By Hannah Feustle Abroad writer
The other night as I was leaving my art history class I came across a woman who was bickering with her husband over directions. “Where is the Russian Museum,” she said. I was so startled at understanding the question and knowing the answer that I pointed back the way I had come and promptly forgot the word for “left.”
I spend a lot of my time here talking around things like that. I’m excited when I manage to do this. It feels like progress, making myself understood. But when it comes to describing something, I’m limited to a series of phrases like “good” and “interesting.”
Last weekend, I went on a trip to a World War II memorial cemetery in the city. When my host mom asked how the tour had been, I said something along the lines of: “Interesting. Second war. Memorial.” I forgot the name.
What I miss is being able to say that it was “intense.” There were mass graves labelled by year. There were roses planted on them, but they were all dead, covered with boxes for the winter. There was a statue—the Motherland, putting the wreath of glory over everyone buried there. Behind the statue, there was a huge wall with lines from a poem on it. The tour guide turned around, with her back to the wall, facing us, and started reciting. That feeling—standing there with chills running down my spine—was reduced to “interesting.”
But I guess there’s something about all those blanks in my vocabulary that make the moments when I get something across even more rewarding.
Next week I’m going on a volunteering trip to a far-flung eastern city called Kirov. A couple days ago, my host mom asked why. “Because I don’t want to see one day’s worth of six different places; I want to see six days’ worth of one place and meet people and practice Russian and take a train.”
I started with “because I don’t like tourist.” No. Her face was blank. “I like volunteer. I want to know people. It is interesting.”
Something changed in her face, and I nodded while she said something in Russian, summarizing what I had been saying. I only understood, or partially understood, the last part. “You want to know more of the life.”
At home, I never would have thought that a conversation like that could make me so happy—but after that dinner, I didn’t stop smiling for a long time. Maybe it was something about hearing what I was thinking restated in Russian words I could understand, or maybe it was in knowing for sure that she knew what I meant—a moment of connection that is often lacking with the language barrier.
The memory of the little victories makes the long gaps between them easier.
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