what we did today #2

Hang up Rivi's beautiful calligraphy.

what we did today #1

Hack apart Manda pig feet! With my new cleaver from the Chinese store downtown. While on the phone with Rivi. Then stew for five hours. Then eat with some very brave friends. YUM.

"She's very elegant."

Here, I demonstrate how I think people in Taiwan manage to eat the kind of things that seem incomprehensible to Americans: things like meat on the bone or other foods where a chewable part comes bound to a non-chewable part. You don't have a knife to do your dirty work, so you have to use your teeth and your suction powers. In this case, my object is crab in the shell.

However, Jennifer does not appear to feel that this is a completely faithful depiction of at least her eating style. "No. I'm very elegant." I obediently repeat after her when I'm done.

All in all, I'll take crab over elegance. But that is no surprise.

the old neighborhood

The park that was the topic of much of the activism that the people I worked with acted out is now closed for reconstruction: it's getting a parking garage built underneath it. This was an old plan that looked like it would never happen by the time I left at the end of my fieldwork -- the newspaper that had offered to pay for it looked like it was pulling out for good -- so it's kind of heartening to see it in the works. Although it's not pretty, currently. Not that pretty was ever the neighborhood's forte.

farming in the aboriginal area of the southern mountains

In the pouring rain, obviously (which struck suddenly in mid-afternoon, in typical summer fashion). Note the lady harvesting something while attached to the more or less vertical mountainside.

the dead weight of felafal weighs like a nightmare upon the stomachs of the living

The title came to me in a bolt upon awakening from a heavy nap on Friday, after my little trip into Jerusalem, a little excitement for the eyes. The minibus in, twelve people: two Africans (presumably Ethiopian) who greeted each other in their own language but spoke Hebrew to the driver; one middle-aged woman in a long skirt and headscarf, one Hassid, and one old lady who moved over so the Hassid could sit alone and not touch any women, and the driver, wearing a yarmulke, all with authentic-sounding (though I never know) Hebrew; three American boys in yarmulkes, one of them spread out over one and a half seats, making loud English arrangements over his cell phone the entire way into town, another one graciously agreeing to sit cramped up on the floor in back behind the seats when it turned out there weren’t enough seats for the two American girls in long skirts who got on together; and me. In general, a fair representation of how things are, including the absolutely crawling all over the place quality of Americans, though a huge underestimation of Russians. There is a pretty well established set of self-identifying symbols here, as my aunt explained, that go way beyond something as universally noticeable as Hassidic dress. I mentioned that nobody wears hats here, even when it’s chilly. “That’s because the religious wear them”—married women are supposed to cover their hair, men obviously of all ages the head. Same with skirts: “And if a woman does wear a skirt who’s not religious, she wears a very short one, even if she’s of a certain age, just so there’s no mistake.”

Jerusalem sneaks up on you, appearing suddenly with full force around the bend, at once closed off with its endless off-white walls and spread open, ready for your contemplating gaze, a citty on a hill, poised for metaphor. I meet another aunt—actually my mother’s third cousin, in the category of people my grandfather calls, emphatically, “a very close relative!”—at noon near the Jerusalem bus station, which is mobbed with people trying to get through the one single bag inspection station at the front door and get to wherever they need to go for Shabbat. Public transportation stops when Shabbat starts, which means early at this time of year: the sun sets a little after four. This gave us around four hours to walk, return, catch another minibus, and make it home before it was time for other people, somewhere in the vicinity, to start lighting candles. We raced through the city, ran through the market, hurried through the curving lanes, stopping only to snap a picture here and there and pick a leaf off a tree in a cemetary. Smell this. Eucalyptis. And on a street. Smell this. Laurel. And off a bush. Smell this. Rosemary. Blooming, purply beflowered, supple leaved rosemary. Rosemary the likes of which my own Chicago rosemary has only seen in glossy movie star magazines; here, out on the street in broad daylight like an ordinary person, for all the world just like that, here in this mythic land.

We took the Arab side path from Jaffa Gate, amazing cloth, a man carrying two glasses of tea on a silver tray up the steps, embroidered dresses, a couple of Hassids, stairways cut at funny angles into the stone. Then through a bit of the Jewish part—kind of the same thing with a Hollywood touch, Americans sitting around drinking soda, rock music—and then to the Wall, where the guy manning the metal detector and checking our bags asked my relative if we were from Jerusalem. I am, she replied, but she’s not. “So what” she transated him as asking, “is she doing here then?” Well, you know. she answered, more or less, it’s like, the wailing wall. He shrugged, and his whole face shrugged with him: the universal shrug of the unimpressed Jew. Nu, so, the wailing wall. And then the bus stop outside it, next to where the old ritual baths were, whose dried remains still pockmark the area around the second temple. And then the bus ride back through Jerusalem, about as long as our original walk had been, down the hill from the temple and through Mea Shearim, the ultra-orthodox neighborhood, where everyone seemed to walk with a suitcase—on their way to spending Shabbat somewhere or other—and some clearly out of town men had already changed from their normal large wide-brimmed hats to the squat cylindrical fat fur-style tubes they wear for Shabbat.

My relative dropped me off at the station, bought me a quick falafel at the corner felafel stand from a man in a large yarmulke, and hurried off to buy some stuff for dinner and get home herself before the buses stopped running and before she broke a holy law—she’s religious herself. Waiting around for a minibus, I realize that I don’t have enough change left, only a large bill. I don’t know what the situation is with giving change on minibuses; wouldn’t do to get caught in Jerusalem after the sun went down. I hop back into the felafel stand to ask for change. Luckily before I get too far into my incomprehensible English, the yarmulked man remembers me and starts speaking Russian. Of course. Apparently the bus drivers give change, even for large bills. The next step is actually getting on a bus: the minibus stops are as mobbed as the official one. I finally manage to be close enough to the door of one of them, asking the girl next to me—clearly religious, with a black beret and a long skirt—where it’s going. The right place.

She’s American. Of course. Early twenties, taking a post-wedding trip with her brand new but already visibly hen-pecked husband, who has a knee problem of some sort: “I’ll put the suitcase in the back. Michael, hold your crutches, I can’t take everything.” He sits at the window and doesn’t say a word the entire way, while she and I chatter away like hen-pecking wives. Except for the fact that I could probably pick her mother out of a crowd, so certain am I that she is reproducing her in oral intonation and romantic relationship, the exciting thing about her was that she, a girl who grew up in New York City and speaks flawless American English, also says things like “usually when I come to Israel I stay by my sister.” I spent the whole conversation trying to steer her back to the topic of guestmanship—not difficult, between the two of them they have quite a bit of family in Israel, it turns out—and to my delight she never once said “with.” It is perhaps the only unself-conscious Yiddishism I’ve ever heard from someone my age. I got dropped off at the American yeshiva down the street, and finished my felafel on the walk home, responding to my grandmother’s “Well, and, what will you have for lunch” by promptly falling asleep. Authentic Israeli felafel, it turns out, not only have strange spices that we don’t have there in America, but also come with french fries, deliciously over-salted, stuffed into the pita along with the felafel balls. And I laugh when my grandfather eats bread with pasta.

personal fronts and impersonal fronts

My grandmother is watching her Argentinian soap opera, dubbed into Russian. These first made it to Russia in the 1980s, I think, and they hit like crack cocaine. My mother remembers her great-aunt complaining about them in the mid-nineties, going into great detail to explain “the nonsense they’re playing here now” before looking at the time and hurrying off. But I thought you said it was such nonsense, my mother said. “Of course it’s nonsense, and you can’t miss a single episode! It’s terrible,” and she turned on the television. My grandfather reads the paper next to her. My mother is waiting for the water for the shower to heat up, reading Elaine Pagels on sex and morality in the Christian tradition. Outside my window someone is playing Hebrew rock and roll; last night it was Russian rap, the kind where you can hear that the back-up girls are naked.

So, today, another walk with my grandfather, this time with his hearing aid. The ear he hears with is on the same side as the arm he holds the cane with, so when you walk with him you’re next to the deaf ear, and when you want to say something you have to kind of talk around his head to the ear that hears, hence all the stopping and looking and not walking, I think. The ear he doesn’t hear with was on the other side of his head from the wound he got—I think it was the second wound. He was lying in the hospital where they were patching up his head, and he told the nurse he couldn’t hear anything with the other ear. The doctor looked at the ear and couldn’t see anything wrong, so he figured he’d get over it. Much later he found out that it was nerve damage from the wound on the other side of his head—so of course the doctor wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with the inside of the ear itself. The next time he was wounded he was in another hospital, and still couldn’t hear anything in that ear, but he didn’t say anything, even though he really should have: “at least they would have written it down, I would have gotten a free hearing aid.”

