Travel Journals by Hilary Hopkins

Part 3 - Shopping and Playing in America

Thursday 14 June 1990

Last night, it being John's and my twentieth anniversary, we went out for our anniversary dinner, and Susannah and Alyson and Olga P. and her friend took Slavko for an evening's entertainment.  First they took him downtown to Quincy Market for a look at Americans at play in the evening.  They checked out a number of bars, strolled around amid the lighted trees, went down to the waterfront, and ended up with some dancing at a Cambridge club.  The report was that he loved it all.

Today was Alyson's day to have him; John and I were occupied much of the afternoon at The Closing, the final step in selling our apartment, our home for twenty years, and being really, truly finally settled here in this jewel of a house with its incomparable sightlines.  Lifelines, for me.

This evening as entertainment we offered Slavko the chance to see our slides of East Africa, Nepal, and the Soviet Union.  He choose to see Nepal first, then Africa, then home.  I keep forgetting that although he has been on driving trips in Ukraine (in his precious car, with the family--he showed us on a map all the places they have been), he has had no experience of the rest of the world.  I wonder what he might have seen on television.  After all, the rest of the world is strangely familiar to me, not only because of my travels through it, but also in substantial part because of the television I watch, public television that shows me the most glorious natural and cultural places of this earth, in the comfort of my house. 

Slavko is awed and moved by our images of Nepal, of Susannah in Nepal.  He watches the screen intently, commenting on each picture.  I explain to him how we slept in never-to-be-forgotten Dheurali, "right in there" I show him.  Although he can't go there, we can give him this fleeting, almost vanishing connection with that place.  In my office I have posted these words by photographer Joel Meyerowitz: "Photographers deal with things that are always disappearing.  We're on the edge of knowing, and then only by a shred of feeling of almost no duration.  In trying to photograph the wholeness of an experience, I'm trying to pass that experience back into the world.  We are emission centers.  We receive sensations and put them out.  That's what artists do." 

That is what I am trying to make of this visit of my cousin Slavko: a work of art composed of fleeting image, memory, token, and feeling, to pass into his world and travel with him.

Among the African slides, especially those of the surprisingly rich plant life interest him.  Then we come to the Soviet slides.  I am embarrassed, for I had forgotten that the single slide tray I am using, compiled from the larger set for showing to students, emphasizes with little subtlety the astounding crudeness of Soviet life.  He sees it all, he does: an old man appears on the screen, riding high on a wagon pulled by a skinny horse.  "Toyota," says Slavko.  Here is my precious slide of the street in Kiev (Slavko names it, and he is right) which runs alongside a church, and down the steep bluff to the Podil section on the banks of the Dnieper River, back into the 17th or 18th century, that tantalizingly real vision of a past time.  Slavko takes one look and laughs shortly. "Nepal," he snorts. 

Tears stand in his eyes on seeing the pictures of his family, taken in 1976.  My Marika, he says, and I remember her now, seeing her.  She is quiet and refined in appearance, unlike most of the women.  The two of them make a handsome and well-suited couple.  She and Natalya are now counting the days, just as he counts them here, now and then, but for different reasons.  In the morning he gestures to me that he dreamed of Maria, because of these slides.

 

Friday 15 June 1990

Today we are going to do the shopping, to find the gifts he wants to bring home to the family.  Yesterday I must confess I looked a bit in his suitcase, not wanting to insult him by trying to give him anything he already has.  He has two dreadfully threadbare pairs of socks, one thin undershirt and a new one unopened in a paper wrapping.  His shirts are pathetic--at least one of them runs in the wash (I know because I did a laundry as soon as he arrived, and he urgently gestured not to wash this shirt with anything white), one which looks new and is passable, and one which is made of such an oddly inferior fabric that it's like wispy paper.  His suitcase, clearly new, is monstrously heavy.  I check out the bathroom cabinet: Italian toothpaste, Bic razor, and I think he's using his own soap instead of the nice pink American soap I provided.  To save it for us?  I have a dozen cakes in the two bathrooms...  Well, all right, that is helpful. 

If I could just send him home with freedom...a little jar of it, Take as needed.

