloud together from the Russian classics she was assigned in class. This was probably the first time he ever read those works. His first language was Ukrainian. My mother went on to become the first generation on this side of the family to go to university. She didn’t speak a word of Ukrainian.
My father was a first-generation university student, too. His father was a police officer serving at the Chernovskii coal mines outside the town of Chita in southeastern Siberia and could have expected to be a lieutenant at a young age had he not refused to go to school and remained almost illiterate his entire life. His wife, my paternal grandmother, a Cossack woman, had had no time for education, either. My father’s advanced degree in metallurgy was an anomaly, another lucky accident, out of which my brother and I emerged, possessed of more formal knowledge about the world than any of our ancestors.
I inherited from my family not knowledge so much as its outline. In each preceding generation, an education had been attempted and not quite completed. What came down to me was the pretense of those attempts rather than their realization.
When we were growing up on the outskirts of the city of Irkutsk in eastern Siberia, one of my favorite projects was to sort our modest home library. It counted a few hundred items and consisted of three parts: my mother’s medical books, my father’s technical books, and their joint collection of fiction and home improvement literature. The latter was more numerous but considerably less structured than the former two segments. I remember always expecting something from this repository, some secret ancient wealth. The oldest volume in our collection, a Soviet thermodynamics handbook of 1934, belonged to my father. Even though it did not make much sense to me as a text, the book’s publication year (pre-WWII meant prehistoric, the time out of reach of memory) and rust-colored pages were cinematographically fantastic, as was its “ancient” font and, at the end of it, ads for commercial publishers that had long ceased to exist. The second oldest book was a 1949 dictionary of foreign words with an appendix on foreign clichés in Latin script (après moi, le déluge; fecit quod potui, faciant meliora potentes, etc.) and copious quotations from Stalin for all social and political vocabulary. It was also marked with my father’s signature on the flyleaf for an ex libris. Around 1994, when I was 12, I read the dictionary page after page, like a novel, and underlined in pencil everything I considered to be a blatant lie. In some entries, such as “Communism” and “Constitution,” I underlined everything. There had been a Russian translation of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital at home, but around 1991 it had suddenly disappeared, and no one could tell me what became of it.
For the longest time, I believed that the default attitude to home libraries was to possess without reading or read without understanding. I’m not sure I’m completely free from this attitude today. But my accidental reading and emotional attachment to certain books resulted in a love of knowledge. That love had nothing to do with the love of authority that comes with the prestige of intellectual prowess. I instinctively avoided the latter when I observed it in children of families with bigger libraries. I was amused by my brain’s ability to know and understand foreign things but never imagined that my place in the world would depend on it. My education surprised me. To be able — to have the leisure — to read and to think for the sake of learning was a rare luxury for anyone I knew, one of the few privileges of youth.
There was a shelfful of homely Soviet editions of English texts at home. Both of my parents had studied the English language in school and then at university. My mother had attended free English classes as a medical student in Irkutsk in the 1970s. But the conversations there had never gone beyond such topics as “Family” and “My Town.” A friend of hers had once copied out a poem by the Soviet poet Ian Khelemskii on a piece of paper and given it to her as a thank you for letting other students in those English classes use her English-Russian dictionary. My mother had then copied it in felt-tip pen onto the flyleaf of the dictionary where I saw it twenty years later. The poem consisted of a gently self-deprecating description of what it was like to study English in the Soviet Union. It began with some friends making fun of the author for studying too hard and ended with the author admitting with disarming irony that it was unlikely he’d ever be able to read Wordsworth or Shakespeare in the original.
That irony defined my mother’s (and I suspect her generation’s) attitude to the English language. Neither she, nor her friends in the English classes, nor Khelemskii ever hoped to travel freely to an English-speaking country. All of the Anglo-American world was an enemy camp separated from them by the Iron Curtain. There was no “seeing the world,” short of emigrating, and the KGB and sheer distance made sure that any exposure to live English would be a one-way ticket or an impossibility. Under the circumstances, fluency was out of the question, no matter how persistent she was in her studies. A familiarity with the “Great Books” presented itself as a somewhat less unattainable substitute goal. If studying English can’t be about communication, then it’ll be about vaguely understood cultural privilege.