That next time was in a better hospital, which he got to by hook and by crook. He’d got some shrapnel in his bone from a wound to his leg, but since the field hospital couldn’t do an X-ray, they couldn’t take it out. They sent him on to another hospital closer inland, and when they got there two of his buddies who also had families in Moscow told him to get his papers, with the history of his wound, from the head doctor. He went in to the head doctor, who didn’t want to give them up. “Well, I started to talk him into it. ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!’ I said. That’s Dante, Anechka.” Finally the doctor gave him his papers, with a warning to say he’d stolen them himself if someone asked. He found the buddies, and together they boarded a frieght train headed toward a town in the Moscowly direction. There they got off and found a passenger train full of military men. They understood right away what was going on—two guys in uniform with arms in slings, another walking with a cane—and got them onto the train. “Right away people got up to make room for us. They spread out their coats,” here my grandfather chokes up a bit, as he’s prone to do when something moves him, which I think is a hereditary trait, actually, “because they could see that I was injured, and they lay me down on a seat. And that’s how we rode all the way to Moscow.”

When they got off the train in Moscow they were promptly arrested by the NKVD (the proto-KGB). But they explained to the guy what they were doing, and “he understood our position. We had families in Moscow.” And so they got into the NKVD hospital, a very good hospital, and the volunteer on duty got the address from my grandfather and went right away to inform his family. His father and my grandmother got there as he was being carried out on a stretcher to remove the shrapnel from his leg. They waited until he was brought back and it was there, recovering from the operation, that he first saw his son, my uncle, who I guess at that point was about a year old or so—I’m having a little trouble getting a straight chronology on this. The next time he’d see him after this spell in the hospital would be after the end of the war.

He started recovering quickly after the shrapnel was removed, and when he could walk, my grandmother brought him a pair of black pants and a shirt. He’d sneak into the neighboring yard and change in the outhouse, and in the evenings they’d stroll together. One day as he was returning, the outhouse door went, according to my grandfather, bang. Someone burst in on him. Apparently someone had witnessed this strange man sneaking in and out of the outhouse night after night and had reported it to the authorities. What are you doing here? the man asked. “Changing,” my grandfather replied, with the exact same look of innocent amusement, I suspect, as he had this morning, sixty some years later, telling me about it.

The man dragged him out of the outhouse and, refusing to look at the papers that my grandfather tried to hand him, started walking him to the hospital, to get to the bottom of this, my grandfather all the way trying to talk him out of it, explaining that if they found out they wouldn’t let him stroll with his wife anymore, that he was going back to the front soon anyway, to just be a buddy why don’t you. When they got to the hospital and were swarmed by a group of war invalids who all said the exact same thing, they guy finally relented and let him go, and thus he was able to keep strolling with his wife all the way up until he was sent back to the front for the next three years. His delight at this great good luck, a hospital respite in Moscow that let him stroll about with his wife, shows clearly. My grandfather’s face, like mine, is an open field: bolts of emotion strike with perfect clarity, transforming the whole area in their image. And after the lightning of delight, a slower cloud of memory. “She was very lucky to have escaped, Anechka.” She’d been evacuated (as his wife, not as a refugee from Poland) from the town in western Ukraine where they’d met, shortly before it was occupied. After the war, my grandfather went back there once; all the Jews were gone. There’d been a wooden synagogue—of course as soon as he says “wooden,” you know where the story is going. The story walks us home.

about suffering they were never wrong, the old masters

We’ve gradually gotten into some slight storytelling mode over the last two days—I expect today to be considerably enhanced by the arrival, last night, of a repaired hearing aid for my grandfather. The social atmosphere is so dense, though, that it's difficult to write about it until it's compacted a bit.

Okay, it's compacted. My god, but not very much.

***
A friend of mine, an American, is reading a book on Chernobyl, a recent ethnography that cites people as saying, more or less, yeah a nuclear meltdown is bad, but it’s nothing compared to the famine of the ‘30s. The American friend asked where it was I came from in the Soviet Union, exactly, and responded to my Moscow with, “at least you’re not from the Ukraine!” And, well, at least I’m not; and certainly not from the ‘30s. Two days ago my grandfather of his own accord stumbled, in a story, onto his 1930s, which did take place in the Ukraine. My mother and I raised our eyebrows at each other; I’d told her abut the American friend. I think when you grow up with the dim assumption of horrible tragedy befalling everyone who is older than you, even as you yourself get only the milk and cookies of history, it's always a little funny to find out that other people don't have assumptions like that, and might even at some point find out about those tragedies for the first time – gaining, thereby, often a much more accurate, much less dim, understanding of them, but not really assimilating them as basic background.

In 1932 my grandfather's family managed to get into a Jewish collective farm in Crimea. His father had a cousin there who got them in. Not as bad as the Ukraine, but also "not sweet." He and his older brother Kolya decided it wasn't the place for them -- "I needed a profession! What was I going to do there?" -- so they escaped to Har'kov', a largely Russian industrial city in Ukraine, and joined a factory of some sort associated with a school of some sort -- where they manufactured during the day and studied in the evening, supposedly. Places like this, factories, had rations, so if you could squeeze in somehow you might get at least enough food to live on. It's unclear how they did squeeze through, though from the sounds of it Kolya had excellent social skills, was always involved in some sort of life-saving enterprise -- unlike my grandfather, who was a bookworm and always wanted to be in school. My grandfather adored him, and still does. It was several years after he went missing at the front that the rumors they were getting—someone said he had been shot by his own men, not unknown treatment for Jews in Russian companies, someone else just that he had been shot—converged heavily enough on his death that they decided to assume it.

The factory had a long, dark barracks full of beds, and at the end of the room was an empty stove. It turned out that factory rations differed depending on the normal criteria that you'd expect: the ones with named for Stalin got food and wood; others got nothing or close to it. All the other boys in the plant were Russian except for the two of them ("Russian," of course, means "not Jewish" -- probably there were Ukranians as well), but nonetheless "our relations were very good."(1)

At that time Har'kov' was busy building a new section of the city (he named it, so I guess it's something one ought to know). At night the boys would take turns going out to the sections just being built and breaking down fences or whatever they could find that was breakable, to get wood for the empty stove. At this point my grandfather was around 15 or 16. He got into this part of the story because somehow he mentioned that when he applied to the Jewish mathematical school in the mid-30s, the examining teacher asked him what language he was more comfortable speaking, and he said Russian -- he'd been living with the Russian boys for two years already and hadn't been speaking Yiddish. But in the ‘20s he'd been in a Jewish school (a "7-year") where his literature teacher would take him to Ukranian schools to recite Yiddish poetry; he recited well. Then my uncle came in and the story was interrupted. "More tomorrow," my grandfather said.

I've heard parts of this story before -- I have it recorded from last time. It's not pretty, and it's not very coherent in the same way my grandmother's Holocaust escape isn't. Somehow when people talk about how they survived world-class tragedies it always sounds muddled. I have a feeling for why it is, but I can't quite get a hold of it. It's a number of things, I guess. One is a disjuncture of empathy, the way that a person you can normally get, somewhat even from the inside, could have lived through something you won't ever be able to really understand with your gut. Another is the difficulty of imagining a situation with radically different necessities and assumptions: we just don't talk about the actual necessities of survival, ever, in the normal course of things. What does it mean to live on half a loaf of bread and a plate of soup a day, and still be working in a factory and going out at night in the Russian winter to break down fences to burn? There are systems there too, patterns for survival, kinds of luck you have to have -- you have to not get sick in the middle of the famine, obviously, you have to not get a very bad splinter that gets infected when you're out stealing wood, I don't know, you have to not have a crisis in a crisis situation -- but they're so different from the patterns we're used to that it looks from the outside like chaos.

It's like when I was in Russia in 1992 and everything was falling apart, there was hyperinflation, and people were simply not getting paid for months and months at a time. What does it mean not to have been paid since January in June? One woman told me it meant "I can't buy butter for my son," which I, a butterlover born and bred, found a powerful description. But somehow they were still living -- there were other protocols for acquisition than salaries. A mother who was still getting her pension; a particularly active garden; friends who shared; a son -- in that, butter, case -- who was taking advantage of the onset of capitalism by buying beer cheap at the store and selling it dear at the train station, and who was, at sixteen, making more money than both his parents put together, much to their dismay because they were, in his contemptuous phrase, "Soviet people." But it's hard for me to think of these other protocols myself, I need them enumerated one by one.