People have said to me, Oh, things are getting a lot better over there, aren't they?  Yes, things are improving, many things are better--Slavko can come here, after all, and he is able to buy Italian UltraBrite toothpaste--but the process of entering the modern world, which will eventually be completed, sometime in the 21st century, while good for the country as a whole, grinds in its gears the individual, grinds and tears real persons, like Slavko, Maria, Natalya, and Natasha.  Those who live in "interesting times" must always pay the price for those who will come after them in a calmer age.

We walk briskly into Harvard Square.  There is a lot on our list: a three-piece jeans suit for Natalya (jacket, skirt, and pants), an "elegant" suit and possibly blouse for Maria, and jeans and a jacket for him.  A few more small odds and ends, but those are the main things.  It's going to be hard, I think, because I'm not really familiar with places to get the denim things.  I myself don't mind hunting all around for things, but I know men aren't usually crazy about it, and with the language barrier it's bound to be even more difficult.  But I am quite determined that we will get what he wants.

The stores aren't open yet, so we pick up the prints of our New York pictures and sit and have some coffee while waiting.  The pictures are wonderful.  I note how when Slavko is with me, his body language is relaxed and loose, his face, voice, eyes mirror a kind of American expansiveness; but when he is talking with the Siberians on the tour boat, he reverts to the tighter, harsher lines of life over there. How I hate the thought of sending him back to the straitjacket!

In the stores, the clerks are all patient, delighted to be waiting on "my cousin from the Soviet Union, he doesn't speak English."  They are helpful way beyond duty.  We begin by getting jeans for him, the very first purchase.  He looks great, the clerk and I make over him and he's shy but pleased.  When he tries on the faded denim jacket, we've got the Marlboro Man! we women exclaim.  He actually understands this ("Marlboro" being a universal cognate I guess), but Soviet fashion demands that the jacket match the dark blue jeans he's chosen.  No such jacket here.  The clerk and I agree that it's going to be hard to find a dark blue jacket.  Fashion in the USSR is at least five years behind America, and nobody's wearing anything but faded stonewashed denim here.  Where am I going to find Slavko's jacket?  Having pulled out of him this modest wish, I am determined that it will be granted. 

We also buy jeans for Natalya, which I try on.  But the right size of skirt for her isn't available in this store, so the clerk calls their downtown branch and has one in the right size put aside for us. Isn't America wonderful?

We subway downtown, dictionarying remarks on the passengers to each other with glee.  Look at those dumb ripped jeans!  our silent conversation goes.  It's fashionable, isn't that silly?  We have a whole repertoire of gestured language now: we can "talk" about going by train or subway, plane, ship, car; we can discuss telephoning, eating, sleeping, walking, writing, loving/liking.  We can "say" something is expensive or ask how much it costs.  We can refer to here, now, yesterday, and tomorrow.  And we can express our approval:  Thumbs Up!

In the downtown store, the skirt is waiting for us.  I model it and several other sizes, and some jean jackets.  I feel frisky in the cute short skirt.  He checks the sizes carefully, hips, waist, length, and makes his choice.  He insists on carrying the bags of jeans, but I get to carry the dictionary.  I'm so happy with our purchases.  Jeans!  Universal American symbol of easy freedom!  Take that into your eyes, you stodgy Soviets!

Next, chancier of success, the "elegant suit" for Maria.  I'm glad I have had my memory of her refreshed by the slides last night.  First at Filene's, I try to help Slavko zero in on exactly what kind of thing he has in mind.  When we'd had the translator with us, he assured us he knew exactly what was wanted.  Now that he sees the kind of selection we have in America, all those choices that astonish and even dismay him so, from cheeses to cars to clothes, he isn't so sure.  Finally I discover though that it really is what we call a suit, not a two-piece dress, that we're looking for, and that it must be a dark color but not black.  Navy seems to do nicely.  I grab up a handful of suits in which he seems interested and hustle off to try them on.  His confusion is written plain as day on his body and face: he thought this would be easy (because the choices would be limited) and instead it's going to be hard, and he wants so much to do it right, for Marika, that his anxiety level is rising. 

I model the suits for him one after the other.  He likes them all!  I see him suddenly slide into irritation and despair: he gestures, Forget it!!