Neither of my parents had ever reached a point where they could comfortably read the English books they had. By the time my brother and I got to those books, they had lingered in a state of disuse for decades. There were self-study guides, short story anthologies, and an illustrated collection of English fairy tales, which included Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” and an excerpt from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit.” My favorite was Georgii Sudzilovskii’s Laughs Parade (1965), which consisted of pirated British and American military-related jokes and comics published in the original and purged of all anti-Soviet propaganda: the reader was only supposed to laugh at NATO forces. The slangy humor of the captions was too difficult for me, but I found the images amusing even when I couldn’t guess their meaning.
Around 1990, when I was 8, some of the instructors from the Institute of Foreign Languages in Irkutsk started moonlighting by offering English classes for young children. My parents signed me up, and once a week my grandmother walked me from school to my English class in an old building on Sükhbaatar Street, duskily mysterious from the shade of its poplars and my overwrought imagination. I remember learning a few new words there, all of them more or less related to food for some reason (“apple,” “pear,” “fork,” “spoon,” “plate”). At the same time, at home, my mother used what I recall today as The Three Little Kittens to teach me to read English. The words “kitten,” “mitten,” and “pie” are the coziest, warmest, softest and safest words I can say in this language: they come to me in my mother’s young, still-happy voice. In a couple of years, I graduated to reading, on my own, her decrepit soft-cover copy of William, written by the British author Richmal Crompton who remained unmentioned and uncredited, in Sofia Ter-Ovanesova’s 1975 adaptation for Soviet schoolchildren. All I remember from that book is its eventful normalcy, the white cat, the boy named Ginger, and the girl named Ethel.
I first heard the sound of native English around age 7, when the main Soviet television channel included in its educational programming the British cartoon Muzzy in Gondoland in the original. From it, I learned the word “plum” and its plural, as well as the phrase “Take him away!” In 1991, it was supplemented with the Christian-themed anime show Superbook, which left no lexical trace in my memory. My brain imbibed English outside of live communication. Most new words were wonderful abstractions, which I retained along with the often-unrelated circumstances under which they were learned. Unlike any other language I have ever studied, English came with a festive entourage of random impressions. It’s funny to imagine that I could, theoretically, recover the place and time of learning each of the English words I know.
In the fall of 1998, at the age of 16, I followed in my brother’s footsteps when I began commuting, three times a week, from our outskirts to downtown Irkutsk to supplement my regular high school education, where emphasis was put on STEM disciplines, with extra English classes. For nine months I attended the “ABC School.” Founded by the son of a famous Irkutsk writer named Rasputin, the school employed some of the younger faculty members of the same Institute of Foreign Languages. They had actually spent some time in the United States, had an ear for colloquial English (“I’d like to take a rain check,” “Fill ’er up!”), and used Hollywood movies to teach listening comprehension. They remembered my brother. I thought I was doing relatively well academically myself. But apparently my oversize clothes and shorn head stood out among other students — mostly the children of the city’s educated elite and moneyed young professionals. One day, a couple of listlessly sarcastic kids of my age made fun of my light shoes, too obviously inadequate for our Siberian winter. I realized that other people noticed what had bothered me in private: my parents couldn’t afford to buy winter boots for me. Thankfully, the kids’ sarcasm didn’t go any further. The fact that my English was better than theirs might have had something to do with that. When I became infatuated with a person in my class and, for the first time in my life, mustered the confidence to tell the object of my affection about how I felt, my rival was a funny 22-year-old who drove a new Range Rover and carried a token from a European casino in his pocket for luck.
That same year, I also read War and Peace and The Gift for the first time and, influenced by Tolstoy and Nabokov, bought a self-study French grammar. I read it quickly in the quiet of my room. When I was done with the book, my brother saw it and asked to borrow it. A few months later, he signed up for classes at the local branch of the Alliance Française, whose existence in Irkutsk had escaped me completely. I tagged along out of sheer envy. Once again, the faculty and students from the Institute of Foreign Languages provided the expertise, while the French government supplied teaching materials for that small class.
I soon became aware of a bookshop next door. It was founded by a fellow Francophile Vladimir Demchikov. A philologist by education and an entrepreneur by temperament, Demchikov had not only helped bring the Alliance Française to eastern Siberia but also created a place in Irkutsk where one could purchase French classics in the original. The dirt-cheap maxi-poche editions of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Pascal, and Proust, which I would buy over the next few years, would travel with me to another continent. Two decades later, their soft covers crumbling irreparably and their newspaper print turning into dust would remind me of home more than any other books I had in my itinerant library.