And then there's just the way that it is a muddle, that the only way that people live through things like this is to muddle through. Everything depends on chance encounters -- my grandmother, abandoned on her way East in a park in some city into which the German army would shortly march, was spotted by someone who recognized her and decided to admit to it, even though it was probably not very convenient, and sent in the right direction. I wonder if part of the reason it's so difficult to understand is that it's difficult not to treat the ultimate survival of the people in front of you -- especially if they happen to be, as in the case of grandparents, the conditions of possibility for your own existence -- as a teleological necessity rather than a conglomeration of coincidences that were much more likely, statistically speaking, not to have happened. It's difficult to treat your relatives as unlikely; even more difficult to treat yourself so.

***

In the meantime I've gone for an hour-long "walk" with my grandfather, which means twice up and down the parking lot with him on my arm, mostly standing still to talk. He's deaf enough that he needs to look at you very closely when you are talking, and so I think he assumes that other people need to look at him very closely when he's talking, too, so basically he can't talk and walk at the same time, at least not while he's making eye contact. This time toward the end I figured out that if you don't look at him but look down or ahead, he actually will walk and talk at the same time, but you have to keep nudging him along.

The father's cousin in the Crimean collective farm was someone who had taken advantage of the New Economic Policy after the civil war, when they allowed limited private enterprise. He'd opened a store, bought a house, done well, but realized in time to save his life that the tide was turning and that the NEPmen, as they were known, were about to get dispossessed and then something, killed or sent to camps. After his house was expropriated and he was shoved into a little apartment with his wife and five children and parents in law, he sold the store and took his family to the Jewish collective farm in Crimea, returning a few years later to enroll others, including my grandfather’s family. By the time they got on the train to go there—he’d enrolled “a whole train-car full of people”—all they had on them to eat were some onions. Onions! At the first stop in Crimea the train was met with a delegation of Jews bearing food, a loaf of bread for each family—“five or six kilograms, a huge loaf of bread! Well we got to that loaf pretty quickly and ate it all”—and other things. Good living, Crimea, comparatively speaking.

After my grandfather and his brother ran away from there to Har'kov' and attached themselves to the factory with the empty stove, there were some very hard times -- "I don't remember at all what we ate. I just remember seeing my brother begging a man who was driving a truck of bread, 'Uncle, give us a piece of bread.' But of course he couldn't; he’d have to feed everyone; everyone was hungry." The factory was not called Stalin but "Hammer and Sickle," in Russian "Serp i Molot," which the people there called "Smert' i Golod," which translates to "Death and Hunger" but rhymes. Their parents were doing okay for a while, so well that they even started raising a pig -- "Well, they'd rejected God, the Soviets" -- but then there was nothing to feed the pig with so they killed it and sent Kolya and my grandfather a care package of grain of some sort and lard from the pig. They cooked the grain in water in a jar and ate it with the lard "instead of bread. It was awkward to eat it during the day when everyone could see, so we waited until they were all asleep. We finished the whole package in one night." And then he doesn't remember how they lived.

Finally, Kolya managed to get them enrolled in a factory called Stalin, and they ran away from the empty stove. At the factory named Stalin they got a daily ration of a certain weight of bread, usually a loaf and a little more. They ate the little extra and sold the loaf, and with the money bought tokens for the factory dining hall, and with what was left over bought things to send to their parents. Ah! and this is why when he took the test to get into a four-year school, where the teacher asked him if he preferred Russian or Yiddish, after he'd finished, the director of the school came in. It turned out that she had been in charge of the Death and Hunger factory-school, from which eventually all the boys had run away in their various directions, for which she'd gotten in trouble. So when she recognized my grandfather she said, "I don't need this hooligan in my school!" and that was that. Good thing too, actually: "What would I have eaten for four years?"

By this time his parents had joined them in Har'kov', with his little sister, who was going to school (she now lives about a half hour's drive away from here). He wanted to keep going to school so he joined up with another factory-school, and then got into the university nearby. He was taking his exam and the teacher was walking around to see how people were doing, and he noticed that my grandfather had done everything right except one problem, which he hadn't touched. What's the matter? I don't know what it means, my grandfather explained. "You see Anechka, our education was a haltura" -- the best translation I can think of is "a mess of half-assedness." The teacher explained what the symbols meant -- sine of what angle and so on -- and my grandfather got it. So he entered the university and got a stipend of forty rubles a month, which he handed over to his mother, and passed all his exams but never went to half the lectures because he'd skip months of class at a time to help his father, who was working as a painter, to support the family.

This is the one point in the story where he expresses real regrets: if he’d lived in the dormitory, if he’d—he doesn’t put it this way—abandoned his parents, he’d have been able to attend all the lectures. He really wasted his university years, going around working for his family. I find it interesting that the one thing he finds extraordinary enough to regret is the one thing that to me seems completely obvious: everything else, the famine, the war, the antisemitism, these are all historically specific occurrences. Your reaction to them depends on the specific conditions and possibilities that you found yourself in or managed to find out. But staying out of school to help make money to support your family seems to be a universal characteristic of impoverishment, whether your poverty is specific to you or, as in their case, just a fact of living in that society. To me it’s the least remarkable thing about the whole story.

Then a job in western Ukraine, then my grandmother, and then, two weeks after they "formalized" their marriage, the war. When he came back from the war in 1946, with four wounds and a mound of medals, nobody would hire him. He looked for work for six months before a friend introduced him to someone high up in the educational bureaucracy -- "a shining individual" -- who told him to go to such and such a school and to say that he had sent him, and that had told him that they were in need of a math teacher. "He knew they were scum, of course." He went and found two people there, the director, a Party member, and another older administrator, another "shining individual," nonpartied, who later told him that after he had introduced himself and been asked to wait outside, the director turned to him and said, "What do we need this Jew for?" But had hired him after all, upon being shamed by the shining individual, reminded of the service at the front and, probably more importantly, of the importance of the man who had recommended him. And so also because of this scum, we are alive.

All the time we've been standing out in the parking lot, various people have been passing by; some exchange "Shalom" with us, others stop and chat in Russian. As we get to these last paragraphs, standing already near the door, a swarthy guy in a yarmulka walks in and out of the house a few times, taking out the garbage, carrying things to his car. I smile and nod at him the way we have been at everyone, but he just stares at me and walks a little closer to us each time he passes. Stares on the way out, stares on the way back in, and stares on the way back out again. On his last trip out the guy in the yarmulka is still staring, walking an arm's length away, making a sucking sound with his teeth that sounds like halfway between a catcall and a spit; then sits in his car revving it for so long that we can smell the gas on the walk up to the house. And of course I think, as I nudge my grandfather along to get out of the glare and out of the gas, Fucking Jews.



(1) During the ritual questioning about my life “on the personal front” yesterday, we finally arrived, after the various information about profession and heritage, at the question of whether the relevant parents were cognizant of my being Jewish. To my insistence that “In America they don’t give a spit” [that’s a literal translation], my grandfather recalled with glee the time when he’d asked my brother how many of his college friends were Jewish and my brother had replied, “I don’t know.” Can you imagine? A country where you wouldn’t know if your friends were Jewish! It was a marvel. Of course my brother was lying; but it was in the service of a point.

the holy land

My teeth are a little slimy feeling but otherwise everything seems fine. I’m sitting at my grandfather’s desk in the room with two windows, both of them sealed at the edges with masking tape. In front of me, the window looks out onto variously colored concrete that differentiates parking lot (grey) from sidewalk (red and black striped), and behind the concrete a small playground with a sand-and-grass base; out of the window to my left I can see a very small bulldozer with no behind to speak of carrying shovelfuls at a time of dirt from the corner of the parking lot somewhere very far away before returning for more. It makes around one trip every two minutes, lending an automotive punctuation to the morning. My grandparents, similarly sized, are sitting next to each other in the living room, so still and with postures so similar that you might have bought a male and female version from the doll series reading grandparents: torso twisted roughly twenty-five degrees to the left of center, right shoulder somewhat slumped and left shoulder somewhat lifted, head bent a bit to parallel the angle of the book and eyebrows raised as if to say, “You don’t say!” My mother’s getting dressed in the next room over, having emerged from the shower in the regulation padded dressing gown with small flower print. I, a rebellious child who only eats half her oatmeal, will wait to shower until we get back from the store, where I am hoping I can procure a toothbrush.