Now it's my turn to word him: Peace, peace.  I pat his arm reassuringly and tell him, It's OK.

He smiles sheepishly, takes a breath, and we are back on track.

Together we make a thorough search of all the suits.  I try on a dozen or so.  He stands outside the fitting room, holding my purse, appraising each new suit.  I feel myself standing in the stead of Maria's body, standing in for her and in her, two women merged across space.  I'm enjoying myself immensely.

Most of the suits he wants me to try are blue and conservative but very feminine in cut.  One, though, is quite smart with a slim black skirt and brilliant scarlet jacket.  As soon as I emerge from the dressing room wearing this one, his face lights up as it hasn't for the others: Yes, that one, that one's beautiful.  Only: not for Maria, for Natalya, he says sadly; he hasn't planned on getting a suit for her.  I can see her wearing it inside his head. 

OK, I tell him.  I gesture and say, We're going to try another store first, though, across the street.  We ask the clerk to lay aside the two suits he likes, the red and black one and a navy one, which doesn't seem the right size but is otherwise perfect for Maria.

At Jordan Marsh, we look further.  We find the navy suit in the right size!  To be certain, I ask a clerk about European sizes, and sure enough, Maria, 46 European, is 12 American.  I buy it, with great satisfaction.

And then I take him back across the street and buy the second suit, the smashing red and black one.  And why not?  

Now we pause for lunch, we sit at ease in the sun, share a chicken sandwich and listen to the Ecuadorian street musicians, which we'd heard in Harvard Square in the morning.  Their music of flutes and drum and strings goes straight to the heart, haunting the memory with something just beyond reach but deeply nostalgic.  We sit with tears standing in our eyes, quiet amidst the lively street scene.

Understandings come pouring from my head into my fingers and I write them down: "These stories will come alive again over there.  This scene, of casual American festivity, freedom, purposefulness, will happen again as Slavko tells it.  It will become a part of the edifice of memory, part of the family folklore.  The food, the ineffable music, the lively crowds, back and forth between the stores, my trying on all the suits, his feelings that I can't be told--all this will return as he describes it."

Or perhaps not.  Perhaps only locked away in his mind and eyes. 

Slavko has begun to look too quiet.  I see that something is amiss, I am pretty sure what is wrong but I dictionary: Feeling?  At first he gestures, Thumbs Up, but then his face betrays him, it's not true.  He dictionaries, in great distress, I feel poor, destitute, indigent.  Oh, I knew this would come, I knew it.  How to reassure him, how to explain what it should mean instead?  I word, A unique situation, and gesture, Put it away, ignore it, forget it!  I am furious that he should be put in this humiliating position (as he sees it) because They made it so, because he is not permitted to bring funds adequate to support his visit.

An enormous well of feelings opens up, each of us in anguish, he because his limit of tolerance for our generosity and emasculation of his manhood has been overflowed, I because I haven't the resources to explain the complex feeling of rightness and the neutrality this all has, that it's just money, that's available, not ours, not his, just a resource that we can use.  So we are full of strong feeling.  That can't adequately be shared.

We return to Harvard Square, where I am intent upon looking for a Parker pen for Natalya, something he'd mentioned through the translator.  But he is sickened now, the fun of it has gone, and he doesn't permit me to get the pen.  She can write with any old pen! he conveys firmly. 

Downtown he'd expressed interest in a black shirt for himself, but we couldn't find the right kind.  I leave him to smoke a cigarette in front of the Harvard Coop while I make a quick shirt search: I find one!  Proudly I lead him to it--I want so much to give him something elegant for himself, but it's no good now, he won't even look at it, he is very agitated.

My feelings are hurt, I can't help it, I am in turmoil.  Finally he dictionaries, firmly and in his Soviet voice, “I will decide about money.”  I can't bear it, I feel so chastised and hurt.