I studied French impatiently, as if the window of opportunity were closing. While my brother learned to speak it and went to France for several months on an internship program, at that time my French never went beyond the receptive skill of reading. I had translated a certain number of poems into Russian and then only returned to the language as an adult.
My brother was in charge of the dictionaries. For his daily English needs he used my mother’s “big” English-Russian dictionary (the one with the Khelemskii poem on the flyleaf; 35,000 entries, compiled by Arakin, Vygodskaya, and Ilyina; Moscow: “Soviet Encyclopedia,” 1970), while I had to make do with her toy Russian-English, English-Russian dictionary that could fit in a child’s pocket. Around 1995, my brother bought the compact and efficient Oxford Russian Dictionary, second edition, and I inherited our mother’s “big” dictionary. Except it no longer seemed big, compared to the 180,000-entry ORD. Impressively, my brother’s new book was so scientifically thorough it included Russian unprintables.
With time, I came to appreciate my mannerly old-fashioned Soviet compilation (“fain,” “ken”) as well as the mnemonic discipline I had to develop when using its English-to-Russian layout in order to go in the opposite direction and translate Russian terms into English. When, circa 2002, I bought my own copy of the ORD, third edition, it seemed bulky and dumbed-down, with a bigger font and thicker pages, more of a souvenir than a workhorse. Irrationally, I was disappointed with Oxford lexicographers.
Our father insisted that we should prepare for university but could barely afford the English classes. As soon as we were done with the entrance exams, we were left to our own devices. At 18, I traveled to the European part of Russia to try to get into the English department of St. Petersburg State University. I got an unexpected “B” on the English exam and, defeated, returned to my department of philology and journalism of Irkutsk State University. Nevertheless, any trip to the capitals, no matter how heartbreaking, promised a bonanza of English books. That summer, at the “Anglia” English bookstore on the corner of Fontanka and Nevsky, I bought the tiny Compact Oxford English Dictionary which remained my most trusted companion, solace, and teacher for three years, until my father brought the specially requested, expensive Concise Oxford English Dictionary from Moscow.
Unfortunately, the copy he had purchased turned out to be defective: the volume was missing what in printing is called a signature, or a group of folded pages. I sent a cheeky email to Oxford University Press to complain. I had never expected a reply from such a busy firm, but they immediately dispatched a complimentary copy of the newly revised tenth edition to our Siberian address.
I showed it with pride to everyone when it arrived. But when I started using it, I noticed that the definitions in that new iteration were often cursory and, in my opinion, superficial. From the preface I learned that the Tenth Concise drew on the New Oxford Dictionary of English the way the Fowlers’ first edition had drawn on the OED in 1911. Now each entry was “built around the core sense or senses of the word in current English.” To make room for more headwords, entries for very common words such as “be” and “go” had been cut to about half their former length. NODE seemed uninterested in history: it pushed rare or archaic senses further down and removed or updated meanings when they fell out of active modern usage, while the OED ordered them chronologically, placing the earliest known historical evidence or original meaning at the top, and never removed meanings, even if they became obsolete, acting as a permanent archive of the language. The streamlining of semantic hierarchy impressed me as impoverishment. The publisher’s generosity notwithstanding, I felt once again as if the technical advancement that befell the great school of British lexicography had left me in the lurch.
I was not the first Russian to take issue with a foreign dictionary. In the mid-1860s, the Russian writers Ivan Turgenev and Alexander Herzen visited the famous French lexicographer Émile Littré in Paris. Littré had just published the first installments of his great dictionary of the French language. During that polite visit, the Russian-born Herzen started an impromptu argument with the elderly Frenchman about some word in it (sadly, no one remembered afterwards what the word was). Herzen became so passionate that he absentmindedly called the 1837 Chambertin, which Littré had specially opened for his Russian friends, un bon petit vin, “a nice little wine.” Littré was deeply offended. But the gist of the story, as told by Turgenev, was not that a foreigner had the temerity to question Littré’s judgment as a native speaker and professional lexicographer, but rather that his guests had failed to appreciate the wine. I suspect that Littré had already been annoyed with the linguistically presumptuous Russian, and the petit vin was simply the last straw. For the Russian writers, however, it was all about the wine, as they ran away with the impression that French was their language, and they were in the right to give Littré their advice.