My plane out of Chicago was a couple of hours late—apparently they couldn’t get out of wherever they were coming from—so by the time we landed in Newark, there was less than half an hour left of my original three hour layover. I jogged from the gate to the airport train, tapped and jittered annoyingly from terminal A to terminal C, got a mysterious reprimand from the headscarved African American woman who checked my identification for security at terminal C (“Hold your head up, Anna.”), and didn’t bother putting anything away after security but sprinted like a track and field tenth grader to the gate, holding my laptop and passport in one hand. “Are you coming from Chicago?” the lady checking tickets at the empty gate called out as I ran up. “Your mother’s waiting for you on the plane.” “Ah, Bairn-shtain?” the man checking in stragglers on the plane pronounced it Russian-style, as they all do here, and crossed me off his little list. “Your mother is waiting for you.” And so she was, down the other aisle, standing up and waving both hands. We piled in and faced each other so thoroughly that it was only as we were disembarking ten hours later that the man in the window seat—who had somehow managed to leave it and return to it without either of us noticing—could ask what language we were speaking, and whether this was our first time here.

In the meantime there were many important things to discuss. For one thing there was the matter of airplane food, which tastes almost decent, it turns out, in the “Hindu” version, and which has also sometimes a decent fruit version. I was discouraged from eating what was called chicken and handed a sandwich from David instead. Which brought up David’s fruitcakes—the most delicious fruitcakes ever, a justification of the concept of fruitcake. We were carrying one for my aunt and uncle, and one for us and my grandparents. Really, it’ll make you understand why people eat fruitcake, my mother assured me. Mmmmm! I can’t wait.

Then there were the presents. Various presents for various relations, and then presents from other people’s relations—a collection of pills for my grandparents’ neighbor whose sister in Brighton Beach had gotten the prescription that she, the neighbor, needed, but wasn’t sure how best to send it. To send it by post cost money. But to send it with my mother was dangerous: it was a big crime to transport medicine from country to country, and she did not want to put my mother in danger. My mother got in touch with the sister’s daughter, thinking that she may be a little less risk-averse, but got the same story. “When you go through customs, the first question they always ask you is, ‘Are you carrying any medicines?’” the sister’s daughter insisted. It was a very dangerous undertaking. Perhaps they should just forget about the pills. After several telephone calls, my mother finally convinced them with the reasoning that, since they were only sending to her, it wasn’t international; and as for her, she was taking it across the border of her own free will. Finally, the day before she was leaving, she got a package with some pills, the names carefully ripped off the labels.

Then there was sleep.

Then there was passport control, always a thrill in Israel. We went up together, so I barely had to talk. “So, you immigrated from here to America?” “No, from Russia to America. My parents came here.” “When did they come here?” “1991.” “And when did you go to America?” “Long ago.” “When?” “1980.” “So, you never lived in Israel with your parents?” “No.” “Why not?” “Well…” “Why don’t you make aliya?” “Well, it’s difficult.” “Why difficult? Your parents are already here.” “Yes, but my husband is American.” “So bring him too.” “Well…” You wonder what this line of questioning accomplishes. Certainly it does not get you any new information about whether my mother is a terrorist, or sympathizes with Palestinians, or is likely to overstay her visa and stay on here as an illegal migrant laborer—presumably the sorts of things that someone in a passport control booth would be worried about. I can imagine that he sometimes gets a mother-daughter team who look vaguely like us but reply enthusiastically that, yes indeed, they are planning to make aliya just as soon as everything is settled with the pregnant sister in Jersey. But if the people he talks to have, like us, no plan and no desire to move to Israel, it’s difficult to imagine these questions inspiring them to change their minds. It strikes me, actually, as a recognizably Jewish approach to a situation you don’t approve of: the passport controlman sounds like nothing so much as my grandmother, pushing a plate of oatmeal at me and telling I’m too thin, I need to eat. I don’t eat it, of course, because I’m not hungry; nu, but okay, at least she tried. She knows she’s in the right, anyway. So nu, okay, we can enter the country. At the end of the interview he glanced at my passport. “You were born in Moscow?” Surprised. “Yes.” “How old are you? Twenty?” Which is kind of a funny question for a person holding your passport to ask, now that I think about it.

It didn’t occur to us until we were waiting for our luggage that my suitcase probably goes to the gym less regularly than I do, and had probably not run fast enough to catch the right plane. When it failed to arrive I went to file the claim, which involved taking the piece of paper with my name and the contents of the suitcase written on it over to one of the people at customs and having him sign it. The person I accosted was busy actually scanning the insides of other people’s actual luggage and had no time to waste on my virtualities, signing my piece of paper without looking at it and sparing himself the details of my addictions (“slippers, coffee, coffeemaker”) and my medical procedures (“suture removal kit”). I then took my paper back over to the girl at the desk, just barely slipping through the mob that was closing in on her from all sides, and in return got a phone number in English just before she disappeared beneath the Hebrew-speaking mass.

The next day would be an adventure of homebound maneuvering. I called the airline, who had an English line with a number that supposedly went with the driver. I called the number and spoke in English to a guy who was not the driver, but who could give me the driver’s number, but “the driver does not speak English.” So the guy called the driver for me, and I called him back; the driver would be here around two thirty. Around two thirty we get a call; it’s the driver, he speaks a little English, he’s lost. Actually, everyone gets lost here; the doctors who get called out for my grandparents’ emergencies get lost. We’re trying to figure out how to direct him here, I say something to my mother, and hear the driver call into the phone, “A vi po ruskii govoriti, nu chtozhe mi golovou morochim? (Oh you speak Russian! What are we messing with our heads for?)” It was a satisfying moment, in an aural cinematic kind of way, but even as a Russian speaker he was still lost and still incapable of giving a decent description of where he was. Finally my mother lulled him into admitting that there was a store right across the street from where he was parked, and we ran out of the house and down the little hilly lawn that leads down to the street where he was, as my mother had kind of suspected, standing, right across from the Russian store we buy all our food from. (So now, halfway through the story, I can brush my teeth.)

But that was all the next day. Now we’re still at the airport.

Outside, in the airport, my mother waited for me with my cousin, who had that day become father to a second child, a baby boy. The first child, a little girl, was with my uncle and aunt, who brought her to my grandparents’ soon after we got there. She walked in all curls and cheeks, carrying a doll on each arm. One doll was dressed in pink. Its name was “Masha.” The other doll was dressed in blue. Its name was “Bebi Boy.” When she saw the real Bebi Boy in the hospital the next day, we’re told, she was delighted, and started wheeling him around and playing with him until it was time for him to go, at which point she became incensed that someone was taking her dollie away.

This morning, while my mother was still asleep, the husband of the neighbor with the sister in Brighton Beach came by to pick up the medicine. Someone handed him the plastic bag my mother had sleepily picked out from her collection, and a small silver-colored tiara with a fur-lined base. For his great-granddaughter. “Were there any dresses?” He asked. “There were supposed to be some dresses for the little girl as well. Could you check to see if there were any dresses?” I went to my mother’s room. No dresses, I reported back. He twisted the handles of the plastic bag.

“That’s a shame.”

“There were supposed to be some dresses.”

“For Purim, you see, she likes to dress up. They were supposed to send a couple of dresses for her.”

We diverted him onto other topics, our newborn great-grandson. He has six great-grandchildren already: one grandson has one child, one granddaughter has two, and another granddaughter, she married a religious guy, so they have three. My mother got up. He thanked her, then asked again about the dresses. No, she repeated, no dresses; but they said they’d send another package with someone else. All she was taking were the pills and the crown. He got up and thanked her again, seemingly trying to think of what an appropriate counter-favor would be—offering to send something to America?—and made his exit. We started our morning milling about, me with an updated version of the familiar wrangle over how much breakfast I’m supposed to eat. My grandmother has been strictly warned not to force food on me, so now my grandfather tries to force food on me while my grandmother scolds him, it’s like the same piece with an extra instrument: we’re exploring a more complex harmonic structure.

The phone keeps ringing with five-minute conversations to welcome my mother. One of these lasts suspiciously long, with my mother apparently interrupted at every sentence until she bursts out in a kind of howling laughter that you wouldn’t quite know what to make of. She hangs up. It was the woman with the sister in Brighton Beach. They’d opened up the plastic bag, but instead of a bottle of pills they had found inside it a big biscuit of some sort. So they had figured, logically enough, that her sister in Brighton Beach had taken all the pills and baked them into this big biscuit, to hide them from the customs agents. They had taken to and destroyed the biscuit, reducing it to crumbs. But they had found no pills. So, it seems that they had thought better of it and decided not to send the pills after all?

A little while later the husband came by again to pick up the right bag, and he was smart to come and go quickly, because I don’t think my mother will ever forgive him for the destruction of her fruitcake. “Biscuit, indeed!”

!!

the first rosy cheek!

