Never in my life had I seen such a boring movie. I chewed nine consecutive sticks of gum, to remind myself I was still alive. The boy in front of me fell asleep and started to snore. The professor didn’t notice because he himself had left after the first half hour. “I’ve already seen this film several times,” he said.
In class the professor told us that, by the time of the film’s making, fifty years had passed since the people of Aran had stopped harpooning whales. To capture the ancient practice on film, the director had imported a harpoon from the British Museum and instructed the islanders in its use. Knowing this, the professor asked, could we rightly classify the film as nonfiction? We had to debate this question for an hour. I couldn’t believe it. That was the difference between fiction and nonfiction? That was something you were supposed to care about? I was more concerned by the question of whether the professor was kind or not, whether he liked us. “It’s so interesting how you think there is, or should be, a right or a wrong answer,” he said to one student in a gentle voice. At the end of class, another student said he had to miss next week’s meeting to visit his brother in Prague.
“I guess I can’t try to tape-record it, can I?” the boy asked.
“That would be completely worthless,” said the professor in a friendly tone. “Don’t you think?”
? ? ?
On Thursday, I got to Russian conversation class early. Only Ivan was there. He was reading a novel with a foreign title and a familiar cover: the illustration showed two hands tossing a bowler hat in the air.
“Is that The Unbearable Lightness of Being?” I asked.
He lowered the book. “How did you know?”
“It has the same cover in English.”
“Oh. I thought maybe you knew how to read Hungarian.” He asked if I had liked the book in English. I wondered whether to lie.
“No,” I said. “Maybe I should read it again.”
“Uh-huh,” Ivan said. “So that’s how it works for you?”
“How what works?”
“You read a book and don’t like it, and then you read it again?”
Gradually the other students trickled in, followed by the teacher, Irina, who had a whole Central American village sewn to her sweater: tiny doll-women with yarn hair, donkeys with yarn manes, and cacti with spines made of yellow thread. She didn’t dye her hair, which she wore in a snow-white French twist, and her dark, bright eyes had a burning expression that looked like it hadn’t changed since she was a little girl.
She immediately started issuing directions that nobody could understand, telling some people to sit and others to stand. Eventually we understood that we were supposed to take turns reenacting the beginning of “Nina in Siberia.” The girls were Nina, and the boys were Ivan’s father.
I was paired with Boris, the one who always looked like he was in a waking nightmare—he turned out to be learning Russian in order to do archival research about pogroms. He didn’t know any of his lines. We were standing there and he was supposed to say, “Why did we never understand him?”
“Tell me about Ivan,” I prompted. “Did we understand him?”
“Oh, Ivan,” he said. “Oh, my son.”
Next I had to repeat the scenario with Ivan, who knew everything and said everything. He had studied Russian for a year as a child, behind the Iron Curtain. Later I remembered saying, “So you think he wrote this letter seriously?” He was supposed to say, “Only God knows.” But what he said was: “Yes, I think it’s serious.”
? ? ?
For linguistics homework, I had to interview two native English speakers from different regions about how they used the words “dinner” and “supper.” Hannah, who had grown up in St. Louis, thought supper was later and more formal. Angela, who had grown up in Philadelphia, thought that dinner was when everyone dressed up and ate with their family.
“We totally don’t say that,” Hannah said.
“What do you call a big formal meal on a weekend?”
“I don’t know. A feast.”
Feast, I wrote. “No, not ‘feast,’” Hannah said. “Put ‘banquet.’”
Angela and Hannah got into an argument about which was more formal, Thanksgiving dinner or the Last Supper. They debated the difference between supper and a snack. Hannah said it depended on whether the food was hot or cold.
“Not in my opinion,” Angela said. “In my opinion”—she said it as if it were a book she could consult—“supper means you’re sitting down and relaxing. If you eat standing up in a hurry, you’re just having a snack.”
“Even if you’re eating lasagna?”
“I don’t eat lasagna.”
“You know what I mean.”
“If you eat it standing up in between two classes, it’s a snack.”
“That’s just to get pity,” Hannah said, after a pause. “That’s just so you can say later, ‘Oh, I didn’t have time for supper today because I was working. All I had was a snack.’ What is it already?” she yelled. “Somebody’s been knocking outside for like ten minutes.”
The door opened and Svetlana came in. “Are you guys asleep?”
“No, I was just going out,” I told her. “Thanks for helping me with the assignment,” I told Hannah and Angela. That was the best thing about college: it was so easy to leave. You could be in the place where you lived, having an argument that you had basically started, and then you could just say, “See you later,” and go somewhere else.
As I was putting on my jacket, I glanced around the room, trying to see it through Svetlana’s eyes. The walls were still almost completely bare, except for the Einstein poster, Angela’s Harvard pennant, and some certificates that Hannah had printed out on her computer. She had printed out a “procrastination award” and awarded it to herself. She had given me a “best roommate award,” which was sad, both because Hannah wanted so much to be loved, and because this award was partly an insult to Angela. I didn’t hang it up.
Svetlana wanted us to write and illustrate a story full of depravity and decadence. We went to CVS and bought construction paper, glue, markers, and a copy of Vogue. “Also I think my roommate has laryngitis,” Svetlana said, tossing a box of medicinal tea into our basket. “Either that or she just doesn’t want to talk to us. But she has to learn to be socially functional.”
Everything Svetlana said left a strong impression on me: her certainty that she wanted to write a book about depraved people, her clear notion of how her roommate should behave, and the idea of a tea that made people socially functional.
We got in line to pay. When I took out my combination keychain/wallet, Svetlana touched my hand and said she would get it. “My family has a lot of money,” she said. I didn’t understand what she meant. Didn’t we all have a lot of money? I counted out the change for exactly half of everything, except the laryngitis tea. “If you say so, but you’re being crazy,” Svetlana said, pocketing the money and paying with a credit card.