I’ve been collecting anecdotes like this my entire career as a reader. They help me visualize what is often called, in academic job descriptions, native or near-native proficiency in a foreign language. Cases such as Herzen’s demonstrate the range of possibilities. I want to believe that the man’s confidence as a French-, or German- for that matter, speaker was not a perceptual bias, a chimera born of his self-willed obdurate temperament, but an idea based in reality. In that nineteenth– and even twentieth-century Russian reality, a foreign language served a Herzen, a Tolstoy, or a Nabokov much like an English governess or a German tutor had served their families.
When I told my American wife about my misadventures with English dictionaries in Russia, she was amused but did not want to believe that Oxford products could be anything but masterly. She told me to read Simon Winchester’s The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. The book, she said, was so wonderful that at some point she had thought about going to Britain to volunteer at the Oxford Scriptorium. That passion of hers, the experience of using a print copy of the actual multi-volume OED as a teenager, and then the year she had spent at Oxford as a student, defined her relationship with the tradition which to me seemed forbidding.
I struggled to express to her that she and the OED came from a venerable old place where the wealth of collected definitions had to be ordered, simplified, and reduced to a short, visually presentable system, whereas in my corner of the world Englishness was in short supply, and I depended on the fullness of definitions, on portable compendia and thesauri. I had once been at the early stage of collecting rare specimens. As a new settler of culture, I wanted my dictionaries to save me, not from surfeit, but from silence. They were supposed to be maximally complete guides to scarce knowledge, not selections preoccupied with what was common or trendy. Unlike Herzen, I welcomed the strictures of normativity and adopted even the mistakes of native speakers because I was, inevitably, an opsimath, serus studiorum, a late learner without rights, in her language. It would be a long time before I understood that late learning is not only a linguistic condition.
“Near native” was a tantalizing paradox. Did it mean that someone could be so close to native that they knew it, tasted it without being it? That there were more than two degrees, on and off, of authenticity? That reality could be ambivalent and non-committal about language? When I had been growing up in Irkutsk, reality had been indivisibly one. I was not friendly with a single foreigner, and the very few native speakers of English I had come across at home had seemed to be horribly lost.
The closest I had ever gotten to having an English tutor was when an unsmiling lonely Englishman from Portsmouth had spent a week with the school where I studied English talking about the difference between “stationary” and “stationery.” The name of that accidental teacher was Paul, he was in his early twenties, and for years afterwards, the memory of him as he had been during that week remained my only experience with native speakers of the language which I had studied with such imitative zeal. I wanted to tell my wife about that zeal, about the time when the world had been simpler, and the person she knew as the real me had been an adventuresome lie.
When I was 17 and lived in Irkutsk, my impressions of Paul the Sometime English Tutor had coalesced into a third-person fiction. During a fifty-minute period in my high school Russian class, when I was assigned to write a short note on something I had read in a newspaper, I composed half a page in which a forgotten Scottish poet named Paul Bettier tried to learn another language from books in order to impersonate a forgotten French poet.
At age 21, still in Irkutsk, I had translated the note into English and supplemented it with other English tidbits, all of them only tangentially related to the main character. It was an essay in willful dissociation. The digressive and random nature of the narrative was the most appropriate way to describe that Frankenstein monster of an identity, rare and fortuitous references the most fitting way to approach something irreal.
In both movements, my intention was to deceive my immediate audience. In the first place, if I wanted a good grade on the assignment, my Russian teacher had to believe that I had read an article published in the 1920s in the New Hastings Review of Books. In the second place, when, to my surprise, that first deception had succeeded, I added new parts to the story, to see if I could convince my then-girlfriend, a Russian university graduate with a degree in Western literatures and conversant with English, that such a poet had existed. It worked again. The initial surprise transformed into a strange confidence. There was something exhilaratingly empowering about the experience. I was proud of myself, although the girlfriend didn’t appreciate the trickery. She thought I had gone too far. In a sense, she was right. All fiction is a more or less convincing lie, an inherently shameful enterprise.
That fiction ended as strangely as it began. Within a year of having published the Bettier dossier online, I received an email from a stranger in America who wanted to know more about him. She was a college student majoring in psychology and informed me that she had seen the name “Paul Bettier” in a dream a few months before. She had been looking for it in libraries ever since. She had even asked her family, to no avail. When she had eventually googled the name, my story was the only source where the name came up in that spelling. She read it and felt akin, she said, to what was written. I was not sure how to reply to her inquiry, and, wary of mystical implications, thought I should reclaim Paul Bettier as my fiction. It felt like the safest thing to do at the time. But then, a few days later, I sent her another email, where the fiction was momentarily revived — only to implode at the end of the paragraph. “As he grew older, reading in any language he knew except his native English gave him heartburn. He was quoted as saying in his later years that he was writing his funniest book. In his last book, men and women die on every page. One of his French correspondents wrote of Paul’s own untimely end: notre pauvre Paul a quitté le monde qui n’avait pas besoin de son don.” There was no reply.