(the taximen of cleveland part 1.02)

We started out in cloudy coolness on a hill in western Massachusetts. I hugged Miss Piggy, the new car, hello (though I don’t love her any more than Underdog, the old car, see below), we got in, drove away, and got lost within a half mile of the house, which I felt was, if not exactly auspicious, at least appropriate. When there’s only one left turn every few miles, how can you tell which one is yours? I, being still in that stage of my automobilic development where you believe in drive for drive’s sake, curved merrily along the country roads as my travelling companion yelped for me to slow down, a trend that would continue much of half way across the country as we gradually converged on some sort of median speed/yelp consensus.

Oh, no, I am already a little past awake-enough to write this. But I wanted to put Miss Piggy up on line, as well as this photo of unpacking and taking care of urgent business the day after the last move:

egyptian papyrus in a pot made by guess-who

some of my not-yet-dead plants

blahgspam!

A comment from a gentle readbot:

“Reading your blog and I figured you'd be interested in advancing your life a bit, call us at 1-206-339-5106. No tests, books or exams, easiest way to get a Bachelors, Masters, MBA, Doctorate or Ph.D in almost any field.”

As I sit here trying to squeeze out another little dissertational chunk (I’m idly rereading Portnoy’s Complaint, do you remember his descriptions of his father’s constipation?), this sounds pretty darn tempting. Although, then again, I don’t think I’ve had a single test or exam in lo these seven years of graduate school. Must be those pesky books, that's the problem.

Underdog, the first car, being driven the way he was meant to.

the taximen of cleveland 1

Luxury, its soft, bouncy lap. Sitting in the kitchen, eating ice cream and reading Ian Hacking, looking up occasionally to see the afternoon sunlight through the back windows, and through the open door my plants, all of them still alive after weeks and weeks of care by me, the renowned herbicide. I go out on the porch often to talk to the plants and try to cool off my lungs. Lately the air has mostly been still, stifled with heat, the molecules in their hellbent acceleration knocking anything in their way flat on its back. Including me: there’s a spot in the middle of my living room where the floor is frosty on the very hot days. Why the people below me would have an air conditioner in the middle of their apartment is not completely clear to me, but sometimes I lie down on the floor there to cool off. It’s like hooking on to my neighbor’s internet connection.

We’ve had a month or so of quiet around here since the big explosion that any normal person not familiar with local ritual could have been forgiven for thinking was a war. The Fourth of July is not a triflling matter in Logan Square. During the day someone let off a very loud firework right near my car as I drove down the street (I reacted as a dog would: anger and whimpers), but the real noise started a bit before sunset. By nightfall the air was actually foggy with smoke, stinky with sulfur that you could smell all the way in the house. We walked out to get some supplies for the barbeque and stopped to watch a group of people ranging in age from five to fifty setting off exploves next to their cars and on their porches. A police car drove by, leisurely. Carnival in the traditional sense. Two days later I saw some large, flatish cardboard boxes piled up in a tumbling way, several tall stacks at the mouth of an alley. They had a kind of beehive of round cardboard tubes in them, and Chinese writing describing the contents as some sort of flower. Firecracker cartons.

By this time my traveling companion had, luckily for her, left for greener, hillier, cooler climes. We’d traveled from the east coast to the middle, the good old American way, for a good old American purpose: to transport our means of transportation. I’ve had a, and been in proximity to the, car for the better part of a year now, and my driving has gone from jerky and unpredictable, frightened and audacious, to only occasionally spastic (although it has stayed steadily self-righteous from beginning to end—I’m the sort of person who remarks snidely to her closed windows, “Yes, that’s lovely, just stand *right* *there* in the midde of the lane like that, that’s just a great place to stand”). But driving pretty much the entire way from western Massachusetts to Chicago (my traveling companion managed to wrest the wheel away from me for a couple of hours only) makes me feel like I have fulfilled the requirements for a certificate of driving. Not a certificate of good driving, necessarily; but I feel I ought to—I mean I could—I mean I wouldn’t feel an imposter to—have a little plaque on the wall that said, “This is to certify that / Blahgstein / drives.”

interludinous coolness

six gummi deadly sins
(via boing boing)

a letter, not a story, about chicago in March

I took a walk today. A walk! In Chicago! The first real walk -- the first stroll for stroll's sake -- I've taken since I got back, on almost windless, sunlit streets, almost like you'd get in a normal city where people actually lived, but a bit colder. One of the freaky things about Chicago to me is the way it will suddenly, technically in the middle of the city, turn into something that is not a city at all, and then in a minute turn back to city, all too city. You walk down Fullerton, falling slightly apart what with the imminent sale of Los Recuerdos ("For sale: nightclub and real estate") but keeping it real with the Missionary Mission of Jesus Christ, Inc., and when you see the highway passing by you in all its diagonal glory you take a left, join a couple of girls rolling along in extremely tight jeans as they make their way under the highway overpass. It still feels a little open, a little spacious, but gritty, city. Then you take a right on Elston and suddenly you are in Park City Mall, the enormous shopping mall outlet hell near my parents' house in the part of Pennsylvania that didn't really need to destroy its gorgeous Amish farmland to build concrete blocks of consumer exhaustion but did.

After a while of this -- as you consider whether you need electronics, household goods, pet supplies -- you take a right and are plunged into something pukifyingly precious, so precious in comparison to where you just were that it seems not quite real, all mauve silk babydoll dresses and bureaus out of Anne of Green Gables, with names they probably paid some designer fifty thousand dollars for before the thing even opened. And then there's a section of nothing in particular -- also a Chicago specialty -- and all of a sudden you are in the land of red and blue hair glued straight up, signs advertising piercings and tattoos, girls with something between a purse and a bike messenger bag standing outside, flicking a cigarette, rolling their eyes into the cell phone: "I'm like right outside of fucking Filter, like where the fuck are you?" I slip inside of fucking Filter to see if my temporary roommate is there (he said he might be) and run almost literally (in case you thought leaving hyde park meant, like, leaving hyde park) into his ex-girlfriend.

And then finally out, and back up Milwaukee, through something a little broken-windowed, a section of the sidewalk run to mud, a man standing by his bike at a pay phone outside a White Castle yelling as the El kachunks by but in a way that makes it clear that he's not yelling because of the El -- there's a cadence and intonation to cursing that you can hear even when you can't make out the words themselves. But it gets livelier from there, until it almost seems like a neighborhood, and the girl in the Mexican grocery is nice, and across the street there are six dollar haircuts, and there are kids playing basketball at the do not enter end of my block, and in the apartment the cats are draped pretty much where I left them, and my roommate is taking a nap.

It's not exactly Whitman, this feeling, it's not exactly ecstatic; but it's heightened, it's the feeling you get from a city, from life and lives teeming and streaming and paying no attention to you, your one small square of home anchoring your movement through it, with the comfort of feeling that anchor and the excitement of knowing that everyone else is anchored somehow else, somewhere you don't know about and in some other way.

the next step in

the wanderings of

the wandering jew
Posted by: blahgstein.

view out my window

view out my window
Posted by: blahgstein.

green living room

green living room
Posted by: blahgstein.

green room with matching cats

green room with matching cats
Posted by: blahgstein.

behind the green room

behind the green room
Posted by: blahgstein.

my ceiling

my ceiling
Posted by: blahgstein.

kitchen + sunroom

kitchen + sunroom
Posted by: blahgstein.

next up in Jakobson:

When you've got nothing more to not say about the phatic function of language, sometimes you start tapping your feet and looking around and stumble on some pretty cool naturally occurring demonstrations of the poetic function.*
(courtesy of HB)



* Poetic function: "The set (Einstellung) toward the message as such, focus on the message for its own sake” (69). Not to be confined to (or confused with) poetry; “The poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent” (69). The poetic function depends on selection and combination. “The selection is produced on the basis of equivalence, similarity and dissimilarity, synonymy and antonymy, while the combination, the build-up of the sequence, is based on contiguity. The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence. ...in metalanguage the sequence is used to build an equation, whereas in poetry the equation is used to build a sequence” (71).

fits, starts, and ends

fits

Yesterday I saw the last remaining apartments in Hyde Park. I’ve been through every management company list I could get my hands on, and I think I’ve seen pretty much everything in my price and size range that there is. I’d even started the application procedure for one decent place, before waking up one morning worried about the sky not falling down: the apartment faces out onto the neighboring building and gets virtually no light. Just the thought of it started to depress me, and I resumed my search. After planning an engagement to one place that turned out to be out of my league—the price was incorrectly quoted to me—I pursued, in what seemed to be an increasingly comic situation, my last opportunity for my very own Platz-an-der-Sonnenhütte (as they say in Der Besuch der alten Dame) by pursuing the word “various” next to an address that is not exactly on, but is within walking distance of, the fashionable side of the street (as they say in The Importance of Being Earnest).