Before we head, grimly, for the subway, there is one last thing.  Blank audio cassettes.  He and Alyson had found a place in the Square where they were having a sale on them, and this is one very important item for him.  He has told us that at home when you can find them, they are $30-$40 each.  Here they are on sale, 11 for $10.  He finds them in the store, and I leave him there, wait outside to let him make this purchase as a competent person should, by himself. I am so terribly frustrated by not being to speak in fullness to each other!  Because he and I are both European, the language of body, gesture, face is readable by each of us, as well as intonation and volume.  But the precious subtleties of tense, voice, preposition, pronoun are missing, and we have only the crudeness of noun, verb, adjective, and occasional adverb.

We walk home from the subway, silently.  Again he tells me, firmly, “I'll decide."  It's too much, I can't help it, I burst into tears, feelings overflowing at last, and tell him, in English, You 're hurting my feelings, don't yell at me, don't yell at me...  He puts his arms around me and gives me a tiny kiss, but I am very upset. 

Then I tell him, in Ukrainian, carefully, "I am very fragile."  To my great astonishment and joy, he immediately rejoins, in Ukrainian, "I too."  I am so moved and enriched by this gift of self that I calm immediately.  Across all these boundaries of sex, age, culture, language, culture, we share this. 

In the evening, both of us feeling happier after some rest, Slavko proudly shows John all of our purchases, I modelling everything.  And after dinner we sit companionably on the rug in his room, seeing about how it might all fit in his big ugly new suitcase.

John and I are about ready for bed, but Slavko, the model traveler, doesn't want to let go of the day into sleep yet.  He gestures for the key and says he wants to go to "The Center" by which we gather he means Harvard Square.  Great!  I'm delighted he wants to adventure on his own, alone with his private thoughts, able to focus all attention on what he may see, rather than having to spend any energy dealing with me or someone else.  We give him the key, no, he doesn't want the map, and out he goes.  And we go to bed.

I am exhausted by intense and continuous awareness of both the real and symbolic meaning of this occasion, and I also feel exceedingly happy.  Euphoric, actually, exhausted by euphoria.  Sleep comes slowly to my excited brain, and Ukrainian invades my sleeping mind.  It is there when I wake, filled with disordered and conflicting thoughts.

 

Saturday 16 June 1990

This morning when John and I come downstairs Slavko is sitting in the livingroom perusing the Boston Globe.  Not only does he page through to sound out and try to read words in the news stories, and examine the sports page (I finally decide it's for World Cup soccer news), but he particularly examines the ads, ads for everything.  I have had to explain to him what "50% off" means.  It must be quite confusing, that the same item can be different prices in different stores.  There, the price of a thing is often printed right on the bottom of the thing itself, immutable.

This morning he has a burning question about which he is quite agitated, and it's a good one too.  He words, How can this CD player be $99 when Maria's suit was $150?  I hardly know how to answer.  I don't even know where to begin.  I try to explain that clothes involve more hand labor (though I don't even know if that is true), and that the CD players are, well, ordinary.  I can't manage.  John comes to my rescue by trying to explain that there has to be a bigger inventory, more choices available, among the clothing, and that the CD players are pretty common and there aren't a lot of different kinds.  But it's all got to do with market economics and much too complex to explain in our incomplete communication. 

I might well ask Slavko, How come at home a blank cassette tape is $30 and a loaf of bread is a nickel?  Clearly he's upset.  I guess he just isn't used to the idea that women's clothing, or any fashionable clothing, can be so expensive.  Electronics, that's the thing, that's all that they think of over there as being expensive.  This household technology represents the West in a way clothing never can, not even jeans.  In the end we all give up and leave the question unanswered.

We're going to Cape Cod today.  I offer the front seat to Slavko.  We stop for Dunkin Donuts of course, and as we drive out the Southeast Expressway and get going on beautiful Route 3 to the Cape, Slavko is lost in admiration.  Over and over he gestures to the fine straight divided road, the clean verdant landscape on either side, our excellent Toyota, with music playing and coffee to hand in comfort, and shakes his head at these marvels of luxury.  Well, it is luxurious. 

It's luxurious because of what I said to him in New York: America is designed for people.  People want to be able to have coffee and music in their cars while they drive along a wide, safe, well-marked road.  Sooner or later--sometimes much later of course--the things that people, that the people, want enough will happen.  I guess I'm an optimist in that way: even the damned Vietnam war ended because the people finally prevailed. 

