The teacher, Barbara, a graduate student from East Germany—she specifically said “East Germany”—told us about Russian names and patronymics. Since her father’s name was Dieter, her full Russian name would have been Barbara Dietrevna. “But Barbara Dietrevna doesn’t really sound Russian,” she said, “so I call myself Varvara Dmitrievna—as if my father’s name were Dmitri.”
We all had to have Russian names, too, though we didn’t need patronymics, because we weren’t figures of authority. Greg became Grisha, Katie became Katya. There were two foreign students whose names didn’t change—Ivan from Hungary and Svetlana from Yugoslavia. Svetlana asked if she could change her name to Zinaida, but Varvara said that Svetlana was already such a good Russian name. My name, on the other hand, though lovely, didn’t end with an -a or a -ya, which would cause complications when we learned cases. Varvara said I could choose any Russian name I wanted. Suddenly I couldn’t think of any. “Maybe I could be Zinaida,” I suggested.
Svetlana turned in her seat and stared into my face. “That is so unfair,” she told me. “You’re a perfect Zinaida.”
It somehow seemed to me that Varvara didn’t want anyone to be called Zinaida, so I looked at the page of Russian names, and chose Sonya.
“Hey, Sonya, what a drag,” Svetlana told me sympathetically in the elevator afterward. “I think you’re much more like a Zinaida. Too bad Varvara Dmitrievna is such a zealous Slavophile.”
“You guys were really torturing her with that Zinaida business,” said Ivan, the Hungarian, who was unusually, almost unreasonably tall. We turned to look up at him. “I felt really bad,” he continued. “I thought she was going to destroy herself. That it would be too much for her German sense of order.” Nobody said anything for the rest of the elevator ride.
Ivan’s comment about the “German sense of order” was my first introduction to this stereotype. It made me remember a joke I had never understood in Anna Karenina, when Oblonsky says, of the German clockmaker, “The German has been wound up for life to wind up clocks.” Were Germans supposed to be particularly ordered and machinelike? Was it possible that Germans really were ordered and machinelike? Varvara was always early to class, and always dressed the same, in a white blouse and a narrow dark skirt. Her tote bag always contained the same three vocabulary items: a Stolichnaya bottle, a lemon, and a red rubber mouse, like the contents of some depressing refrigerator.
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Russian met every day, and quickly started to feel internalized and routine and serious, even though what we were learning were things that tiny children knew if they had been born in Russia. Once a week, we had a conversation class with an actual Russian person, Irina Nikolaevna, who had been a drama teacher in Petersburg when it was still Leningrad. She always came running in a minute or two late, talking nonstop in Russian in a lively and emotional way. Everyone reacted differently to being spoken to in a language they didn’t understand. Katya got quiet and scared. Ivan leaned forward with an amused expression. Grisha narrowed his eyes and nodded in a manner suggesting the dawn of comprehension. Boris, a bearded doctoral student, rifled guiltily through his notes like someone having a nightmare that he was already supposed to speak Russian. Only Svetlana understood almost everything, because Serbo-Croatian was so similar.
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The Boston T was completely different from the New York subway—the lines named after colors, the cars so clean and small, like toys. And yet it wasn’t a toy, grown men used it, with serious expressions on their faces. The Red Line went in two directions: Alewife and Braintree. Such names were unheard of in New Jersey, where everything was called Ridgefield, Glen Ridge, Ridgewood, or Woodbridge.
Ralph and I went to a pastry shop he knew in the North End. They sold cannoli like phone receivers, No?l logs like logs, elephant-ear cookies. Ralph ordered a lobster tail. I had a slab of German chocolate cake the size of a child’s tombstone.
Ralph was doing premed and taking classes in art history, but thought he might major in government. Most government majors belonged to a social type known as “gov jocks.” It wasn’t clear to me what was going to happen to them after college. Were they going to be our rulers? Would Ralph become one of them? Was he one, somehow, already? Surely he was too funny, and not interested enough in war. But he did have a certain all-American quality, a kind of clean-cut broad-shoulderedness, as well as a powerful obsession with the Kennedys. He imitated them all the time, Jack and Jackie, with their slow, goofy 1960s voices.
“I’ve so enjoyed campaigning, Mrs. Kennedy,” he said, looking in the distance with a startled, stymied expression. Ralph had already applied for an internship at the JFK Presidential Library.
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Constructed Worlds met on Thursdays, for one hour before lunch and three hours after. Before lunch, the visiting artist, Gary, gave a lecture with slides while pacing around the room and giving decreasingly genial instructions to his TA, a silent Gothic-looking person called Rebecca.
On the first day, we looked at pictures of genre scenes. In one painting, shirtless muscular men were planing a floor. In another, gleaners stooped over a yellow field. Then came a film still of people in evening dress sitting in a theater box, followed by a cartoonish drawing of a party full of grotesque men and women leering over cocktail glasses.
“How well do you know this party?” Gary exhaled, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “You look at it and think: I know that scene. I’ve been to that exact fucking cocktail party. And if you haven’t yet, you will—I guarantee it, you’ll find yourself there someday. Because you all want to succeed, and that’s the only way to do it. . . . Selin doesn’t believe me, but she will someday.”
I jumped. The cocktail party was reproduced in miniature in Gary’s eyeglasses. “Oh no, I believe you,” I said.
Gary chuckled. “Is that sincerity or what? Well I hope you do believe me, because someday you’re going to know that scene by heart. You’re going to know what every last one of them is saying and eating and thinking.” He said it like it was a curse. “Power, sex, sex as power. It’s all right there.” He tapped the bilious face of a man who was holding a martini glass in one hand and playing the piano with the other. I decided that Gary was wrong, that I was definitely not going to know that man. He would probably be dead by the time I even turned drinking age.
The next slide showed a color photograph of a woman applying lipstick at a vanity table. The photograph had been taken from behind, but her face was visible in the mirror.
“Putting on the face: preparing the self for display, for a party or a performance,” Gary chanted. “Look at her expression. Look at it. Does she look happy?”
There was a long silence. “No,” intoned one student—a skinny junior with a shaved head, whose name either was or sounded like “Ham.”