The day was crisp but not cold, and when the snow started to come down in fattened flakes like little tufts of the wool of clean, happy, well-fed sheep, I was, for once, neither resentful nor apprehensive. I skipped a little as I walked down the street. I thought of hot cocoa. I did not actually think of Julie Andrews, but I could have—that's the kind of snow it was. As I waited by the gate, a man came up with a garbage bag and said, theatrically raising his hands to indicate the sky, “Saint Pyatrick’s day! I yask you!” before opening the gate and collecting some dead flora for his bag.

starts

Instead of the gruff probable-Serb with whom I had arranged the appointment (Hyde Park buildings tend to be managed by Serbs), a friendly Mexican guy a little taller and a little wider than me showed up to open the door for me. The apartment was almost perfect: both rooms’ windows faced out over the roof of the entrance onto the street. The kitchen was big enough to eat in. The closet was big enough to camp in. The only problem was that the oven was about as wide as my hips: an oven for a skinny New York appetite, an oven for heating up frozen bread in.

“The list said various,” I said. “You have anything else? Or is this the only one?” Well, he hemmed a little in his soft, shy way, there’s another one right next door, but it’s the exact same thing. “Why don’t I take a look, since we’re here anyway.” He searched around for the keys and we entered the mirror image of the first apartment. Again he stood at the window watching the snow fall--the key point here being that there were windows to stand at where watch the snow fall--while I made a slow inspection. It was, in fact, the exact same thing, except one bedroom window, which was a little blocked by a brick protrusion, and the oven, which was a healthy midwestern size, big enough for a couple of cookie sheets in at the same time. I was weighing the relative importance of brick blockings and oven sizes when I asked him again, “So, it's these two, huh? Nothing else?” Well, he started reluctantly, there is one more, but it’s not ready yet, we’d have to fix it up, and it’s pretty much the same…

The stairs up to the third apartment were dripping in salsa music—it was running down the walls, spilling out into the hallway, from the door next to the one he opened. The apartment looked like it had only recently and not quite thoroughly been vacated. The curtains on the main windows, a layer of dusty translucent blue lace with an insulating layer of raggedy old blue cotton with a floral pattern, suggested an old lady meshing of prim and tawdry. I almost asked if I could keep them. The apartment turned out to be a corner unit, windows all along two sides, living room and dinette facing out directly onto the street, bedroom facing onto a small parking lot and lots of sky. Even the closet had a window, for god’s sake, covered with another raggedy sheet of brown floral patterning. “I want it,” I said and, opening the bedroom closet, was immediately doused with a bucket of salsa music from next door. “Although, does the neighbor always listen to music that loud? That’s gonna drive me nuts.”

He laughed: “That’s my brother, he’s next door, fixing up the studio they’re renting out. He likes to listen to music when he works.” And with that I felt my fate click into place. “This is great,” I said as he locked up the apartment door, “I’ll go over to the office right now and see about a lease. Hey, thanks for showing it to me. What’s your name, by the way?” “Abel,” he said. I didn’t quite get it. “Ay, bee, ee, el.” A little screw turned and tightened the fit of my fate: how could I, a girl who thinks it is important to be Ernest, possibly not live in a building cared for by a man named Abel? “Abel, hi. I’m Anya.” He smiled again. I glanced over at the wellspring of salsa music. Behind that door worked the brother of Abel. I considered it. I refrained. I can always ask after I move in.

ends

Although there were still some complications to work through—the person in charge of this building at the management company was out sick so I couldn’t formally get started on the lease—I thought I should call and withdraw my application for the sunless room of several days ago. The realtor was, of course, not happy about it—this is a bad time for everyone, renters and rentees—and reacted to my explanation as though he’d never heard of the sky and couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to see it. “Sorry about that,” I said. “Yeah,” he said in a voice of such finality that it made me think of Jakobson. In Jakobson’s terminology, phatic, a term he lifts from Malinowski, refers to “messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works…, to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention.”* In everyday academic-speak, the part about discontinuing communication has generally been lost, and people use the word phatic to describe that part of an interaction oriented around preserving it or confirming that it is still going on.

In my own life the word phatic is defined by childhood phone calls to my grandparents in Moscow, which for me followed an unshakeable pattern: “Hi! How are you? We’re fine! We’ll talk to you next Sunday!” The realtor’s tone, however, was clearly not oriented toward preserving the interaction but toward ending it and telling it not to come back. As I hung up the phone, still excited by my prim and tawdry find, I felt just a pinch of heaviness, a little tint of tiredness, emerging from the conversation. I was thinking that the subset of the phatic function to which the man’s utterance belonged could well be called the dephatic—the fatiguing departure of phatic confirmation that marks the end of one interaction, the impossibility of another.



* Roman Jakobson, 1987. “Linguistics and Poetics” in Language in Literature. Krytyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, eds. Harvard, p. 69.

the marriage counselor

Did I mention I went to see an apartment yesterday? A two room studio, if there is such a thing -- two equally sized rooms with a fridge, stove, and sink kind of thrown at jaunty angles next to one another in a little tiled alcove. Instead of the usual Hyde Park room plus kitchen plus dinette, this was a room plus room plus kitchenette. Carpeted in a strong, institutional brown that hides the tracks well and has seen everything. As we walked up the stairs, Glen, the super, who had arrived half an hour late after a prodding phone call from me, wondered out loud, "What the fuck?" There was a big empty Coca Cola bottle on the landing and you could kind of make out the brown spots from what must have been in the bottle. The stairs smelled so strongly of bleach that you couldn't really tell where it had gone though. Down the hall as I looked in the apartment a woman was yelling, "Get the fuck out of my house. Get the fuck out of my house and don't come back. Get the fuck out of here." It's always difficult to describe the qualities of people's voices beyond the obvious, pitch, breathiness. Her voice was neither high nor low, neither thick nor thin, strong and clear without being piercing. A normal, actually quite nice, decent sounding, woman's voice.

But there was something about the volume of it: she was yelling to be heard perfectly clearly down the hall and a floor in either direction, without sounding like she was screaming, desperate, at her wits' end. It sounded like it was a normal range for her, on a pissed off day. I remembered walking in Manhattan one time in the middle of the night and this guy started following me down the street yelling something like "Get out of my city! You cunt! Get the fuck out of my city!" What was so striking about it was not what he was yelling (although I don't think anybody has ever yelled that at me aside from him) but just how loud he was going. He was going pretty much about as loud as he probably could. He was not barring any holds. And I realized (as I stepped off the sidewalk to cross over to the other side and turned my head over my shoulder to yell, sharply, like you might at an animal, "Hey! Leave me 'lone!" upon which he started just a little, paused just a little, before continuing to yell, in that same unreally loud voice, from his spot on the sidewalk, now no longer following me, as I walked away down the other side of the street) that I hadn't ever actually heard someone yell like that, yell seemingly without any consciousness that they were yelling at all, or that it was an unusual thing to do. That's what was frightening about that guy, not that the words were aggressive but that he was yelling like someone who really had nothing restraining him, no, for lack of a better word but I mean this rather precisely, sense of propriety. Either really no intention of being anything like proper or simply no sense of there being some proper way to be. Again it's hard to describe the quality of a sound, but after that guy on the street I became aware of different levels of restraint in people's voices. It's relative, of course -- in Taiwan there is a kind of woman, a chubby middle-aged type with grown children, who yells through most of her life, and might easily be heard upon occasion down the hall, and not even for any particularly pissed off reason. But it's considered completely normal, it's not a sign of unrestraint but just of a certain social role being ably filled. The man in Manhattan, though, and the woman in this apartment building, were neither of them middle-aged Taiwanese housewives.

I finished up looking -- mostly just looking out the windows really, the place faces right out onto a busy street and in the not-quite rain of yesterday afternoon it was kind of magical, the people hurrying by in their trench coats -- while Glen the super muttered about "always making trouble." What's that? "Crazy nigger down there always in some kind of trouble." Glen let me go out by myself while he went and knocked on the door down the hall. "What's up now?" I heard him ask, and in response he got, "Get this motherfucker out of my house. I want him the fuck out of my house, right now. And I don't want him back" "What the fuck?" said Glen, again. Poor Glen.

say dontcha know me

One afternoon a few weeks ago, I drove west. I drove west from the snow fort of the parking space that had been my miraculous reward for not having killed anyone exactly one week earlier. Exactly one week earlier, I had driven for the very first time in the snow. The snow had started as a sputter as we'd walked in to the movie but had grown to a fury by when we got out. When we got out, I drove us back home at ten miles an hour with the kind of visibility I might have gotten with a loose blindfold. And, having not killed anybody on the way, I was rewarded with a beautiful space just a few steps down from my house in which to leave my car while I recovered from the wracking terror of this event, which took about a week and a letter from the State of Illinois telling me to go test my emissions.