Thus bloweth the winds of change, swinging around the world to the people's direction.  Earlier in the week I had dragged out my big box of family photographs and showed him a few.  Among those that turned up were the blurry black and white ones I had taken in 1972 when I went to Washington to march at Nixon's second inauguration.  Slavko took one look at the first picture, barely discernable as a crowd of people looking excitedly earnest, and said, in English, "Protestmarch."  No one could have guessed, or even dreamed, ten years ago, that "Protestmarch" would be a cognate in Ukrainian.  But there's been a change in the wind.  And people all over the world want to redesign it to satisfy their own visions and understandings of what's truly right.

We park at the National Seashore Headquarters, familiar and beloved after so many summers, and set off on the two miles of paved path that wind through the woods to the ocean.  I stride out briskly, and Slavko dictionaries that I am young.  He's pleased with my vigorous and athletic comportment.  So am I!  I begin to feel frisky.  The three of us take pictures of each other.  Slavko comments on how total strangers greet each other pleasantly along the trail (it's funny how we Americans hardly ever do this on the street, but usually do on paths).  I teach him levels of greeting.  "Hi," I word, is casual.  "Hello," I gesture, is what you say on the phone.  "How do you do," I demonstrate, is when you are meeting someone and shake hands.  He has fun practicing these.  After a while, he begins to try out a shy "Hi" on people we meet.  To his evident satisfaction, and mine, they respond.  They don't even know he's from the Soviet Union, and he can forget it himself in this way. 

There's some dictionarying back and forth about this, about total strangers greeting each other.  Slavko demonstrates how people at home are: grim, stony-faced, hard.  They are afraid of each other, I word.  No, he says, and pages through our book.  "Competition," he words, and gestures queues of people.  Oh God, that's even worse than fear.  Like animals driven to unnatural warfare over limited food. 

At the beach, the June fog hangs like a scrim over everything.  The surf line invites us.  I hurry down to it and wade in, and the cold water washes up to the bottom of my shorts.  Slavko is eager to come in too, and he rolls up his pant legs and takes off his shoes, and joins me.  John takes pictures.  After a while I come out and walk along the beach with John.  But Slavko stays at the edge of the waves, playing with them, jumping over them, trying out being free.  Children frolic near him, but unaware of their good fortune.

For lunch we go to the Eastham Lobster Pool, and I order a scallop roll for him, and some beer.  He eats it all but I think he is a little dubious.  He's eaten everything here, with equal enthusiasm: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, spaghetti, tuna fish salad, steak, Sugar Frosted Flakes, hot dogs.  He tells us how wonderful it is to have all these restaurants so handy to the road.  At home, he explains, you're lucky to find one or two in a day's drive. 

Finally we drive to the other side of the Cape, to Mr. Seaman's.  We show Slavko "our" cottage and I dictionary how we spend two or three weeks here every summer.  He is impressed (so am I, still).  He and I wade in the hot shallow water, I pick up snails, seaweed, a horseshoe crab and give them all to him to hold himself. 

It's been a fine day together.  At home, he takes a pure white pebble from his pocket.  "Atlantic," he says.  I produce an elegant pearly blue mussel shell.  "Atlantic," I say as I give it to him.

He and John go out at the end of the afternoon to mow and rake our lawn.  He is so eager to do anything of use around the house.  A few days ago, having observed after dinner that our driveway needed sweeping and the car had a few bird spots on it, nothing would do but that he should sweep the drive and wash the car.  Of course John was delighted.  And Slavko had the pleasure of making believe it was his driveway and his Toyota. 

Again after dinner this evening he goes out by himself to "The Center."  It being Saturday night, I dictionary to him in warning, "Wild!"  But that's all right.  He jokes how last night he was looking at Playboy, I have to study American things! he laughs.  "Ah," I word, "a student!"  He's a big, alert, intelligent man; he can handle Harvard Square on a Saturday night.  And he needs this time by himself.  I understand very well.  In the morning we learn he's been out till 2 a.m.!

Oh, it's poignant, painful, to think of sending him back, stuffing the prisoner back into the prison, he now full of the breath of freedom and thus enlarged and no longer able to fit...