Just to distract myself from sombre thoughts (mostly, about my procrastination guilt and how to balance my working goals under these constantly changing conditions), I decided to go down the rabbit hole and retrieve an episode from my past life that connects my linguistic experience and my love of cajun spice (actually, cajun is my Proustian Madeleine in this case) in the weirdest way ever.
But let’s start at the very beginning. It happened 15 or so years ago, when I worked at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art. I was one of those mildly annoying folks in the reading room who prepared manuscripts for researchers coming from everywhere. Despite sounding fairly simple, it was a non-trivial task for my colleagues and me, because we had to hold a reasonable balance between two conflicting sides—people who want to work with archival stuff (i.e. scholars) and people whose job is to preserve documents in the best way possible (i.e. archivists). We did our best, but boy, was it tough: ever since those times, I lost all illusions about the moral standards of well-educated people forever, lol. But I digress.
At the time of the event, I was what they called “a person whose English was so minuscule that even the elementary level would be regarded as a great achievement“: like many people of my generation, I’d been studying English pretty much all my life without any obvious success. Or maybe I was just too slow, dunno. But anyway, I was lucky enough to interact with foreign researchers mostly in Russian, only rarely translating for them the tiniest bits from their “orders” (i.e. piles of manuscripts).
So, our story started one afternoon when a security man at the reception (a militiaman: now policeman) called us to give a temporary pass to a newcomer. She was an American girl in her middle twenties. She looked completely lost. The militiaman smiled awkwardly and said that she didn’t speak Russian. “Like, not at all, man. Zero words.” The girl looked at us with visible fear. My beloved colleague and friend Dimych asked me: “You can help her, right?”
I have to admit: I hate to disappoint people. Of course, I nodded and then gave the girl a similarly frightened look. And then, I began the conversation (or so I thought). “Hello,” said I trying to sound as nonchalant as one scared person could ever do. “How do you do?”
The girl smiled, and let me tell you: that was one happy smile! “I’m totally fine, thank you!” And then, she proceeded to what, I guess, was her story of how she was lost while searching for the right building (the Archive’s location is no joke even for locals, not to say foreigners who weren’t familiar with the Moscow map: mind you, that was before GPS on mobile phones).
I was in despair: the longer she had talked, the clearer I understood that, well... I didn’t understand her at all! But I was too confused, and she was too busy to reboot our conversation!
Then, she stopped and looked at me with hope. “Right?” She asked.
“Of course!” I said. “Can you...err... go to the room?”
The girl’s facial expression changed again. She was visibly petrified.
“Huh?” She asked.
I pointed out the reading room; she nodded and followed me.
And then, a brilliant idea (well, more or less, but given the circumstances, I guess I did the best I could) suddenly came to my mind. I gave the girl a piece of paper and a pen and asked her (it would be a stretch to say that my explanation was straightforward, but she got my point) to write what exactly she wanted to order.
“1923,” she wrote.
Eisenstein’s fund! Finally, things were getting somewhat clearer. Dimych gave her the folder with the list of Eisenstein’s manuscripts, and she immediately pointed out at the things she needed (she managed to read in Russian, but were unable to speak even the most basic language, and it’s still a complete mystery how on Earth she found us in the first place).
She booked everything she needed, and we gave it to her as quickly as we could. She worked at the archive for two weeks or so, and on the very last day she brought with her a CD of country music. She gave it to us shyly and said “Spasibo” very melodically.
The girl was from Louisiana, and that was the very first time I got the idea that 1) English could sound alien and still be regarded English. 2) I must learn it, because it’s cool.
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