So that afternoon I went and cleared the one remaining hunk of snow from my windshield. While I'd been putting off buying a shovel with which to extract my car, the sun had come out and most of the snow had melted. There was still around a foot of crackled, iced snow hedging me in like the recalcitrant edge of a slurpy, so I squatted for a while and beat it with my windshield clearing tool (surely a person who'd driven for more than three months in her life would know the appropriate term for this implement), remembering what a friend had been telling me about the work of miners and thinking that I would not make a very good one. And I drove off west. I drove west from our whitish grocery store and university neighborhood through a checks cashed here and pawnshop black neighborhood and finally into a salvation army and carnecita neighborhood that seemed to be somewhere between Mexico and Poland. It's kind of great how Chicago is exactly what you'd think an American city would be, at least down here where we are.

I got my emissions checked on what looked like an abandoned stretch of street crossed by an abandoned stretch of rail, by a man who attached a number of machines to my car while I stood in a heated glass booth with a television screen that depicted a generic man doing to a generic car exactly the things that this man was doing to my car. I alternated between watching the television screen and the window until one of the men indicated that it was time to go. A little bit disoriented, I took possession of my car once more, among whose ailments, I was amazed to find, improper emissions is not one. The man—the real man—was easily mistakable for the television man because the entire process, including our interaction, seemed both automated and somehow removed. Trying to alleviate the pressure of so much distanced humanity, I said something resembling a passing remark in a tone resembling that which one would use for a live social interaction. The effect was remarkable: a smile, a nod, a comment: he came alive, like the moment when everything bursts into color as Dorothy lands in Oz. (I guess a metaphor drawn from 3D movies would be more appropriate, but I don't have stereoscopic vision so I don’t feel the punch.)

I was charmed, no, inspired, by this little interaction, by the humanity of it, and drove off in no particular direction in the way one might kick up one’s heels. That is the difference between walking and having a car, it turns out. I drove around in rectangles for a while, observing the populace, ended up accidentally on a highway, got off it, did a few more spins, and ended up on a large road with many stores. (Someone gave me a big thick book of city map for my birthday to replace the skinny vague poster I had, and now I am fearless, though still not competent.) A parking space presenting itself to me, I took the opportunity for a little stroll. Can you hear how stuffy I am right now? It’s this head cold, it’s killing me. I’ve been sounding like this all day. Do they have Sudafed for writing tics? Lord, she said, and, Achoo.

So I’m walking down the street in no particular direction and there’s this little used stuff store with a few stuffs in the doorway. Inside, it’s packed, a tiny railroad type of compartment but dressers and tables one on top of the other, chairs sideways and upside down, shelves of bakeware I remember from my childhood and copper colored bundt pans each one more ornate than the one before, its previous owner an ever older and more purple-haired grandmother. A squattish coffee carafe in silver and the orange of the late nineteen seventies. Some male members of a Spanish-speaking family are wheeling a number of large items down the little path; the mother asks me the price of some dishware, in Spanish, to both of which I regretfully shrug. Then they disappear and a thin, short man in a very large hooded sweatshirt is saying to me, “Ah good thing they came early. They said they was gonna come around seven tonight cause that’s when they could get the truck, and I says, okay, well, I usually close around six but okay, I’ll wait for you for seven. But they just came already.”

“So you don’t have to wait,” I said. “That’s cool.”

“I guess they got the truck early,” he nodded. “So they already got their stuff. So now in a little while I can get ready to head out. And have a drink at the bar. Like I do every night.” I could almost swear he lifted his eyebrows a bit on every night, with such significance did he weight the phrase. I had no idea what the significance signified so I did what my old boss Ronna taught me to do when something I didn’t have a response for happened.

“Huh,” I said, and nodded a bit. But then I exceeded Ronna’s instructions and asked, “You go to a bar around here?”

“Oh yeah,” he said, “There’s lots of places you can go to around here. There’s one right on the corner. Hell, there’s maybe nine bars right around here I go to.”

“Huh,” nod.

“But there’s one, there’s one. There’s this Polish bar down the street, yeah? One day I’m in there, I’m sitting at the bar having a beer, and this Polish guy down the bar, he uh, he’s been drinking vodka. He’s been drinking vodka, right, and he was talking. I just kept sitting at the bar drinking my beer, and he keeps talking. Finally he walks down from where he’s sitting and he stands right behind me, and he keeps talking, you know. So I got down off my stool,” (he shifted his weight a little and lifted his ribcage up and to the side, as you would when getting off a bar stool) “and stood and faced him. So, we’re facing each other in the bar and everybody’s looking, and he keeps talking. And I told him, he better shut up, and he just keeps talking, so, well, I punched him. Knocked him right down.” He’s definitely relishing the telling of this story in the way that men relating their knock-down exploits are described by the word relish, but somehow it is obvious that this is not the punchline. He’s just building up to the climax and this is background information. So I don't go all girly on him knocking someone out, though I do nod with my eyes wide and my eyebrows up.

“The next time I walk into the bar,” he continues, “Donna who’s serving shakes her head and says No. No, Bob. No more. And I say, What, what no more? And she says, Last time, you fight. You got in a fight. No more. So I says Yeah I got in a fight, the guy was saying stuff, that Polish guy he had too much vodka. He was saying stuff. So, you know, we had a little verbercation, and, ah, I punched him. And she says, Bob, no. That Polish guy, is my husband, and the owner of this bar.”

“Wow!” I laugh. In all my years in graduate school, have I ever come across the term verbercation? And here this man, hooded in the too-big sweatshirt, had just casually mentioned it, with the kind of guileless ingenuity that had surely struck Toqueville. “So you don’t go there much anymore?”

He speaks slower now, nodding a little for emphasis and stretching some of the words out, “Haven’t been back in nine years.” Then speeding up, “Hell, I’m forty-three. I can walk into any bar I want. There’s lots of bars.”

I buy the carafe. I almost buy a bundt pan, I’m so delighted. On the drive home I hear a rumbling in my head and start off from that to reconstruct, phrase by phrase, by ceaseless repeated singing as I drive back through the thrift stores and the carnecitas and the pawn shops and into the lower temperature of the university, the entirety of City of New Orleans. I’ve got most of it by around halfway home, and I just keep singing and singing, from the diaphragm, for the rest of the way. When I finally land near my house, I realize that the light in the car has been on the whole time. Probably hundreds of people, from the west of Chicago to the east of it, have just observed me loving America, loudly and off key.

um

yeah.
anyway...

finally, something weird happens

You know the Cowboy Junkies, right? A band I was chagrined to learn falls into the “adult contemporary” category, pegging me as old, sentimental, lazy, and maybe a little bit wanna-be for liking them. The past few nights, whenever I have had the misfortune of being outside, I keep hearing a line from one of their songs: “It's the kind of night that's so cold when you spit it freezes before it hits the ground.” I haven't actually done the experiment—the past few nights, when I've been outside, it's taken so much effort just to be, outside, that I've had no energy left over for spitting, and besides every time you move or change your posture you inevitably expose another part of your body to the cold. It's better not to try anything funny. Christopher lives in a house on a corner somewhere up where the cool things are in Chicago. Gabriel and I drove up there to pick him up for dinner yesterday,¹ and even though Gabe parked on that same corner, just the walk inside the gate and the minute-long wait while Chris came down to open the door and let us in was enough to keep me huddled in my coat as we sat around for fifteen minutes in his warm apartment saying our hellos and deciding what to eat. How else to describe this cold? Among the many ailments of my car, one is that it's sometimes impossible to open the driver's side door from the outside with the key. You have to walk around to the passenger's door and reach through. A couple of days ago I ended up having to climb in and twist myself into the driver's seat through the passenger's door: the driver's side lock was so frozen that I couldn't even get the button up until the car had warmed up on the inside. Granted, my car is like a vaudeville show on wheels, so it doesn't really prove anything one way or the other, but still: it's pretty cold.