In a sense, Paul Bettier was always dying. French served as an extra layer of insulation from his terrible unreality, as if I needed a third language to utter the ethical impossibility of his continued existence. That was my last winter in Russia. I was 22 years old. I lived completely alone in St. Petersburg, while applying to graduate programs in the United States and thinking about traveling abroad for the first time in my life. Reality was about to get stranger, to the point where fiction seemed redundant. In about two years, I would stop inventing stories altogether. Or rather, I stopped inventing characters. I never learned to stop inventing myself.
For the longest time, I thought of Niagara as my accident-prone friend. Niagara falls, and I rush to help her up to her feet. Puns being the low-hanging fruit of comedy, that one is practically a windfall. Even my word processor humorlessly suggests that the first letter in “falls” should be capitalized. For such intelligent machines and the native English speakers that built them, there is a tangible phenomenon behind the name. The noise of gravity insensibly flinging a whole river over a rock and the mobile mist of water over your head have long become part of your childhood mythology, along with the conversations you had with your parents on that trip. To ignore all that for the sake of pointing out a grammatical ambiguity is childish in the wrong sense of the word. And yet, this is what foreigners do. This is what I did. For someone who grew up in a faraway world where verbs could never be confused with nouns or adjectives morphologically, Niagara Falls was a temptation. And since the term was a linguistic experience outside of the possibility of becoming anything else, I yielded to it. I played with words to distract myself from the palatial emptiness of the new idiom, like a child who sits on the floor in a new house and plays with flickering sunlight and dust bunnies, in the absence of her favorite toys and playmates.
I wish I could say that it changed when I came to America, but if anything, it got worse. I once heard a journalist from Wisconsin Public Radio make thoughtful pauses between elements in the following sentence: “She worked on a Prison Rape Elimination Act… compliance… project.” The journalist was accompanying two of my colleagues and me on our way to an actual prison in Wisconsin, where we volunteered as instructors, but at that moment in the conversation all I noticed was the difficult, impossible beauty of the attributive nouns. I wondered if I was the only one in that car who found the grammar of the phrase interesting. Having been in the US for nine years by then, I decided against drawing other people’s attention to such trifles.
On the rare occasions when I spoke English within the earshot of my parents, on whose shoulders I stood with respect to the language, they seemed at once surprised, impressed, and intimidated. I carry their attitude within me at all times. I suspect I will never be able to shake it off completely. English is a permanently estranged language that draws attention to itself. Everything I say in it sounds mildly incongruous. The incongruity is a source of both pride and confusion. I get better at it, but the world in English feels unnecessarily, arbitrarily wobbly in comparison to my native Russian world. In that, speaking English for me will always be uncannily like telling a lie. The only thing that changes with time is the level of conviction with which I tell it.
When a Russian travels from Russia to America to study Russian literature and stays after completing her education, there is, if not a lie, at least a pretense, an unobvious ulterior motive. America was not so much about education as it was about escape, a vanishing act.
When I had come to St. Petersburg for the first time in 1999, the city of Leningrad had renamed itself a mere eight years earlier, and people, myself included, had started to pretend that this was a place of imperial glory — not a place where KGB agents used to shadow foreign tourists and harass local poets. I was old enough to remember the collapse of the Soviet Union, and for my post-Soviet generation, the new Russia was supposed to catch up with the victorious West culturally by renouncing its provincial past and the funny messianic fervor of the Soviet project. But I had grown up in eastern Siberia and was a new settler in St. Petersburg just as I was one in America. Even more importantly, I had grown up in the 1990s, when all of Russian culture was in flux. Despite the fact that Russian society was opening up to the world, it was still for the most part intolerant of homosexuality and experimental gender expression. For me as a provincial teenager struggling with their gender identity amidst a society in disarray, all of Russia was full of the shame of unbelonging. A smattering of foreign languages had been my way of dispelling a deeper sense of cultural orphanhood.