The last stop of the evening, which followed a complicated car-switching maneuver that left Gabe and me car-less, was a little party in the university neighborhood at which people of all ages constantly asked us, and then reminded us of, how long we'd all been in this phd program. Somehow that and everything the three of us said seemed to contribute to the impression of irrational depravity that apparently is now the reputation of us senior type people. Of course I'd prefer not to have a reputation at all, but if I have to have one I suppose it doesn't get much better than irrational depravity. Around two in the morning, one of the hosts came around waving an empty wine bottle and announcing that everybody had to go to the living room for a game of spin the bottle.² A moment later, people started commenting how late it was getting and quietly putting their coats on. We depraved ones made our way out with Megan, who had offered to give Gabe, me, and another girl who lives in the neighborhood a ride home. I live within a seven minute walk of the party, but when she offered the second time I decided to spare myself the pain of the walk.

We dropped the other girl off first and then went down a dead end trying to get to my house. Hyde Park is 90% one way streets, and if it's not a one way street, it is probably a dead end, so driving from one house on 54^th street to another house on 54^th street can be quite complicated. A police car passed as we did this maneuver, which was probably where this story actually began. We pulled back out onto some non-dead-end streets and were driving along swimmingly towards my house when we were pulled over. I guess they'd followed us for long enough to find something they could stop us for: Megan's license plate registration was long expired. She has out of state plates and an out of state license, and she didn't have proof of insurance on her. The policeman took her license, disappeared for a while, and came back to say that because of some lack of arrangement between the Illinois and California governments which didn't allow him to deal with this situation by just writing a ticket, Megan would have to follow him to the police station “on 29^th street, you know where that is?” Of course none of us knew where the station was. What would happen once she was at the police station was that she'd be given a court date and be assigned a $2,000 bond, of which she would have to give $200 in bail.

Despite the number of movies we've all seen that involve these sorts of terms, we were all a little confused. “Well, see, you're technically, now, you're under arrest,” the policeman told her. Bail can only be posted in cash, we managed to find out, and there was no cash machine at the police station. “You got a cell phone? Start making some phone calls,” he said. To me it sounded like a line from a movie. We actually passed the Dunkin' Donuts with the ATM on our way to the police station, but we were following the police car and none of us knew where the station was, so we didn't want to stop. The police station turned out to be a little hut in a middle-of-nowhere area right near the Illinois Institute of Technology campus, which I am told is not really the nicest neighborhood in Chicago. The front room was split into an open office area where several people were milling about and a civilian area with a couple of pay phones and a couple of seats on which Gabe and I were instructed to sit while Megan first talked to someone across the desk in the open office area and then went to the detainee room, which she later described as split between a comfy chair area and a bench area with rings for handcuffs. Among the benches at least one, presumably, was the Group W bench, and I like to think that this was the one she sat on. We non-detained people weren't allowed in to take a look, though Megan kindly tried to arrange a tour for us.

The officer who had originally talked to us, and who came out now to fill out some paperwork, had been accompanied in his car by another officer. She came out of the detainees room just as Gabe and I were asking about bail money and said to him, “She can come out here, she doesn't have to stay in the room, she's not under arrest” in a voice of mild exasperation as he stood with a slight smile over his paperwork. There was some conversation among the people in the open office area about the where the nearest ATM was, and the consensus seemed to be a gas station a few blocks away. Neither Gabe nor I felt comfortable driving, at least not out of a police station—we'd both had a couple of drinks at the party, and wouldn't it be silly to get arrested for drunk driving while driving to get money to post bail for your friend who'd been arrested for lacking a sticker. I'm new to driving and Gabe is new to drinking, so we're not really the most useful people to have around in this kind of situation.

So Gabe and I walked out into the now even later, now even colder, part of this night that was already, hours ago, so cold that when you spote it frozes before it hit the ground. Gabe flips up the enormous, fuzzy-edged hood on the enormous down blanket that passes as his coat, so that all you can see of his face is a dark shadow: he's like a ring wraith with fashionable fur trim around his hood. I pull my hat down over my ears and my scarf up over my mouth so that the only thing that really hurts a lot is my nose. I cover my nose with the scarf occasionally to relieve the pain but then the glasses get fogged up from the breath being reflected back at them by the scarf and I can't see, so then I pull the scarf down again until the glasses clear up and the nose starts to hurt again. There is no angle at which it makes sense.

The gas station was a few minutes' walk away, but when we walked in there was a grill pulled out to block the ATM machine. It's out of order, explained the man behind the glass at the register, it's some sort of communications problem, is all. Gabe explained that we needed cash to bail a friend out of jail. This didn't seem to particularly endear us to anybody. The man did tell us that there was another ATM at the 7-11 down the street. It was difficult to imagine there being a 7-11, or anything else open all night but a gas station, anywhere for miles around: the area was all tall classroom buildings and a few things that looked like unfortunate married student housing, surrounded by lots of scary, dark open space. But we struck out in the direction that the man behind the glass had pointed at, even though it looked like a block full of nothing. “You know,” said Gabe helfpully as we huffed along,

“this isn't really the best area. I mean, it's really not such a good area.” For some reason I was feeling very cheery. In the car on the way to the station I'd been thinking about how late it was and how I've been going to sleep before eleven lately and how I was going to be completely exhausted the next morning, but somehow now that we were in this kind of absurd situation I was feeling all sprightly. There's something very satisfying about a clear, limited mission that is slightly and somewhat comically unpleasant. “I think we'll be fine,” I answered. “Who'd want to be out mugging people on a night like this?” After a few minutes Gabe said, “They'll be wondering where the hell we are. I wonder if they'll send out a cop car to look for us,” and we joked about that for a while.

We walked alongside a long, short building that seemed to stretch on forever. The first floor had full-length, full-breadth glass windows opening into large, open rooms with giant pointellist photographic designs on the walls like big Lichtenstein paintings, and the second floor was covered in some sort of very strange metallic glow--it was either reflecting a bright orange light from an unknown source or emitting it. The building took up a good part of the block, and it seemed to undulate as we walked, changing its distance from us. It was, in short, one cool building, and for good reason: upon further investigation it turns out that this clunkily named McCormick Tribune Campus Center was very unclunkily designed by one Rem Koolhaas. I'll give you some advice: next time you are wandering through a gang-ridden arctic tundra trying to find money to bail your friend out of jail, try to walk by a Rem Koolhaas building. It has a most soothing effect. In a very unlikely turn of events, the far end of the Campus Center turned out to house, of all things, a 24-hour 7-11 in which a very brave man was unpacking a box as we walked in and asked for the ATM. I took out two hundred dollars, counted it twice, thought back to what the woman in the police station had said—yes, she had said two hundred dollars (I wanted to make sure we would not have to make this trip again)—and we walked back out into the scratchy night air. “Boy, I am certainly fit to drive now,” Gabe commented. “I'm about the least drunk I've ever been.”

By the time we got back to the police station, I didn't even feel all that cold. Either I was numb or the quick walking had warmed me up. I handed over the two hundred dollars and we waited around while more paperwork was written up. The very zealous policeman who had originally stopped us had apparently written out a ticket for Megan's plates, her failure to have proof of insurance on her, and her invalid driver's license. Megan pulled out her California driver's license to show that it was valid, and a long conversation ensued among the five or so people behind the desk about whether or not a student is required to get the driver's license of the state where she studies. For a while nobody seemed to know an answer that was more convincing than anyone else's answer, and the woman sitting at the computer in the back, although clearly participating in the conversation, made no move toward anything like actually looking up the answer. Finally a police officer who looked like a man but sounded like a woman said decisively, “No, oh, well, if she's a student, and her residence is still there, then no, she doesn't have to get a new licence.” The woman at the desk, who was explaining the procedures to Megan, widened her eyes at the piece of paper in a kind of flash I recognized as what I do when I catch myself wanting roll my eyes but know that I oughtn't to. “Well, just take this citation into court along with the others and they'll just throw it out for having issued a wrong citation.³” The original police officer who had written the citation was not around, but it seemed pretty clear that the piece of paper stood in for him.

Finally Megan had been given all the paperwork and a court date, and we left to go home in her car. She reported that while we had been out battling the tundra for the cash, another police officer had walked into the office and, seeing Megan, asked what was going on. When the original officer who'd stopped us told her the story, she asked him where he'd sent us for money. Her reponse to the answer was, “You sent them there, in the middle of the night? That cash machine isn't working, anyway. What kind of car are they driving?” And, hearing the answer to that, “You sent them out on foot? In this neighborhood? Are you stupid?” And she'd gone back out to her cop car and, apparently, gone to look for us.

1I'm on the Psuedonym Randomizer here—uh, it sounds like kind of a Christian type name, let's think of another Christian type name...

2Any non-native adolescents in the audience? You sit around in a circle and the two people who end up at either end of the spun bottle have to kiss each other. Or so I've heard; I don't think I've ever actually played.

3It's sic, okay? So don't even say it.