My brother and I turned out to be the first ones in our family who got to see how far education can go and how deeply it could affect one’s sense of self. But after a few months in France my brother returned home. Our parents had never realized how pervasive this crisis of identity was and how dangerous one’s interest in languages could be until it was my turn to travel.
I disappeared into the big world. My parents obsessively warned me about the fragmentary and incomplete nature of an assimilated persona. Neither of them had ever believed in the possibility of seamless assimilation for me. The idea of an Americanized child frightened them. I suspect that they continued to live in the intergenerational trauma of their own assimilations, related to language, class, national, and ethnic identity. You’re completely alone in America, they would remind me for twelve years, as if to say: we refuse to accommodate your renewal; we will leave you behind as we left our pasts behind, drown you in familial silence the way we drowned ourselves. While I was thinking about adopting a pseudonym and dissolving in fiction, they kept telling me about reality, confirmed for them beyond doubt by their shared experience. Long before Russia’s state-sponsored homophobia and transphobia, they held on to their instincts, afraid of mine. With a frightening degree of compulsion, all the more intransigent for its irrationality, they kept pointing out to me the line beyond which fiction couldn’t go.
And then my father died. I came to Irkutsk for his funeral under the guise of an American professor, with my Russian provinciality thoroughly assuaged. His words about returning rang out with particular plangency then. My Russian would emerge, in full armor, from the shadows, as if it had remained completely impervious to the natural processes of attrition. It surprised me then that neither fiction nor oblivion could touch the soft kernel of memory. These, I thought on my last visit home in 2017, while striving to recognize the unrecognizable face of the man I loved, now in the cheap casket, in the stuffy dark room, drowning in a mixture of plastic and real flowers, were the frontiers of reality. My entire family in a faraway Siberian city preserved my old identity. I was complicit in this preservation, this reluctance to change, if only by not being able to forget their language. Even though I lived elsewhere, their reality would always find a way of reminding me that it was indeed an elsewhere. From the point of view of that reality, there was more absence in my life in America than presence. In my American elsewhere, the vanishing had become a household habit.
Despite the small size of my American apartment, my cat Lily does her own vanishing act every now and then. One evening my wife and I decided that the animal deserved a magician’s name. I was the first to make my unmemorable suggestion, upon which she paused dramatically and, instantly giving her voice the recognizable inflection of a ringleader, announced with a flourish: “The Great Lilibar!”
Two things happened simultaneously: she made me laugh and I realized I couldn’t emulate her spontaneity. I even remembered a time in the past when I wouldn’t even have gotten the joke. It felt as if once again my father’s voice called my attention to the outlying edge of reality, the maddeningly narrow gap between native and near native, which was really the unbridgeable, irreducible difference between instinctual and conscious, organic and mechanical, born and created, fated and chosen.
What was more, it was reciprocal. Even though I, too, was capable of language play and conversational tricks, my spontaneous puns were in a language my spouse didn’t understand. To avoid that most horrible of creative punishments, the solitary joke, when you can’t share humor with an audience and it wilts, unborn and untested, I kept them to myself. I knew that the more numerous non-native speakers of English have long taken the language over from its native speakers, but inside the marriage, knowing this was not enough. A drop of little sadness lingered at the bottom of every English one-liner. I couldn’t think of anything better to do than share the impression with my partner. For the longest time, I thought this was just the way we were: she made me laugh, and I made her go: “Aw.”
The change in how I read and write this life-long story came as a crisis. It came with the gender transition which precipitated the divorce and a concomitant sense of the marriage as an irreparable mistake, the anguish of solitary immigration, the Russian invasion of Ukraine a year later, and finally finding a place in the US as a trans person and a political asylee, twenty years after arriving in the country. It also came as a natural evolution of subjectivity, the cumulative effect of time on a body and mind after a certain age.
It came as the knowledge that as far as symptoms of intimacy go, sadness has the same rights as humor. Invention is the native language of the non-native. As long as there is self-disappearance, there will be, must be self-creation. Created here is not a deficit mode of born. It’s its own form of authorship, not a consolation prize for the missing birthright. Unlike a native speaker who holds English spontaneously, I hold English deliberately, and that is a different relation to language — one that foregrounds what nativeness conceals. The same applies to near-nativeness in gender. By accident or design, for better or for worse, I have two languages in which to imbue with trans joy my parents’ shyness and fear of English, my foreign Russian childhood, my American solitude, intimate jokes untold and unheard, unacknowledged pasts, names turned dead, and names coming to life.